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November 12 - 30, 1998 | Feedback
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
November 30, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Parasoft Donates $2.8 Million in Software to Princeton's Computer Science Program
Donation Promises to Better Prepare Computer Science Students for Futures in ProgrammingDATELINE: MONROVIA, Calif., Nov. 30
ParaSoft, leading provider of software development productivity solutions, announced today their donation of 825 licenses for their award-winning suite of software development tools to Princeton University's Computer Science department in Princeton, New Jersey.
These licenses represent approximately $2.8 million in software being donated by ParaSoft to the university. The donation gives the students complete access to ParaSoft's leading error prevention and error-detection tools for software development. The donation includes ParaSoft products CodeWizard, Insure++ (with the add-ons TCA and Inuse), jtest!, and CodeWizard for Java (TM). ...
Princeton is eager to get the opportunity to use ParaSoft tools in their computer science classes.
"We are very excited about this gift from ParaSoft," says David Dobkin, Chair of Princeton's Computer Science Department. "It is vital to be able to provide cutting edge tools to our students as an important part of their experimental education."
ParaSoft sees this donation as an opportunity to help develop qualified and effective software developers. "Knowing how to produce error free software is an extremely valuable skill. Once these students join the work force, they will be better prepared and possess good production habits that will please their managers and their customers," says Kolawa. ...
Fortune
Copyright 1998 The Time Inc. Magazine Company
December 7, 1998HEADLINE: Should Alan Greenspan Be Worrying About Deflation?
BYLINE: N. Gregory MankiwI have some important advice either for Alan Greenspan or for bond investors. The problem is, I can't decide which.
I came upon this ambiguously targeted advice by watching the market for inflation-indexed government bonds. The U.S. Treasury introduced this new type of debt in 1997 to the acclaim of most economists and the yawns of just about everyone else. (For more on inflation-indexed bonds, see FORTUNE Investor.) Today, the bonds are telling an amazing story about what the future may hold.
Consider: Ten-year indexed bonds have recently been offering a yield that is less than one percentage point below the yield on ten-year bonds without inflation protection. Taken at face value, this means that the bond market expects the consumer price index to rise by less than 1% per year. Now add the result of the 1996 Boskin commission that the CPI overstates inflation by a bit more than 1% per year, and we are left with a striking conclusion: Not only has the Fed achieved the Holy Grail of central banking--price stability--it may even have overshot. We may be on the verge of a decade of deflation. ...
The problem is that the link between unemployment and inflation, while apparent in historical data, is far from precise and reliable. Standard theory says that rising inflation is a threat when unemployment falls below some threshold "natural rate." Yet the natural rate of unemployment changes over time in ways that are obvious only with hindsight, and sometimes not even then.
Several years ago many economists were estimating the natural rate between 5.5% and 6%. But unemployment has remained below that level for several years now without reigniting inflation. Economist Robert Shimer of Princeton University argues that the aging of the baby boom gets the credit: As this bulge of workers has entered middle age, they have moved into more stable jobs, pushing down the economy's natural rate of unemployment. Perhaps that's why the bond market is no longer worried about inflation, despite low unemployment. ...
The New Republic
Copyright 1998 The New Republic, Inc.
DECEMBER 7, 1998Wonderland
To the editors:
The New Republic is to be congratulated for having stimulated a culturally interesting transatlantic debate. Richard Jenkyns's protracted assault on my beastly American invasion of the childhood domain he nostalgically defends as the last bastion of a sunny and unsoiled Englishness has, of course, a most venerable ancestry ("Phallus in Wonderland," October 26). Whether intentionally or not, he adopts the strident rhetoric of "Frauds on the Fairies," the 1853 essay in which Charles Dickens lamented that a phallic " hog of unwieldy proportions" had violated the "fairy flower garden" of childhood.
Dickens feared that Americans would cast Cinderella as a bloomers-wearing virago who, as queen, might extend the vote to all members of her sex. Jenkyns's similar horror at any deformation of a virginal "space" that he associated with Lewis Carroll's Oxford, however, was already anachronistic in 1853. Fairy tales never were the "pure" child-texts reinvented by Perrault and the Grimms. And, as I argue in Ventures into Childland and elsewhere, Victorian child-texts, and, indeed any child-text written by the former child we call a grown-up, inevitably involves a dialogue between adult and child selves. ...
U.C. Knoepflmacher
Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
Business Week
Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
November 30, 1998HEADLINE: THE SCIENCE OF THE DEAL
BYLINE: By Seanna Browder in Bothell, Wash.HIGHLIGHT: George Rathmann of ICOS knows how to pump life into biotech
George Rathmann is a nut for games. Back in the late 1970s, when he was the research chief for Abbott Laboratories, a co-worker left a Rubik's Cube sitting on Rathmann's desk. Entranced by the seemingly simple challenge, Rathmann proceeded to spend ''night and day'' on the puzzle until he finally solved it -- three days later. Even so, that's no easy feat: Out of 43 quintillion possibilities, there is only one correct combination.
These days, as the 70-year-old CEO of ICOS Corp., Rathmann is absorbed in solving another arduous puzzle. Rathmann joined ICOS shortly after its founding in 1989. Ever since he has been working to distinguish the Bothell (Wash.) company from hundreds of other biotech startups struggling to turn cutting-edge research into commercial drugs. Finally, it looks like the years of hard work may pay off: Two months ago, Rathmann persuaded Eli Lilly & Co. to pump at least $75 million into the development of a new ICOS anti-impotence drug.
The Lilly deal was a huge coup; executives there believe ICOS may be close to coming out with the next Viagra. They've got good reason for their vote of confidence. Rathmann has had plenty of coups in his long career as a biotech pioneer. ...
If living close to the edge drives Rathmann, he has picked the right industry. Although bioengineering is producing radical new drugs, developing one can cost up to $500 million. And ICOS, even with its Lilly partnership, faces daunting hurdles.
The company burned through $42 million last year for trials on four new drugs. Profits are still years away. IMPATIENT. It wasn't money that drew Rathmann to chemistry when he was growing up in Milwaukee. As a teenager, he used his grasp of chemical reactions to create spectacular explosions in the neighborhood. He now says his early pyrotechnics display was mostly intended to impress his high school girlfriend, Joy. It worked: The couple have been married since 1950. An impatient youth, Rathmann completed his BS in chemistry at Northwestern University by age 18. But he was so irate when the university denied him entry into medical school that he huffed off to Princeton University to get a PhD in chemistry instead. He landed his first job with 3M Co. as a plastics researcher....
Business Week
Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
November 30, 1998HEADLINE: EMPLOYERS PARE HEALTH BENEFITS
BYLINE: BY GENE KORETZHIGHLIGHT: Part-timers and new hires lose out
At last count in 1997, more than 43 million Americans lacked health insurance of any type -- up from 31.8 million a decade earlier. In a new study, economists Henry S. Farber of Princeton University and Helen Levy of the University of California at Berkeley examine a trend that may have contributed to this increase: the long-term decline in health coverage among workers in the private sector.
From 1979 to 1997, according to survey data, the share of private-sector workers with health insurance from their jobs fell from 71.9% to 64.5%, with most of the drop occurring since 1988. (The share of government workers with such health coverage stayed close to 80% over the same period.) The study asked several questions: Did the decline in coverage occur because employers were dropping insurance plans entirely or just for some of their workers? And did it reflect growth of jobs that normally lacked coverage? To find out, the researchers distinguished between ''peripheral'' workers, defined as part-timers and those on the job for less than a year, and ''core'' workers, who are full-timers in longer-term positions and who have always enjoyed a high level of coverage.
Their analysis is revealing. They found little change in either the percentage of workers whose employers offered insurance plans, or in the share of workers in peripheral jobs (about 30% of the private workforce). But they did find a sharp decline in the percentage of ''peripheral'' workers that are eligible for employer coverage.
There was also a rise in the number of ''core'' workers choosing to opt out of available plans (presumably because of high employee costs), about half of which was offset by coverage under their spouses' plans. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 29, 1998HEADLINE: EDUCATION; Tempest Over Princeton Teacher
BYLINE: By KATHERINE ZOEPFDATELINE: PRINCETON
"Infanticide at Princeton," read posters papering bulletin boards and lampposts across the Princeton University campus this fall.
The signs were referring to the appointment of Peter Singer as the Ira B. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the University Center for Human Values.
Perhaps best known in the United States for his work on animal rights, Professor Singer has earned the nickname "Professor Death" because of his writings on the sanctity of human life and the euthanasia of disabled human infants.
Despite the furor over his appointment, the university has not been moved to reconsider his selection. And faculty members are generally supportive of the appointment also. Students have largely expressed a wait-and-see approach to Professor Singer, who is is currently the director of the Center of Human Bioethics at Monash University in Australia.
Described by many academics as one of the most original and influential ethical thinkers of his day, Professor Singer expounds views that many consider abhorrent.
His books, which include "Practical Ethics" and "Animal Liberation" try to create an intellectual framework that makes discussion of life-and-death possible. Among these is the notion that people with disabilities might be better off killed shortly after birth. ...
Katie Tillman, a senior and president of the student Bioethics Forum, expressed surprise at the reactions the appointment has provoked. "I never thought Princeton could react like this," Ms. Tillman said. "In my four years here, this is the single biggest controversy on campus."
Kathryn Getek, also a senior, whose group, Princeton Pro-Life, is part of a collaborative effort to pressure the university into rescinding the appointment. She said that while "relating Singer's writing to Nazi Germany is a tired analogy," it is "not all that far-fetched." ...
Faculty members here are generally looking forward to Professor Singer's arrival. "I think it's a brilliant appointment," said Lee Silver, a professor of molecular biology. "I don't know any professor at the university who's against it. I think there's been some amusement at the reactions this has been getting, the attacks from both the far right and the far left." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 29, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: The World; Germany Searches For 'Normality'
BYLINE: By ROGER COHENDATELINE: BERLIN
GERMANY is whole and free. The Allied and Russian troops have long since left Berlin. Next year, with Poland's entry into NATO, the country will be surrounded by allies for the first time in its modern history, and the German parliament will return to the Reichstag. A cycle has been completed, it would seem, a chapter closed, 53 years after the fall of Hitler's Reich.
And yet Germany is anything but tranquil at the dawn of what Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's rule. In recent weeks, a former President, leading writers and prominent Jews have been drawn into a fierce debate about the place of memory and the shame, if any, that young Germans should feel for the crimes of their forebears. ...
After the death camps, after the destruction of European Jewry, Germany has more recently been dealing with the issues of slave labor at many of its corporations and the cooperation of many banks and insurance companies with the Nazis.
"The taboos have all been lifted at last, and the complicity of most sectors of German society revealed," said Arno J. Mayer, a historian at Princeton University. "But once you do that, of course, you want to move forward, get beyond it all." ...
Newsday
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc.
November 29, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: REBEL WITH A CAUSE / IN EXILE, DISSIDENT SEEKS REFORM
BYLINE: By Mae M. Cheng. STAFF WRITER
Wei Jingsheng's goal for his country is to see a democratic government in power. His personal goal is to enjoy the advantages of a "common person," able to pursue photography and painting. For this exiled Chinese dissident now living in New York, the successes of both are intertwined.
Only when China becomes a democratic country, Wei says, can he retire from his work as a human rights activist and enjoy what are now only hobbies he has no time to explore. "I especially want a normal life," said Wei in Chinese, explaining that he sees himself as a pu tong ren, or common person.
"I love literature, natural sciences and photography, but all these things must be put aside for now," he said in a recent interview at Columbia University, where he has lived since shortly after his release from prison a year ago this month. "It's like being in a toy store. You want everything, but you can't bring them all home." ...
"He's a good politician and a tireless worker," said Perry Link, a professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University. Observers have picked up on his charm and have been respectful of Wei and his struggles in the past two decades even though the reaction to his message has been mixed, said Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch-Asia. ...
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
November 28, 1998HEADLINE: Psychiatric guinea pigs are left in limbo
BYLINE: Nell Boyce (Washington DC)ADVOCATES for the mentally ill are disappointed by a report from an expert ethical panel which was asked to produce new guidelines for experiments involving patients with psychiatric illnesses.
Calls for reform followed high-profile cases of research subjects suffering severe psychotic episodes and even committing suicide (This Week, 20 June, p 20).
The new report, from the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), calls for independent doctors to assess people's ability to consent to take part in proposed research trials.
But critics say that the report ducks the thorniest issues. "I think it's a positive step. However, it clearly falls short," says Adil Shamoo of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, a long-time critic of trials which put psychiatric patients on placebos or "challenge" them with drugs that provoke their symptoms. The report does not recommend a ban on those studies, but calls for further debate.
The panel also decided that researchers can continue experiments that offer no potential therapeutic benefits to their subjects, even where the patient is incapable of giving informed consent, as long as a family member or guardian agrees. "That was the most controversial issue," says NBAC chair Harold Shapiro of Princeton University in New Jersey. The report calls for a national panel to review all the research protocols for such experiments before they can go forward, but does not ask for a moratorium until the panel is set up.
The Idaho Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Idaho Statesman
November 27, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: Impeach Clinton, but not Burr?
BYLINE: By Sean WilentzSOURCE: Special to the Los Angeles Times
Now that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has made his best case for the impeachment of President Clinton, the House Judiciary Committee must struggle over a difficult question: Do Starr's charges rise to the Constitution's standards of ''high crimes and misdemeanors''? Starr's critics assert that even if his accusations about perjury and obstruction of justice are true, they are not impeachable offenses, because they relate to private matters. Starr and his defenders reply that the critics' standards are too narrow and would permit a president guilty of all sorts of offenses, including murder, to escape impeachment.
No one, apart from a few conspiracy nuts, has accused Clinton of murder, so Starr and his defenders' point comes across as a bit academic. I would hope that any president charged with murder would be impeached. The trouble is, the one historical precedent we have points the other way. Incredibly, the Constitution's framers may well have thought that an executive charged with murder could escape impeachment. Or so it would seem from the example of the most notorious killing in early American political history: Vice President Aaron Burr's shooting of the former secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. ...
Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University, is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
NOTE: This column also appeared in The Record (Bergen County).
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 27, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: Editorial Observer; When a Law Firm Is Like a Baseball Team
BYLINE: By BRENT STAPLESThe state of Washington followed California earlier this month when it voted to eliminate state-sponsored affirmative action in education and government contracts. But the nation as a whole has moved in the opposite direction since California's Proposition 209 raised fears of a national movement that might re-segregate higher education and the professions, deepening racial divisions.
Faced with the prospect of civic disaster, even hard-line conservatives have taken a more moderate stance, seeking ways to limit affirmative action instead of killing it. The new tack among conservatives is to frown on race-sensitive policies in most contexts, while endorsing them in the municipal services and in public colleges on the premise that publicly financed institutions should be racially representative to keep taxpayer support.
Abigail Thernstrom presented a troubling variation on this theme last month in The Wall Street Journal. Ms. Thernstrom argued that African-Americans who attended middling and "allegedly dead-end colleges" had done so well professionally that they had no need of access to first-tier institutions like Harvard, Duke or the University of Chicago. In the Thernstrom theory, elite universities could re-segregate with no foreseeable harm to African-Americans -- as long as middling colleges continued to provide broad access.
This view is noxiously classist and historically naive. Studies of work-force integration show that African-Americans are routinely required to have far more impressive credentials than whites, even when competing for the same jobs. For whites, elite university degrees are a nice enhancement. But for African-Americans, those same degrees are required just to get in the door. ...
The Thernstrom theory -- that African-Americans can achieve equal professional access without attending Harvard, Yale, Princeton or the University of Chicago -- is wrong on its face. The country may yet get there, but we have a long way to go.
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Copyright 1998 New Mexican, Inc.
November 27, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: Success comes through methodical discipline
BYLINE: Dottie IndykeA.J. Verdelle presents Lannan reading
Every day for 14 months, A.J. Verdelle got up in the morning to work on her novel.
Two-thirds of the way through what would become The Good Negress, the 29-year-old writer realized she didn't have the maturity to fully inhabit her narrating character, a struggling widow and mother of three children. The author tossed the draft in the garbage, had herself a good cry and began again.With the methodical discipline she learned as a professional statistician, Verdelle completed her book, painstakingly reviewing the draft six complete times, reading for dialect, character and so on.
"Life is hard work," she said in a phone interview from New Jersey, where she is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
That Verdelle subscribes to that philosophy will come as no surprise to readers of The Good Negress. The novel's main character, Denise Palms, spends all her waking hours cooking, cleaning and babysitting, struggling to squeeze her education in amid her crushing load of responsibility. ...
Cox News Service
Copyright 1998 Cox News Service
November 26, 1998HEADLINE: It's a familiar song and dance
BYLINE: Douglas KalajianDATELINE: BOCA RATON, Fla.
BODY: The girls, as they call themselves, are talking about each other the way girls do.
"She's so cute," Bette says.
"Adorable," Lee agrees. "What a figure! Why didn't I keep mine?"
Teri, the object of these observations, seems to be involved in another conversation. Suddenly she turns to Lee.
"You're still beautiful," she says, and then goes back to what she was doing.
All this gushing might be suspect if it were merely overheard. These are, after all, accomplished performers. But the light of sincerity and gratitude is unmistakable in the eyes of Teri's admirers.
"She's done so much for me," Bette says.
"She rejuvenated me," Lee says.
Teri Carlin earned this gratitude by casting Bette Dubbs and Lee Schulman in charity shows a few years back, the first real chance each had to shake off a half-century's stage rust. ....
"He changed my name to Leonor Sola," Lee explains, with dramatic sweep of her arms.
The next few years were a whirl, as Lee took to the road with a stack of wolf-whistle publicity photos and a suitcase full of exotic dresses. "At the time, those costumes cost about $500 each," she says. "My kids wound up wearing them for Halloween."
At 19, she landed a major dance role in George Abbott's Broadway production Too Many Girls, starring Desi Arnaz and Van Johnson. ...
Lee couldn't even dance again for a year, but she was determined make up for the missed film opportunity. When she recovered, she signed with the William Morris talent agency, which booked a series of club appearances. Her tour ended when she collapsed with pleurisy.
"At that point, I decided God was trying to tell me something," she says.
So had a most persistent suitor. This time, Lee not only listened to his proposal, she accepted. Leonor Sola of stage and almost screen became Lee Schulman of the alumni records department at Princeton University. She stopped thinking about performing but never lost the instinct.
"My daughters tell me they could hear my heels clacking on the kitchen floor while I was doing dishes," she says. ...
St. Petersburg Times
Copyright 1998 Times Publishing Company
November 26, 1998, ThursdayEAKES, JOHN A., 45, of Philadelphia, formerly of St. Petersburg, died Saturday (Nov. 21, 1998) of liver disease. He was born in Waco, Texas, and lived in St. Petersburg from 1962 to 1971, when he graduated from St. Petersburg High School. He was a 1975 graduate of Princeton University and received a doctorate in 1980 from George Washington University. He was a Navy veteran. He was a director of an employee assistance program and was politically active in gay rights. Survivors include his companion, Jeff Weeden; his mother, Jane Eakes; a sister, Donna Coch; and a brother, Edward Jr. Emmanuel Johnson Funeral Home, Philadelphia.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS
Copyright 1998 Bangor Daily News (BANGOR, MAINE)
November 25, 1998 WednesdayHEADLINE: Global warming causes clear, but squabbles sink solutions
BYLINE: Clair WoodLast December all but a handful of the world's nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to debate what to do about global warming caused by the greenhouse effect. There was an overwhelming consensus that emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel consumption, must be reduced.
There was next to no consensus on how this goal was to be reached. Developing Third World nations insisted that Western industrialized nations, primarily Europe and the United States, must shoulder nearly all of the burden since they are the ones producing the bulk of the gases.
Delegates from the Westheld out for some degree of emission control by the developing nations.
Moreover, the industrial nations want to be able to buy emission allowances, in effect a license to produce greenhouse
gases, from developing nations not using their quotas. An agreement finally was reached and signed by most of the participants with the noticeable exception of the United States.
On Nov. 12, the Clinton administration finally signed at a second conference being held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but it was a largely symbolic gesture since Congress must ratify the treaty and there is almost no chance of that happening. The political and economic consequences of ratification are immense, and those opposing the treaty have a number of controversial scientific studies to bolster their arguments.
If a nation has a carbon "sink," some means to soak up its carbon dioxide emissions, then the argument can be made for that nation not to be required to make stringent cuts. In a recent issue of Science, Jocelyn Kaiser cites a controversial study indicating that North America may have a sink so huge that it offsets every ton of carbon emitted from the burning of fossil fuels in both the United States and Canada.
Jorge Sarmiento of the Carbon Modeling Consortium at Princeton University leads a research group that feeds atmospheric and oceanic data into a model for carbon sinks. They were amazed to find that carbon levels dropped off as one goes from west to east in the United States. The reverse should be the case, leading Sarmiento to believe that a carbon sink large enough to negate U.S. and Canadian carbon dioxide emissions is in operation. ...
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
November 25, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: New Thirst for Spirituality Being Felt Worldwide
BYLINE: Jane Lampman Staff writer of The Christian Science MonitorHIGHLIGHT: A LULL IN U.S. NORTH
Religious signposts at the close of the 20th century are full of surprises.
* In a 1998 Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of Americans said religion could "solve all or most of our problems."
* While the world's population has grown by 60 percent since 1970, the number of evangelical Christians has risen by 126 percent. ...
Some sectors of religious life are flourishing while others are struggling. Mainline Protestant churches - the "establishment" of the 1950s - have seen memberships decline. The number of Americans who say they are Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist is one-third lower than 30 years ago, according to Princeton Religion Research Center. "The mainline lost a lot of young people, partly because of 'coasting,' " Marty says. "You have to win your own kids, and they're going to go seeking on their own."...
Meanwhile, many Americans, particularly among younger generations suspicious of institutional authority, are engaged in what sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University calls "spirituality of seeking" in his book "After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s." They explore many avenues and pick and choose among traditions to create a personal faith. From Generation X downward, young people often find their religious communities in cyberspace. ...
USA TODAY
Copyright 1998 Gannett Company, Inc.
November 25, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Good times are here, but just how good?
BYLINE: Beth Belton and Rich MillerThe U.S. economy sets a record next month for the longest peacetime expansion since World War II. Inflation and unemployment are near 25-year lows. But by some measures, the expansion hasn't been as strong as some other postwar expansions because of the impact of corporate restructuring and globalization, experts say. That has kept growth in household income and productivity muted. ...
Both the longest wartime expansion, during the Vietnam War, and the longest peacetime expansion, during the Reagan administration, were driven by huge government outlays on defense. This expansion was driven by U.S. companies investing in computers and new factories in a bid to be dominant players in the global economy.
Yet despite record levels of investment spending, productivity growth -- the key to rising living standards -- remains mediocre compared with the golden years of the 1960s.
It has picked up slightly in recent months, but "to say it's inched up would be an exaggeration," says Alan Blinder, a former Fed governor who now teaches at Princeton University. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 25, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Donald C. May, Weapons Scientist
Donald C. May, 81, who did research in weaponry and missiles for the Navy and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, died Nov. 22 at Arlington Hospital after suffering strokes. He lived in McLean.
Dr. May was a native of Ann Arbor, Mich., where he graduated from the University of Michigan. He received a master's degree and doctorate, both in mathematics, from Princeton University. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 24, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: New Data Help Explain Crystals That Defy Nature
BYLINE: By MALCOLM W. BROWNEA team of physicists has found evidence that a new kind of atomic jigsaw puzzle, in which identical puzzle pieces are allowed to overlap each other to form complex structures, may explain why a peculiar class of compounds exists in defiance of long established geometric rules.
Their demonstration, reported this month in the journal Nature, strengthens a theory about how atoms arrange themselves in an enigmatic type of substances called "quasicrystals," discovered in 1982. Then, many scientists were skeptical that quasicrystals could exist, and even today, although the skeptics have been refuted, some uncertainties remain about the mathematics underlying quasicrystals.
But a new theoretical framework for quasicrystals promises to simplify matters.
Most solid matter can be roughly classified as either "glassy," in which atoms are jumbled together without any order, or crystalline, in which atoms arrayed in lattices form regularly repeating patterns. A typical crystal is the cubic lattice of table salt, in which atoms of sodium and chlorine alternate with each other in a kind of three-dimensional chess board.
For the past 150 years, rules based on well-known geometric relationships have sufficed to explain the forms and behavior of crystals. One such rule has to do with symmetries of rotation. For example, if a crystal is rotated in an X-ray beam and the X-rays scattered by its atomic structure create exactly the same pattern with each half turn of the crystal, the crystal is said to exhibit "two-fold symmetry." A repetition of the pattern every third of a turn implies that the crystal has "three-fold symmetry," and so on.
But one of the symmetries forbidden by classical crystalography is five-fold symmetry. The reason is related to the fact that regular pentagons -- "tiles" with five equilateral sides -- cannot be fitted together to neatly cover a table top without leaving gaps. ...
About the time of Dr. Schechtman's discovery, two mathematical physicists at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt and Dr. Dov Levine, hit upon a possible structure for a substance in which atoms are arranged in nonperiodic patterns. Their system borrowed from a mathematical game that had been invented by Dr. Roger Penrose, an Oxford University physicist and cosmologist.
In 1974, Dr. Penrose devised various pairs of complementary "tiles" -- parallelograms that can be laid on a flat surface with their edges joined. Such tiles can be fitted together (using rules stipulated by Dr. Penrose) to completely cover any flat surface, leaving no gaps between tiles. The patterns thus formed have endless variations and do not repeat themselves in any periodic way. ...
Dr. Steinhardt noticed the possibility of building a three-dimensional structure analogous to a smooth, gapless surface covered with two-dimensional Penrose tiles. The equivalent of the Penrose fat and skinny rhombuses was a pair of complementary rhomboids that could be fitted together to completely fill a three-dimensional volume without leaving gaps. ...
In a development reported this month, Dr. Steinhardt, now a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, and his collaborators in Korea and Japan said they believed they detected experimental proof that the stacked decagon theory was the best explanation for the structure of quasicrystals.
The new theory, which was partly suggested in 1991 by Dr. Sergei E. Burkov, a mathematician at the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Moscow, is based on the joining-together of single units with the same shape rather than pairs of units with different shapes like the original Penrose tiles.
Dr. Steinhardt's group believes it has experimentally validated and improved on Dr. Burkov's theoretical scheme by producing electron-microscope images of a real quasicrystal, an aluminum-nickel-cobalt alloy. ...
The News and Observer
Copyright 1998 The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
November 24, 1998 TuesdaySECTION: EDITORIAL/OPINION
HEADLINE: High-water markJames Lee Witt and his Federal Emergency Management Agency are making a timely and well-advised change by emphasizing the prevention of disaster along with the traditional role of helping people and communities recover from catastrophe.
Mitigation of risk through FEMA purchases of homes in flood-prone areas has been one of the agency's recent strategies. Witt's latest proposal, on the heels of much discussion of repetitive flood and wind damage claims in the highest-risk locations, calls for a limit - and in some cases a ban - on approval of federally subsidized flood insurance. His proposal approaches, if you will, a high-water mark in dealing with disaster.
Essentially, the FEMA director offers a two-part suggestion. First, he proposes that flood insurance be denied homeowners who have filed two or more claims that total more than the value of their homes, and who further have refused to elevate or move their homes or accept a buyout. Second, homeowners who have chosen to live in locations at high risk for flooding would be required to pay the fair market flood-insurance price instead of the subsidized rate. ...
The revised flood policy would address another cost taxpayers face when they rightfully come to the aid of victims through FEMA and other agencies. Wealthier Americans are building more homes, vacation homes or high-end rental properties in high-risk coastal areas. Princeton University research shows the much higher property values have caused disaster losses to soar without any significant increase in the number of disasters. ...
The Advocate
Copyright 1998 Capital City Press (Baton Rouge, La.)
November 23, 1998 MondayHEADLINE: Medical research on mental patients
We live in an era of vast changes in our knowledge of how both mind and body work. Genetic predisposition to disease, research into how cells grow, new drugs and "cocktails" which allow old drugs to work more effectively - all are the fruits of research.
When research involves human beings, in the testing of new medical procedures or drugs, the United States government has always insisted in theory on the strongest possible protections for the consent of the research subject. In practice, sometimes these protections haven't worked as well as advertised, but the bedrock basis for U.S. policies in human-subject research is the principle of informed consent.
We hanged German doctors at Nuremberg for participating in sometimes horrific Nazi-era research which violated the basic principle: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. "
For research involving the mentally impaired, the principle of informed consent is a tough standard to reach. The government's National Bioethics Advisory Commission has wrestled with the issues for more than a year, and a report last week tried to meet the happy medium proposed by the commission's chairman, Princeton University President Harold Shapiro: "You have to find the right balance of protection and respect on the one hand, and the ability for ethically appropriate research to go ahead on the other. " ...
It's easy enough to criticize the commission's ultimate response to the dilemma: another committee. For the moment, however, it seems sensible to create a review committee of sorts at the national level to review - in advance - research proposals involving risky, nontherapeutic research on mentally impaired patients. ...
AP Online
Copyright 1998 Associated Press
November 23, 1998; MondayHEADLINE: Jordan Queen Discusses King's Pain
BYLINE: DONNA ABU-NASR
DATELINE: WASHINGTONAs Jordan's King Hussein was being treatment and chemotherapy for cancer in the United States, rumors spread back home that dissension over the issue of succession is splitting apart the royal family.
But Queen Noor, Hussein's wife, says the succession and transition ''will take place in their own time.''
''His majesty would never allow a situation to develop that would not be for the best of the country,'' the American-born queen said in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press and Associated Press Television News.
''He has worked very hard over the years to ensure that the Hashemite family will serve the country in the smoothest and most capable fashion,'' added Noor, sitting in the couple's family room at their residence in suburban Maryland.
The king and queen have been in the United States since July, when Hussein disclosed he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. After months of treatment and chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., his cancer is reported in complete remission.
Noor said she and her husband expect to return to Jordan early next year after Hussein undergoes a marrow transplant to guard against recurrence of the lymphoma. As any cancer survivor, the king, who has lost his hair to chemotherapy and appears frail, will continue to be monitored. ...
Noor also is an active opponent to the use of land mines and a campaigner for ecotourism. In addition, the queen an Arab-American Christian by birth has been fighting hard to dispel misconceptions about Islam and the Arabs.
But she said her training in architecture and urban planning at Princeton University, which involved long hours, prepared her for the demanding life of a queen.
Noor was working on an airport design project in Jordan when she met the king. The former Lisa Halaby adopted the Islamic religion and took the name Noor al Hussein, or ''Light of Hussein,'' when they were married in 1978.
Asbury Park Press
Copyright 1998 Asbury Park Press, Inc. (Neptune, NJ.)
November 23, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: First-ever title eludes Princeton
BYLINE: PETE BIGELOW; STAFF WRITERPHILADELPHIA - Princeton University entered yesterday's NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship looking to establish a winning tradition. Instead, Old Dominion kept its tradition intact, winning the program's eighth national championship.
The Tigers were searching for their first-ever title, but for the second time in three years they fell one game short as ODU fended off the feisty Tigers down the stretch for a 3-2 win in front of 3,200 fans at Franklin Field.
The hard-fought contest crammed all the high-stakes drama you could ask for in a championship game. There was the second-half charge single-handedly led by Princeton senior Kirsty Hale the Ivy League Player of the Year. There was senior Molly O'Malley gritting it out on the field just four weeks after tearing her ACL. There was Old Dominion's Marina DiGiacomo preserving the win with her astonishing stick-work. There was emotional Lady Monarchs goalkeeper Jamie Hill saving the day in the cage, just two months after her mother's death.
"This group of (eight) seniors, like the ones before them, they have laid the groundwork for future success," Princeton coach Beth Bozman said. "We hope to not skip a beat. That said, I can't imagine a better class either relating to field hockey or the people, too." ....
The Commercial Appeal
Copyright 1998 Southeastern Newspapers Corporation (Memphis, TN)
November 23, 1998HEADLINE: SCHOOL DIVERSITY ENTERS NEW CHALLENGE
BYLINE: Kate Zernike The Boston GlobeDATELINE: BOSTON
With a referendum banning affirmative action in California, and court rulings effectively doing so in Texas and now Boston, the question becomes: What can be done to make sure elite schools and universities reflect the same rainbow as the nation?
So far, the solutions being tried haven't quite worked.
Some educators suggest using family income in place of race. But that doesn't result in racial diversity.
Another policy in Texas automatically accepts the top 10 percent of every high school graduating class to state universities. But that doesn't necessarily foster racial diversity. ...
Ultimately, diversity without race-based preferences means making sure that Hispanic and black students are so well-prepared beginning in elementary school that they can compete for admissions to top high schools and colleges on grades alone. Yet no school system in the nation has figured out how to do that. ...
So if schools attempt diversity by taking the best students with low incomes, they still end up with mostly white classrooms.
"The number of minority students who are poor yet qualified is very low," said William Bowen, former president of Princeton University. ...
Health Line
Copyright 1998 The National Journal Group, Inc.
November 23, 1998SECTION: POLITICS & POLICY
HEADLINE: HEALTH CARE REFORM: SURVEY FINDS STRONG PUBLIC SUPPORT
A new survey by Louis Harris Associates finds that an overwhelming percentage of Americans would vote to support candidates who institute health care reform, USA Today reports. Nearly nine of ten respondents to a telephone survey would vote for a candidate who would support legislation to improve quality of care, provide more choice in medical care and decrease out-of-pocket costs. Although approximately 85% are currently satisfied with their health coverage, "42% don't think their satisfaction will last," and predicted that people will, in five years, be less able to pay for nursing home care (90%) and afford care for a seriously ill child (78%). ...
Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University, noting that Americans support both lower costs and increased quality and choice, "said that Americans are hopelessly naive about medical care, wanting everything but balking at paying what that would cost." Reinhardt said, "One way or another there will be health care rationing in this country. The only real question ... is who will do the rationing -- government bureaucrats or health plan accountants."
Jet
Copyright 1998 Johnson Publishing Company, Inc.
November 23, 1998HEADLINE: Larry Ellis, Coach For The 1984 U.S. Olympic Men's Track Team, Succumbs At 70
Larry Ellis, who was the head coach of the 1984 United States Olympic men's track and field team, recently died of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Skillman, NJ. He was 70.
Ellis, who was reared in the Bronx, coached the men's teams at Princeton from 1970 to 1992. He coached the outdoor and indoor track and field for the first 20 years and cross-country for 22 years.
The prestigious university, under Ellis's guidance, competed in the Heptagonal League, which comprises the eight Ivy League colleges plus Army and Navy.
Until he arrived, Princeton had never won a Heptagonal team title since 1938 and had never won a Heptagonal cross-country title. But, under Ellis's powerful leadership, the university won 11 titles in track and eight in cross-country. His coaching at Princeton made him the first Black American coach in any Ivy League sport. ...
National Post
(formerly The Financial Post)
Copyright 1998 Financial Post from National Post
November 23, 1998 MondayHEADLINE: Washington voters' support for higher minimum wage sparks debate: Once again real life departs from dusty theory
BYLINE: Bill Tieleman;Bill Tieleman is president of West Star Communications and former communications director to Glen Clark, B.C. premier.
When Washington voters overwhelmingly passed a citizens' initiative November 3 to increase that state's minimum wage by 33% they made U.S. history. But they also made sense.
The first state to ever pass a minimum wage hike initiative showed that ordinary people strongly reject orthodox economic theories which claim higher minimum wages cause job loss and hurt the poor.
And they are not alone. In the past few years more and more studies have disproved that hoary old Economics 101 chestnut.
David Card, the Canadian-born Princeton University economist [now at the University of California-Berkeley] who also advises the Clinton administration, was one of the first to actually test the theories and find them wanting. His studies, along with those of colleague Alan Krueger and a host of others, found that boosting the minimum wage had either a negligible economic effect or even increased jobs. ...
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
November 23, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Japanese Study Confirms Efficacy of The Female Condom
DATELINE: CHICAGO, Nov. 23
(The Female Health Company Amex: FHC) In a recently published analysis of a study conducted in Japan on the contraceptive efficacy of The Female Condom(TM) contraceptive, results showed that when The Female Condom(TM) is used correctly and consistently, it is highly efficacious. James Trussell, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Associate Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, authored the analysis. Published in the journal Contraception, the analysis showed consistent results with studies conducted earlier in the U.S.
The perfect use (used correctly and with every sex act) failure rate in the Japanese study for six months use was 0.8 percent. In the U.S. study conducted by Family Health International, the perfect use failure rate for six months use was 2.6 percent. In the Japanese study, the typical use (not used correctly with every sex act) failure rate was 3.2 percent for the six months use while in the U.S. study the typical use failure rate for six months was 12.4 percent. Differences in the rates may be attributable to fewer acts of sexual intercourse, more disciplined use of The Female Condom(TM) or other factors among participants in the Japanese study. ...
Star Tribune
Copyright 1998 Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
November 23, 1998, Metro EditionHEADLINE: Playwright finds right pace in Minnesota;
Successful writer says move from East Coast to St. Peter suits him fineSOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: St. Peter, Minn.It's easy to imagine an all-American dream of leaving a relatively small city, moving out East and writing plays that get hailed by the New York Times as the stuff of genius. Maybe you get an office at Princeton University shared with such writers as Toni Morrison.
It's a nice success story, and it all happened to David Hancock - backward. Hancock moved to St. Peter last summer from the East Coast when his wife, Nancy Hanway, accepted a job in the Modern Foreign Language Department at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Hancock has spent much of his life in the bustle of the East; now he lives with his family on a quiet street near the fairgrounds. His work continues to meet with literary success.
In October, he was in New York to receive a Whiting Writers Award worth $30,000. The awards are given annually to 10 emerging writers of "exceptional talent and promise." Past winners have included David Foster Wallace and August Wilson.
"I guess you're emerging until you're overrated," Hancock said recently.
It's the latest in a series of grants, fellowships and awards that have kept his art alive since he began writing at the University of Iowa. His work in the 1990s has included three plays performed in New York City that yielded awards and coverage by the New York Times and the Village Voice, which called him "the most audacious and provocative playwright to emerge on the Off-Broadway scene in the '90s."
The attention led to a fellowship to write at Princeton for the 1997-98 academic year. Hancock worked there in the company of Russell Banks, Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates. ...
Traffic World
Copyright 1998 Journal of Commerce, Inc.
November 23, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Kyoto Aftermath
BYLINE: BY FRANK N. WILNERThe signing by the Clinton administration of an international treaty to reduce the production of greenhouse gases by industrialized nations has transportation firms, their unions and many shippers distressed that American industrial competitiveness, freight tonnage and transportation employment will tumble. ...
Attorney Mike McBride, who represents electric utilities and also holds an environmental engineering degree, said experts disagree whether global warming is a societal threat. He said Thomas Jefferson wrote of the ""year without a summer'' in 1816 following a volcanic eruption and that a second major eruption some 70 years later combined to cause ""a depression'' in average 19th century temperatures.
"The baseline being used to measure global warming could be phony,'' said McBride. In fact, Princeton University researchers said last month that North American forests use photosynthesis to soak up about the same amount of carbon dioxide that is discharged by burning fossil fuels. ...
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Austin American-Statesman
November 22, 1998HEADLINE: Human cloning hard to stop, expert says
BYLINE: Usha Lee McFarling
WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission said last week that human cloning will be "very difficult if not impossible to try to stop."
His comments came as the commission met to consider an urgent request by President Clinton that the group immediately take up the issue of human cloning. That plea followed stunning reports that the first human clones had been created by merging human DNA with donor cow eggs.
"I am deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and nonhuman species," Clinton wrote.
Clinton's request and the cautious response of Harold Shapiro, the head of the advisory group and president of Princeton University, spotlight what seems to be a crisis for bioethics and a troubling crossroads for society.
While bioethicists ponder whether humans should be cloned and what it means to blend humans with different creatures, scientists are racing, unfettered, to do it. ...
"As this technology continues to burst forward with such stunning speed," Shapiro said from Miami, where the commission met last week , "we know it will be very difficult if not impossible to try and stop something, even if we are against it." ...
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Austin American-Statesman
November 22, 1998HEADLINE: Dilemma: research on mentally ill; Issue of consent hinders
BYLINE: Rick WeissWASHINGTON -- Gripping a scientific article in her trembling hand, Beverly Post stood before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission in September to tell of her son's participation in a research study at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville.
"This is an article, a study in which my son was used," Post said. As part of that research, said the Highland, N.Y., woman, doctors gave her son amphetamines to exacerbate his symptoms for study. They also treated him with a drug called Haldol, she said, though she had warned them that he had previously reacted badly to the drug.
"Two years of his life were lost there," Post said. "It concerns me greatly that the animal activists can protect the lower forms of life from inhumane research, but thus far little has been said about human guinea pigs."
Her story struck a sympathetic chord with the commission. But its members were equally moved by very different testimony last month from Kathy Mannion of Port Washington, N.Y. Two of her four children have autism, a poorly understood psychiatric syndrome characterized by repetitive motions, verbal echoing and an impaired ability to bond with others.
"Good, ethical, humane scientific research has started to bring advances for an understanding of childhood autism," she testified, but if the commission recommended overly strict research rules, scientists might never figure out how to prevent or treat the disease. ...
Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, chairman of the commission based in Bethesda, Md., summed up the arduous task faced by the 18 scientists, lawyers, ethicists and patient advocates: "You have to find the right balance of protection and respect on the one hand, and the ability for ethically appropriate research to go ahead on the other."
That goal would be elusive under any circumstances. But the commission's work was made tougher by lobbying efforts by officials at the National Institutes of Health and heads of university psychiatry departments, who feared that the commission's crafting of patient protections might interfere with the nation's psychiatric research agendas. ...
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
November 22, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Oversight board eyed on medical research
BYLINE: By Dolores Kong, Globe StaffSaying the existing system for protecting people in research fails to do the job, a congressional committee and medical ethicists last week called for an independent national board with the power to enforce rigorous standards and prevent harm.
Citing psychiatric research abuses detailed in a Globe series last week as adding impetus to efforts to create such a board, legislators and ethicists said the move is urgently needed because of the rapid pace of research and the poorly funded and overworked state of research review boards. ...
A presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission last week recommended such protections be adopted, but some legislators, ethicists, and mental health advocates worry that its proposals either do not go far enough or will be largely ignored. ...
Harold Shapiro, National Bioethics Advisory Commission chairman and president of Princeton University, said last week that while the commission only has authority to recommend regulations to the White House, "we hope that the report will be convincing to enough people, that people will be inclined to take these recommendations seriously." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 22, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Parallel Lives
BYLINE: By Michael Wood; Michael Wood is the author of "The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction." He teaches English at Princeton University.
THE HOURS
By Michael Cunningham
230 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.ON a morning in June, a woman in her early 50's steps out into the bright, busy city that she loves. She needs to buy flowers for a party she is giving later in the day. She bumps into an old acquaintance, remembers moments from her earlier life. Along with a number of other people, she catches a glimpse of a celebrity, but isn't sure who it is. She buys the flowers, goes home and her day continues.
Where are we? We could, of course, be in any one of a number of days and cities, and the possibility itself is part of the answer to the question. But we are quite definitely, recognizably, in two novels: "Mrs. Dalloway," by Virginia Woolf, and "The Hours," by Michael Cunningham.
There are differences. The city is London in one case and New York in the other. The time is the 1920's; it is the 1990's. The unknown celebrity is a prince, a queen or a prime minister in a car; she is a movie star in a trailer. The woman in both novels is called Clarissa, but in the later work Mrs. Dalloway is a nickname. The chief difference, perhaps, is that no one in the first novel can have read the second, whereas almost everyone in the second seems to have read the first.
There are eerie consequences of this impression. When "The Hours" begins to repeat some of the darker events from "Mrs. Dalloway," is this a literary parallel, a hint at the limitations of human plots and chances -- or a suggestion that the first novel has caused the events in the second? ...
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
Copyright 1998 Sentinel Communications Co.
November 22, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: PANEL SAYS CELL RESEARCH RAISES DISTURBING IDEAS
NEW YORK - An ethics advisory panel has told President Clinton the hybrid cow-human cells announced earlier this month create the conceptual possibility of crossing "species boundaries," The New York Times reported Saturday. Clinton had requested immediate advice from the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on the implications of the research. Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University and head of the commission, wrote that the new research raised "concerns about crossing species boundaries and exercising excessive control over nature."
The Post and Courier
Copyright 1998 The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
November 22, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Weekends at War/Re-enactor lives Civil War, battle by battle
BYLINE: SUSAN HILL SMITHLADSON - Steve Burt climbs the back stairs of his house to the room his wife and two daughters call The Museum.
Inside the glass-covered coffee table is a display of spent bullets, minie balls and musket powder. Ceramic plates painted with Civil War scenes hang over the couch. Titles such as "Generals in Gray" and "Southern by the Grace of God" line the bookshelf.
Burt's fascination with the War Between the States started when he was a boy and never quit. Now, he travels back in time on weekends to relive the battles as one of an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Civil War re-enactors in America.
"You can read all the books there are about it, but it's like doing a black-and-white sketch," says Burt. "Actually wearing the uniform and doing the marches and walking the wheat field, it's like Technicolor." ...
He gets angry when critics paint Confederate re-enactors as racist, and says the assertion that the Southern soldier went to war over slavery is shallow. He points to the book, "For Cause and Comrades," by Princeton University professor James McPherson, to support his argument that men fought for many reasons - duty, honor, defense and patriotism.
Burt fell back into re-enacting six years ago after he and his family moved to Charleston from Texas. ...
Sunday Star-News
Copyright 1998 Wilmington Star-News, Inc. (Wilmington, NC)
November 22, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: ANOTHER CLOSE LOSS / Princeton takes down UNCW in OT
BYLINE: BRIAN HENDRICKSON, Staff writerFor many UNC-Wilmington basketball fans, referee David Elliott's name is synonymous with several four-letter words this morning.
It was Elliott's falling hand that signaled Nate Walton's buzzer-beating, off-balance shot good, extending the game into overtime and ultimately sending the Seahawks to a 61-54 loss Saturday night to Princeton before a sellout crowd at Trask Coliseum. Fans who thought the tip-in came after the buzzer and their Seahawks had their first win, 49-47, were streaming out of the stands onto the court as Elliott fought his way to the scorer's table.
And fans jumped wildly in the stands until the public address system announced the condemning words: Basket good.
"I thought we won the game," said Princeton's Gabe Lewullis, whose miss Walton tipped in. "I didn't know what was going on."
The game wasn't over - it was tied 49-49 and headed for a 5-minute overtime. "I thought we were very visibly deflated in the overtime," said UNCW coach Jerry Wainwright. "It started with the jump ball. We didn't get the jump ball. I don't even know if we jumped."
Things quickly went downhill for the Seahawks (0-3). The Tigers (1-1) outscored UNCW 12-5 in the extra period, slowly pulling away as UNCW missed shots with defenders in their faces and had others blocked.
Princeton was quicker to the ball and made some really tough plays," Wainwright said. "And they got on the back of Gabe Lewullis." ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 22, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: From Days of Yore, A Guide to Knight Life; National Gallery Show Looks Back in Time
BYLINE: Paul Richard, Washington Post Staff Writer
The horseman with the lance, the maiden in the tower, menace in the woods, pennants on the breeze -- an imagined Middle Ages is part of what we share.
Its gallantries, its shinings, have soaked into our culture. Sam Spade and the Lone Ranger and Obi-Wan Kenobi are medieval knights. Trump Tower and the stony dorms at Princeton University aspire to be castles, and draw from the same dream. When Diana died the story line got savaged. The dragon with the fiery mouth is not supposed to eat the princess. Everybody knows that. Princesses get rescued in chivalrous romance.
This is fairy-tale stuff, long ago gauzed over by Mother Goose, Sir Walter Scott, Walt Disney, the Pre-Raphaelites of England, Errol Flynn and Sigmund Freud. But once upon a time, real knights in armor rode to real jousts beneath the parapets of real castless. "Love and War: A Manual for Life in the Late Middle Ages" at the National Gallery of Art opens little leaded windows on that long-gone world. ...
Agence France Presse
Copyright 1998 Agence France PresseNovember 21, 1998
HEADLINE: US fusion
BYLINE: Philippe AlfroyDATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, Nov 21
For decades scientists have sought to tap the tremendous power of nuclear fusion, but their chances for success seemed remote -- until now.
Recent progress by US researchers using a device called the "Z" machine has revived hopes among rival US laboratories of harnessing the force that fuels the sun.
"Speaking about achieving high-fusion energy output, the Z machine is definitely the best thing I have heard of," said vice president Gerry Yonas of the Albuquerque-based Sandia National Laboratory, which built the Z machine.
But Richard Hawryluk, who heads a competing project at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory, suggested the race is far from over.
"Which one at the end of the day would be the one to produce commercial fusion power -- that remains to be seen," said Hawryluk.
"They have made some very nice progress in the development of the Z machine ... but we improved our design as well," he said. ...
Ultimately, if nuclear fusion reactors could be developed, humanity would have at its disposal an extremely cheap, virtually unlimited source of energy, fueled essentially by tiny quantities of sea water. ...
Albuquerque Tribune
Copyright 1998 Albuquerque Tribune
November 21, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Tily negotiated Elvis' record deal for RCA
BYLINE: Sarah Van Cott TRIBUNE REPORTERJust before the sun peaked above the horizon, kindergarten-age Barbara Maddoux would sneak downstairs and keep her father company while he got ready for work.
Her father would cook them both breakfast while the rest of the family was fast asleep.
"I remember waking up at about 5:30 in the morning. He and I would talk while we waited on the curb for the car pool," she said.
The car pool would take "Coley" Tily out of the suburbs of Philadelphia and into New York City, where he worked as the head lawyer for RCA Victor Records. ...
"He made Elvis a deal he couldn't refuse," Maddoux said of her father, who negotiated Presley's contract with RCA Victor Records before it was sold to NBC.
Known as "Coley" to family and friends, Herbert Coleman Tily III graduated from Princeton University in 1940. He served in the Air Force during WWII. After becoming a major in the Air Force, Tily returned to college, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1947. ...
He also lent a helping hand to recruit New Mexico high school students to Princeton University. He traveled to high schools throughout the state as a member of the Princeton Alumni Council Executive Committee, promoting his alma mater. Tily received Princeton's Alumni Award for Service in 1982. ...
Tily died in the-intensive care unit at the John F. Kennedy Cherry Hill Hospital in New Jersey. ...
AP Online
Copyright 1998 Associated Press
November 21, 1998HEADLINE: Panel Uneasy Over Cell Research
DATELINE: NEW YORKAn ethics advisory panel has told President Clinton that the hybrid cow-human cells announced earlier this month create the conceptual possibility of crossing ''species boundaries,'' The New York Times reported today.
Clinton had requested immediate advice from the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on the implications of the research.
Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University and head of the commission, wrote that the new research raised ''concerns about crossing species boundaries and exercising excessive control over nature,'' according to the Times. ...
The Buffalo News
Copyright 1998 The Buffalo News
November 21, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: BLACK SORORITY SPLITS HAIRS BY BARRING TEEN WITH DREADLOCKS FROM DEBUTANTE BALL
BYLINE: SAM FULWOOD III; Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTONSeventeen-year-old Michelle Barskile could imagine her appearance at the Alpha Kappa Alpha debutante ball. All eyes would be focused on her as she waltzed with her father under the spotlight in the darkened ballroom. She planned to wear a pearly white gown purchased months ago for the special night and to have her black tresses sway to the music.
But her coming-out experience isn't going to be anything like that.
The Raleigh, N.C., chapter of the black sorority withdrew Michelle's invitation to the Nov. 27 ball, saying her hairstyle was unacceptable. Michelle wears dreadlocks, long and thick ropes of naturally twisted hair that frame her bespectacled face and cascade down her back. The sorority sisters wanted her to wear her locks pinned up off her neck for the ball.
"I'd look like Marge Simpson if I did that," Michelle says, referring to the blue beehive hairdo of the television cartoon character. "When I refused, they said I couldn't be in the ball."
What particularly offends Michelle is her conviction that she is a victim of racial discrimination by a black sorority. Clearly, she argues, if a white group had done this to a black woman, the AKAs would be among the first to cry foul.
"I don't think that's right," she says. "I think someone should question them about this attitude they have. They seem to be saying unless you look a certain way, you don't have the qualities to be an AKA debutante." ...
Beyond the disappointment of one wannabe debutante in central North Carolina, this tale of hair strikes a chord of angst among black women across the nation. Those familiar with the history and politics of black hair say the demand to conform to white and mainstream expectations often begins at the top of their heads. ...
"Many of the people who wear locks are younger people 30 and under and tend to be on the East and West Coasts, where styles are more relaxed than in the South," says Noliwe Rooks, author of "Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African-American Women." "The people with locks will tell you that they get a much harder time about their hair from other black people than they ever do from white people."
Rooks, a visiting professor at Princeton University, says dreadlocks are sprouting from the heads of more and more blacks, as well as many white youths. But they are not yet mainstream. ...
A few iconoclasts, like actress Whoopi Goldberg, buck the conventional by wearing dreadlocks. As does folk singer Tracy Chapman and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who is an AKA. ...
NOTE: This story first appeared in The Los Angeles Times.
Financial Times
Copyright 1998 The Financial Times Limited (London)
November 21, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Loyal keeper of the Kennedy flame: Arthur Schlesinger has defended JFK's reputation at no little cost to his own, writes Michael Steinberger:
November 22 is the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, but Arthur Schlesinger Jr does not give over his day to prayers, toasts, or moments of quiet reflection. Schlesinger looks to other milestones, less drenched in grief, to dwell on the life of the president he served and revered.
"I think about Dallas, but I prefer to celebrate his birthday," says the 81-year-old historian, sounding wistful.
It is somehow fitting that Schlesinger would choose not to mark the date on which Kennedy died, for in the 35 years since that grim afternoon, he has laboured harder than anyone to keep alive the "Camelot" mystique, or myth.
Through waves of revisionist assaults on the Kennedy legacy, he has remained loyal, answering each charge, challenging every allegation, using every platform at his disposal to return the spotlight to the late president's vast but unfulfilled promise, rather than his promiscuity. ...
Not that his devotion has earned him much praise; quite the opposite in fact. As tales of presidential philandering and palace intrigues yield a more complex portrait of Kennedy, Schlesinger's airbrushed recollections have brought him ridicule. ...
Although clearly associated with a brand of liberalism that was all but routed out of existence during the Reagan ascendancy, Schlesinger has always been militantly mainstream. He locked horns with Marxists in the 1950s, did not budge when the Democratic party careened to the left in the 1970s, and now, in the 1990s, inveighs against the excesses of multiculturalism.
"He is the great liberal Democratic intellectual of our time," says Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz.
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
Company November 21, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Ethics Panel Is Guarded About Hybrid Of Cow Cells
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
Struggling to respond to President Clinton's request for immediate advice on the hybrid cow-human cell announced earlier this month, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission has delivered a guarded and somewhat tentative reply, based on the few facts available to it.
The chairman of the commission, Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, the president of Princeton University, said in a letter to Mr. Clinton that the news raised "concerns about crossing species boundaries and exercising excessive control over nature."
The proposed use of the hybrid cells to grow human tissues for transplant into a patient would or would not raise new ethical issues, depending on the nature of the cells, Dr. Shapiro said. ...
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
November 21, 1998HEADLINE: Written in the clouds
BYLINE: Hazel MuirHIGHLIGHT: When will the lights of our Galaxy finally be snuffed out ? The answer may be blowing in giant clouds of gas, says Hazel Muir
ASTRONOMERS can watch dramas unfold in exotic galaxies billions of light years away, so it's easy to forget that they still haven't fathomed some of the things going on far closer to home. Take a host of giant gas clouds that are ripping their way through our celestial neighbourhood, some moving at more than 350 000 kilometres per hour. Astronomers have known for more than 30 years that the clouds are out there, but still can't agree where they're coming from.
The trouble is it's easy to tell how fast the clouds are moving, but impossible to decide where exactly they lie. Are they outside our Galaxy, raining down from outer space ? Or are they just a few tens of light years away, powered by the births and deaths of stars in the disc of the Milky Way ? According to Leo Blitz, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, the difference could mean a long life for our Galaxy, or imminent death.
The so-called high-velocity clouds made their debut in the 1960s amid lively debate about how our Galaxy formed. Astronomers agree that all galaxies were born in an enormous sea of hydrogen and helium that filled the early Universe. Some parts of this sea were slightly denser than others, and at these points isolated clumps of the gas collapsed under gravity, creating galaxies. As the galaxies grew, more and more of the primordial gas would have fallen onto these islands of matter, fuelling the formation of the first stars. ...
Blitz's colleague David Spergel of Princeton University in New Jersey has used a computer simulation to add weight to this idea. His program modelled thelocal group of galaxies as they formed roughly 14 billion years ago. It then simulated how the primeval gas left over from the formation of the galaxies would fall onto them, leading up to the present day. The simulation suggested that our Galaxy has already swallowed around a quarter of the mass in the embryonic cloud. The virtual Andromeda guzzled even more, around 50 per cent.
Spergel's simulations predict that the rest of the gas should remain outside the galaxies, tending to gather along a filament connecting Andromeda and the Milky Way. That's exactly where we see the main groupings of clouds today, according to Blitz, if you ignore the few clouds that are probably nearby. The simulations also predict cloud velocities in line with those that radio telescopes observe ("The Astrophysical Journal", in press). "We were knocked off our feet," says Blitz. "What this means is that these high-velocity clouds around the Milky Way and Andromeda are the material out of which the galaxies formed." ...
South China Morning Post
Copyright 1998 South China Morning Post Ltd.
November 20, 1998HEADLINE: Long queues for places at 'Nobel' kindergarten
BYLINE: SHIRLEY KWOK
More than 1,000 parents queued to enrol their children in Pui Ching Kindergarten in Mongkok yesterday after a former pupil won the Nobel Prize.
Parents lined up from 5am, hoping their toddlers will follow in the footsteps of Professor Daniel Tsui Chye, 59, who won the Nobel Prize for physics last month.
The mainland-born scientist is now at Princeton University, New Jersey.
He spent five years at the school's secondary section and graduated in 1957 before going to the United States.
Ada Chan waited with Chan Ho-sum, three, for about four hours from 9am.
"All my relatives and friends recommend this school. We saw on the news that its secondary section produced a Nobel Prize winner so it must be good," said Mrs Chan, from Tsing Yi. "If my son can enter this kindergarten he will have a better chance of going up into its primary and secondary sections." ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 20, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: The Professors' Opinion
It is rare that I agree with David Broder, but his op-ed essay on Nov. 1, "The Historians' Complaint," was right on target. I was, however, dismayed by Mr. Broder's apparent assumption that all historians are in lock step with the 400 who signed Prof. Sean Wilentz's statement and that history professors today are really political apologists.
I speak as a historian myself -- one who was trained at Princeton University, where Prof. Wilentz now teaches. I was privileged to study under Prof. Arthur S. Link, one of the century's preeminent presidential scholars, internationally known for his work on President Woodrow Wilson.
One point on which Prof. Link was adamant was the difference between scholarship and personal opinion. Scholarship must be based on objective, documented fact. Opinion is the impression an individual draws when he examines the facts. In the process of reaching an opinion, the individual adds his background and personal beliefs to the equation. And that is where the historians' letter falls short. They have expressed their opinion and have used their status as historians (although some are actually not historians) to give that opinion an air of fact or legitimacy.
Please do not tar all historians with the same brush. Many of my colleagues toil away in the classroom to ensure that their students understand the difference between fact and opinion so that they can go out in the world and come to their own informed decisions. We were distressed by the letter less for the opinion it expressed (the First Amendment guarantees us all the right to our beliefs) than for the impression the general public was left with -- that what the professors said was fact when it really was their opinion.
ANNE CIPRIANO VENZON
Bethesda
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 20, 1998 FridayPANEL PUSHES PROTECTIONS FOR PATIENTS IN STUDIES
BYLINE: News items on this page are compiled from Reuters, Associated Press and Universal Press Syndicate.
A presidential advisory commission is recommending increased protections for people with mental disorders involved in research, including giving family and friends more say in what happens.
The National Bioethics Advisory Commission proposed new federal guidelines Tuesday to try to ensure that people with disorders such as dementia, schizophrenia and delirium are not exploited.
"There are special protections for pregnant woman and for children," said Harold Shapiro, commission chairman and Princeton University president. "It's our feeling that there should be protections for those with mental disorders."
The commission drafted the regulations to make sure those too ill to decide their own fate are not subjected to studies without the consent of their families and guardians. ...
International Herald Tribune
Copyright 1998 International Herald Tribune (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
November 19, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: A Vietnamese Girl's Journey to Become Dr. Tiffany Ho
BYLINE: By William Branigin; Washington Post ServiceDATELINE: WASHINGTON
At first, Ho Bach Mai was excited by the prospect of leaving her native Vietnam. It was 1980, and an exodus of thousands of ''boat people'' was under way.
But after her mother scraped together the money to buy her a place on a refugee boat and delivered her to a middleman in Saigon in the dead of night, the 12-year-old recoiled in fear at having to leave her family and make the hazardous trip on her own. ''If you really love me,'' she pleaded with her mother, ''why are you sending me away?''
''When you're older, you'll understand,'' her mother replied. ''The reason I'm sending you away is precisely because I love you.'' ...
Today she is known as Dr. Tiffany Ho, a psychiatrist for an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland. A graduate of Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania medical school, she was among more than 300 former refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who gathered this month to say a collective ''Thank you, America,'' for more than two decades of resettlement in the United States.
The event marked the impending end of an era of refugee flight from Indochina, a prolonged exodus in which nearly 1.5 million people have embarked on new lives in the United States. Refugee camps in Southeast Asia, once teeming with people who fled by boat and on foot to escape Communist rule in the three countries, have been emptied and closed in the last couple of years. ...
Mainichi Daily News
Copyright 1998 Mainichi Daily News
November 19, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: US AND JAPANESE EXPERTS EXCHANGE OPINIONS:
'Racking our brains to overcome the economic crisis'
The global economic crisis, which originated in Asia and has spread to Russia and Latin America, is experiencing a temporary lull thanks to an interest rate cut announced by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board (FRB). The root causes of the crisis, however, are far from being eliminated. The Mainichi Newspaper asked two experts -- Kent Calder, director of Princeton University's Institute for Japanese Studies and special adviser to U.S. Ambassador to Japan Thomas S. Foley, and Kiyohiko Fukushima, chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute Ltd. -- to discuss the economic problems facing their countries and the world as a whole.
The following is a gist of their talks as translated from Japanese:
State of the Japanese economy
Calder: Today, the Japanese economy is under extreme deflationary pressure. The government's anti-recession program involving the expenditure of 16 trillion yen has been almost eaten up by deflation. Now, a proposal to distribute shopping coupons as an economic incentive has been attacked as foolish, but I myself am of the opinion that present-day Japan needs something quite extraordinary if it is to escape from the current recession.
Fukushima: Offering something equivalent to cash always results in black-market transactions. Shops where train and air tickets, and other types of coupons can be exchanged can safely be assumed to be tax-evading outlets.
C: There is a big gap between a general assessment of the Japanese economy and concrete measures put forward to solve its problems. Japan needs measures of one kind or another to stimulate its economy. Probably the greatest tragedy for Japan today is the fact that discussions are based on the presumption that the fiscal policies employed by the Finance Ministry in the past would not be effective enough to cope with the present crisis.
F: I think that new ideas are definitely needed to stimulate consumption. ...
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Copyright 1998 Journal Sentinel Inc.
November 19, 1998 ThursdayHEADLINE: Stem cell finding reopens debate on embryo research / Efforts under way to alter 1994 ban on federal funding for tissue work
BYLINE: MARILYNN MARCHIONE
The next frontier is political rather than scientific for those seeking to build on the landmark news that researchers have cultured human embryonic stem cells raw material for growing every kind of tissue in the body. Efforts are under way to overturn, modify, or at least clarify, the ban that Congress imposed in 1994 on using federal funds for embryonic tissue research.
"I believe the policy will be changed" within a year, predicted Arthur Caplan, a well-known bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. "A more moderate Congress is about to come in, and very soon they're going to confront a firestorm of interest in stem cell technology."
That interest has been sparked by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists, who announced that they are the first in the world to isolate and grow stem cells from human embryos. Johns Hopkins University researchers announced similar success, though their work is not as far along. They produc ed a different kind of "master cell" and used aborted fetal tissue, instead of donated embryos.
In a letter sent Saturday to the chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Harold Shapiro of Princeton University, President Clin ton asked for a review of embryonic stem-cell research. The president noted that the research has real potential for treating illnesses, but said he wanted a "thorough review, balancing all ethical and medical considerations." ...
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
November 19, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: American Bioethics Advisory Commission Demands Resignation Of Princeton Professor
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 19"The American Bioethics Advisory Committee is demanding the resignation of Princeton professor of Philosophy Peter Singer," said ABAC president Father Joseph Howard.
Dr. Singer has held the appointment of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values since the fall of this year.
Dr. Singer, who is also president of the International Society of Bioethics, is both pro-abortion and pro-infanticide and wrote in his article, Rethinking Life and Death: A New Ethical Approach, "A newborn infant does not have the same right to life as a person and the cultures that practiced infanticide were on solid ground." ...
"My daughter had intended on applying to Princeton but she will not attend a school that espouses the beliefs of a man who advocates the killing of disabled infants. We'll look for another school and Princeton better take into consideration how many other parents and families will make the same decision," said Erin Alexander of Clearwater, Texas. ...
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
November 19, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Supreme Court Ruling Turns Up Heat on School Voucher Debate;
Voucher Symposium Featuring William Bennett and National Panelists To Convene at the Gesu School in Philadelphia on December 2DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 19
Following on the heels of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the hotly debated school voucher movement will take center stage in Philadelphia on December 2 at the Gesu School Symposium on Inner-City Education, featuring best-selling author and former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and other distinguished national leaders.
Entitled, "Do Faith and Vouchers Mix?", the symposium is scheduled from 11:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and organized by Gesu School, an independent, Jesuit-run Catholic elementary school located in North Philadelphia that is recognized as a national model for inner-city education. The topic of school vouchers and faith-based education is especially timely in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's November refusal to hear a challenge to a recently implemented Wisconsin voucher plan -- opening the door for nearly two dozen states currently considering voucher legislation.
The symposium will cover the many controversial issues involved with voucher programs and feature a panel of leaders who have garnered significant national acclaim and press coverage for their achievements, including:
-- John DiIulio Jr., a noted policy analyst and Princeton University professor who serves as director of the Partnership for Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth and whose opinion is frequently sought after by policy makers and journalists alike.
The American Banker
Copyright 1998 American Banker, Inc.
November 18, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: The Lobbyists: Leach Raps Treasury Over Fund-Raising
BYLINE: By DEAN ANASONHouse Banking Committee Chairman Jim Leach bluntly explained Tuesday why he opposes the Treasury Department in the financial reform debate: Administration officials have too much interest in raising money from industry contributors.
Speaking to fellow Princeton University alumni in Washington, Rep. Leach warned that the turf war between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board over which becomes the lead financial regulator presents the biggest obstacle to reform legislation.
"You've got as large a battle royal between the Treasury and the Fed as our government has ever seen," the Iowa Republican said. The Treasury's position would make it "the single focal point for political fund-raising. It's one reason I prefer the Fed." ...
EIU ViewsWire
Copyright 1998 The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd.
November 18, 1998HEADLINE: USA Economy: Lawmakers are worried about the euro
American lawmakers are worried about the euro. The prospect of a muscular competitor on the world currency markets is of less concern to them than the euro's perceived attractions to drug traffickers, mafia hoods, extortionists and big-time thieves.
The largest banknote issued by the US treasury is the $100 bill. In January 2002, the European System of Central Banks will begin circulating 100, 200 and even 500 notes; large-denomination paper money which Washington fears will prove irresistible to cash-rich criminals.
"Given the enormous popularity of large-denomination notes in the world underground economy, this constitutes a truly aggressive step towards seizing a larger share of the currency market for the euro," claimed Princeton University economist Kenneth Rogoff in a recently published study for the Centre for Economic Policy Research. "In attempting to exploit the global demand for large-denomination euro notes, Europe will be facilitating tax evasion and illegal activities at home," he added.
Rogoff pointed out that although consumers and legitimate businesses in the 29-nation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development tended to stick to small-denomination banknotes, 60% of OECD money supply was held in the form of bills worth more than $100....
The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 1998 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
November 18, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Human cloning called 'difficult, if not impossible, to stop'
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder Tribune NewsBYLINE: USHA LEE McFARLING
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON - The chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission said Tuesday that human cloning will be "very difficult, if not impossible, to try to stop."
His comments came as the commission met to consider an urgent request by President Clinton that the group immediately take up the issue of human cloning. That plea followed reports that the first human clones had been created by merging human DNA with donor cow eggs.
"I am deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and nonhuman species," Clinton wrote.
Clinton's request, made Saturday, and the cautious response of Harold T. Shapiro, the head of the advisory group and president of Princeton University, spotlight what seems to be a crisis for bioethics and a troubling crossroads for society.
While bioethicists ponder whether humans should be cloned and what it means to blend humans with different creatures, scientists are racing, unfettered, to do it. ...
Lee Silver, a professor of genetics at Princeton University, said cloning science is moving with lightning speed because, like infertility research, it is driven by market forces - people who are willing to spend vast amounts to extend their life spans with new organs.
While Silver said the ability to create cloned embryos is ready but for some tinkering, he predicted it would be years before anyone tried to grow a cloned human embryo into a human baby, because of the potential and still unknown dangers to the child. Even infertility clinics, long known for testing ethical boundaries, would likely be slowed by potential lawsuits, he said. ...
Investor's Business Daily
Copyright 1998 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
November 18, 1998HEADLINE: Why Lease?
It's well known that people who buy houses take better care of them than people who rent. Why? Because people who rent don't stand to gain if they take extra care. People who buy do.
The same principle applies to cars. Cars that people buy get better care than cars that people rent.
Is that a surprise? No. It's human nature for people to take better care of property that's theirs than someone else's.
One drawback of this is that people with houses and cars will think twice before renting them. They can't be sure that the car or house they get back will be as nice as the one they rent out. ...
A fourth reason for car leasing is put forth in a new study by Princeton University economists Igal Hendel and Alessandro Lizzeri.
Hendel and Lizzeri begin with the observation that a car's quality is not something that is easy to judge.
As a result, someone who has owned and driven a car for a while knows more about its quality than someone who is thinking of buying or leasing it.
Now, imagine a world in which cars cannot be leased. They can only be bought and sold.
In such a world, cars put up for sale as used will often be bad, because people who own good cars know that potential buyers won't be able to tell theirs from the bad ones. Thus they'll hesitate to sell, because they know they won't be able to get a good price. ...
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
November 18, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: EDUCATION: SMART RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND PARENTS; COLLEGE APPLICANTS STRUGGLE TO CRAFT KEY ESSAYS; GOOD PERSONAL STATEMENTS CAN HELP STUDENTS STAND OUT FROM THE PACK
BYLINE: LYNN O'DELL, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
They've already taken the SAT, the ACT and at least three SAT II subject tests. Now thousands of high school seniors are filling out college applications and pondering the most perplexing question of all: Who am I?
All this introspection can be chalked up to the need to write a college essay or personal statement, part of the application process for the University of California system and most private colleges.
Facing a Nov. 30 deadline for the UC system, most students have written and rewritten several versions of the two-page essays, which "can make or break you," as one college counselor put it. ...
At the other end of the spectrum are the super students, those with 4.0 GPAs and scores of 1400 on the SAT. They face such depressing college admission facts as these:
* Princeton University rejected 175 students with perfect scores of 1600 on the SAT last year. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 18, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Human-Cow Hybrid Cells Are Topic of Ethics Panel
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADEAt the request of President Clinton, the ethical implications of creating hybrid human-cow cells were discussed by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission at its meeting yesterday in Miami, but at least in the public portion of their discussion, none of the commissioners voiced concern about the creation of the hybrid cells.
Mr. Clinton requested the discussion last week in a letter to the commission's chairman, Dr. Harold Shapiro of Princeton University. Mr. Clinton said he was "deeply troubled" by news that Advanced Cell Technology, a small biotechnology company in Worcester, Mass., had created the hybrid cells. The company proposes to use the technique to take any body cell from a patient, return it to its embryonic form and use it to grow any of a variety of body tissues for possible transplant back into the patient. ...
The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright 1998 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
NOVEMBER 18, 1998, WEDNESDAYHEADLINE: Danger Grows From Biological, Chemical Arms; Experts discuss threat at Stanford meeting
BYLINE: David Perlman, Chronicle Science EditorAs U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq yesterday to resume their search for biological and chemical weapons, American scientists and intelligence experts weighed the threat posed by the continued global spread of such weapons of mass destruction.
More than 100 specialists from the Central Intelligence Agency, the departments of State and Justice and the nation's leading research universities gathered at Stanford University's Hoover Institution this week to discuss such problems as how to detect new versions of biological and chemical weapons, how to counter attacks by these weapons, and how to protect the public against them.
In a world largely freed from the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War, the threat of chemical warfare and biological agents capable of spawning deadly epidemics now dominates the concerns of arms controllers.
Evidence is growing that at least a dozen nations -- including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and North Korea -- are capable of producing chemical and biological arsenals, according to Michael Moodie of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. ...
LETHAL BACTERIA
It's already possible for genetic engineers to combine varying strains of lethal bacteria or viruses that would defeat any vaccines designed against only a single strain, said Steven M. Block, a molecular biologist and physicist from Princeton University.
In view of the growing threat, said Dr. Lucy Shapiro, a Stanford developmental biologist, scientists in government agencies, universities and the pharmaceutical industry must work together quickly to develop new antibiotics, new vaccines and new sensors that can be deployed to quickly detect new pathogens that might be used by terrorists or attacking nations. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 18, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Research Ethics Panel Urges New Regulations to Protect Mentally Ill
BYLINE: Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff WriterA presidentially appointed ethics panel yesterday called upon the federal government to adopt broad new regulations to protect psychiatric patients who participate in medical research.
Citing a "checkered history" in which mentally ill people have been the unwitting victims of ethically dubious experiments, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission said current regulations do not adequately protect patients who are incapable of rationally consenting or declining to participate in research.
But the commission failed to reach consensus on the most difficult and controversial question of whether a representative, such as a family member, has the right to enroll a mentally ill patient in a risky medical study that offers no prospect of benefiting that patient. ...
The commission did not explicitly call for a moratorium on such research during the months or years it might take to create such a panel. But commission chairman Harold Shapiro said his personal sense was that "enrollment in such protocols ought to wait" until the panel is established. ...
Shapiro, who is the president of Princeton University, said implementation of the group's 20 policy recommendations would protect vulnerable patients without blocking important psychiatric research. ...
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 18, 1998 WednesdayHEADLINE: THE NEW NEWBERRY;
VENERABLE RESEARCH LIBRARY SCRUBS ITS FACE, DUSTS OFF ITS COLLECTIONS AND INVITES THE PUBLIC TO VISIT A SPELL
BYLINE: By Doug Bukowski. Special to the Tribune.
There is a research library on Walton Street, founded more than a century ago by a Chicagoan made rich from investments in real estate and railroads. His love of learning is reflected in the library's 1.5 million books, 10 million pages in manuscript collections and 75,000 maps. But over the years, the materials collected came to matter to the libary more than the public they were intended for.
Until this summer, passersby saw the Newberry as that odd-looking Romanesque palace across from Bughouse Square. Books did not circulate so the public had little reason to venture in. But a just-completed exterior wash of the building is a Newberry invitation to come inside to do a family history, listen to centuries-old music, take a class on Jack Kerouac or read a book about Chicago's first bicycling mayor.
Charles Cullen has guided this now-apparent revitalization for the last 12 years as the Newberry's president and librarian. Cullen came by way of Princeton University, where he had been editor of the Thomas Jefferson papers.
The Newberry, he says, "had the same thing that attracted me to Jefferson," which was -- and is -- a wonderfully eclectic store of knowledge. Much like the third president of the United States, whose interests ranged from astrology to zoology, the Newberry has that same broad intellectual focus. ...
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1998 The Hartford Courant Company
November 17, 1998 TuesdayHEADLINE: GOTTLIEB, Dr. Felix
Dr. Felix Gottlieb, 62, of Downs Road, Bethany, died at home Sunday (Nov. 15, 1998) after a brief illness. Dr. Gottlieb, son of the late Morris and Lillian Loewe Gottlieb, was born in Brooklyn, NY, June 14, 1936. He graduated from Princeton University and John Hopkins Medical School. After finishing a surgical internship at Cornell, he completed a residency in psychiatry at the University of Rochester. Dr. Gottlieb was a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service and former director of the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Program at Bridgeport Mental Health Center. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 17, 1998, TuesdayNAME: John McPhee
HEADLINE: A CONVERSATION WITH: JOHN MCPHEE;A Writer Takes a Turn Reading Sermons in Stone
BYLINE: By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
John McPhee, 67, a New Yorker writer best known for taking long looks at small things, has recently published "Annals of the Former World," a 696-page look at the geologic history of a large thing: North American.
In that work, which took Mr. McPhee much of the last 20 years to produce, he and other geologists travel from the Newark Basin to the San Andreas Fault as they uncover the prehistory of the land. The book is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($35).
Mr. McPhee spoke with Science Times recently from his offices at Princeton University, where he is a professor of nonfiction writing. He said he devoted himself to the Annals because he found geologists and what they do a "completely engrossing subject."
Q. How did a 20-year book project on geology change your perception of the world?
A. I came to look at rocks literally, specifically. For instance, looking at an outcrop by a road: It's not what it appears to be. It's not what it used to look like. Its history is embedded in its rocks.
Another thing that changes on a project like this is your sense of time. We live in such a whisper of time. Developing a sense of geologic time is frightening. Initially, you come up against numbers that are so large that they don't really mean a lot to you -- even if they differ by millions of years. But once you get a sense of that, when you realize that one million years is really a short unit in the history of the earth, that the earth is marching along and constantly changing in its own time scale, you come to feel absolutely insignificant. The other side of that is that you feel a little less disturbed about the human condition. I think it helps in your contemplation of death. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 17, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Minot K. Milliken, 82, Textile Company Officer
BYLINE: By PAUL LEWIS
Minot K. Milliken, who was treasurer and chief financial officer of Milliken & Company, the country's largest privately owned textile company, died at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York on Saturday after a three-month illness, his eldest son, M. K. Milliken, said. He was 82 and lived in New York City.
Mr. Milliken, who was born in New York City, graduated from Princeton University in 1937 and worked at Milliken & Company for 50 years, until his retirement in 1996. His grandfather, Seth Milliken, founded the company in 1865....
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 17, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: A Ringside Vantage On History And a Hero
BYLINE: By IRA BERKOWOn a gentle night in late September 1976, a dark-haired 17-year-old high school senior from Hillside, N.J., scraped together $25 to buy a ticket to watch Muhammad Ali successfully defend his world heavyweight championship against Ken Norton at Yankee Stadium. This cheapest seat available was so high and far away, he recalled recently, that "the two fighters in the ring looked like ants."
For David Remnick, the teen-ager in the distant reaches of the upper deck that night, his journey to see Ali was in equal parts a young fan's curiosity and moth-to-a-flame lure for a ballyhooed sporting event, as well as an abiding fascination with Ali, that seminal figure on the world stage.
Some 20 years later, Mr. Remnick gained a significantly closer look at Ali, visiting him at his farm in Berrien Springs, Mich.: "I'd come up to Michigan to see him because I wanted to write about the way he'd created himself in the early 60's, the way a gangly kid from Louisville managed to become one of the most electric of American characters, a molder of his age and a reflection of it."
Mr. Remnick wrote that in the prologue to his new book, "King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero" (Random House). ...
But Mr. Remnick was no stranger to sportswriting. His first full-time job in journalism, not long after graduating from Princeton University, was as a sportswriter for The Washington Post. He did it for two years, from 1983 to 1985. He covered the Washington Federals of the defunct United States Football League, the Washington Bullets of the N.B.A., and boxing. ...
The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 1998 The Richmond Times Dispatch
November 17, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: A POET OBSESSED; PULITZER WINNER FINDS IMAGES THAT CONNECT
BYLINE: Bill McKelway; Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Not much seemed to bind Yusef Komunyakaa of Princeton University to Patricia Janes' senior honors class in English at Armstrong High School yesterday.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, he does not come across as the sort of man on a Monday morning who would readily respond to the staccato alarm of classroom bells or the teen-age hallway clatter beyond the door.
Komunyakaa's stubble of beard and graying hair, his thick sweater and brown leather shoulder bag, set him apart. ...
And when the lofty-visioned poet talked of his boyhood in Bogalusa, La., talked of his carpenter father or of the deaths he witnessed in Vietnam, of his first poem, of the black man's trials and of life's offerings, whatever separation may have existed between Komunyakaa and newfound admirers vanished. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 17, 1998, TuesdayNAME: KEVIN GOVER
HEADLINE: At Indian Affairs, a Tough Act to Balance; Interior Official Challenges Convention to Seek Middle Ground for Tribes, Lawmakers
BYLINE: William Claiborne, Washington Post Staff Writer
Kevin Gover, a ponytailed Oklahoma Pawnee Indian with a degree from Princeton and a keen political sense honed in the Native Vote movement in New Mexico in the 1980s, has seen the future as he finishes his first year as the Clinton administration's top Indian official -- and it is smaller.
Gover, assistant secretary of the Interior Department and head of the long-beleaguered Bureau of Indian Affairs, believes his agency's 12,000-member staff could easily be cut by 75 percent to 85 percent in three years if Congress were willing to increase aid for tribal schools, law enforcement and other services and allow reservations to run their own programs.
"The BIA could be reduced to a minor component on most reservations, if not all," Gover said in a recent interview at his Interior Department office. "We would become a technical assistance and policy coordinating agency, a very small entity as bureaucracies go -- dozens of people, not hundreds." ...
By the time he was 30, Gover's resume seemed flawless: Raised in Lawton and Norman, Okla., by parents who were both civil rights activists, he was "discovered" by a non-Indian VISTA volunteer whom he met at his father's Indian self-help organization. The volunteer sponsored him for scholarships to the prestigious St. Paul's prep school in Concord, N.H., and Princeton University. As a young Native American boy from Oklahoma, going to a tony prep school in New Hampshire was an eye-opener.
"It was like being on another planet. The campus was beautiful and wanting for nothing in the way of facilities. I had never seen anything like it before," he said. The academic work was so far advanced that "it took me two years to catch up to the other students." ...
Asbury Park Press
Copyright 1998 Asbury Park Press, Inc. (Neptune, NJ.)
November 16, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: IN THE LIMELIGHT
BYLINE: SHARON KRENGEL; CORRESPONDENT
THE czars had their Russian wolfhounds. Zsa Zsa had her cats. Bill Clinton has his Buddy. For centuries, the well-heeled and well-known have made time in their busy schedules for their Rovers and Tabbys. Which just goes to show that the attachments we humans feel to our pets know no social, political or economic boundaries. Hearts of all ilks are melted by a boisterous greeting, a wet kiss, a contented purr. ...
Michael Graves, architect, designer and Schirmer Professor of Architecture at Princeton University "My dog, Sara, a yellow Labrador retriever, spends each workday in my homelike Princeton office, where her dog bed sits next to my drawing table. If I'm out of town, she waits patiently in the reception area on a chair if one is available for me to return." ...
The Associated Press
November 16, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Physicist, gospel singer, millionaires: New Congress from many walks of lifeBYLINE: By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: WASHINGTONBrian Baird hopes his congressional career lasts longer than it did two years ago.
The Washington state Democrat was elected to the House in 1996 but had to pack up during freshman orientation and go home after a tally of absentee ballots turned the seat over to his opponent, Republican Linda Smith.
"It was not a good day," recalled Baird, a professor and psychologist who this month recaptured the seat Smith vacated to run, unsuccessfully, for the Senate. "Someone said my clinical training as a psychologist may be perfect for Congress."
The psychologist is among 40 newly elected House members - 23 Democrats and 17 Republicans. The group includes a gospel singer, lay minister and former Princeton University physicist among millionaires, attorneys and career state lawmakers. ...
-Rush Holt, D-N.J., a former Princeton University physicist and five-time "Jeopardy" game show champion who ran for the House and lost in 1996. His father was a U.S. senator, and his mother served as West Virginia's secretary of state. "I think I have a lot to offer as a scientist, but I don't want to be pigeonholed," Holt said.
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
November 16, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Pakistani ambassador: Country will maintain nuclear arsenal
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
Pakistan will maintain its nuclear arsenal at a "level of sufficiency," the country's United Nations ambassador said Monday.
"Pakistan will have the ability to give (India) a bloody nose," Ambassador Riaz Khokhar said.
"Pakistan is not interested in a nuclear arms race with India. We only want to get to a level of sufficiency."
Khokhar, speaking at a Princeton University lecture about the disputed Kashmir region, did not say whether Pakistan is manufacturing weapons-grade atomic material, only that it will determine the size of its weapons stockpile when the size of India's is known.
The two countries agreed earlier this year to halt production of weapons-grade material after they both tested nuclear bombs last spring, heightening regional tensions. ...
Biotechnology Newswatch
Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
November 16, 1998HEADLINE: Stem cell studies raise hope for human patch kits
BYLINE: By Mara BovsunOnce considered an impossible dream, embryonic stem cell research is becoming biotechnology's hot new field as laboratories race to create therapies out of the cells that appear fleetingly at the earliest stages of life.
They hope to learn how to grow these primordial cells in the laboratory, and then coax them into becoming all kinds of tissues, from bone marrow to neurons.
Ultimately, scientists think this work will lead to human patch kits that can replace virtually any worn out body part. ...
Others fear these methods present serious ethical issues that must be sorted out.
''There are a lot of different techniques moving forward, from several different companies, because the potential is so enormous,'' said Princeton University molecular geneticist Lee M. Silver.
''The field is exploding,'' said Silver.
Silver, who is the author of ''Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World,'' said the group that creates a way to produce embryonic stem cells in the laboratory will have a tool to manufacture everything from bone marrow to nerve cells to hearts. It would be a goldmine. ...
Electronic Engineering Times
Copyright 1998 CMP Media Inc.
November 16, 1998HEADLINE: Architecture, physical design must meet, ICCAD panelists say -- Wanted: Tools for billion-transistor designs
BYLINE: Richard GoeringSanta Clara, Calif. - Architectural and physical design must be brought closer together to handle billion-transistor designs, said panelists at last week's International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD '98) here. The SIA's National Technology Roadmap predicts billion-transistor chips by 2010.
The panelists had been participants in March in a National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop that considered the challenges of billion- transistor systems. A document produced by that workshop outlined recommendations in such areas as intellectual property, architectures, interconnect and verification. It's available at www.ee.Princeton. edu/ wolf/nsf-workshop. ...
Other panelists agreed that the future will bring more programmable chips and much more embedded software development, but they weren't ready to take things quite so far. "I think we'll gravitate to a few microcontroller and DSP architectures, but numerous chips handling many functions," said Wayne Wolf, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University. ...
The Independent
Copyright 1998 Newspaper Publishing PLC (London)
November 16, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Damn! What a nice, bookish tycoon; The boss of Amazon.com is a cheerful guy who smiles a lot. And so he should, having made pounds 2bn from his online bookstore.
BYLINE: Steve Homer
Jeff Bezos laughs a lot. But then again, why shouldn't he? He is a healthy 34-year-old, happily married, has a big yellow labrador, lives in a lovely house, loves his job, and, oh yes, in the last four years has made himself about $2bn selling books on the Internet, as the most successful online retailer.
You could forgive the founder of Amazon.com - which is yet to move into profit - all this if he were your usual miserable paranoid business mogul. But he's not. He's a very nice guy. It's very irritating. ...
Bezos, being something of a nerd (he had studied computer science at Princeton University), invented "regret minimisation". "I projected myself into the future. . . When I am 80 what do I want to have done? I knew I would never regret having left Wall Street in the middle of the year, having forgone my 1994 bonus. By the time you are 80 you are not going to remember any of those things. But I thought I might regret not being involved in this thing called the Internet. Once I thought about it in that sort of way, I knew I would not regret taking the risk." ...
Morning Star
Copyright 1998 Wilmington Star-News, Inc. (Wilmington, NC)November 16, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Flood insurance limits painful, but needed
It comes as no surprise to folks around here, but researchers from Princeton University reported a few days ago that the cost of natural disasters is rising rapidly, even though the number of disasters hasn't increased much.
That's because natural disasters tend to damage more expensive property these days. More people are moving to coastal areas prone to hurricanes, or to places like California where earthquakes are common.
This newest research could give more momentum to a drive by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to limit subsidized flood insurance, and to ban it altogether in some areas.
That's not easy to accept for many people along the coast, but in the end it could help discourage unwise development in areas vulnerable to storms. The easier it is to get the federal government to underwrite flood insurance, the easier it is for some people to build expensive houses in places they really don't belong. Those who choose to build unwisely ought to do so at their own risk. ...
Periscope Daily Defense News Capsules
United Communications Group
November 16, 1998HEADLINE: RUSSIA - OLD NUCLEAR SUBS POSE THREAT (NOV 16/WP).
WASINGTON POST -- Every few months, a green four-car train crawls along Kola Bay, past the lumbering cranes of the commercial port, and stops at a dock north of here in a district known as Rosta. The special train is at the center of a logistical and financial bottleneck that is making this region one of the most dangerous nuclear dumping grounds in the world. The Arctic seascape here has become a graveyard for the once feared fleet of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. Highly radioactive spent fuel from their nuclear reactors has been piling up in storage tanks and open-air bins, on military bases and in shipyards. In some cases the fuel has broken and tanks have leaked. The train is the only way to move the spent fuel more than 2,000 miles to Russia's sole reprocessing plant, the Mayak Chemical Combine in the Ural Mountains, where uranium and plutonium are separated out for possible reuse. ...
But the main problem -- what to do with the nuclear fuel and reactors -- has left Russia paralyzed. It is another costly, unresolved legacy of the Cold War arms race that now haunts a country struggling to build a market economy and a democratic political system. In the Soviet era, "when they produced nuclear submarines, it's ridiculous, but nobody thought about how to decommission them," said Alexei Yablokov, head of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow. ...
Joshua Handler of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University estimates in Jane's Navy International that the Northern and Pacific fleets have a total of 72,000 spent fuel assemblies. Of the 150 decommissioned submarines in the Kola region, 120 are sitting in shipyards and repair docks. Of these, 104 still have their nuclear fuel on board. Another 33 submarines have had their reactor sections cut out, and the reactors remain afloat. ...
Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Cahners Publishing Company
November 16, 1998HEADLINE: New Vistas at University Presses; religious publishing and small makret books take on new importance
BYLINE: CARRIGAN, HENRYUnique pressure and market-driven changes are generating expanding publishing projects focused on faith
Judging from various recent media reports, university presses have come on hard times. Once the best available means of publication for younger scholars just entering the race for tenure, university presses have fallen victim to lack of financial support from their state legislatures and home universities, rising paper and printing costs, shrinking library acquisitions budgets and serious questions about the profitability of printing small press runs of specialized monographs for a diminishing audience. The ability of large trade publishers to snare scholars and publish their research in a lively style for a broader audience--perhaps especially noticeable in recent years in the field of religion--has also added to the pressures on university presses.
But in spite of all the doomsaying about the future of university presses, many are stronger than they have ever been. ...
One of the fields in which audience interest is booming and publishers' efforts are increasing is religion. Alan Thomas, senior editor at University of Chicago Press, says, "The past five years or so have been particularly good for religious studies." ...
Princeton University focuses on the practices of the world's religions in its Princeton Readings in Religion series, edited by Donald Lopez, and, according to Princeton acquisitions editor Deborah Malmud, "we are just launching a series called Buddhisms, edited by Stephen F. Teiser, that will deal with Buddhism in different areas of the world." ...
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998 U.S. News & World Report
November 16, 1998HEADLINE: Climate conundrum
BYLINE: By Laura TangleyHIGHLIGHT: North American forests provide a new clue to the mystery of the world's carbon cycles;
As officials from 170 nations wrangle this week in Buenos Aires over details of implementing last year's climate-change treaty, their efforts are hampered by the fact that predicting the impact of global warming is an imprecise science at best. One unsolved mystery is where all the carbon dioxide (CO2) pumped into the atmosphere ends up. A controversial new study suggests that North American forests, through the process of photosynthesis, soak up 1.7 billion metric tons of CO2 a year--roughly the same amount the region discharges by burning fossil fuels. ...
Globally, about 7.1 billion metric tons of CO2 are released annually by factories, power plants, and cars, and through deforestation. Of that total, about 3 billion metric tons end up in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons are thought to be absorbed by oceans. Researchers from Princeton University's Climate Modeling Consortium may have found where much of the remaining 2 billion tons end up. In a study published last month in Science, they fed CO2 data from dozens of sampling stations into mathematical models that identified North America as an enormous carbon "sink."
The study has drawn a chorus of criticism. Environmentalists worry that opponents of CO2 controls will use it to argue that the United States already does its share. ...
The Boston Herald
Copyright 1998 Boston Herald Inc.
November 15, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: CRITIC AT LARGE
BYLINE: By T.J. MedrekIf you missed Boston Academy of Music's concert performance of Strauss' "Arabella" at Jordan Hall this spring, you missed a positively sensational Boston debut by soprano Andrea Matthews in the role of Zdenka. And her local engagements are picking up, beginning this afternoon when she sings Poulenc with the Masterworks Chorale at Sanders Theatre.
So what took so long for this Needham native and, for the past few years once again Needham resident, to enter the local music scene?
"I'm not in the conservatory world, not in the academic world here with its strong loyalties," she says. "It's an odd little market that way. I'm a native, but I'm an outsider."
While studying languages and history at Princeton University, Matthews took voice lessons as a hobby that grew into her main focus. From her home base in New York City, she got an agent and began singing with orchestras around the country and the world. She also spent two years under contract with the Aachen Opera in Germany, where she performed many lyric soprano roles. ...
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1998 The Dallas Morning News
November 15, 1998HEADLINE: CRISIS CONTROL: With eye on home front, U.S. pushes Asia recovery;
BYLINE: Edward DufnerThe vocabulary of Asian economies in crisis tends to glide into jargon, polysyllables and distant geography.
Issues such as transparency and crony capitalism, debt overhang in South Korea and negative growth in Indonesia swirl through scholarly circles and among the Pacific Rim leaders convening this week for a summit in Malaysia.
Dense stuff. So consider a more parochial way of measuring the region's troubles.
For every $5 in Texas exports last year, about a buck's worth went to East Asia. And the Asia-bound flow shrank by about a quarter between 1997 and 1998.
Similar fallout across the nation helps explain the urgency of U.S. officials as they prepare for the 18-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Recovery in Asia is vital, experts say, to keep the American economy healthy.
Himalayas of debt
Asian borrowers and lenders alike confront Himalayas of debt. South Korea, for example, ended 1997 with $154.4 billion owed to foreign creditors, according to the Berkeley APEC Study Center at the University of California.
Renegotiating those loans is critical to ending the region's paralysis, analysts say. But it's unclear how that will occur.
Japan, and not the United States, will have to do the financial heavy lifting, experts say, because its banks are by far the largest lenders on the Pacific Rim. Its recession, now in its sixth year, saps vitality across the region.
"The other Asian economies are heavily dependent on Japan through financial and trade links, and when Japan sneezes, they catch cold," said Princeton University economist Kenneth Rogoff. ...
Emerging Markets Datafile
NEW STRAITS TIMES-MANAGEMENT TIMESNovember 15, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: Taylor's College offers pathway to US varsities, NEW STRAITS TIMES-
THE American Degree Program offered at Taylor's College is a gateway for school leavers keen to study in leading universities in the United States. The ADP guarantees seats and transfer of credits to partner universities in US. Students also have the option of going to universities in the UK, Canada, Australia and other countries. ...
Besides the foreign universities, students can also apply to continue their studies at local private universities like Uniten and Unitel. Some of them have been admitted into top universities like the University of Illinois, University of Georgia, Cornell University and Princeton University. ...
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
November 15, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: NO STRANGER TO PRAISE--OR CRITIQUE;
AS MOCA'S CHIEF CURATOR, PAUL SCHIMMEL CHAMPIONS NEW AND VINTAGE ART, OFTEN TO SURPRISING EFFECT.BYLINE: SUZANNE MUCHNIC, Suzanne Muchnic is The Times' art writer
"I remember in 1992 when I was working on 'Helter Skelter,' it was absolutely clear to me that Chris Burden and Mike Kelley were internationally regarded as the artists from Los Angeles for the 1970s and '80s," said Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art. "And I knew--as sure as I am sitting here--that Charley Ray was the artist who would move to the front of this pack in the '90s. I also knew that Charley would be the next one-person survey I did." The show opens today at MOCA.
Six years have passed since "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" created an art-world sensation with a sprawling onslaught of aggressively ominous art that catapulted Schimmel to fame as a champion of Los Angeles' dark side and aesthetic machismo. ...
Schimmel had intended to go to graduate school after completing his internship in Houston. Although his plan was delayed, he returned home in 1978 to do graduate work at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University. Immersed in a classical art history education, he studied Old Masters and took an eye-opening class in conservation, but also managed to pursue his personal interest in Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s--laying the groundwork for future exhibitions by taking a course with Modernist Sam Hunter at Princeton University.
"Unfortunately, the one thing I didn't learn was my German," Schimmel said. "I never passed that exam, so I have a master's degree minus German." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 15, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Status is ... for Math and Science Researchers; Writing a Paper With a Big Shot
BYLINE: By Gina KolataIn a world where most people broadcast their status to all who care to listen, scientists seem decidedly out of step. They drive beat-up cars and work in cluttered labs. They dress like the students they once were -- in scruffy T-shirts and faded jeans. (Or, in the case of mathematicians, they don socks and sandals, even in the bitter cold of winter.) But of course, no insular society could exist without its pecking order. The status clues may seem opaque to outsiders, but to those who have walked the halls of science, they are as clear as a test tube. ...
In a community in which so much status is conferred upon those who rub shoulders with the top researchers, name-dropping has become a fine art. According to Lee M. Silver, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, biologists will oh-so-casually refer to what "Jim" said to them. You are supposed to know, of course, that "Jim" is James Watson, the Nobel laureate who is president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Similarly, Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, reports that her colleagues love saying that they are sending their latest manuscript to "Benjamin," meaning Benjamin Lewin, the august editor of the journal Cell. Strivers, alas, often give themselves away -- by saying that they are sending a paper to "Ben."
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 15, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: The Ruling Class
BYLINE: By RICHARD TRENNERDATELINE: FAR HILLS
IF any part of New Jersey still justifies the name Garden State, it is the Somerset Hills, a lush region of farms and estates about 50 miles west of Manhattan. Here, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays in autumn and winter, a field of as many as 80 scarlet-jacketed riders from the Essex Hunt chase foxes over the countryside of Bedminster and Oldwick.
A pastiche of little rivers, big houses, broad fields and old-money Republicans, the Somerset Hills are home to far more than hunters and others who make the breeding and riding of horses something of a religion. Others are ignited by a very different passion: the marriage of money and politics. ...
How has this area of villages, small cities, farms, and estates roughly bordered by Morristown on the north, Somerville on the south, Bernardsville on the east, and Whitehouse on the west become as close to a breeding ground for politicians as New Jersey has had since the days when Princeton was closely associated with three American presidents: James Madison, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson?
Ernest C. Reock, a former director of the Center for Government Services at Rutgers University, offers a one-word answer to the question.
"Money," he said, alluding to both the extraordinary wealth in the area and to the personal fortunes that, in his view, enabled many people here to have careers in politics. ...
GRAPHIC: Photos: The rolling countryside of the Somerset Hills boasts vast estates like the 456-acre Natirar (Raritan spelled backwards), above, which spills over Peapack and Far Hills, owned by King Hassan II of Morocco. The current governor, Christine Todd Whitman, as well as a former one, Tom Kean, have their roots in the region, as do Hugh Fenwick, center, and Cyrus Vance, left. (Associated Press); (Laura Pedrick for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Dunwalke, the 126-acre estate of the late Clarence Dillon in Bedminster. After his death in 1979, the property was donated to Princeton University as a conference center. (pg. 10)
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 15, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: JERSEY;
Art to Go, an Idea Whose Time May Have Come
BYLINE: By NEIL GENZLINGER
NORMALLY when you're invited to join in an experiment thought up by an Ivy League professor, you expect to be ingesting radioactive isotopes, or maybe racing a genetically altered mouse through a maze. What you don't expect is something involving Minotaurs, hors d'oeuvres and a Yankee Doodle doorbell.
But that's what Sam Hunter, a professor emeritus of art history at Princeton, hatched last weekend in Skillman, in an event that probably won't revolutionize the art world but ought to.
What Professor Hunter did was persuade a somewhat renegade German-born artist named Walter Gaudnek to bring a bunch of his extremely loud, often extremely large paintings up from Florida for a show. Except the two men didn't hang the things in a gallery or museum; they hung them in a private home, a rather opulent one owned by Nicolas and Susan Procaccini. Then they invited the neighborhood to have a look. ...
The Sunday Gazette Mail
Copyright 1998 Charleston Newspapers
November 15, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Imagine monitors thin as poster board . . .
BYLINE: Leslie J. Nicholson Knight Ridder Newspapers
Take a look at the monitor on your desktop computer. Chances are it's heavy, at least a foot long, and shaped like a TV set.
Fast-forward a decade or so. That big cathode ray tube, or CRT, has been relegated to a museum. You're sure of it because you just called up the museum's Web page on your new monitor, a sheet that hangs on the living-room wall like a window shade. ...
Cheap, easy and thin
Universal Display says its organic light-emitting diodes will be formidable competition for LCDs. OLEDs are relatively cheap and easy to manufacture, use less power, and can be made thin and lightweight. Universal Display's research partners in developing OLEDs are Princeton University and the University of Southern California. ...
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 15, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: HARRISON STEANS' BIGGEST INVESTMENT; FORMER BANKER WORKS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER IN CHICAGO'S NORTH LAWNDALE NEIGHBORHOOD
BYLINE: By Cassandra Fortin, Special to the Tribune.
After Harrison Steans of Bannockburn achieved great success in the banking industry, he had the means to spend the rest of his years anywhere in the world--the Caribbean, Hawaii. But the place that has drawn most of his interest is North Lawndale, one of the neediest neighborhoods in Chicago. ...
Steans, a graduate of Princeton University and a Navy veteran, had started his career at IBM, eventually becoming administrative assistant to then-CEO Tom Watson. In 1967, Steans struck out on his own, heading a group that began buying banks. In addition to purchasing banks, he served as chairman of LaSalle Bank from 1973-78, then incorporated six other banks as US Ameribancs, which he sold to NBD in 1987. ...
The Economist
Copyright 1998 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
November 14, 1998, U.S. EditionBRIEFSHEADLINE: The international euro
The euro will, at a stroke, become the world's second-biggest currency. But, as the fifth in our series of briefs explains, it is less clear whether and when it might challenge the dollar's dominant role in the world financial system
UNTIL recently, few outside Europe paid any attention to the euro. American policymakers maintained a conspicuous silence, commenting only that what was good for Europe was good for America. Asians were too preoccupied with their own crises to worry about a new currency half a world away. And Europeans themselves were too concerned with the mechanics of the single currency to think about its international impact.
Partly as a result, there is remarkably little consensus on what that impact will be--and even less on how to respond to it. The one certainty is that the euro will immediately be a major international currency, second only to the dollar. ...
How realistic are these claims? Many economists, particularly in central banks, are sceptical. They point out that the euro is still untried, and that markets will need time before they trust it as a stable store of value. More important, investors have historically shown a "home bias" in their portfolio allocation. For a net portfolio shift towards the euro to occur, foreign investors must hold more assets in euros than they did in its constituent currencies.
Nor is a single capital market entirely guaranteed. As Peter Kenen of Princeton University points out, a single currency does not mean that Europe's bond markets will become completely unified. Although the euro will eliminate intra-European exchange-rate risk, it does not mean that German and Italian bonds become perfect substitutes. Differences in default risk and tax treatment will mean that individual bond markets remain segmented--th the extent that they are less so than now, the euro may still gain. ...
The National Journal
Copyright 1998 The National Journal, Inc.
November 14, 1998HEADLINE: Workers of the World, Insure!
BYLINE: Marilyn Werber SerafiniThe already-strained marriage between jobs and health insurance--the bane of the American system of medical care--may be damaged further by a spate of horror stories coming out of Florida and Ohio. As the only country in the world that ties its medical insurance to employment, the United States continues to struggle with one of the consequences--the ever-growing number of uninsured citizens. Severing that link, in pursuit of a politically palatable alternative, may be at the center of the next surge of health care reform proposals. ...
The extent of the likely progress in uncoupling health insurance from employment remains anyone's guess. Charles
''Chip'' Kahn III, president of the Health Insurance Association of America, said he expects Congress to make a major effort at health care reform in the next few years, but he doesn't think that ending the employment-based system is the answer. ''For those who receive employer coverage, it works,'' he said. ''Any other approach for covering most Americans is impractical.''
Still, Uwe E. Reinhardt is encouraged. The Princeton University professor of political economy, a longtime champion of scrapping the prevailing arrangement, said recently that ''as employer-based health insurance continues to crumble and the number of uninsured grows, sooner or later the issue cannot be avoided by the Congress''--especially if there's a serious economic recession, which would drive people out of jobs and expand the ranks of the uninsured. The idea of starting from scratch is ''not any longer written off as the ranting (of) right-wing nuts,'' he said, ''but is going mainstream.''
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 14, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Architects To Compete With Ideas For Cities
BYLINE: By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
New York City has been chosen as the first site of a new international competition to help cities develop innovative visions in architecture and planning. Architects are to be invited to come up with plans for pivotal sites in major cities around the world. The program, called the International Foundation for the Canadian Center for Architecture Prize Competition, offers a $100,000 prize and will take place every three years in a different city. ...
In addition to Ms. Lambert, the jurors are Frank O. Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Arata Isozaki, architect of the Sant Jordi Palace Gymnasium for the Olympic Games, Barcelona, Team Disney Headquarters in Buena Vista, Fla. and the master plan for the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Rafael Moneo, architect of the Atocha Railway Station, Madrid, the Museums of Art and Architecture, Stockholm, and the Potsdammer Platz Hotel and Office Building, Berlin; Elizabeth Diller, associate professor of architecture, Princeton University, and co-founder of Diller & Scofidio, an interdisciplinary studio in architecture, print and performance; Mr. Gargano; Mr. Rose, and Gary Hack, a city planner and dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ralph Lerner, dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, is director of the competition, which is intended to support the Canadian center's mission of making architecture a public concern. ...
Newsday
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. (New York, NY)
November 14, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: MAKING CONNECTIONS / FOR ALUMNI, STAYING IN TOUCH WITH THE OLD ALMA MATER HAS SOCIAL, INTELLECTUAL AND EVEN CAREER BENEFITS.
BYLINE: By Henry Gilgoff. STAFF WRITER
IN THE FALL OF 1998, Fred Davis Jr. is looking ahead to Black History Month, 1999. The leadership he gives a group planning for the occasion reflects many connections, not the least of them between an alumnus and his alma mater.
Davis, 35, a senior manager with the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, is president of the Black and Hispanic Alumni Association at Hofstra University. One of the group's goals is to raise money for scholarships to be awarded at a dinner when Black History Month arrives in February. ...
A trend toward bringing higher education online also has extended to alumni. At Princeton University, a course providing a psychological analysis of the ethnic conflict in the Balkans is offered via the Internet to people affiliated with the university, including alumni. No fee is charged, no credit given. Participants hear the professor speak and see images. A news group also has been set up through the Princeton Web site to allow people taking the course to post questions, which can draw responses from the professor or others in the class.
The program is part of an evolution. "There is a growing interest in education among alumni overall. That extends into the online activities," says Douglas Blair, associate director of the Alumni Council of Princeton. ...
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
November 14, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Sustenance for the affirmative
BYLINE: Martin Morse WooserPerhaps the most contentious issue on college campuses these days is affirmative action. Affirmative-action policies have been banned in several places, most notably state universities in California and Texas. But even bans on affirmative action have not stopped universities trying to figure out how to admit more minority students with low test scores. At nearly every college in America, you'll find that racial issues rank high on the president's agenda.
Until now, supporters of affirmative action have largely relied on anecdotal evidence to make their case. This is one reason why William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's "The Shape of the River" is an important book, as it tries to use the tools of social science to make a case for the affirmative-action policies currently in place at most American colleges and universites. Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok may not change anyone's mind, but they have made a lasting contribution to the affirmative-action debate that cannot be lightly dismissed.
Mr. Bowen is president of the Mellon Foundation and was formerly president of Princeton University. Mr. Bok, a Harvard professor of government, previously served as that university's president. They use two tools to make their case and selected 28 of America's best colleges and universities to form what they call the "College and Beyond" database. ...
Although Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok support affirmative action, they are honest enought to make several concessions to affirmative-action foes. They conclusively show that the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) does indeed predict how well students will do in college, and that there is strong evidence students with better SAT scores will get higher grades than those with lower test scores. More surpisingly, they admit that African-American students with lower SAT scores are more likely to demand multiculturalism and to be more assertive in making such demands than their peers with higher SAT scores. ...
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
November 13, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: A Sherpa breaks barriers; Triumph on Everest alters connection to Westerners
BYLINE: By David Arnold, Globe StaffMOUNT EVEREST BASE CAMP, Nepal - Kaji Sherpa squinted in the morning sun toward the summit of the world's tallest mountain.
About 90 Sherpas have hacked their way to the top of Everest, mostly breaking trail and pitching tents for Western expeditions that treat Sherpas more like servants than saviors. Fifty-five of them have died on the mountain.
Undaunted, Kaji Sherpa planned to climb it, and in record time.
"Yes, I have big fear," he said in broken English. "I do this for Sherpas, for Sherpa pride. Important for Sherpas to be known."
Four days later, on Oct. 17, Kaji Sherpa made his assault. He succeeded in every way. His 20-hour, 24-minute "dash" to the top bested a Frenchman's eight-year-old record to the summit from the Nepalese side of Everest.
He also broke a culture barrier.
"Historically, Western chauvinism has been part of the relationship. The Sherpas are frequently seen as slaves," said Vincanne Adams, a Princeton University anthropologist. "There at the core is the source of Sherpa resentment and the significance of Kaji."
Kaji's face now appears on billboards across Nepal. There is the prospect of more sponsorships (Tuborg beer sponsored this climb), and ceremonies at the royal palace. ...
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Information Bank Abstracts
November 13, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: PRINCETON DEFENDS ITS PHILOSOPHER OF INFANTICIDE
BYLINE: BY WILLIAM MCGURNABSTRACT:
De Gustibus column assails Princeton University's choice of animal-liberationist Peter Singer for its prestigious DeCamp Professorship in Bioethics; drawing (M)
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 13, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: U-Md. Professor Tonu Parming Dies at Age 57; He Also Headed Soviet, East European Studies at State Dept.'s Foreign Service Institute
Tonu Parming, 57, a former associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who served on the faculty at College Park from 1974 to 1988, died Oct. 30 at a hospital in Toronto of complications related to a stroke following heart bypass surgery.
Dr. Parming was born in Parnu, Estonia. He fled to Germany with his family following the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic States early in World War II and spent the war years in Germany.
He immigrated to the United States in 1948 and grew up in New Milford, N.J. He attended Princeton University and then served in a U.S. Army Special Forces unit in Vietnam, where he led a project to build a schoolhouse for a Montagnard tribe.
In 1967 he returned to Princeton, where he graduated in 1969 as a member of the class of 1964. He studied in Finland for one year on a Fulbright scholarship and then received a doctorate in sociology from Yale University. ...
The Week in Germany
Copyright 1998 German Information Center
November 13, 1998HEADLINE: AMERICAN ACADEMY IN BERLIN FORMALLY OPENS NEW HOME
Leading figures in the fields of economics, politics and culture celebrated the start of a new chapter in German-American relations as the American Academy in Berlin dedicated its new quarters Friday (November 6). The academy's home is a villa on the Wannsee now called the Hans Arnhold Center in honor of the Berlin banker whose descendants provided much of the academy s endowment. ...
Earlier this fall, the New York office of the American Academy in Berlin hosted a dinner to welcome the inaugural class of Berlin Prize fellows. Among the first to receive support from the academy are poet C. K. Williams of Princeton University, novelist Robert Kotlowitz of New York, theater scholar Gautam Dasgupta of Skidmore College, architectural critic Diana Ketcham of San Francisco, historians Gerald Feldman and Brian Ladd, and law professor Kendall Thomas, as well as Distinguished Inaugural Senior Fellow Arthur Miller. The fellows are in residence this fall at the Wannsee villa. ...
U.S. Newswire
Copyright 1998 U.S. Newswire, Inc.
November 12, 1998HEADLINE: Augustine, Nunn, Levin to Receive 1998 Aspen Institute Awards
CONTACT: Kerry Green Zobor of the Aspen Institute, 202-736-3849, or e-mail: kzobor(At)aspeninst.org
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 12
BODY: The Aspen Institute has announced the recipients of the 1998 Aspen Institute awards. The three awards -- the Henry Crown Leadership Award, the Public Sector Award and the Corporate Leadership Award -- were created to recognize individuals who have demonstrated leadership and service for the good of society. This year's award recipients will be honored at the 15th Annual Aspen Institute Awards Dinner held this evening at the Essex House in New York City.
The Henry Crown Leadership Award was established to honor an outstanding business leader whose achievements reflect the high standards of honor, integrity, industry and philanthropy that characterized the life of the late Chicago industrialist, Henry Crown. The award is presented annually by the Co-Trustees of the Henry and Gladys Crown Charitable Trust Fund in cooperation with The Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship Program. This year's recipient is Norman R. Augustine, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, now professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University. Prior to the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta in March 1995, Augustine had served Augustine has received four times the Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, among other accolades. ...
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
November 12, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Oates' output is truly scary; Author: Master of suspense, honored by Pratt Library, has more surprises, and thrills, in store.
BYLINE: Patricia Meisol, SUN STAFF
Running is the way Joyce Carol Oates aerates her imagination, one of the most fertile in America. An hour each day in fall, two hours in summer, she winds through the streets near her house outside Princeton, N.J., opening her mind for new seed.
It must work. Look what Oates is doing this fall:
In October she published a collection of 27 tales of the grotesque. Her article on a fictionalized male writer who mistreats women appears in the current issue of Playboy. On her desk is a proof of the novel she will publish in July. On her mind is an essay on Ernest Hemingway she has been invited to write for the Folio Society edition of his work. In the meantime, this American storyteller is at work on yet another novel. And, yes, she continues to explore new terrain: In September, she published a children's book, her first.
Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1987. She leads what she describes as an ordinary life with a husband and a cat and, each semester, about 25 students. She married Raymond J. Smith, a professor of 18th century English, 30 years ago. ...
Business Wire
Copyright 1998 Business Wire, Inc.
November 12, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Sears Collegiate Champions Program Reaches 10,000Th Trophy Milestone
DATELINE: HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill.
10,000th Trophy to be Presented in Sears Hometown at the Big Ten Conference Men's Soccer Championship at Northwestern University
As the fall collegiate sport season reaches full speed, Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck and Co. is gearing up to award its landmark 10,000th Trophy of the Sears Collegiate Champions (SCC) program--a five-year-old initiative which recognizes the country's top collegiate sports programs by awarding trophies and academic scholarships. The 10,000th Trophy will be presented in Sears hometown, to the winner of the Big Ten Men's Soccer Conference Championship tournament hosted by Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., on Sunday, November 15.
According to the SCC, other institutions with outstanding sports records include:
Princeton University (NCAA Division I), five national and 56 conference trophies -- Abilene Christian University (NCAA Division II), ten national and 27 conference trophies -- Mary Washington College (NCAA Division III), 44 conference trophies -- Saint Ambrose University (NAIA), 34 conference trophies. ...
Cox News Service
Copyright 1998 Cox News Service
November 12, 1998HEADLINE: Music professor strikes sad note after bassoon theft
BYLINE: Jenny StaletovichDATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.
Somebody swiped John Kitts-Turner's bassoon.
Ask the 67-year-old music teacher and he'll tell you they stole his soul.
Last week, the professor emeritus at the University of Florida, who for 32 years has taught generations of Gators music appreciation, survey of music history and countless classes in Renaissance and baroque music, walked into his campus office and discovered the bassoon he has played nearly every day since 1962 gone.
OK, so it's just a bassoon. Bassoons aren't exactly the Hope Diamond.
Not to you, anyway. ...
After graduating from high school, bassoon in tow, Kitts-Turner attended Princeton University where he undertook a regimen of pre-med classes and prepared to enter Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But before he could enroll in medical school, he visited New York City where he met, totally by accident, one of the world's foremost bassoonists, Leonard Sharrow. Sharrow agreed to teach him and Kitts-Turner dropped any notion of being a doctor. ...
The Guardian
Copyright 1998 Guardian Newspapers Limited (London)
November 12, 1998HEADLINE: Nature's motors;
Science and technology / Steven Block, a nano -mechanic, is studying a 'snowplough' a few millionths of a millimetre wide. Michael Brooks reports
BYLINE: Michael Brooks
As your eyes move across this text, you are performing a task that remains beyond the understanding of modern science. The simple movement in the muscles that control your eyes is still a mystery; inside the muscles, tiny proteins called myosins are doing the work, but no one knows how. They are one example of biological motors - your body contains billions of them, pushing, pulling, carrying, lifting and breaking up the chemicals that, as a whole, make you what you are.
Biology could essentially be reduced to a collection of machines: exertion and movement are involved in almost everything going on inside a living organism. The dream of the Foresight Institute, a non-profit making nanotechnology organisation whose annual conference kicks off today in Santa Clara, California, is to create machines approaching the scale of these biological examples. Then we might be able to build tiny robots that could assemble new materials atom by atom, or carry out microsurgery inside the body.
Steven Block, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, doubts that these goals are entirely realistic. However, he will be speaking about his research into biological motors at the Foresight conference this week. Block's research team has just published studies on RNA polymerase, an enzyme which rips through DNA, separating its twin strands so it can duplicate itself. This is an essential part of life - every cell in the body is relying on this process to work without a hitch.
RNA polymerase, Block has found, is an extraordinarily powerful motor, somewhat like a biological snowplough. A few millionths of a millimetre in size, it is able to exert force equivalent to the weight of a red blood cell more than a thousand times its size. Remarkably, the exertion that separates DNA strands is fuelled by the DNA itself. 'It's as if you were laying down an asphalt road using the asphalt itself as a fuel,' he says. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 12, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Closed-Door Policy
BYLINE: By PETER WAYNER
WHEN F. Scott Fitzgerald told the story of young Amory Blaine at Princeton University in "This Side of Paradise," he wrote of "the silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light." Many of the same halls are still on the Princeton campus, but today the tenderness of the night is often shattered by shrill beeps and a klaxon-like speaker screaming in a robotic voice, "Please close the door securely."
Princeton University, like many other institutions of higher education, worries about protecting its students. And one way to protect those students, when you have 4,600 of them, is with an electronic security system. But when most of those students are older than 18, the question is: Do they want to be protected?
In the early 90's, Princeton began equipping all dormitories and other buildings with automatic locks and a system for unlocking the doors built around slim plastic cards called proximity cards, or prox cards, one issued to each student. This fall, Princeton increased the level of security by keeping all dormitories locked all the time, instead of just between 9 P.M. and 7 A.M.
The change has generated a campus debate over whether students want to trade the inconvenience and what many perceive as a loss of privacy for the increased security provided by keeping the dormitories locked all the time. The privacy question arises because not only does the security system read the prox cards to open doors, but it also records all card usage so there is a computer database of students' entries into campus buildings. ...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1998 The San Diego Union-Tribune
November 12, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: To boldly split infinitives is OK
SOURCE: NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
BYLINE: Karla Cook
"Writers who insisted that English could be modeled on Latin long ago created the 'rule' that the English infinitive must not be split: to clearly state was wrong; one must say to state clearly. But the Latin infinitive is one word, and cannot be split, so the 'rule' is not firmly grounded and treating two English words as one can lead to awkward, stilted sentences." -- from the 1998 edition of The Oxford American Desk Dictionary
After waves of newspaper stories and radio broadcasts reporting that the ban against split infinitives had been lifted by the Oxford English Dictionary publishers, we have news for you.
There was no Oxford ban. Not ever.
"The advice we're giving is what we've been saying for some time," says Frank Abate, editor of the Oxford American Desk Dictionary. "It's not true that we changed our policy."
When Abate talks about time, he's not talking about a few weeks, or even a few years. He's talking about 1926 and H.W. Fowler's seminal volume, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, also published by Oxford University Press.
Fowler's words: "We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any s.i. without involving either of those faults, and yet reserve to ourselves the right of deciding in each case whether recasting is worthwhile."
The trouble started earlier this fall, when the 350,000-word The New Oxford Dictionary of English was published in Great Britain. Literature accompanying the books trumpeted, "Infinitives can be split!" ...
Susan Wolfson, English professor at Princeton University, said the Oxford publicity department is "restating the standard position to get publicity."
"The record is to be flexible," she says. "When you can keep the infinitive together, you should, but no one should torture a sentence for the sake of that partnering, if the sentence would look or sound ridiculous." ...
United Press International
Copyright 1998 U.P.I.
November 12, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Latest cloning research sparks reaction
BYLINE: BY MARA BOVSUN UPI Science News
DATELINE: NEW YORK, Nov. 12
Research in the hot new field of human body repair kits is advancing so rapidly that it could produce matched bone marrow within five years, and later, other tissue and organs, one scientist predicts. At the same time, other scientists say they have serious doubts about the method to produce the basic ingredients for these kits -- the embryonic stem cells -- that was announced today by a biotechnology company. The company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), Worcester, Mass., used a cloning technique called nuclear transfer, which created Dolly the sheep, to produce the embryonic stem cells, which are the raw material for building a body. ....
The announcement by ACT is one of several recent breakthroughs in the area of research on these cells. Princeton University molecular geneticist Lee M. Silver says: ''We are awash in stem cells.
There are a lot of different techniques moving forward, by several different companies, because the potential is so enormous.'' Embryonic stem cells are totipotent, he says, meaning they can make everything. ...