Princeton in the News
January 7 to 13, 1999
PrincetonUniversity
Communications Office
Stanhope Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
Tel 609 258 3601, Fax 609 258 1301
Feedback
Headlines
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
January 13, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: Concern Rising About Mergers In Health Plans
BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIMThe health insurance industry is rapidly whittling itself down to a few giant companies that dominate the health systems of some of the country's biggest cities.
Doctors and hospitals are increasingly concerned, and the trend is also raising questions about the cost and availability of care to millions of patients and their employers.
The criticism sharpened after the recent announcements of two billion-dollar deals that would propel Aetna Inc. to first place among the nation's health insurers. Last month, Aetna agreed to buy Prudential Health Care, the No. 5 for-profit managed care company, while it was still digesting its July purchase of NYLCare, No. 11. …
"The health system is stumbling toward a bilateral monopoly of insurance companies and provider groups in every market," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton University.
If only one insurer is left to deal with local doctors and hospitals, Professor Reinhardt said, "they will send the bill to the consumer" by raising premiums. "Then the Government will say: 'You have converted health care into a public utility. We are going to regulate you.' " …
The Scotsman
Copyright 1999 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
January 13, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: PLATFORM MATHS=FUN
BYLINE: Douglas BlaneON THE face of it the situation doesn't add up.
Mathematics graduates glide into careers with salaries stretching into infinity in the worlds of high finance, computing, commerce and insurance, or at the very least are welcomed with open arms if they opt to become teachers or lecturers.
Additionally, the long-running cult television programme Countdown, fronted by Carol Vorderman, has a strong hold on a significant section of the British public. But somehow, in the minds of the majority, maths does not equal fun.
Now academics are sufficiently concerned about the high numbers of schoolchildren proficient in the subject opting for higher status subjects such as law and medicine instead, that they are holding a series of masterclasses at Glasgow University to persuade them that mathematics is beautiful and enjoyable - honest. …
Perhaps. But to describe maths as "beautiful"? Surely that is stretching it a bit? She is not alone.
Andrew Wiles of Princeton University, who solved the world's most famous mathematical problem, Fermat's Last Theorem, described his moment of insight as follows: "I was sitting at my desk when suddenly I had this incredible revelation. It was so indescribably beautiful. It was so simple and so elegant."
But that moment was the culmination for Wiles of seven years' research. His description of working as a mathematician on those days he did not make the discovery of the century has a more familiar ring, at least initially: "I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion," he said. "You go into the first room and it's completely dark and you stumble around bumping into the furniture. Gradually you learn where the furniture is and finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you are." …
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Copyright 1999 Deutsche Presse-Agentur
January 12, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: FEATURE: Microsoft rebuttal begins in antitrust trial
BYLINE: By Tilman Streif, dpa
DATELINE: Seattle, WashingtonSince October, witness after witness has presented evidence for the prosecution that Microsoft is the monopolist and bully the U.S. Justice Department and 19 U.S. states say it is. This week, Microsoft defence lawyers get a chance to rebutt the antitrust charges in a Washington D.C. courtroom.
Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, is expected to launch a vigorous defence to the barrage of accusations. …
Last but not least, experts testifying for the prosecution tried to cast doubt on Microsoft's position that Windows and the Internet Explorer form one seamless, integrated product.
Instead, they can easily be separated, a Princeton University computer expert said, thus supporting the Justice Department's claim that Microsoft was illegally bundling separate products in order to gain market share in the browser-field. …
The Legal Intelligencer
Copyright 1999 American Lawyer Media
January 12, 1999 TuesdayHEADLINE: Jerome Weinstein, Estate Planner, Dies
Jerome B. Weinstein, who practiced law in Philadelphia for 56 years, died after a long illness in December. He was 88 years old.
Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Mr. Weinstein graduated from Princeton University in 1931. In 1934 he earned his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor of the Law Review. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
January 12, 1999, TuesdayNAME: Bohdan Paczynski
HEADLINE: SCIENTIST AT WORK: BOHDAN PACZYNSKI;Finding Opportunity Where Others See ImpossibilityBYLINE: By JAMES GLANZ; James Glanz writes for Science Magazine
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.When he was 14 and growing up in 1950's Poland, Bohdan Paczynski started observing the flashing and flaring of the double stars called binaries through a 10-inch telescope outside his hometown of Warsaw. Now, with the constellation Orion gently shimmering over his shoulder like an alighting falcon, Dr. Paczynski stands on a bridge above Lake Carnegie on a chilly evening here and explains his proposal to record panoramic images of the entire sky -- all of it -- several times each and every night, "endlessly," as he puts it.
Astronomers, and anyone else who wanted to view the images over the Internet, would use them as a sort of cosmic surveillance camera to find thousands of relatively bright but undiscovered exploding stars, binaries, pulsating stars, quasars and comets, not to mention the dozens of house-sized asteroids that whip through Earth's immediate neighborhood every day.
These fluctuating features of the sky are so unexplored, and the necessary equipment is so unimposing, that an astronomer who shares Dr. Paczynski's enthusiasm plans to set up an observing station amid the bright lights of New York City -- on the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West -- and hopes to make modest astronomical discoveries there. …
That role is all the more notable considering that Dr. Paczynski, a professor at Princeton University, has for decades been a theoretical astrophysicist. It is a calling that often leads far from real sky-watching, but Bohdan Paczynski (pronounced BOG-don pah-CHIN-ski) has made it his business to spur the observers into action. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
January 12, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Richard D. Walk, GWU Professor
Richard D. Walk, 78, a retired professor and former chairman of the psychology department at George Washington University, died of a cerebral hemorrhage Jan. 2 at Suburban Hospital.
Dr. Walk joined the GWU faculty in 1959. He retired and took emeritus status in 1991. During his years on the GWU faculty, he had also been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics. For 10 years, he had been the psychology department chairman.
A resident of Chevy Chase, he was born at Fort Dix, N.J., and he graduated from Princeton University. During World War II, he served in the Army, mostly with the Office of Strategic Services in Europe. …
Business Wire
Copyright 1999 Business Wire, Inc.
January 11, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: Intel Science Talent Search Honors 300 Young Scientists as Semifinalists; New York, Virginia and California Lead with Most Semifinalists
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, D.C.
Jan. 11, 1999--Science Service and Intel Corporation today announced the names of 300 high school seniors from across the country as Semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS).
Intel assumed sponsorship of this 58-year-old national treasure -- often considered the Nobel Prize of science competitions for U.S. high school seniors -- from Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1998. On Jan. 25, judges will announce the 40 Finalists who will travel to Washington, D.C., March 3-8 for a week of activities including final judging and awards. …
All Intel Science Talent Search entries were reviewed and judged by top scientists from a variety of disciplines and overseen by J. Richard Gott, Ph.D., professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and former Science Talent Search Finalist in 1965.
Health Line
Copyright 1999 The National Journal Group, Inc.
January 11, 1999HEADLINE: DEFECTING DOCTORS: MORE M.D.S SAYING NO TO MANAGED CARE
Citing administrative headaches and low reimbursement rates, doctors are "quietly starting to fight back" by dropping out of managed care or whittling down the number of plans they accept.
A story on the front page of Sunday's New York Times took a look at what it termed the "rebellion in white," noting that while there is no evidence of a mass exodus, physicians with more affluent patients willing to foot the bill for services are leading the "revolt." …
'CASTE' SYSTEM OF CARE?
The movement away from managed care sparks "difficult questions" about doctors' salaries and whether dropping out of managed care spawns "the caste system of care that (HMOs) were meant to eliminate by providing preventive care and a variety of services." …
But some protest that physicians complaints are unfounded. Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University, said, "If doctors say that quality will fall as reimbursements fall, they are insulting themselves. The truth of the matter is that when a group of laborers are in surplus, wages fall. They are the only group that is unwilling to accept that" (Steinhauer, 1/10).
Internet World
Copyright 1999 Mecklermedia Corporation
January 11, 1999HEADLINE: Arrival of Java 2 Raises New Security Issues
BYLINE: By David F. Carr
Last month's release of Java 2 rewrote the Java security story, and now the authors of the first Java security book are back with an update.
"Securing Java: Getting Down to Business with Mobile Code," which Wiley will publish this month, updates the analysis Gary McGraw and Edward Felten began in their 1996 book on the subject.
Felten leads Princeton University's Secure Internet Programming team, while McGraw is vice president of business development at Reliable Software Technologies, a security consulting firm.
The old "sandbox" Java security model was intended to allow downloaded programs to run within a browser while tightly restricting their access to the user's computer.
The book provides an updated catalog of sandbox flaws that have been found and fixed, including some that hackers could use to crack the system wide open. …
The Record
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
(Bergen County, NJ)January 11, 1999; MONDAY
HEADLINE: NO PAYCHECKS, BUT HIGH PRESTIGE; FEDERAL ADVISORY POSTS ARE IN DEMAND
BYLINE: The Associated PressDATELINE: WASHINGTON
If a flow chart of federal power were drawn on a wall, their names would be closer to the floor than the ceiling. Still, legions of Americans agree to serve on the advisory councils, presidential commissions, and boards of trustees that provide a constant flow of outside opinion to the federal government.
Though unpaid, the jobs offer a degree of prestige, an opportunity to network in federal circles, and the chance to apply skills and specialties. …
The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, created to mull the consequences of cloning, is headed by Princeton University President Harold Shapiro. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
January 11, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: PAST MASTERS: American Historians Are a Curious Lot -- Current Events Excepted
BYLINE: Ken Ringle, Washington Post Staff WriterIn one of the nicer bits of synchronicity in recent memory, some 5,000 members of the American Historical Association showed up in Washington over the weekend just as the historic impeachment trial of William Jefferson Clinton opened on Capitol Hill.
But they were not exactly taking notes.
What respectable historian wants to trifle in current events when beckoned by the great sweeping currents of antiquity? …
Nations and cultures in the midst of tumultuous change, she and others said, show a greater tolerance for extreme attitudes and behavior. When things calm down, there's more consensus and less bitter division.
Stanley Katz of Princeton University, a legal historian who edited "Impeachment," a key text published in 1972, sees important parallels between the Clinton impeachment and that of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Both, he said, have come during "moments of important transition" for the United States. In Johnson's case it was the reuniting of the Union after the Civil War. In Clinton's case, he said, it is the emergence of the United States as the sole great power in a post-Soviet world.
Such moments, he said, "cause us to rethink the whole nature of presidential leadership: what we expect of leaders and what we will allow them to do." And that questioning "has produced narrow partisanship of the most unproductive kind." …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: Two die in collision of fire truck, sport utility vehicle
DATELINE: BOZEMAN, Mont.Two people died when a sport utility vehicle collided with a fire truck responding to a blaze early Sunday.
The victims were identified as Sean Michael Miles and Kathleen Ann Easton, both 19 and from Bozeman, said Gallatin County Coroner Duncan MacNab.
Miles was a sophomore at Princeton University and Easton was a student at the University of Montana. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: The next 25 years; ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS / DAVID WARSH
BYLINE: By David Warsh, Globe StaffIt has been more than 25 years since, entering upon the vast sea of discontent that was the 1970s, a group of graduate students at Yale University set in motion the events that led to the formation of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association - and so began to infiltrate one of the last untroubled shores of male dominance.
There had been women in economics in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were discouraged from entering a field that was thought to be too difficult for them. They didn't teach ordinarily at research universities, perform research, or hold down leadership positions in their professional associations. …
Efforts are continuing to smooth the path of women into economics. The National Science Foundation, mindful that for many years economics was thought to be as "inappropriate" for women as mechanical engineering, has several projects under way. The Committee on the Status of Women has begun its second 25 years with a series of mentoring workshops designed to put one senior figure together with five younger women for two days at a time.
Clearly it is the work of several generations - but the future is promising. Avinash Dixit of Princeton University notes: "I teach a very hard mathematical course in microeconomics to undergraduates. It used to be thought that women shied away from the harder subjects . . . But the composition of the class is 30-40 percent women now, and they do at least as well in the grade distribution."
The Buffalo News
Copyright 1999 The Buffalo News
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS RECALL ROLE IN BOMB THAT ALTERED HISTORY
BYLINE: TOM SIEGFRIED; Dallas Morning NewsThe middle of the 20th century marked a turning point in human history, and science was responsible.
Atomic explosives, the signature product of 20th century science, thrust their shock waves throughout the nonscientific world when they brought World War II to an end in 1945.
World War II's victors deified their scientific saviors, and sketches of atoms and mushroom clouds became symbols of science's power. But soon the Soviet-American Cold War chilled the world, and civilization faced the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
Society's entry into the nuclear era was engineered by scientists who had studied atomic physics in obscurity until the war. Then science's best and brightest assembled in secrecy, unleashing the power of the scientific method to produce the world's most powerful weapon. …
Glenn Seaborg, then a young chemistry instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, recalls hearing about fission in a seminar at the end of January 1939. Also present was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who became the Manhattan Project's director.
"I remember Oppenheimer was there, and he didn't believe it at first," Seaborg, 86, said in an interview last year. "But . . . after a few minutes he decided it was possible. It just caught everybody by surprise."
Word of had been delivered to America that January by the Danish atomic physicist Niels Bohr. He enlisted the collaboration of the Princeton University physicist John Wheeler to produce a thorough explanation of the fission process. Their paper was published on Sept. 1, 1939, the day that Hitler invaded Poland to launch World War II. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: A Canadian Rousts Diplomacy (and Ruffles the U.S.)
BYLINE: By ANTHONY DePALMADATELINE: TORONTO, Jan. 9
As a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1960's, Lloyd Axworthy spent many nights at the old Madison Square Garden watching greats like Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley outplay almost everyone in the league.
It did not help his studies, Mr. Axworthy concedes, but the New York Knicks' approach to basketball did help him develop a game plan that has made him the most successful Canadian Foreign Minister in years, and also the one who has most antagonized Washington.
"If somebody asks me to define Canadian foreign policy I say, 'Take a look at the Knicks of the DeBusschere, Frazier, Bill Bradley era,' " Mr. Axworthy said. "They were a bit slower than other teams, and they were not as big, but they were crafty." …
Sunday Times
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Limited (London)
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: The brains behind the 21st century
BYLINE: Steve FarrerSteve Farrer on the scientists who are going to revolutionise our lives in the course of the next 100 years
Inventions have the power to change the world, but only a few scientists become household names. Breakthroughs can often come from unexpected quarters, as Dolly the cloned sheep proved to a stunned world in 1997. Working in laboratories and academic institutions are little-known scientists and engineers who could revolutionise the way we live in the next century. Helped by leading figures in the scientific community, The Sunday Times has identified those who could shape the 21st century. Some are tipped as future Nobel prize-winners, others have yet to reach their full potential, but all are working to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. …
Lyman Page
A prominent cosmologist who has been responsible for many insights into how the universe works but is set to cap all of his work to date when the Nasa satellite he helped design starts answering some fundamental questions concerning the cosmos. Lyman, 41, professor of physics at Princeton University, has focused his efforts on analysing the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which contains a wealth of information about the universe - its age, size, history, the evolution of the galaxies and its ultimate fate. The afterglow will be studied in unprecedented detail by the Nasa satellite Map, to be launched in 2000. The satellite will provide Lyman and his colleagues with raw data to test their theories - promising, he says, "the biggest jump in our understanding of the universe in decades".
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
January 10, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: A New Era for a Benchmark Index; Vanguard's John Bogle Looks at Technology Stocks' Impact on the S&P 500
BYLINE: Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff WriterJohn Bogle pioneered the creation of mutual funds that track a major stock index at the Vanguard Group, but he never imagined this.
The builder of America's second-largest family of mutual funds could never have foreseen a Standard & Poor's 500-stock index with a price-to-earnings ratio of 33, roughly twice the historical norm. And he would have been hard pressed to imagine an S&P 500 that includes highflying technology stocks with P/Es of 60, 80 or 100. …
Bogle, senior chairman of Vanguard, who wrote his senior thesis at Princeton University about the mutual fund business, took time this week to share his thoughts on the latest changes in the benchmark index, which Vanguard's biggest fund seeks to mirror.
Q: How has the influx of expensive technology stocks changed the S&P 500 index and has that damaged its usefulness as a benchmark of the broad stock market?
A: This is not the S&P index of the old days. This is not your father's or grandfather's S&P index. At the end of 1964, 40 percent of the value of that index was in 10 stocks. They were really hard business companies. There was a real business there. AT&T, General Motors, Exxon, IBM, Texaco, DuPont, Sears, General Electric, Kodak, Gulf Oil. AT&T alone was 9 percent of the index.
Just consider that list being the basic industries of America. Oil, a computer company with what looked like a monopoly, autos, telephone -- everything you needed to live.
Today what are the stocks that make up the S&P? It is heavily populated with high technology: Microsoft, Intel is the third largest, Cisco is the 10th largest, and Dell and Lucent are going to be right there. That's a different list. Technology oriented. . . .
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1999 Chicago Tribune Company
January 10, 1999 SundayHEADLINE: WILLIAM V. HOFFMAN
William V. Hoffman, 84, a longtime Hyde Park resident and professor emeritus in the department of modern languages at DePaul University, died Dec. 23 in Montgomery Place, a retirement and nursing center in Chicago. Born in Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Hoffman taught French, Italian, humanities and cinema at DePaul from 1953 until his retirement in 1985. He also served as head of the department of modern languages during his 32 years at the university. "He was enthusiastic about teaching and his students adored him," said his wife, Maxine. Mr. Hoffman received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, a master's from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate at Princeton University. The French government awarded Mr. Hoffman the Palmes Academiques award in 1976. In addition to his wife of 41 years, survivors include a son, Nicholas; three sisters, Helen Downer, Catherine Peck and Grace Simonds; and a granddaughter. Services were private.
AP Worldstream
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
January 09, 1999; SaturdayHEADLINE: Yugoslav authorities bar Canadian Nobel laureate, American scholars
DATELINE: BELGRADE, YugoslaviaYugoslav authorities have barred a Canadian Nobel laureate and a team of five Americans from visiting Serbia, a dissident Belgrade professor said Saturday.
A member of an independent association of dissident college professors in Belgrade told The Associated Press that Canadian Nobel laureate John Polanyi and five fellow academics, all Americans, were denied a Yugoslav visa.
''We can only assume it is because they were to be our guests,'' said Zagorka Golubovic, from the Alternative Academic Educational Network.
The six had hoped to show support for beleaguered intellectuals in Serbia after authorities launched a crackdown against college professors critical of the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and revoked the autonomy of the Belgrade university last year. …
Apart from Polanyi, a professor at the University of Toronto who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1986, the delegation was to include Stanford university philosopher Richard Rorty, Princeton University physicist Sam Treiman and Jonathan Fanton, president of the New School University in New York. …
THE FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Copyright 1999 Star-Telegram Newspaper, Inc.
January 9, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: Obituaries
BYLINE: Star-TelegramGuy Merriman Page Sr.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Guy Merriman Page Sr., 88, died Wednesday, Jan. 6, 1999, at a nursing home in Chapel Hill.
Guy Merriman Page Sr. was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Nov. 4, 1910, a son of James and Clara Merriman Page.
He graduated cum laude from Princeton University in civil engineering in the class of 1932, was president of the Triangle Club and a member of the Elm Club. …
The Morning Call (Allentown)
Copyright 1999 The Morning Call, Inc.
January 9, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: HENRY THOMAS KOCH JR. FORMER LEH'S PARTNER
BYLINE: The Morning CallHenry Thomas Koch Jr., 72, a partner in the former H. Leh & Co. department store for 43 years, died Thursday, Jan. 7 in Lehigh Valley Hospital, Salisbury Township. He and his wife of 49 years, Jane (Newman) Koch, resided in Allentown.
Born in Allentown, he was a son of the late Henry T. and Ruth (Kuntz) Koch. He was a grandson of the late Horatio Koch and a great-grandson of Henry Leh, founders of the local department store group.
He was a 1944 graduate of Lawrenceville (N.J.) School and received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1949. He did post-graduate work at New York University. …
New Scientist
Copyright 1999 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd.
January 9, 1999HEADLINE: Into the void
BYLINE: Charles SeifeHIGHLIGHT: Add a few time-travelling tachyons and black holes make sense
DO BLACK holes spit out particles that move faster than light and travel backwards in time ? Two physicists in New Jersey say that particles with these bizarre properties could come to the rescue of a promising theory about what happens in the heart of a black hole.
The world of very massive objects is ruled by general relativity theory, while quantum mechanics governs the realm of very small scales. Black holes - enormous stars crushed into no space at all - fall into both categories, as they are both massive and tiny. Much to the chagrin of physicists, general relativity and quantum mechanics appear incompatible, so nobody is sure what equations hold true at the centre of a black hole.
But in the past few decades, a new set of theories has raised the hopes of physicists struggling to understand the interior of these bodies. …
What's even more exciting is that physicists are combining these theories into one large "M-theory", which explains a lot about the interior of black hole. But there is still a flaw: although black holes seem to devour everything that comes their way, this cannot happen under the rules of M-theory. Just as oil and water refuse to mix, so energetic particles cannot merge with black holes, according to the theory.
"If you send a particle in towards the black hole, and it gets sufficiently close, it needs some mechanism to be absorbed," says Daniel Kabat, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. "Once it gets too close to the black hole, it becomes unstable." Without some way of getting rid of that instability, the black hole would spit out the particle - something that doesn't happen in nature.
But now Kabat and Princeton University's Gilad Lifschytz believe they have figured out how to keep M-theory intact, while at the same time explaining how a black hole can keep down its lunch. The answer lies in tachyons. These are particles with imaginary mass that can be thought of as travelling backwards in time. They move faster than light, and slowing down to the speed of light would be as impossible for them as it is for us to accelerate to light speed. Physicists also use the term "tachyon" for a whole family of instabilities that quickly decay. …
New Scientist
Copyright 1999 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
January 9, 1999HEADLINE: Glorious noise
BYLINE: Peter McClintock, Dmitri Luchinsky (Peter McClintock and Dmitri Luchinsky are physicists at Lancaster University)HIGHLIGHT: Random noise can be used to drive chemical reactions or stop a spacecraft spinning out of control - you just have to know how to tweak it. Peter McClintock and Dmitri Luchinsky tune in
THERE'S no doubt it's had a bad press. For most of us, noise is what goes on next door when you're trying to sleep. It's that horrible hiss and crackle when an old recording ends or when you try to tune your short-wave radio into the BBC World Service when you're in the Brazilian jungle.
But within that seemingly meaningless barrage of uncontrolled and usually disruptive rapid-fire shocks lies something far more interesting. If those shocks arrive in just the right sequence, interesting things happen. …
Making noise work
There may be other uses too. Suppose there is some event that you want to happen - a chemical reaction, for example, which is the key step in manufacturing an expensive drug. Random thermal noise will drive the reaction at a certain rate. But you might do better. If you want to speed things up, and follow the most energy-efficient approach, you might try to apply well-designed forces to push the molecules involved along one of the special paths most likely to lead to the reaction. By carefully measuring the chemical system, you should be able to work out the required forces directly. This is exactly what chemist Herschel Rabitz and his collaborators at Princeton University are doing, using lasers to do the "pushing" (see No toil no trouble, New Scientist, 18 July 1998, p 33).
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR WEEKEND SATURDAY
JANUARY 9, 1999, SATURDAYHEADLINE: Roman God Janus
GUESTS: Elaine Fantham, Princeton, New Jersey
BYLINE: Scott Simon, Washington, DC;HIGHLIGHT: The month of January is named after the Roman god Janus. Scot talks with Princeton Classics Professor Elaine Fantham about the two- faced God.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST: January is often considered a fine time to make a fresh start. It's the beginning of a new year marked by the arrival of credit bills to finance the holidays just past.
It's the month to make new resolutions and no doubt and the beginning of their demise.
Professor Elaine Fantham, who teaches classics at Princeton University, joins us from her office to tell us about what January meant to the ancient Romans as she so often does.
Professor, thanks for being with us again.
ELAINE FANTHAM, PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Ah, yes Scott, happy new year to you. And I hope that on January the first, you remembered like a good Roman or descendant of the Romans to give dates and figs and nuts to your friends. …
SIMON: So, January was the beginning of the Roman calendar as well.
FANTHAM: Well, it was and in another sense it wasn't. Have you ever wondered why September, which is the ninth month of the year, is called the seventh, and October the eighth and so on?
SIMON: No, but it's an awfully good question.
FANTHAM: Well, this is all because the Romans at the earliest stage seem to have begun the year in March. So their March is spring like... And I guess that they thought that the time to begin the year was in the spring. …
FANTHAM: Then they switched to January and the name must always have implied beginning, because it's called after Janus, who is one of my favorite gods. …
Star Tribune
Copyright 1999 Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
January 9, 1999, Metro EditionHEADLINE: Is low unemployment good or bad for nation?
BYLINE: Mike Meyers; Staff WriterNot too long ago, the stock market swooned whenever the government reported a drop in unemployment. Strong growth in job creation sent shudders through the bond market.
Why all the fidgeting about a robust labor market? In a word, inflation. Too many jobs chasing too few workers could encourage wage demands that would ripple throughout the economy in the form of higher prices. Or the reverse: An abundance of workers pushes down wages and brings stable or falling prices.
Or so the theory goes. But many economists think the hypothesis is hokum and say the experience of the past couple of years proves them right. …
Former Fed governor Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist, said the relationship between rising inflation rates and falling unemployment rates seemed pretty clear in the 1980s. "The correlation looked strong," he said. The fact that the relationship seems to have been broken in the second half of the 1990s does not refute the theory, Blinder said. "Four years is not enough time to draw any conclusions," he said.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 8, 1999HEADLINE: NIH Prepares to Create a Ph.D. Program, but Some Educators Question the Need
BYLINE: PAULETTE WALKER CAMPBELLWhile skepticism remains strong among some scientists, leaders of the National Institutes of Health are preparing to create the agency's first-ever Ph.D. program, in biomedical research.
N.I.H. officials are just beginning the planning process, but they have a vision in mind: A small and highly selective graduate school based here, run by a dean, and focused on academic subfields that play to the N.I.H.'s strengths. Officials also see the program as a viable effort to recruit more black, Hispanic, and American Indian scientists into biomedical research. …
Judging from the reaction of several scientists and others on the N.I.H. Director's Advisory Committee, the idea may be a hard sell. …
"It is very difficult to make this case that there is a need for another Ph.D. degree-granting program in biomedical sciences in this country," said Shirley M. Tilghman, a co-author of the research council's report and a member of the N.I.H. advisory committee.
Ms. Tilghman, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, said she was equally doubtful about Dr. Gottesman's claim that the program could improve racial diversity.
According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the number of black students enrolled in the first year of Ph.D. programs in science and engineering fell by about 20 per cent from 1996 to 1997, from nearly 1,000 to 800. The enrollment of Hispanic students in such programs declined by more than 16 per cent, from 1,415 to 1,186. The report, released in September, warned that a further drop could lead to a decline in "work-force diversity" in the next century.
"There is not a serious graduate school in this country that has not been trying to solve" the problem, Ms. Tilghman said. "There is not a national need for a program that is going to be very, very similar to what's going on across the country." …
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 8, 1999HEADLINE: Graduate Students Win Concessions at Contentious MLA Meeting
BYLINE: COURTNEY LEATHERMANGraduate students had vowed to make last week's annual gathering of the Modern Language Association "a convention to remember." Critical of the M.L.A.'s response to the job crisis in the humanities, students had promised to use the convention to radically reform the association.
If this was a revolution, it was an easy overthrow.
Graduate-student leaders didn't stage any protests, demonstrate, or picket the convention. Instead, they calmly, deliberately, and simply won almost every item on their legislative agenda. …
"Today, the future of the profession belongs to those who, at present, have no future," said William Pannapacker, a graduate student at Harvard University speaking on the first day of the convention to a packed session organized by the caucus. Mr. Pannapacker's address was titled, "Enjoying Your Apprenticeship?" As he spoke, students passed around stickers that hammered home his mockery: "Graduate Student Caucus: We Work." …
" 'Let them eat cake,' our advocates are told. Let them wear Prada," Mr. Pannapacker said, taking a jab at Elaine Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University who just finished her term as M.L.A. president and has written about her love of fashion in Vogue magazine.
Ms. Showalter's year-long presidential message has been to encourage graduate students to look beyond academe toward alternative careers, as one way to deal with the job crisis. Her focus is controversial even among professors, but it has infuriated many graduate students who think she's missing the point, and both sides have engaged in some nasty written exchanges. …
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 8, 1999HEADLINE: Sophisticated Software Is Reshaping the Way Scientists Use Statistics
BYLINE: VINCENT KIERNANMarshall L. McCall is on the lookout for galaxies formed billions of years ago. His search relies not only on telescopes, but also on another crucial tool: his desktop computer, which runs sophisticated software that can find patterns and trends in the data he collects.
The way Mr. McCall does his research has been reshaped by desktop machines far more powerful than mainframe computers of only a few years ago. Increasingly, he and other scientists are taking advantage of that power to use "exploratory data analysis," a technique that relies on statistical programs to search for patterns -- such as unexpected similarities or differences among the measurements collected by astronomers, or in the data from a survey conducted by sociologists -- that could be tip-offs to interesting scientific phenomena. …
Other researchers, however, warn that exploratory data analysis is so easy and powerful that it might tempt academics to abandon ethical standards in the use of statistics in their research.
The technique was first proposed in 1970 by James [John] W. Tukey, who was then a professor of statistics at Princeton University and is now an emeritus professor there. He suggested that scientists use statistics to explore data, rather than simply to test hypotheses about the data, as statisticians themselves traditionally had done -- and and had stressed in for years in training other researchers.
His proposed approach is heavily visual. Mr. Tukey suggested that researchers compute many statistical measurements of their data -- not just a few, as had been done -- and plot them on graph paper, to look for patterns that the researchers might not have thought to look for in the first place. …
Asahi News Service
Copyright 1999 Asahi News Service
January 7, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: JAPAN TO SPARK DEBATE ON CURRENCY EXCHANGE LIMITS
BYLINE: AMY SHIRATORIDATELINE: TOKYO
Japan's proposal to create a foreign currency trading system in which the dollar, the yen and the euro fluctuate within a limited zone is expected to spur much international debate, experts point out.
Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi is expected to suggest such a managed float in the currency market when he meets political leaders during his visit to France, Italy and Germany which began Wednesday, government sources said. …
But other experts perceive a momentum for creating a new international finance system to replace the floating exchange rate system that has been in place since 1973.
''The U.S. government doesn't support (a managed float) now, but it may be persuaded toward that direction,'' said Peter Kenen, an international finance professor at Princeton University. ''Large fluctuations in the currency market do not help the trading system, particularly between the United States and Japan, and it helped destabilize the emerging markets.'' …
The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1999 The Providence Journal Company
January 7, 1999HEADLINE: NEWPORT CHARLES DURELS STENGEL
CHARLES DURELS STENGEL, 91, of 9A Victoria Ave., an employee with Prudential Life Insurance Co. from 1942 to 1972, when he retired as manager of the claims department, died last Thursday at Heatherwood Nursing & Rehabilitation Center. He was the husband of the late Ruth Stengel.
Born in Newark, N.J., the son of the late Charles Alfred and Ida (Johanna) Stengel, he had lived in Chatham, N.J., for 42 years before moving to Newport in 1990.
Mr. Stengel was a 1929 graduate of Princeton University and a 1932 graduate of Yale Law School. In 1976, he received a master's degree in law from New York University. He was a a lawyer licensed in New Jersey and Connecticut. …
top