Princeton in the News
June 3 to 9, 1999
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Anchorage Daily News
Copyright 1999 Anchorage Daily News
June 9, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Palmer resident Marcus J. Sternhagen, 74, died from a lengthy illness June 6, 1999, at Our House Care Home in Palmer. …
He attended Princeton University and later graduated from the University of Montana at Missoula. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 9, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: Computer executive's death ruled accidental
DATELINE: COLUMBIA, S.C.
A computer company executive's death on a trip to New York City was an accident, the result of alcohol poisoning, the New York City Medical Examiner's office has ruled.
Rob DiGiacomo, 33, who co-founded KryoTech of West Columbia, was on a trip to New York to show off the company's new computer supercooling technology when he died April 30.
He died of from acute alcohol intoxication, said Ellen Borakove, a medical examiner's spokeswoman. Toxicology tests released by the medical examiner on Tuesday revealed no other substances in DiGiacomo's system, she said. …
He was born in Ohio and graduated from Princeton University in 1987 with honors in electrical engineering and computer science. In 1993, he earned a master's in business administration from the University of South Carolina. …
After several years working for NCR Corp., DiGiacomo co-founded KryoTech in 1996.
The New York Post
Copyright 1999 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
June 9, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: STRIKE 3: YELLEN OUT AS ECONOMIC ADVISER
BYLINE: BETH PISKORAPresident Clinton is about to lose his top economic adviser.
Janet Yellen is expected today to quit her job as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, making her the third top-ranking economic official to abandon Clinton in a month's time.
Yellen follows in the footsteps of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alice Rivlin, both of whom are taking advantage of the strong economy to pursue other interests outside government.
Beltway insiders say two top contenders have emerged for Yellen's post - the president's closest economic adviser.
The first is Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is now on the faculty at Princeton University. …
But Kudlow gave even better odds to Blinder, citing the professor's close personal relationship with Vice President Al Gore, who is expected to play a big role in choosing the replacements for Rivlin and Yellen. …
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Copyright 1999 Star Tribune
June 9, 1999HEADLINE: A galaxy of dream technology;
Two physicists have some disappointing - and disturbing - observations abut the Star Wars cache of weapons
BYLINE: Michael Arnone
"Star Wars" fever is raging once again, set loose by the recent release of "Star Wars: Episode 1 --The Phantom Menace." …
Who wouldn't want to have a light saber spring to neon life in his or her hands? Who could deny the allure of traveling faster than light to alien worlds?
But could anything we see on the screen actually work?
That depends, say two eminent physicists _ Frank Wilczek, the J. Robert Oppenheimer physics scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Neil Tyson, visiting professor at Princeton University and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York.
Neither Tyson nor Wilczek has spent any time investigating the scientific merits of the "Star Wars" universe. First, there's little need to spoil the fun. Second, the films' basis in fantasy makes them less interesting to analyze than the more fact-based science fiction such as "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Even so, Tyson emphasizes the difference between things that are impossible because they breach known laws of physics and those that technology has simply not yet reached. For instance, both scientists dismiss the possibility of "The Force" as a total dream. But they freely admit that some of the films' technologies could exist, albeit with a few changes. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
June 09, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: ALAN TURING; The Oddball Who Changed the World
BYLINE: M. Mitchell Waldrop, Special to The Washington PostNo doubt about it: Even by the eccentric standards of Cambridge University in the 1930s, Alan Turing was a mess.
The young mathematics student wore a jacket and tie, of course, just as all students did in those days. But he managed to make his clothes look as though he'd bought them in a rummage sale. He never seemed to comb his hair or clean his fingernails. He often neglected to shave, since he might nick himself and would invariably faint at the sight of blood. …
BRAIN OF A NEW MACHINE
This was a philosophical departure for a young man who had spent his youth deeply concerned about issues of free will, convinced that spirit could not be reduced to mere matter.
By 1936, however, his feelings on this subject were clearly shifting -- he would soon declare himself an atheist -- and this paper marked the first public hint of what was to become a lifetime conviction that there is no fundamental difference between human brains and computing machines. They both perform the same functions, what we would now call information processing.
Although these concepts are familiar enough in 1999, they were radical at the time. But after some initial shock, Turing's tutor encouraged him to submit his paper to a journal. He did so despite a horrifying episode in which he found that American logician Alonzo Church of Princeton University had just published precisely the same result, though in slightly different terms. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
June 8, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: Myron Weiner, 68, prolific MIT; specialist on developing countries
Myron Weiner, a specialist on refugees and developing countries who was a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than 30 years, died of brain cancer Thursday in his home in Mooretown, Vt. He was 68. …
Mr. Weiner was born in New York City. He graduated from City College of New York in 1951, and earned a master's degree and doctorate at Princeton University.
The Guardian (London)
Copyright 1999 Guardian Newspapers Limited
June 8, 1999HEADLINE: Poet in a prize position;
While the poet laureate was being called a 'bag of shite', Paul Muldoon was getting down to work as Oxford's new professor of poetry. He talks to Michael Ellison
Paul Muldoon has been having a good time of it lately. His two-week-old son, Asher, is thriving; he has been granted one of the highest honours in the English literary firmament; and no one has made him the target of a stream of invective. Not bad going for a poet.
What's more, he didn't really need to make any great effort to secure the position of professor of poetry at Oxford. He wasn't even sure that he wanted the job. After all, Muldoon has it made already. The attraction of another academic title is limited when you are the Howard GB Clark professor in humanities at Ivy League Princeton University, New Jersey.
He has been described as attracting more imitators than any poet since Auden and has won prizes and accolades in Ireland, the United Kingdom and America as well as having written plays for the stage and television and edited and translated poetry collections. …
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Information Bank Abstracts
une 8, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: STILL SCRATCHING HEADS OVER MINIMUM WAGE
BYLINE: BY ALAN B KRUEGERJOURNAL-CODE: WSJ
Princeton University economics professor Alan B Krueger letter asserts Bruce Bartlett, in May 27 1999 editorial-page article 'Minimum Wage Hikes Help Politicians Not the Poor,' misrepresents findings of his own study on minimum wage
The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
June 8, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: U. of Chicago rejects efforts to dumb down; President quits amid curriculum debate
BYLINE: Andrea Billups; THE WASHINGTON TIMESFriends and alumni of the University of Chicago are calling the resignation of President Hugo Sonnenschein on Thursday a victory for traditional academic standards that sends a clear signal across America against the dumbing down of higher education.
Mr. Sonnenschein, whose attempts to diminish the school's strict undergraduate core curriculum to increase enrollment and better market the university to a wider, less academically inclined group of students, had come under fire in the past year. Veteran professors, concerned alumni and current students joined to protest his efforts, seen by many as an affront to the culture and mission of a revered liberal arts institution that boasts 70 Nobel Prize winners - more than any other school in the world. …
Mr. Sonnenschein, 58, a well-known economist and former provost at Princeton University, joined the University of Chicago as president in 1993. His resignation was his own decision and not influenced by any public outcry, he said. "It is time for another president, one who is less a symbol of change, to carry the momentum forward," he wrote in a letter to faculty. …
Business Week
Copyright 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
June 7, 1999HEADLINE: PRINCETON RULES
BYLINE: By Owen Ullmann; EDITED BY ROBERT McNATTHAIL TO THE NEW IVY LEAGUE CHAMP OF EXCLUSIVITY! Harvard University, the perennial No. 1 in the hard-to-get-into category, has been supplanted by Princeton University.
Princeton accepted a record-low 10.8% of the 14,874 high school seniors who applied for admission this fall.Harvard sent ''yes'' letters to 11.3% of an applicant pool of 18,160, the second-highest in its history. Last year, Harvard's acceptance rate was 12.3%, vs. 13.1% at Princeton.
Despite its high rejection rate, Harvard is aggressively marketing itself. In May, it sent out nearly 50,000 letters to high school juniors with strong records. ''We are writing to offer congratulations on your academic achievements and to encourage you to consider Harvard,'' the letters begin.
Some college counselors say the university just wants to increase next year's applicant pool to reclaim the exclusivity crown from Princeton, breaking even more teenage hearts. However, Harvard spokeswoman Sally Baker says that the university has mailed out similar letters for years. She adds that the only reason for doing so is ''to attract the best candidates.''
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
June 7, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: SCIENCE UPDATE
ATOM & UNIVERSE Sky survey makes rare celestial finds: a couple of free-floating brown dwarfs
* CHICAGO - Unlike Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, and their four counterparts, celestial dwarfs may not always have companions.
Two new brown dwarfs, with especially cool temperatures, have been found floating all alone in space by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Astronomers announced the finding last week during the centennial meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago.
"This is an interesting object, an object with properties between the properties of stars and planets," said Xiaohui Fan, a Princeton University astronomer who announced the discovery of the first of the orphan dwarfs. "It's too small to be called a star, but it's probably a little bigger than a planet. And unlike a planet, it's not rotating around its own sun, but kind of free-floating in interstellar space." …
Insight on the News
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
June 7, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: Academia Embraces Own Future Shock
BYLINE: Suzanne Fields; INSIGHTIt has been so easy to make fun of politically correct academia that it is hard to shock the public anymore in exposing how the intellectual elites think. It's particularly difficult to write satire after surveying the titles of courses at prestigious universities, as reported in Comedy and Tragedy, published by Young America's Foundation. …
I recently was invited to speak at Princeton by a group of students who call themselves Princeton Students Against Infanticide, or PSAI. No, they're not killing babies at Princeton, but they actually are "debating" the circumstances when killing babies is justified. Princeton has hired Peter Singer, a bioethicist, to teach in a tenured chair at its Center for Human Values. Singer advocates killing disabled infants, up to 28 days after birth, as a humane course of action. He writes: "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all." He would waste infants with spina bifida, Down's syndrome and hemophilia. …
Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton, defends Singer's appointment in the name, natch, of academic freedom. But Singer, in his own words, is an advocate as much as an academic. "The whole point of ethics is to guide practice," he writes. Professor Robert George, who teaches philosophy of law and civil liberties at Princeton and who has been appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says the Singer appointment "gives legitimacy to the practice of infanticide." …
The Jerusalem Post
Copyright 1999 The Jerusalem Post
June 7, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: Help the Kosovars help themselves
BYLINE: Shlomo Avineri And Stephen HolmesThe writers are, respectively, professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and professor of politics at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at New York University Law School.
One million Kosovar Albanians were brutally expelled from their homeland by the Milosevic regime. NATO's task of returning them to the ruined and pillaged villages and towns poses enormous logistical and social challenges.When the masses of deportees and refugees began pouring into Macedonia and Albania, the first order of business was naturally to provide them with food, shelter, and a minimal, bearable routine. NATO troops, UNHCR officials, mobile military hospitals from far-flung countries, and various humanitarian and church organizations did what they could under difficult conditions. Needless to say, still more will have to be done, since many, if not most, of the refugees are unlikely to be able to return to a ravished Kosovo before the onset of another bitter Balkan winter.
But along with the physical aspects of survival, the social aspects must also be addressed: The refugees have not only lost their homes and property, but their familiar social contexts and relationships. They are waking up dazed in a foreign land, wrenched from their normal social networks. Despite the good intentions of the many organizations working to assist them, the refugees risk becoming impotent, passive wards of their protectors and helpers. …
The allies must begin reconstructing Kosovar society now, without delay, even before they make or find their way into Kosovo itself and face the immense task of rebuilding the province's decimated infrastructure and housing stock. …
Modern Healthcare
Copyright 1999 Crain Communications Inc.
June 07, 1999HEADLINE: PUNDIT REINHARDT JOINS TRIAD BOARD
BYLINE: Barbara KirchheimerNoted Princeton University healthcare economist and well-known industry pundit Uwe Reinhardt has been appointed to a paid director post on the board of Triad Hospitals, one of two for-profit hospital companies spun off in May by Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp.
Reinhardt, 60, has made a career out of critiquing the American healthcare system and has called for a two-tiered system under which all Americans would be guaranteed basic care.
Reinhardt said he doesn't see a conflict of interest between his work as an academic and public speaker and his position on the Triad board.
He noted that he is already a director of the not-for-profit Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
''It's a terrific way to learn about health economics, to actually sometimes sit in the trenches and see how decisions get made,'' he said. ''I don't really see that it would affect me. If it did, I would probably quit the board.'' …
New Jersey Law Journal
Copyright 1999 American Lawyer Newspapers Group, Inc.
June, 7, 1999HEADLINE: Handler Says He's Retiring Sept. 1, Two Years Early Surprise retirement strips Court of last death-penalty foe, gives Whitman another appointee; (156 N.J.L.J. 837)
BYLINE: Matt Ackermann
Justice Alan Handler, for two decades the lone opponent of capital punishment on the state Supreme Court and one of its most prolific writers, announced Friday that he is retiring on Sept. 1, the same day one of his brethren justices is stepping down.
Handler's early retirement, which will coincide with Justice Stewart Pollock's, gives Gov. Christine Todd Whitman a historic opportunity: not only to appoint a justice who is not a conscientious objector to the death penalty but also to pack the Court with justices of her idealogical bent. …
Handler, a 1953 graduate of Princeton University who earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1956, served as a deputy attorney general from 1961 to 1964 and first assistant attorney general from 1964 to 1967. …
Radio Comm. Report
Copyright 1999 Crain Communications, Inc.
June 07, 1999HEADLINE: BI-COASTAL UNIVERSITIES COLLABORATE ON 'UNIVERSAL RADIO'
BYLINE: Elizabeth V. MooneyNEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.-To move device interconnectivity from enticing theory to practical reality, the new Wireless Research Center of the University of California at Berkeley has formed a bi-coastal collaboration with the Wireless Information Network Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
''We started the Wireless Research Center to apply and leverage semiconductor communications theory and systems engineering,'' said Robert W. Brodersen, a professor in Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
''As we close the century, semiconductor technology has reached the point where it can drive communications systems. Our model is to collaborate as much as possible to create true wireless communications systems in silicon.'' …
The demand for bandwidth in cellular applications is growing exponentially while the supply of RF spectrum available for them remains fixed, said Sergio Verdu, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University, located in New Jersey about 25 miles south of Rutgers. Verdu spent 1998 as a visiting professor to Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer sciences department.
''A variety of technologies has been proposed recently to make use of the spectrum in a more efficient way than existing digital wireless systems,'' Verdu said. …
The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
June 7, 1999SECTION: WORLD; THE U.N. REPORT
BYLINE: Betsy Pisik; THE WASHINGTON TIMESDATELINE: NEW YORK
COUNCIL 'MARGINALIZED'Just as it seemed that peace was busting out all over last week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced a retreat - for the Security Council.
Mr. Annan invited the 15 council members and their spouses to a conference center near Princeton University to discuss "ways to invigorate their role as the principal U.N. organ dealing with international peace and security," said his spokesman, Fred Eckhard.
The council, guaranteed the starring role by the U.N. Charter in all dramas affecting international stability, has been divided on key issues and was ignored altogether in NATO's air war against Yugoslavia. …
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
Copyright 1999 The Telegraph Group Limited
June 06, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: Books: A bestial kind of logic
BYLINE: By ADAM LIVELYThe Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee
Princeton UP, pounds 11.95, 127 ppWHEN J. M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, was invited last year by Princeton University to give the Tanner Lectures - a series usually devoted to the philosophical analysis of ethical issues - he responded with this work of fiction.
It tells of a distinguished novelist, Elizabeth Costello, who is invited to give a similar lecture series and responds with an impassioned attack on society's treatment of animals. We are, claims Costello, complicit in "an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that that Third Reich was capable of".
Coetzee presents us not just with the substance of what his fictional novelist has to say to her audience, but also its personal context. We see, in particular, her strained relationship with her son and daughter-in-law, with whom she is staying during the course of the lectures. …
In fact there is a good deal of Reason here. Almost half the book is made up of replies by real commentators, including Peter Singer, the philosopher, and Wendy Doniger, the religious scholar, to the substantial points raised in Coetzee's text. The result is an accessible, thought-provoking introduction to the issues sur rounding animal rights.
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 6, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: EBay's Meg Whitman is richest woman CEO - on paper
BYLINE: MARTHA MENDOZA, AP Business Writer
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, Calif.EBay chief executive officer Meg Whitman, the richest woman CEO in the world, is having a bad day.
First, her online auction site shut down for seven hours during the night, a rare and damaging event that halted trading and flooded their customer service centers with complaints.
Then a photographer shooting her picture for the cover of a business magazine made her kneel, almost genuflecting, with her chin on a table littered with Pez candy dispensers for half an hour. …
A graduate of Harvard Business School and Princeton University, Ms. Whitman is a mother of two sons who are 11 and 14, and the wife of a brain surgeon.
"Virtually all of my time is dedicated to eBay and my family," said Ms. Whitman. "It's a wonderful life." …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
June 6, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: The wonderful life of Jimmy Stewart;
Bette Alburger is a freelance writer from Swarthmore, Pa.
BYLINE: By Bette Alburger, Globe CorrespondentINDIANA, Pa. - Every Christmastime there's sure to be another TV showing of the classic movie "It's a Wonderful Life." But film fans don't have to wait until December to discover the wonderful life of Jimmy Stewart, star of the famous Frank Capra film that was released in 1947. At the Jimmy Stewart Museum, visitors learn all about the small town's favorite son and the many roles he played both on and off screen. …
According to the narrator of the video, Stewart's family always encouraged whatever he did, including taking a shot at Hollywood. But long before he took off for Tinseltown, he donned a Kermit-like costume to star in his high school production of "The Frog Prince." Probably nobody realized it back then, but a star was being born. While at Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1932 with a degree in architecture, he met Josh Logan. Logan invited him to join a summer stock group. Broadway followed, and then Hollywood in 1935. …
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1999 The Hartford Courant Company
June 6, 1999 Sunday, STATEWIDEHEADLINE: COLLEGE BOUND
AS HIGHER EDUCATION BECKONS, THE CLASS OF '99 IS FACED WITH TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PAY FOR ITBYLINE: DAN UHLINGER; Courant Staff Writer
Some high school graduates would die for a scholarship to Harvard.
Not Jennifer Hughes.
The valedictorian of Manchester High School's Class of 1999 has told the famous university in Cambridge to keep the money. She is staying closer to home, at the University of Connecticut.
"It was a tough choice. I was really impressed with Harvard and Princeton University," she said. "I visited both schools and I liked Princeton the most, but UConn won't cost me anything. And I'll have more money later on for law school." …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 6, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: COUNTERINTELLIGENCE;The Greatest of Unease
BYLINE: By Alex Witchel
DATELINE: MCLEAN, Va.I'M not sure what I was thinking when I decided to fly the trapeze. In retrospect, it seems, I wasn't thinking at all.
I arrived at Circus Arts Workshop, an outdoor trapeze rig here, to meet Sam Keen, the author of "Learning to Fly: Trapeze -- Reflections on Fear, Trust and the Joy of Letting Go," (Broadway Books, 1999; $23). Mr. Keen is based in Sonoma, Calif., whhere he runs a program called Upward Bound, teaching people to use the trapeze experience as a mechanism to examine their own fears about life. It has been particularly successful with abused women and recovering drug addicts, but garden variety neurotics like me have also been able to benefit. …
Circus Arts is owned by Michel Bigotti and Laurent Givry, former instructors for Club Med, and offers classes ($30 for one, less for a series), birthday parties and corporate events. Though Mr. Bigotti and Mr. Givry wore shorts and jeans, Mr. Keen arrived clad in tights and slippers. He looked like a bony old bird, his frame lean and spare from years of flying. He has bright, hard blue eyes and talks about the trapeze with the passion of a preacher, which he is, having graduated from the Harvard Divinity School and Princeton University with a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion. For 20 years he was an editor at Psychology Today, and "Learning to Fly" is his 14th book. His previous one, "Fire in the Belly" (1991), about male identity, was on the New York Times best-seller list. …
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 1999 San Antonio Express-News
June 6, 1999HEADLINE: Serious about laughs; Bruce Barshop rules a growing empire of comedy
BYLINE: Hector Saldana; Express-NewsStaff WriterBruce Barshop is San Antonio's king of comedy.
Unlike the fictional (and delusional) Rupert Pupkin in MartinScorsese's "King of Comedy," the laid-back San Antonio native is asuccessful attorney, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, as wellas co-producer of the Latino Laugh Festival, which ends tonightwith the Comedy Fiesta at the Charline McCombs Empire Theater. Nextyear, Barshop plans to launch a 24-hour cable channel. …
His interests weren't always so lofty.
In high school, Barshop played bass guitar in a garage band calledthe Blue Fandangos, which specialized in the loud acid rock of JimiHendrix and Cream.
"We were going to be the Orange Fandangos, but we couldn't find anyorange business cards, and we had a choice between blue and white," recalls Barshop, a 1970 graduate of Robert E. Lee High School. From Lee, he went to Princeton University, graduating in 1974, then earned his law degree in 1977 from the University of Texas atAustin. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 5, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: Highlights of Justice Handler's major opinions, death-penalty dissents
BYLINE: By The Associated PressFollowing is a selection of the opinions of New Jersey Supreme Court Associate Justice Alan Handler (Princeton Class of 1953), who on Friday announced he would retire this fall:
State vs. Schmid, 1980
Handler rules that private colleges such as Princeton University are barred by the state Constitution from infringing on the free-speech rights of protesters on campus.
Daily News (New York)
Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.HEADLINE: BIG BUDDHIST BASH A CHANCE TODAY TO CHANGE YOUR MIND
BYLINE: BY CHARLES W. BELLRANDE BROWN, WHO organized the sixth annual Change Your Mind Day, which is today on the Great Lawn in Central Park, thinks she already knows who will show up.
"Let's see, 90% already are practicing Buddhists," she says, "and another 9.95% are interested in Buddhism."
That leaves .05%.
"Oh," says Brown, "those are the people walking their dogs who stop to see what's going on."
Change Your Mind Day is the biggest Buddhist bash of the year in New York, and Brown expects more than 3,000 people, the number that turned out last year. …
That's one reason that it's so difficult to count Buddhist noses many practitioners retain the religious identities of their childhood. Brown, 49, a longtime Greenwich Village resident, wears several hats. She is a writer, and a Japanese-to-English translator of Buddhist texts. She is a founding director of the board that publishes Tricycle from a funky loft in the West Village.
SHE BECAME interested in Buddhism as a teenager and got serious about it at Princeton University, where she majored in Japanese studies. (She also lived in Japan for 10 years, where she polished her language skills). …
National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: SOUNDS LIKE SCIENCE
June 5, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE MAY NOT BE THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER AS TO WHY WE EXIST
ANCHORS: IRA FLATOWREPORTERS: DAVID KESTENBAUM
IRA FLATOW, host:I'm Ira Flatow. Welcome back to SOUNDS LIKE SCIENCE.
Cosmologists are physicists who earn their keep trying to understand where the universe came from and why it came out the way it did. Some of the field's leading minds have recently embraced a powerful idea known as the anthropic principle. Now the good news is, it may answer some deep questions. The bad news, some say: It's a cop-out. NPR's David Kestenbaum attended a recent cosmology conference in Chicago. …
KESTENBAUM: The anthropic principle says that some features of the universe are the way they are because, otherwise, life could not exist. If the universe were the size of a golf ball or, as Hawking likes to point out, like a two-dimensional painting, we wouldn't be here to contemplate it. It's a one-time fluke that could not be otherwise.
If that sounds like circular reasoning, then you're in good company. The anthropic principle bugs a lot of physicists, including Rob Caldwell from Princeton University.
Mr. ROB CALDWELL: It doesn't seem like real science.
KESTENBAUM: He says you could use the anthropic principle to answer any question.
Mr. CALDWELL: Yeah, it's like playing poker and making all the cards wild. That's no fun. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card. You might want to save it for a case when you really need it, but I don't think we need it yet, because I think there's an explanation for the way things work, or for the way things look and the way things appear to work. …
KESTENBAUM: And if things keep going this way, cosmologists hope they will never have to say, We are here, so things must be this way.'
But, oddly, the progress with inflation theory hasn't driven a stake through the anthropic principle. That's because it suggests that there are probably many universes, and that increases the odds that ours may be a random accident.
Making a universe is easy,' Guth jokes. You could even cook one up in the kitchen. Take a few pounds of matter, heat it to an ungodly temperature and--Boom!--a universe of your own.' Universes should reproduce like rabbits, springing from black holes, for instance. But on thhis issue, the community is divided.
Mr. JIM FRYE (University of Florida): I'm Jim Frye(ph) from the University of Florida, and one universe is plenty for me.
Mr. IGOR KACHAEV (Geneva): My name is Igor Kachaev. I'm from CERN, Geneva, and I think there are many, infinite number.
Mr. HARVEY REAL: I'm Harvey Real(ph), and I don't know.
Ms. NETA BAHCALL (Princeton University): I'm Neta Bahcall from Princeton University. I don't know how many universes exist. I know just that we have at least one, the one we live on. …
Note: This show was first broadcast on June 2, 1999, during NPR's All Things Considered.
The National Journal
Copyright 1999 The National Journal, Inc.
June 5, 1999HEADLINE: 'Fulminating Cesspools of Microbes'
BYLINE: Neil MunroBiotech is likely to yield many new medical benefits, but it also may convince people to view their ailing parents, balky children, and fellow citizens as mere ''fulminating cesspools of microbes,'' lacking any unconditional claim to life and liberty, said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Caplan said this ''reductionist'' point of view, in which a person may be viewed less as an irreplaceable spirit than as a replaceable bag of chemicals, is biotechnology's main threat.
In the long term, say critics, biotech may also segregate humans into two castes--the wealthy GenRich, who upgrade their natural talents with expensive added-on genes, and their unimproved inferiors, the Naaturals. That's the biggest threat, argued Dr. Lee M. Silver, a professor of genetics at Princeton University. Indeed, the GenRich may recoil at the thought of marrying a Natural, just as people today would recoil at the thought of sleeping with a baboon, said Silver, who uses mice to study the biology of anxiety and addiction. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times CompanyJune 5, 1999, Saturday
HEADLINE: New Jersey Justice Will Retire, Allowing Whitman to Expand Her Legacy on Top Court
BYLINE: By JERRY GRAY
DATELINE: TRENTON, June 4Justice Alan B. Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court announced today that he would retire in September. His departure will open the way for Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to make her fourth nomination to the state's highest court and will assure that her imprint is stamped on one of the nation's most respected benches for years to come.
Justice Handler made the announcement barely a month after Attorney General Peter G. Verniero was confirmed for a seat on the bench at the end of a grueling political fight over his nomination. Justice Handler will leave the bench on Sept. 1, the same day that Mr. Verniero is scheduled to join the court.
Justice Handler attended Princeton University and is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1956 and was admitted to the New Jersey bar the same year. …
New Scientist
Copyright 1999 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
June 5, 1999HEADLINE: Hubble knows
BYLINE: Charles Seife (Washington DC)HOW fast is the Universe expanding ? NASA announced last week that scientists have finally reached a consensus, drawing the main work of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to a close. But the consensus is less than unanimous.
"We all agree," says Jeremy Mould, an astronomer at the Australian National University in Canberra and co-leader of the NASA Hubble team. "We just don't agree that we agree."
Not everyone takes that line, however. "That's a bunch of hooey," says Allan Sandage, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. "The impression NASA tried to give to the media is that it's all solved, but that is not true."
In an expanding Universe, the farther away a particular galaxy is, the faster it is receding. The primary goal of the HST has been to measure the figure that describes this - known as the "Hubble constant" - in part by examining a class of pulsating stars called Cepheids. The NASA Hubble team now concludes that galaxies are speeding away at 70 kilometres per second per 3.2 million light years, plus or minus 10 per cent. …
Other astronomers think that despite the fuss, astronomers are still moving towards consensus. "The high values are slowly coming down," says Edwin Turner of Princeton University.
The Boston Herald
Copyright 1999 Boston Herald Inc.
June 4, 1999 FridayHEADLINE: Celebrity; U.N. agency honors Queen Noor in Hub for her landmine fight
BYLINE: By DANA BISBEEA royal hand still carries the torch in the international fight against the use of landmines.
Queen Noor of Jordan, widow of the late King Hussein and stepmother to reigning King Abdullah II, received the New England Children's Champion Award from the United Nations Children's Fund during a benefit party last night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. …
The queen was born Lisa Halaby Aug. 23, 1951, to a distinguished Arab-American family. She attended Concord Academy in Massachusetts before entering Princeton University in its first co-educational freshman class. …
The Charleston Gazette
Copyright 1999 Charleston Newspapers
June 04, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: Drug prevention money coup for Big Tobacco, critics claim
BYLINE: Greg MooreState officials trumpeted a $4.5 million program Thursday that they say will help more than 21,000 West Virginia schoolchildren stay off tobacco, alcohol and other drugs.
But some health advocates say West Virginia should have turned the money down, because it comes from tobacco companies and because the deal was brokered by a tobacco warehouse in Wood County. …
The governor has generally been a foe of the tobacco industry. He proposed a 25 percent tax on smokeless tobacco during this year's legislative session.
Developed at Princeton University, the Life Skills Training program has received accolades from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association. CDC spokesman Alan Grant said he'd never heard of tobacco companies sponsoring the program. No one at the CDC was available to comment on the tobacco companies' funding of the program, Grant said. …
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 4, 1999HEADLINE: Students Say They Check Course Web Pages Before They Enroll
Some students say the best professors are the ones who bother to make Web pages for their courses. And a growing number of students use the quality of course Web pages as a decisive factor when picking classes. …
Some students are also mentioning course Web sites in their reviews in student-published course guides. At Princeton University, for instance, a review of "American Places" says that one of the high points of the American-studies course is a "VERY thorough" Web page made by a graduate student who teaches some of the course sections. …
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 4, 1999HEADLINE: Bioethics Panel Plans to Urge Federal Support for Some Human-Embryo Research
BYLINE: LIZ McMILLEN and PAULETTE WALKER CAMPBELLThe National Bioethics Advisory Commission is preparing to recommend that certain kinds of research on human embryos be allowed to receive federal support.
For four years, Congress has banned using federal funds for research on human embryos. But the Presidentially appointed commission, citing the potential of such research on human embryonic stem cells to lead to important medical treatments, will conclude that the ban should be relaxed, according to Harold T. Shapiro, chairman of the commission and president of Princeton University. …
The bioethics panel has weighed several issues during its six months of deliberations, including moral obligation to future generations who could benefit from such research, said Shapiro. In the commission's view, to withhold federal support for promising research may be unfair.
"We certainly understand the perspective that early-stage embryos have the moral status of a person," he said. "We don't agree with that position, but we understand it. You have to balance that with the needs of future generations." …
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Copyright 1999 Deutsche Presse-Agentur
June 4, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: CORRECTION: U.N. council to discuss resolution on Kosovo next week
DATELINE: New YorkA United Nations Security Council resolution to implement accords on the Kosovo crisis will be discussed early next week, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday.
Annan said the resolution would spell out the U.N. role in the implementation of the accords worked out by the European Union and Russia and accepted Thursday by the National Assembly of the Serbian Republic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. …
The council's 15 members planned no meeting Friday at U.N. headquarters. They were to spend late Friday and Saturday at Princeton University, New Jersey, behind closed doors in a so-called retreat to discuss ways to improve their work in the council. …
Investor's Business Daily
Copyright 1999 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
June 4, 1999The Economy: Not-So-Random Walk
Economists say stock prices follow a 'random walk.' That's a fancy way of saying you can't predict them. But a growing number of economists aren't so sure. Take Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Craig MacKinlay of the University of Pennsylvania, who have just written a book called ''A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street.''
The book's title is a play on the name of another well-known book - ''A Random Walk Down Wall Street'' - by Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel. Malkiel is the best known advocate of the random walk view. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 4, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: ART REVIEW; Not Penmanship, Cultural Treasure
BYLINE: By HOLLAND COTTERChinese art has enjoyed V.I.P status in New York in the past few years. The Met opened its ultra-deluxe new Chinese galleries. The Guggenheim's "China: 5,000 Years" exhibition and Asia's Society's recent showcase of contemporary work, "Inside Out," were high-profile events.
As a result, an entire visual culture has become part of the active experience of local museumgoers. A Chinese scroll painting may still not deliver the seen-on-Oprah psychic punch of a van Gogh. But at least a once distant art and a new audience have begun to meet on a first-name basis.
Another stellar exhibition can be added to the list, "The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy From the John B. Elliott Collection," now at the Art Museum of Princeton University. Consisting mostly of works given to the university by Elliott (1928-1997), a wide-ranging collector, the show presents one of the premier gatherings of Chinese calligraphy in the West and offers a comprehensive overview of a major art form. …
Through brushwork, much about a writer can be intuited: his state of physical and spiritual health, his emotional temperature, his social position. For a Western viewer trying to understand such subtleties, a little guidance goes a long way. And the Princeton exhibition, accompanied by a superb catalogue, provides hand holding of a very high order. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 4, 1999, FridayNAME: Crombie Taylor
HEADLINE: Crombie Taylor, 85, Architect Who Helped Champion Bauhaus
BYLINE: By HERBERT MUSCHAMPCrombie Taylor, an architect and teacher who helped spread the influence of the Bauhaus to American architecture during the 1940's, died on May 24. He was 85 and lived in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Born in Oakmont, Pa., Mr. Taylor was educated at Penn State and Princeton University. In 1944 he joined the Institute of Design, a Chicago school founded by a former Bauhaus instructor, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The school was a successor to the New Bauhaus, so called because its faculty included prominent refugees from Nazi Germany. After Moholy-Nagy's death in 1946 Mr. Taylor became assistant director to the designer Serge Chermayeff. …
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
June 4, 1999; FRIDAYHEADLINE: TIANANMEN CRACKDOWN HAD LASTING EFFECT IN N.J. MANY CHINESE STUDENTS DIDN'T GO HOME
BYLINE: ADAM GELLER, Staff WriterFrom the day he arrived in America, Hui Long looked forward to returning home to China.
That was until the day Long flipped on a television and, staring into an apocalypse of smoke, blood, and tears, knew there would be no homecoming.
"When the June 4 massacre happened, everything changed," said Long, of Bridgewater, recalling the 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square."And I knew there was no way for me to go back."
This week marks the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen, and vigils and protests around the world are drawing renewed attention to the indelible mark the democracy movement and its demise left on life in China. …
In the months after Tiananmen, students at Rutgers, Princeton, and other universities signed petitions and staged protests that drew the ire of Chinese government officials. …
Sen Hu recalls that when he led the Chinese student federation at Princeton University in 1989, what had been a social club dedicated mostly to parties turned into a cell of political ferment.
Two days after Tiananmen, he and scores of classmates were marching in protest in Washington, D.C. Hu, today employed by a scientific publisher in River Edge, said he spoke up in ways he had never thought to before and then decided he had no choice but to stay in the United States. But many other Chinese accepted residency because it was too good to refuse.
"There are lots of them who never went to a single demonstration, but they still took advantage of it,"said Teddy Zhou, a former protester and now a Princeton researcher. …
TOPEKA CAPITAL JOURNAL
Copyright 1999 The Topeka Capital-Journal
June 04, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: You win some, you lose some.
Winner: Voters in Beverly Hills soundly rejected a measure that would have labeled fur garments with anti-trapping propaganda.
Loser: Princeton University, which this spring hired philosopher (I use the term loosely) Peter Singer to teach bioethics. Singer is the author of Animal Liberation.
Singer is best known for his position that if he were in a lifeboat with a mentally retarded child and a healthy dog, he'd toss the child overboard if it came down to a decision on which one should survive. His rationale? The dog would stand a greater chance for living a fulfilling life.
USA TODAY
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
June 4, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: For six, everything changed after Tiananmen Watchful police kept prominent dissident from joining protest
BYLINE: Julie Schmit
DATELINE: TUCSON, Ariz.TUCSON, Ariz. -- China's one-time leading dissident, whose speeches in the 1980s inspired legions of students to embrace democracy, never maade it to Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The secret police were watching Fang Lizhi's every step out of his Beijing home as the demonstrations raged.
He was able to warn some students before the crackdown June 4 that they should leave the area around Tiananmen. But even he didn't expect the Chinese army to come in with tanks and guns. …
Fang and his wife took refuge inside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on June 6, 1989. It took 13 months of delicate negotiations between the United States and China to spring them. The deal landed them in exile in the USA and resulted in renewed international loans to China.
Fang worked at Princeton University before settling here, where he continues to write pro-democracy articles. He also works with groups that monitor human rights in China….
Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc
June 3, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: DOUBLE TAKES
BYLINE: COMPILED FROM NEWS DISPATCHESA Proposal in Plain English
A Princeton University student slipped a very personal message into the end of his commencement address delivered in Latin.
The words, "Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" were the only ones spoken in English during Thomas Wickham Schmidt's salutatory speech. The rest was in Latin.
Rohrman said yes. Or, more accurately, she held up a sign that a friend of Schmidt's had slipped her with the word "YES!" written on it. There was apparently no sign saying "NO!"
University Wire
Copyright 1999 The Guardian via U-Wire
June 3, 1999HEADLINE: Immigration center formed at U. California-San Diego
BYLINE: By Jennifer Grady, The Guardian
SOURCE: U. California-San Diego
DATELINE: La Jolla, Calif.University of California - San Diego recently authorized the creation of an interdisciplinary, campus-wide research and training center that will focus on worldwide immigration patterns.
The first of its kind at a major west coast university, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) will systematically compare the current and historical immigration experiences of the United States and other labor-importing countries. CCIS programs and courses will gradually be integrated into UCSD graduate and undergraduate programs in the next academic year. …
A 1999 pamphlet from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies stated that one objective of the center is to develop collaborative relationships with immigration specialists at other universities.
Collaboration with the California State and University of California campuses -- along with universities in Tijuana and the East Coast -- will lead to jointly sponsored and funded conferences, research prrojects and research workshops. Princeton University and UCSD have already established such a relationship. …
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