Princeton in the News
July 29 to August 4, 1999
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HEADLINE: Letters
Accept all the living
The Michigan Court of Appeals wisely rejected an appeal from a couple who sued their doctor and hospital for medical malpractice, emotional distress and wrongful birth. The parents blamed the hospital and radiologist for not detecting their child's physical disabilities before birth. If only they had known, they could have aborted him or her.
Despite the court's decision and the defeat of Proposal B last November, there is a growing acceptance of a eugenic philosophy that condones the elimination of the metally and physically impaired. Those with Down syndrome, for instance, have little chance of surviving to birth if their condition is discovered. And when Princeton University hired philosopher Peter Singer, who has advocated the killing of disabled infants after birth, there was little protest.
It is a troubled society that establishes physical and mental health prerequisites to human life, and denies permission to live to those who do not qualify. Others have tried to advance humanity by removing the "defective," but by tossing away the disabled, all of humanity is debased. It is a better society that accepts and helps those who are less fortunate.
Louis J. Machovec, Livonia
HEADLINE: Veterans Deserve the Best Care
To the Editor:
Re "Audit of V.A. Health Care Finds Millions Are Wasted" (front page, Aug. 1): Other countries do not operate separate health systems for their veterans, because all their citizens are entitled to comprehensive health insurance and have access to the same public and private health care institutions. Probably because private health insurance in this country can be so easily lost, American veterans place their trust in the bogyman of American health policy: socialized medicine.
An alternative might be to give all who have worn this country's uniform -- or at least those who have risked combat -- a lifelong, tax-financed guarantee to the same private health insurance coverage and same good health care enjoyed by members of Congress. Higher-income Americans, who usually do not serve in the armed forces, owe at least that much to those who put their lives at risk for our country.
UWE E. REINHARDT
Princeton, N.J., Aug. 1, 1999
The writer is a professor of political economy at Princeton
University.
HEADLINE: Miss New Jersey Readies for Pageant Next Month
COLUMN: AROUND NEW JERSEY
BYLINE: FROM NEWS SERVICE REPORTS
DATELINE: SPARTA
So what if she's a long shot?
Miss New Jersey, Victoria Paige, said she is ready to perform before the national television audience that will view the Miss America Pageant next month.
The 20-year-old Princeton University student plans to sing an opera melody from"The Marriage of Figaro"and give a speech about child advocacy.
"Of course I would love to win,"Paige said."I kind of have this theory that God has a path for me, and if it's meant to be, it's meant to be." ...
HEADLINE: Alternative auto fuel transforms trash into
treasure
BYLINE: Earle Eldridge
Grass clippings, leaves, sawdust, cardboard, banana skins, junk mail and other trash could become fuel for the family car.
Pure Energy, a New York-based company working with Princeton University, has created a fuel that's a blend of ethanol, natural gas liquids, a solvent and up to 70% "cellulosic" wastes -- trash with fibers that create energy when burned. ...
Last year, the Department of Energy approved P-Series as an alternative fuel. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson estimated it could replace about 1 billion gallons of gasoline annually by 2005.
But the company faces several challenges before P-Series is ready for everyday use. ...
It would have to build refineries around the nation, each costing $120 million to $150 million to build.
Stephen Paul, a Princeton University research physicist who helped develop P-Series, says, "The real issue is the cleanliness of the fuel." ...
HEADLINE: Miss New Jersey undaunted by Miss America long shot
status
DATELINE: SPARTA TOWNSHIP, N.J.
So what if she's a long shot.
Miss New Jersey, Victoria Paige, said she is ready to perform before the national television audience that will view the Miss America Pageant next month.
The 20-year-old Princeton University student plans to sing an opera melody from "The Marriage of Figaro" and give a speech about child advocacy.
Oddsmakers have made Paige a 51-1 choice to be crowned Miss America. ...
August 2, 1999, Monday
HEADLINE: Slavery in context;
SHELDON M. STERN and JEREMY A. STERN;
Sheldon M. Stern is historian at the John F. Kennedy Library. Jeremy A. Stern is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University.
In recent decades, historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg have been legitimately criticized for ignoring or sanitizing the story of slavery in early America. Williamsburg has opted for a new approach, using actors to dramatize the brutality and suffering of slavery.
Visitors have responded to these reenactments with shock and anger, as they should. But the public will learn nothing from these performances if they are ripped from the context of a time when harsh physical punishment was commonplace and often sanctioned by custom, law, and religion: husbands beat wives; parents beat children; teachers beat pupils; masters beat servants, free and indentured, black and white. There is a great danger that visitors will draw incomplete historical lessons from these disturbing scenes.
All Americans must recognize the terrible realities of slavery. At the same time, it is equally important to understand American slavery in its full historical context and to recognize the unique role of freedom in our heritage. Though our past is replete with failures, Americans should not hate their history. ...
HEADLINE: What's new out there in the IT world?
JAKARTA (JP): By now you must have heard people talking about electronic newspapers of the future. Soon, you will have on your screen a crisp bright display that you can roll or fold just by pressing a specific area on a panel. ...
Maybe you'll see them on your windshield in front of you and the road. The same company has also been working on a transparent organic light emitting device (TOLED). When nothing is displayed, you won't see it. You can see the road ahead perfectly clear as if nothing but the windshield glass was there. But when information needs to be displayed, it will pop up on the windshield, visible but not too obtrusive to hamper safe driving. ...
The company has been developing this technology, which may eventually replace the liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology, in cooperation with Princeton University and the University of Southern California for the last five years. The company currently has over 40 patents pending in the U.S.
HEADLINE: Stock indexes are indicators of a great variety of things; Consider methodology, what is being measured
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
BYLINE: MIRIAM HILL
When it comes to indexes, there is life beyond the Standard & Poor's 500. And the Dow Jones industrial average, for that matter.
Indexes, those measures of stock and bond-market performance that make it simple to monitor whether your investment is keeping up with the market, are more complicated than their over-in-a-second mentions on the nightly news suggest.
Here are 10 points to keep in mind about indexes:
1. While investors have intense debates over which index is the best yardstick of the market, it doesn't appear to make much difference in the long run. From 1973 to the present, the Dow, S&P 500 and the Wilshire 5000 index, which tracks the entire U.S. market, all generated about the same average yearly returns. ...
9. Who's the smallest of them all? Not the Russell 2000. The Russell 2000 index is the 2,000 smallest companies of the 3,000 largest companies in the U.S. market. Russell does it this way because the remaining small companies are so tiny that fund managers usually can't buy them.
But Burton Malkiel, Princeton University professor and author of the newly revised A Random Walk Down Wall Street, argues that the Wilshire 4500 is a more comprehensive small-cap benchmark because it includes the 6,500 smallest stocks in the U.S. market.
HEADLINE: Latest Walk brings ideas up to date; Author revises
book that shook up Street
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
BYLINE: MIRIAM HILL
Before Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel came along, monkeys were just animals in the zoo, darts were a barroom pastime, and investors held out hope that they could beat the market.
In 1973, Malkiel proclaimed in his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street that "a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts."
On Wall Street, where generations of money managers had grown rich by promising investors that they could outsmart the market, that was like saying the Earth revolved around the sun when everyone still thought Ptolemy had it right. Malkiel was telling the world that expensive investment advice wasn't worth a dime. ...
Malkiel's ideas weren't completely original. Academics had bandied them about for years. But by presenting ivy-tower theories in a way the average person could understand, Malkiel contributed to the huge popularity of index funds, which seek not to beat the market but simply to match the returns of broad stock indexes such as the Standard & Poor's 500 or Wilshire 5000.
"His book was sort of a landmark," said John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group, the Malvern, Pa., company where Malkiel is a director and that in the mid-1970s offered the first index fund. "He said there was no point in trying to beat the market, that it was kind of like watching a drunk wander around in a hay field and trying to predict where he would fall."
In May, Malkiel revised A Random Walk for the seventh time. ...
HEADLINE: Father of New Jersey's TV Connection; Sarnoff turned
Marconi Wireless into radio, network giant BYLINE: Dan Fost,
Chronicle Staff Writer
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
This state owes its standing as the headquarters of the digital television revolution to a Russian immigrant who died nearly 30 years ago.
Although he wasn't a technologist himself, David Sarnoff had the vision and ambition to pull off some of technology's greatest achievements of the 20th century: radio, television, color television, fax machines. And along the way he spawned today's No. 1 television network, NBC. ...
In 1942, he built his crown jewel: the research labs outside Princeton.
New Jersey's greatest concentration of tech work is now done along Route 1, a crowded highway that connects Rutgers and Princeton universities. ...
HEADLINE: Morning-after pills easier on the stomach
BYLINE: Kim Painter
Emergency birth control pills that are at least as effective and cause fewer side effects than those now on the market will be in doctors' offices within weeks, developers say.
Like the older version, the Plan B regimen is intended for women who want to prevent pregnancy after they've had sex -- because they failed to use other birth control or because that birth control failed. ...
"This is a better mousetrap," says James Trussell, a contraceptive researcher at Princeton University who has been a booster of emergency contraception. ...
HEADLINE: The Independent Assessment Team
Retired Air Force Gen. Robert T. Marsh, who headed the team, was commander of Air Force Systems Command, 1981-1984, chairman of Thiokol Corp., 1989-1991, and chairman of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure, 1996-1997.
Members were: John Bachkosky, former deputy undersecretary of defense for advanced technology and former deputy director of defense research and engineering; Darryl P. Greenwood, senior staff, Aerospace Div., Lincoln Laboratory, MIT; Will Happer, Higgens professor of physics, Princeton University, and former director of the Dept. of Energy's Office of Energy Research; Jack Krings, former and first director of the DOD Office of Operational Test and Evaluation; Walt Sooy, former chief scientist, laser and environmental programs directorate, Lawrence Livemore National Labs; and retired Air Force Gen. Larry D. Welch, president of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), member of the Defense Science Board, and former Air Force chief of staff.
As noted in the report, the ABL program has undergone a number of reviews in recent years by the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Air Force-chartered ABL Independent Review Team, the IDA, and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Each took note of the same technical challenges and uncertainties underscored in the IAT report -- laser power generation; beam pointing accuracy; measuring, predicting, and compensating for atmospheric optical turbulence; lethality; and countermeasures.
POLITICAL CAPITAL
Former Dukakis official off to Moscow
Some critics of the New Deal said it was tantamount to socialism, but now its ideals are being exported from America to the former Soviet Union. Former Dukakis human services secretary Phil Johnston is headed to Moscow in September, joining Princeton University historian William Leuchtenburg to speak at the opening of the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation at Moscow State University. Johnston, a lifelong FDR buff, notes that "the economy is so bad there that they're very interested in the New Deal experiences we had in the 1930s."
HEADLINE: Sports, being quasi-religious, can promote good or bad: It is not only a kind of religion, it's a lot like life
BYLINE: Douglas Todd, For the Calgary Herald
DATELINE: VANCOUVER
Is sports sublime or demonic? Like many parents, I frequently worry about the lessons taught by sports, particularly now that I'm devoting part of this summer to following my 15-year-old son around the B.C. Interior for soccer and baseball tournaments.
The mass media is making sports an ever more central part of global culture, and one that I think has elements of a civil religion. We come to revere elite athletes like secular saints, save momentoes of sports contests as if they were icons, rigorously follow rituals about offside traps and sacrifice flies and swoon in communal ecstasy at amazing victories. ...
Princeton University religion and ethics professor, Jeffrey Stout, who is also an amateur soccer coach, believes athletics, at their best, can develop the ancient Greek virtues of physical courage, justice, co-operation, temperance (the ability to keep emotions in balance) and practical wisdom (the ability to make sound decisions based on a guiding vision). ...
HEADLINE: Top Black High
HIGHLIGHT: Academic Dream Team Heads To College
SOME people view graduation from high school as an ending. Four years of learning and living and it's over. But smart people like America's top Black high school seniors from the Class of '99 know that commencement is just a start. Having graduated at the head of their classes, the 23 scholars featured on the following pages are on their way to the country's best colleges and universities. ...
JENNIFER IMARA HAYES ranked third in her class at Metro Academic and Classical High School in St. Louis. Along with being recognized in Who's Who Among American High School Students, Hayes was a National Achievement finalist and won a Princeton Book Award. She participated in many high school activities, including the Spanish Club, National Honor Society and cross-country and soccer teams. She will attend Lincoln University in Missouri.
ANNEKE JANETTE ALLEN was valedictorian of her class at D.M. Therrell High School in Atlanta. She was a student ambassador to Holland, member of the National Forensic League and was listed in Who's Who Among American High School Students. Her other high school activities included student government, debate team, Key Club and academic decathlon team. She plans to attend Princeton University and one day become a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
HEADLINE: A Road to Nowhere
BYLINE: EDWARD C. LUCK; EDWARD C. LUCK is Executive Director of the Center for the Study of International Organization of New York University's School of Law and the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.
By caricaturing the past, misreading the U.N. Charter, and prematurely divining the lessons of Kosovo, Michael J. Glennon concludes that international law and practice have entered a brave new humanitarian world and that the restrictive old United Nations should step aside. But the present is not so radically different from the past, and Glennon's argument sheds no light on those persistent political dilemmas that confound international law and organizations as perplexingly in 1999 as they did in 1945 and 1919.
While others warn of U.N. meddling, Glennon roughly asserts that the U.N. Charter is fundamentally anti-interventionist. Although any number of repressive governments have claimed that the United Nations is prohibited from intervening in their internal affairs, the charter specifically grants the Security Council authority to override this principle if it finds a potential threat to international peace and security. More incrementally but more powerfully, the very principles and purposes of the charter -- with their emphasis on human rights, fundamental freedoms, humanitarian values, and economic and social development -- have undermined barriers to outside scrutiny that have been erected by repressive regimes.
Contrary to Glennon's contention, the charter does not require a "cross-border attack" to permit international enforcement action. Aggression is only one of several possible triggers stipulated in Chapter VII, which uses broad terminology to permit considerable discretion by the members of the Security Council. ...
HEADLINE: Prudential Thought to Be Planning Expanded
Domestic-Partner Benefits
BYLINE: By Allison Salerno
Richard Russo has worked at Prudential Insurance Co. of America for 13 years. But his partner of five years doesn't qualify for the company's health insurance because Prudential of Newark, the nation's largest life insurer, doesn't offer health insurance to its employees' same-sex domestic partners.
Russo, who co-chairs a group for gay and lesbian employees at Prudential known as EAGLES, is hopeful about rumors Prudential will extend health benefits to domestic partners and other members of employees' households in its year 2000 benefits package. Such a benefit would only add to Prudential's reputation as a comfortable place to be an openly gay or lesbian employee, he said. ...
Should Prudential offer domestic-partner benefits, it would join a growing trend in corporate America. Dozens of major employers in New Jersey -- including AT&T, Princeton University and Bell Atlantic -- offer health insurance or other benefits to the same-sex partners of their gay or lesbian employees. ...
HEADLINE: Lifting the lid on Russia's nuclear weapon
storage
BYLINE: Joshua Handler
HIGHLIGHT: Using newly declassified US intelligence reports and Cold War Coronasatellite reconnaissance imagery together with Russian accounts,Joshua Handler provides for the first-time an open-source guide tothe location, organisation and size of Russia's nuclear weaponstorage facilities.
ON 29 APRIL 1999 President Boris Yeltsin chaired a meeting of the Russian Security Council which examined the development of Russia's nuclear weapons complex. Western press reports focused on speculation that the Russian Security Council had approved the development of new tactical nuclear weapons. However, Russian press reports stressed that particular attention was paid to the problems related to the safety and security of nuclear weapons during their production, storage, operational deployment and dismantling, as well as the conditions of specialists who deal with nuclear weapons. In this regard, President Yeltsin remarked: "Nuclear weapons are a sphere in which we have no right to make even a single mistake. Everyone - even the president - will answer with his head."
In the West, the possible theft of a nuclear warhead from a Russian nuclear weapon storage facility has generated much concern. However, little has hitherto been known about the Russian nuclea weapon storage system, upon which the security of the thousands of tactical weapons and non-deployed strategic weapons in storage depends. ...
Joshua Handler is a doctoral candidate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
HEADLINE: Civil War Scholars Put Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals in Their Sights
BYLINE: Denice M. Santangelo; Special To The Post-Dispatch
When Civil War historians sit down to gab, anybody can start the guns roaring by tossing out the name Jefferson Davis.
The president of the Confederacy remains a complex figure. He has been described as prideful, narrow-minded and doctrinaire. The admiration he generated across the South at the start of the war had turned to doubt and questions by the end of the conflict. ...
Also notable is an essay by Emory Thomas, a professor at the University of Georgia and the author of "Robert E. Lee: A Biography." Thomas looks into the discord between Davis and Lee.
James McPherson, professor at Princeton University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," pens the final chapter, "Jefferson Davis and Confederate Strategies," which gives a final thread of continuity to all that went before.
INTO THE GARDEN
HEADLINE: Handling Our Hot Dry Climate
BYLINE: JANET DAVIS, TORONTO SUN
Feelin' hot, hot, hot ... and so's the garden.
To all those naysayers and neanderthals out there who've recently been quoted pooh-poohing warnings of global warming caused by steadily increasing use of fossil fuels (usually calling it "junk science"): It ain't a modern myth.
Global temperatures are increasing, oceans are rising, tropical storms are becoming more severe, warm places are getting hotter, wet places are getting wetter and dry places are getting much dryer. (Don't take my word for it; read some of the work that world-renowned experts on global warming at Princeton University's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory have published. Go to their Web site at www.gfdl.gov/ and click on "Science of Weather & Climate.")
It may not happen in our generation, but if things continue the way such scientists predict, our grandchildren are going to be gardening very differently from the way we do. ...
HEADLINE: Accel Boosts Carry for $500M Fund VII
BYLINE: Shawn Neidorf
PALO ALTO, Calif./PRINCETON, N.J. - Accel Partners began raising Accel VII in June and is seeking $350 million from financial investors as well as $150 million from entrepreneurs and strategic corporate investors, said Managing Partner Jim Breyer.
The information technology and communications-focused fund in late June had more than $1 billion in hard commitments, and all existing limited partners said they wanted to increase their participation in the new vehicle, Mr. Breyer said. ...
Accel VI closed on $275 million in early 1998. Investors in that fund included: Nassau Capital (the Princeton University endowment), Horsley Bridge Partners, HarbourVest Partners, J.P. Morgan, Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center and the Kresge Foundation.
HEADLINE: Space Geologist Gets Wish: Shoemaker 'Buried' on Moon He Loved
BYLINE: By John Stanley, The Arizona Republic
Eugene M. Shoemaker always wanted to go to the moon.
This morning, he got his wish.
The Lunar Prospector spacecraft was scheduled to crash into the moon just before 3 a.m., scattering the Arizona geologist's ashes across the landscape he dearly loved.
"Gene is the first human to be laid to rest on another celestial body," said Carolyn Porco, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. "This puts a human face on the heavens, and they will never again be the same." ...
Eugene M. Shoemaker
Born: April 28, 1928.
Education: B.S., 1947; M.S., 1947, CalTech; Ph.D., 1960,
Princeton University.
1963: Diagnosed with Addison's disease.
1965-70: Trained Apollo astronauts.
1993: Discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
1993: Became Lowell Observatory staff member.
July 1997: Died in a car crash.
Jan. 6, 1998: An ounce of remains launched on Lunar
Prospector.
July 31, 1999: Remains land on moon.
HEADLINE: Classical CDs
DUPRE Organ works (Decca) Birmingham's city organist Thomas Trotter has gone Stateside for this new release which intriguingly combines traditional practices of the Old World with exciting new technical developments of the New.
French organist-composer Marcel Dupre, steeped in the art of improvisation, often upon ancient melodies, spent a lengthy, highly successful period in the United States during the 1920s. One result of his visit was his collaboration in the construction of the Princeton University Chapel organ in 1928, and it is upon this instrument, with its pungent, incisive colours, that Thomas Trotter performs four of Dupre's major works from that period. ...
Good for Steve Forbes and other critics of Princeton University's appointment of Peter Singer to a chair in bioethics at the university's Center for Human Values. According to your July 27 article, "Furor follows Princeton philosopher," Singer "advocates giving parents and doctors - not the state - the right to kill newborns with severe defects that will condemn them to lives of pain with limited development."
This view is merely a rebirth of an old rationalization for getting rid of inconvenience. Furthermore, it reveals Singer's own ignorance; it ignores both the ability of modern medicine to greatly alleviate the problems of spina bifida, and the progress of modern education to help children born with Down syndrome and other disabilities to grow into productive, happy citizens in our communities.
Doctors, teachers, and parents know that it is impossible to predict the future mental or emotional development of an infant soon after birth. Time after time we all are fooled by the unpredicted progress achieved by children with apparently severe disabilities.
MARTHA ZIEGLER
Founder, Federation forChildren with Special Needs
Cambridge
HEADLINE: It's a matter of degrees for Goodrich
BYLINE: By Michael Smith, Globe Correspondent
Steven Goodrich is trying to earn an invitation to the Philadelphia 76ers camp and possibly even crack the team's roster. But games like the one he had last night at UMass-Boston in Shaw's Summer Pro League won't do much to help his cause.
Goodrich, a 6-foot-10-inch, 225-pound center, started for the Sixers against the Celtics at Clark Athletic Center. With 10:41 left in the first quarter, after two quick fouls, he was on the bench. He returned in the second quarter and immediately made his presence felt by double-dribbling. ...
So it's safe to say that last night's performance did not solidify a position. But it's far from the end of the world. He's got a degree in history from Princeton University. In a league that praises its incoming players for staying in school, any school, for four years, here's a young man who graduated from an Ivy League school a year ago with a 3.4 GPA. If basketball doesn't work out, he could probably join some of his classmates in the business world. ...
HEADLINE: Evangelicals more progressive than rhetoric
suggests
SOURCE: Religion News Service
BYLINE: Holly J. Lebowitz
A new study by Princeton sociologists reports that evangelical Christian families are far more progressive in action than the words of their leaders might suggest.
"The Evangelical Family Paradox: Conservative Rhetoric, Progressive Practice," is the latest study in an ongoing research endeavor by W. Bradford Wilcox, a doctoral student at Princeton University, and John P. Bartkowski, a professor of sociology at Princeton. It was published in the summer issue of the non-sectarian, nonpartisan quarterly journal the Responsive Community.
Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Bartkowski call their findings a paradox because they found, "Evangelical family practice does not match evangelical family rhetoric."
Rhetoric from evangelical leaders, such as the Southern Baptist Convention's 1998 resolution that called on wives to "submit graciously" to their husbands, is often disconnected from the day-to-day experiences of evangelical families, the researchers say.
The researchers find evangelical men and women often share in parenting and household duties. Mr. Wilcox says evangelical women often are "relieved" when their husbands take the lead in getting their families to church or having a home Bible study. ...
HEADLINE: Here's a dream job: Get paid to say hello
He could've been just another Wal-Mart shopper that day in Crowley, La.
But this was no ordinary customer. This was Sam Walton, the legendary founder of the Arkansas-based chain, entering the store with one of his executives.
"Hi, how are you, glad to see you," an old gentleman stationed at the store's entrance said to Walton. "If there's anything I can tell you about our store, let me know. "
That was nearly 20 years ago, says John Bisio, a Wal-Mart spokesman. Bisio adds, "Mr. Walton was inspired by the idea and wanted to xpand it. "
Today, there is at least one "greeter" - usually a senior citizen - at each of the chain's 2,450 stores, a concept that is catching on across the country as businesses try to survive in a more competitive marketplace. ...
At Luke's Running Store in Dallas' Oak Lawn neighborhood, co-owner Sharon Lucas says she requires all her salespeople to greet customers, not just the person standing closest to the door. Usually, that is 39-year-old Brad Urschel, a self-described "customer greeter," who has made welcoming customers his specialty.
Urschel was a college track star whose career was cut short after an accident in which he was thrown from a car.
The accident occurred Nov. 30, 1983. Urschel was 23 and had graduated from Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in neuropsychology.
"We were en route to a track meet," he says. "The car got on to the soft shoulder of the highway and flipped over one-and-a-half times. I landed in the street. "
Urschel was in a coma for a month but fought his way back. He still walks with a limp, and on most days, the father of two rides his bicycle to work. ...
HEADLINE: Morality tales;
Who can tell right from wrong when it comes to deliberate alteration of the cells that make us human? As technology races ahead and religion fails to provide the answers, James Meek reports on the new breed of secular philosophers in the pulpit
BYLINE: James Meek
On the far side of the millennium, a strange procession is approaching Britain, carrying fear, hope and consternation in equal measure. It contains patented pigs, pregnant men, children born deaf at the request of deaf parents, cloned boys and girls given life to save the lives of their sibling originals, humans saved by the sacrifice of baboon hearts, farms cultivating human organs by the tankful, restored crash victims with artificially grown skin, flesh and bone, doomed men and women told the year of their anticipated death by genetic analysts, parents demanding elite schools for their designer children. ...
These are creation matters, fundamental where-do-we-come-from and what-is-a -life questions on which traditional religion, neglected as it is, has kept a tenuous hold. Now even that may be slipping. ...
Remarkably, one of the most uncompromising blows against God's role as arbiter of right and wrong is about to be struck by a senior British bishop, the Most Reverend Richard Holloway, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
In a startling new book, Godless Morality Keeping Religion out of Ethics, published next month, Holloway tries to yank away a favourite comfort blanket of the mainstream Christian clergy: that Britain is only prevented from complete moral collapse by the inherited Christian, God-given sense of right and wrong that lingers on as the churches fall empty, and that if the churches don't fill up again soon, the inheritance will vanish. ...
British bioethicists are still cautious about offending the religious. If there is one bioethicist who inspires real fear and loathing in the traditional religious moralists, it is Peter Singer, the Australian thinker who became notorious after he argued that in some very limited circumstances, the killing of children is justified.
Singer, who this month defied vocal protest to take the post of professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has long maintained that the avoidance of suffering, in humans and in animals, is the highest moral imperative, even when it overrides the traditional special value placed on human life. In his world-view, a healthy, mentally well great ape a gorilla, for instance must be granted near-human rights. By the same token, it is appropriate to kill a severely disabled child rather than to allow the child to die slowly by withdrawing food or medication and letting nature take its course. His vision is of a society which has room for compassion for all living things, but no irrational sentiment. The consequences of this thinking are that in certain cases the life of a pig may be of more true value than the life of a severely brain-damaged child. ...
HEADLINE: TB Screening of Immigrants Too Haphazard to Work Well
The July 21 article ''Immigrants' TB rates barely slow'' targets immigrants as the major problem for tuberculosis control and prevention in Florida, yet fails to provide explanations of this trend or any constructive solutions to the problem. It is dangerous to label immigrants as major tuberculosis carriers without describing the pitfalls of U.S. TB screening and treatment procedures for immigrants.
Currently, TB screening in the United States is required only for immigrants applying for permanent legal status. Treatment is required of individuals identified as having active TB but is not required of immigrants with latent TB. ...
Instead of labeling immigration as a major problem for tuberculosis, health departments should work hard to develop programs that increase the success of TB identification and treatment of immigrants. ...
Nawal Atwan
Vero Beach
Editor's note: Nawal Atwan works for the Princeton University Project 55 Tuberculosis Initiative.
HEADLINE: Black seminaries push for activist role
BYLINE: JAMES HANNAH, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: WILBERFORCE, Ohio
Seminaries are thought of as refuges from the roar of the outside world, cocoons where students study the word of God and train to become shepherds of their flocks.
But the Rev. Obery Hendricks Jr. sees a more activist role. And the former kick-boxer and Wall Street executive is using his energies and experience to make it happen at Payne Theological Seminary, the nation's oldest black seminary.
"We really feel we are part of an important movement in theological education," said Hendricks, president of the seminary. "Its purpose is to empower the church to make a real difference in this country."
The 46-year-old Hendricks knows all about activism. He grew up in East Orange and Newark, N.J. In the 1960s, he left the Baptist church, where his father was a trustee, because he felt it was too quiet on social issues. ...
Hendricks decided to study divinity, earning a master's degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Princeton University before coming to Payne. ...
HEADLINE: In Global Contest to Build Networks, Does the Race Go
to the Swiftest?
BYLINE: JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Canadian universities now have the fastest research-network backbone in the world, officials here said during the annual meeting last month of Canada's top network gurus.
At the meeting, the usual geek speak of zeros and ones was accented by a sense of national pride. "We are first, and it feels good," said Alan Greenberg, director of computing and telecommunications at McGill University, during a conference session.
Such pride is well-founded. The new Canadian network, known as CA*Net3, can transmit the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in one second, according to the network's architects. It would take a minute for the U.S. high-speed network, created by the Internet2 consortium, to do the same job.
In the United States, where the Internet was invented, network officials point out that the Internet2 project supports more research into new network applications than does its Canadian counterpart, and that such applications are the keys to spurring further revolutions in on-line communications.
"What we would be envious of is if they had wondrous applications that they're making use of," said Ira Fuchs, vice-president for computing and information technology at Princeton University, who has been involved with Internet2 since its inception three years ago. ...
LETTERS
HEADLINE: Scholarly Monographs at University Presses
To the Editor:
Left-handed people often browse through books from back to front. Those who wonder, as Andre Schiffrin does, about the current trends in university-press publishing should perhaps try to become left-handed for a day ("Payback Time: University Presses as Profit Centers," Opinion, June 18). If they flip through, say, the Princeton University Press catalogue the left-handed way, they will see that the scholarly monograph is as vibrant as ever. Our current catalogue, read in this manner, boasts such titles as: David W. Stanley's Eicosanoids in Invertebrate Signal Transduction Systems, . . . Christian Reus-Smit's The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations, and Carrie Noland's Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology. None of these is likely to be selected by Oprah for her reading club in the near future, nor -- given the current buying trends of university libraries -- by many librarians either.
For those who like numbers, the discipline-specific section of the current Princeton catalogue extends from page 48 through page 96, featuring some 70 titles in total. What's more, the front-list section, designed for a more-general audience, has only 26 titles, one of which was a re-announcement of a previously published book, and several of which could be mistaken for technical books. . . .
Far from Mr. Schiffrin's assertion that Princeton "has been aggressive in trying to replace traditional monographs with commercially attractive books," almost the opposite holds true. We are proud of our long-standing tradition of publishing high-class monographs and intend to continue to do so. ...
Trevor Lipscombe
Physical Sciences Editor
Peter J. Dougherty
Senior Editor
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
HEADLINE: UC-Berkeley study shows dip in energy research
BYLINE: By Stephen Lau, Daily Californian
DATELINE: Berkeley, Calif.
Worldwide expenditures in energy research decreased dramatically in the last 20 years, a University of California Berkeley researcher shows in a study published in Friday's issue of "Science."
Daniel Kammen, a UC Berkeley associate professor of energy and society, co-authored the study with Robert Margolis of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at Princeton University.
Between 1980 and 1995, funding for solar, wind and bio-mass energy research in the United States decreased 58 percent, according to Kammen and Margolis.
Currently, the U.S. government's annual expenditure on research and development is approximately $100 billion, the study indicates. Approximately $4.3 billion was spent on energy research in 1996, a drop from $11.9 billion in 1979.
Worldwide, the researchers reported a 39 percent decrease in funding since 1970. ...
HEADLINE: Business faces
LAW
Robert George, a lawyer with the Charleston law firm of Robinson & McElwee LLP, has been appointed to the Cyrus Hall McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence at Princeton University. ...
HEADLINE: Rights for chimps;
This week's claim that chimpanzees can talk has reignited controversy among humans. One of the apes' most prominent advocates is Professor Peter Singer
The unknown author of Genesis portrayed God as first creating the animals and then making man in his own image. Ever since, western tradition has tried to draw a sharp divide between ourselves and other animals. Even after Darwin had shown the continuities between ourselves and other apes, we have tried to cling to the idea that there is something quite unique to human beings, some way in which we differ, not only in degree, but also in kind, from animals. The most popular candidate for that unique distinction is our use of language. ...
Peter Singer is DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Together with Paola Cavalieri, he founded the Great Ape Project and co-edited The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (Fourth Estate, London, 1993). The Great Ape Project can be contacted at PO Box 2602, Reading, RG2 7YQ
HEADLINE: New Bill Aims To Bring In More Foreign Tech Workers
07/29/99
BY Robert MacMillan.
WASHINGTON, DC, U.S.A., 1999 JUL 29 (NB) Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Wednesday introduced his bill to raise the number of H-1B visas granted on a yearly basis, as the increase that was passed in the most recent Congress could not satisfy the number of visa applicants.
Meanwhile, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Bill Frist, R-Tenn., held their fifth Senate Forum on Technology and Innovation, this time focusing on the H-1B situation.
As Newsbytes previously reported, Gramm in early June said he would introduce his bill because the visa cap, which was raised last year via a bill from Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., already had been maxed out because of the program's popularity. ...
Alan Krueger, professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University, noted that the healthcare profession is the No. 2 industry that consumes H-1B visa workers after the IT industry.
He urged a cautious approach to expanding the program, saying that "We don't know the skills are of those who come. We don't know how much they're being paid."
He also said that employers may be able to exert an undue influence on how H-1B visa holders perform, since many of them are seeking permanent alien status green cards, and they need their employer's sponsorship for this.
HEADLINE: BEXTRA Trial Terminated Early for Lack of Significant Survival Benefit
DATELINE: RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., July 29
Incara Pharmaceuticals Corporation (Nasdaq: INCR) today announced that it has been notified that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have terminated the Phase 3 heart failure study of BEXTRA(R) (bucindolol HCI) earlier than scheduled, based on an interim analysis conducted by the Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) that revealed no statistically significant survival advantage in the BEXTRA-treated group. BEXTRA was being tested in the Beta-blocker Evaluation of Survival Trial (BEST). ...
Incara's four non-BEXTRA programs have made recent advances. A paper published in the April 16, 1999 edition of the journal Science describes a new class of antibiotics discovered under an Incara sponsored research agreement with Princeton University. ...