Princeton in the News
November 5 to 11, 1999
PrincetonUniversity
Communications Office
Stanhope Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
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HIGHLIGHTS
HEADLINE: High school seniors confront culture of
confession
BYLINE: Mari Blecher
The first college applicant I saw told me how her father died of a heart attack when she was in the ninth grade. Her older brother was away at college, so her mother depended on her to remain in the area, an anchor for the family. Her eyes welled with grief.
Next, I saw another young woman, a religious Christian. She talked of her relationship with God and of the death of her grandfather, a minister who baptized her. At the word "grandfather," her voice cracked. "I wanted to be rebaptized after my missionary work," she said, weeping, "but it felt like a betrayal." …
Here's the amazing thing: I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a friend or relative of these youngsters. No, I'm just their high school English teacher, the faculty member appointed to read their college essays. Yet they revealed intimate details of their lives to me during periods 5 and 8. …
Their assignment, the thing high school seniors are focused on this fall: In one page (500 words), "tell us who you are." Or, "describe a significant experience and how it shaped you." Or, "write an entry from your life journal."
As the tragedies rolled in -- deaths, illnesses, losses and indignities -- I found myself wondering: What is the point? Why should half-formed kids have to reveal their most intimate experiences to an anonymous admissions committee just to get a decent college education? …
Every college has a legitimate right to see how a student writes and thinks. But a college can get this with essay questions that focus on issues rather than identity, on the intellect rather than the emotions.
Some already make this distinction. Princeton University, for example, asks four focused questions designed to reveal the creativity and intellectual depth of the respondent:
-- "What one class, teacher, book or experience can you point to as having really changed the way you think?"
-- "Discuss something (anything) you just wished you understood better."
-- "If you could hold one position, elected or appointed, in government (at any level), which one would you want it to be and why?"
-- "What one or two suggestions would you have if asked about how we might improve race relations in this country or around thhe world?" …
HEADLINE: Robert Darnton has been named a Chevalier of the
Legion d'Honneur
BYLINE: By Jessica Hafkin, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Princeton University history professor Robert Darnton has been named a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur, the most prestigious award given by the French government.
Darnton, who was born in America and is not of French descent, received the coveted accolade in recognition of his research and analysis of French history. The award was bestowed last month in a ceremony at the French Consulate in New York.
Darnton has written dozens of books on French history, including one in French.
"After years of reading archives and struggling quietly without creating a splash, when a splash occurs, it's really moving," Darnton said. …
HEADLINE: 'Overrating the Ivy League'
Robert Samuelson [op-ed, Oct. 27] drew some conclusions from a study of ours that are not necessarily supported by our analysis. As Mr. Samuelson reported, we do find that students who attend more selective colleges subsequently earn about the same, on average, as students of comparable ability who attend less-selective colleges.
However, we do not find that college choice is unrelated to students' economic success.
For example, students who attend schools with higher net tuition rates or greater expenditures per student subsequently earn more money, other things being equal. And the gain from attending a higher-priced college is larger for children from less-advantaged families than for those from more advantaged families, suggesting that pursuing diversity on campus can raise national income.
Our finding that students from middle- and high-income families do about equally well in the job market whether they attend one of the most selective colleges or one in the next tier down does not necessarily "weaken the case for race-based admission preferences," as Mr. Samuelson argued. This finding also suggests that the cost of race-sensitive admissions policies is smaller for white students than previously believed.
STACY BERG DALE
Research Associate
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
ALAN KRUEGER
Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
Princeton University
HEADLINE: Fitness and Health
Few aware of morning-after pill: A push is under way to raise
awareness and availability
In the past few years, there has been a push to raise awareness
and availability of emergency contraceptives: high doses of
birth-control pills that can reduce a woman's chances of becoming
pregnant by about 75 percent, if they're taken within 72 hours of
unprotected intercourse and repeated 12 hours later…
The chances of pregnancy decrease by 89 percent with Plan B, compared with 75 percent with Preven, when either is taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex. Efficacy is better if Plan B is used as directed as quickly as possible after unprotected intercourse, according to Princeton University's Emergency Contraception Web site.
HEADLINE: On 20th anniversary of key global warming report,
Yale to examine future trends
DATELINE: New Haven, Conn.
The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is hosting a symposium on Friday, November 12 to mark the 20th anniversary of a watershed climate report by the National Academy of Sciences that first identified the human contribution to global warming.
The event will feature one of the world's premier atmospheric scientists detailing projections for the climate if efforts are not made now to cut greenhouse pollution within the next 20 years.
There will be a special press briefing at 9: 15 a.m. with James Gustave Speth, dean of the forestry school, Jerry D. Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, and Yale Professor Thomas Graedel of the forestry school. …
The main symposium speaker will be Mahlman of Princeton University. "It takes a long time to get this process of human-caused climate warming cranked up, but it will incontestably take a lot longer to get out of," he said. The IPCC predicts the climate will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Fahrenheit during the 21st century. Sea levels are expected to rise one to three feet as a result, and major agricultural regions will experience severe weather and hydrological changes. …
HEADLINE: Eco-Challenge Race Live on GreenTravel.Com Web Site
Sponsors Adventure Team, Offers Intimate Race Perspective
DATELINE: WASHINGTON and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Nov. 11
GreenTravel.com, the leading adventure and specialty travel Web site, is excited to announce its sponsorship of the Tiger Adventure team in the Discovery Channel Eco-Challenge(R) in Patagonia, Argentina, Nov. 24 through Dec. 13.
In a unique partnership, designed to bring the excitement and real-life drama of the Eco-Challenge to the Web, GreenTravel.com and the GreenTravel.com Tigers will provide a first-hand account of the race in daily and weekly updates that include team dispatches, race interviews, photos, multimedia presentations and more. Webventurers around the globe can begin to live the journey -- from training and preparation to the actual race -- intimately through the eyes of one team, long before the race is televiised in April. …
The GreenTravel.com Tigers is composed principally of Princeton University graduates, three men -- Rick Corcoran (Captain), Ben Stefanski, and Jon Ziglar -- and one woman, Janine Pisani McGuire. Team coach and racer Ranch Kimball, trains with the Tigers and is driving the team logistics and preparation for the Eco-Challenge. …
Tigers in Service
Inspired by the spirit of adventure racing -- teamwork, passion, and overcoming obstacles -- GreenTravel.com Tiger members also dedicate their time to education and commmunity service.
The team's trademark orange-and-black race uniforms and name are reflective of their mutual alma mater, Princeton University. …
HEADLINE: Doctors-in-Training at Davis, Calif., University
Attempt to Unionize
BYLINE: By Jean P. Fisher
Unionization efforts of doctors-in-training at UC Davis Medical Center are again underway after a recent state ruling that determined medical interns and residents at University of California hospitals are more employees than students.
The ruling by the state Public Employee Relations Board last week recharges a process that began more than two years ago when interns and residents at the three schools sought to join the University of California Association of Interns and Residents.
They hoped by forming a union, they win a reprieve from draining marathon shifts and improve overall working conditions. …
Health care economist Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University said physicians-in-training have compelling reasons to seek more say.
"Teaching hospitals can make them work 18 hours a day, they can pay them a pittance -- they're almost enslaved," he said. "It's a wonderful deal for the teaching hospitals. You couldn't treat a janitor that wayy. The janitor would quit." …
HEADLINE: Russian scholar accused of spying for the Unites
States: report
DATELINE: MOSCOW, Nov 10
A Russian scholar at the Canada-US Institute of Strategic Studies has been accused of spying for the United States by the Federal Security Agency (FSB), the daily Kommersant newspaper reported Wednesday.
Igor Sutyagin, head of politico-military studies, is suspected of passing state secrets to the United States.
"Sutyaguin did not have access to state secrets, but investigators said they had reasons for arresting him," said the Institute director Sergei Rogov said.
According to the FSB, Sutyaguin could have passed documents to US researcher Joshua Handler, an expert in nuclear security whose Moscow apartment was searched October 27.
Handler, from Princeton University, and Sutyaguin met regularly during Handlers work on a thesis on nuclear disarmament.
HEADLINE: Princeton in autumn
BYLINE: SUSAN WEINER; STAFF WRITER
Ivy League college town has something ofr all day trippers. An autumn day is the perfect time to hop in the car and go for a ride. Leave when the morning is crisp and arrive as the day warms, while the afternoon sun is still hot.
The perfect destination is Princeton. It has something for everyone - an interesting university campus to tour, lovely shops, wonderful restaurants, and the bustling atmosphere that only a college town can have. …
Free tours of Princeton University are given Monday through Saturday at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. and on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Tours start from MacLean House on campus, which is a yellow brick building near Nassau Hall. Call (609) 258-3603 for more information.
The Princeton Art Museum is right on campus, two blocks from the main gates. Take the path to the left after you walk through the main gate at Nassau and Witherspoon Streets. You'll find the museum behind the sculpture "Head of Woman" by Picasso. …
HEADLINE: After 10 years, Hubble still dazzles astronomers:
Space telescope offers views that were only dreams decade ago
BYLINE: Paul Hoverstein / USA TODAY
WASHINGTON -- From its lonely perch high above Earth, NASA's orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is opening a view of the universe that humanns could only dream about for thousands of years.
Nearly 10 years after it was launched into space, Hubble is turning in discovery after discovery about how the cosmos works.
Astronomers are learning in amazing detail how stars and galaxies are born, live and die. The telescope is surpassing the expectations of even the astronomers who nursed it from concept in the 1970s to reality in the 1990s. …
"The scale of Hubble's images is so enormous and so incredible that it makes human events, even who wins the World Series, seem to be of no importance by comparison," said John Bahcall, a professor of natural sciences (at the Institute for Advanced Study and a lecturer at Princeton University,) who helped lead the push to get Hubble funded nearly three decades ago.
NOTE: This story first appeared in USA Today.
HEADLINE: Eastern Europe Industry: IT entrepreneurs lack
cash
COUNTRY BRIEFING
FROM BUSINESS CENTRAL EUROPE
Each year the EU runs a competition, called the IST Prize, to find entrepreneurs with innovative and marketable IT ideas. And each year Central Europe comes away with a fair haul of awards--five out of 25 in the latest batch. So why do venture capitalists despair of finding good local technology companies to inveest their money in?
It's not through any lack of skill, insist locals, who boast about the few that did make it. Hungary's Graphisoft, which makes world-leading architectural software, is always on the list, as is translation software firm Recognita or internet games company E-Pub. …
Others get their cash beforehand. Jozsef Kiraly is a good example of an emigre who made it big in the US and returned with cash in hand. He owned little more than talent when he arrived to take up his research scholarship at Princeton University in 1983. Sixteen years later, he is owner of the three-year old Mindmaker, a $15 million software producer that owns subsidiaries world-wide, including two in Hungary. His recent Hungarian acquisition, Cygron, was one of the EU's prize-winners, for its intuitive data-processing software DataScope….
HEADLINE: New Crime Study Identifies the 25 College Communities with the Greatest Risk of Violent Crime
APBnews.com today announced the first comprehensive risk assessment of violent crime in the communities surrounding 1,497 colleges. The APBnews.com College Community Crime Risk study ranked all of the nation's four-year colleges, including the 25 highest risk and 25 lowest risk college neighborhoods.
The APBnews.com College Community Crime Risk study provides crime risk maps for each of the 1,497 college communities, based on a statistical crime risk model that measures the risk of violent crime, which was defined as murder, rape and robbery. …
Ivy League College Community Ranking for Risk from Violent Crime
COLLEGE CITY STATE
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA
Columbia University/Barnard College New York NY
Yale University New Haven CT
Brown University Providence RI
Harvard University/Harvard & Radcliffe Colleges Cambridge
MA
Cornell University Ithaca NY
Dartmouth College Hanover NH
Princeton University Princeton NJ
HEADLINE: Research suggests physical exercise may boost brain
function
DATELINE: BOSTON
Physical exercise may boost brain function, improve mood and increase learning ability, according to preliminary research findings presented at a meeting of neuroscientists and educators.
Although it is too soon to conclude that children who do not exercise do worse in school, the research performed on animals and humans raises questions about recent national trends toward cutting physical education programs, some scientists and educators said.
The research shows exercise benefits the brain by improving blood flow and spurring cell growth, making cutbacks in physical education programs "a crime," said Dr. John Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. …
Elizabeth Gould, a Princeton University neurobiologist who also spoke Monday, cites research by California scientists in mice that shows physical activity increases the number of brain cells in the hippocampus and that learning improved with exercise.
Gould urged caution in using animal research as a basis for changing classroom practice. …
HEADLINE: Blumenthal: Clinton presidency will be remembered for
economic boom, decline in crime
BYLINE: By RICHARD BRAND
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
Presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal said Tuesday night that the Clinton presidency will be remembered favorably, despite significant policy setbacks and an impeachment.
Blumenthal, speaking at Princeton University, talked about the legacies of progressive presidents, including James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. (Both were Princeton alumni.)
Blumenthal said President Clinton will be remembered for leading the country "as the first president of the post-industrial, post-Cold War era," and for bringing the benefits of an economic boom to most Americans.
"Family incomes and real wages have risen, reversing decades-long declines. Poverty, for the first time in decades, has fallen, not enough, but it has fallen," Blumenthal said. "Economic dynamism has been combined with policies of opportunity. Rather than deficits as far as the eye can see, there are surpluses." …
HEADLINE: PRIMATE RESEARCH: ANIMAL RIGHTS AND SCIENTISTS DO BATTLE
More than 80 threatening letters -- in envelopes lined with razorblades -- were sent last week to academic institutions nationwide by an underground animal rigghts group protesting the use of animals, particularly primates, in scientific research.
But scientists including those at the Harvard-owned New England
Regional Primate Research Center, remain undeterred by the
letters, contending that primates are ideal specimens because of
their biological similarity to humans. Ironically, activists argue
that it is this very characteristic that makes primates "worthy of
protection."
Princeton University bioethicist and animal rights movement
founder Peter Singer adds, "There are very
careful studies that (such primates) are self-aware beings with rich and complex emotional and social lives. On that basis, they should have special status and not be used for harmful experimentation." While some primates at the center are used only for blood and urine samples, many "involuntary sacrifice their lives for scientific research intended to benefit humans." …
HEADLINE: Crime Risk in Ivy League School Neighborhoods
BYLINE: By Bob Port and Ben Lesser
DATELINE: NEW YORK
The campus neighborhood at highest risk among Ivy League schools is that of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Although Penn ranked first among its Ivy League counterparts, nationally the school ranked 41st.
When compared with the other schools in the 1999 APBnews.com/Cap Index College Community Crime Risk Assessment the Ivy League schools ranked as follows:
41. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
43. Columbia University, New York
182. Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
357. Brown University, Providence, R.I.
541. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
690. Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
1,031. Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
1,066. Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
Penn, Columbia and Yale were each assessed a 9 on a risk scale of 1 to 10. Brown measured 8; Harvard, 7; Cornell, 6; Dartmouth, 5; and Princeton, 4.
HEADLINE: JOINING THE CREW
TEENS TAKE TO THE WATER AS ROWING MAKES HEADWAY AS A POPULAR SPORT FOR HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETES
BYLINE: Margaret Weston; Staff Writer
Competitive. Gratifying. Fun.
That's how some area teen-agers who participate in rowing describe the river sport.
''It does take a lot of work and dedication, but it's a whole lot of fun,'' said Mia Woods, 16, a junior at Davidson Fine Arts High School.
Mia, who has rowed for three years, is on the Varsity 8 Women's team of the Augusta Rowing Club's Junior Rowing Team.
More than 100 high school students from Richmond, Columbia and Aiken counties participate in the program, which has been around for about 10 years. The program is open to high school students.. …
Mia and Rachel both plan to pursue rowing in college - on scholarship, they hope. Rachel's older brother won a rowing scholarship to Princeton University. …
HEADLINE: Exercise seen boosting children's brain function
BYLINE: By Dolores Kong, Globe Staff
Reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic. And running?
Emerging new research in animals and humans suggests physical exercise may boost brain function, improve mood, and otherwise increase learning, according to findings presented yesterday at a meeting of neuroscientists and educators.
While it is too soon to conclude that children who do not exercise fare worse in school, the research raises questions about the recent national trend toward cutting physical education programs, some scientists and educators said.
Such cutbacks are "a crime" considering the new research showing exercise's benefit to the brain by improving blood flow and spurring cell growth, said Dr. John J. Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Ratey presented some of the latest findings at a Boston conference titled "Learning and the Brain." …
Elizabeth Gould, a Princeton University neurobiologist who also spoke at yesterday's conference, cited research by California scientists in mice showing that physical activity increases the number of brain cells in the hippocampus, and that learning improved with exercise.
While her own animal research has not looked at the effect of physical activity, it has shown that the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus increases with exposure to female sex hormones and with learning, while it is slowed by exposure to stress hormones.
But Gould urged caution in using animal research as a basis for educators to change classroom practice. "I think what's interesting from the perspective of education is that this is new information about how the brain works, and it also gives us a sense of how the brain is structurally changing throughout life." …
HEADLINE: Bigger Band-Aids won't do the trick on this one
BYLINE: Zay N. Smith
Can't think why you're sad?
Princeton University researchers announced depression may be triggered in people whose brains don't produce enough new brain cells.
Well. If yours wasn't, wouldn't you be? …
HEADLINE: Quirky questions in the quest for college
BYLINE: Liz Marlantes, Special to The Christian Science
Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
The "common application" certainly has made life easier for high school seniors. Gone are the days when applying to eight colleges meant writing eight different essays on topics ranging from "discuss a time you failed," to "describe someone who has profoundly influenced you." Now, applicants can simply write one "personal statement," and send out multiple copies.
Unless they're applying to the University of Chicago, that is. Chicago, along with a small number of other holdouts (mostly in the Ivy League), still refuses to accept the common application. "We want [students] to write directly to us," says Chicago's dean of admissions, Ted O'Neill.
The common application may appeal from a practical standpoint - most public universities, as well as many private ones, have recently opted for it. But Dean O'Neill argues that the generic "tell us something about yourself" question is hard to answer, as it's so shapeless and can lead students toward self-aggrandizement. …
And Princeton University has its applicants fill out a section called "Hodge-Podge." Students are required to list their favorite book, recording, movie, TV program, source of news, pastime, time of day, food, place to get away from it all, academic subject, and word.
Although the admissions committee tells applicants not to "lose any sleep" over these questions, many students wind up spending far more time on this section than they do on the rest of the application, weighing the pros and cons of "Pride and Prejudice" vs. "The Catcher in the Rye," and trying to come up with a favorite word that isn't either pretentious or too cute.
In contrast, Princeton's essay question: "Discuss something (anything) you just wished you understood better," seems positively easy. …
HEADLINE: Chirac's Attack on Congress Has a Bigger Target
BYLINE: By Joseph Fitchett; International Herald Tribune
DATELINE: PARIS
In an unusual public berating of the U.S. Congress, President Jacques Chirac of France has laid bare - and perhaps sought to exploit - an undercurrent of resentment in his country against U.S. power and prosperity.
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in a single-superpower world, even some European allies feel concern that U.S. success has bred indifference to their interests and fostered a congressional habit of taking unilateral actions regardless of their international implications for global security and social cohesion. …
''Americans feel - often arrogantly - that they are the ones who have shown themselves ready and able to take the human and financial risks that safeguarded the world and continue to,'' Ezra Suleiman, the Princeton University political scientist, writes in the current issue of Revue des Deux Mondes.
This mood, he said, plays into ''a personalized approach to world affairs in which the United States knows what is allowed and what must be stopped.'' Ironically, objections from allies, with whom the United States shares common values, often seem to irritate Americans more than opposition from former adversaries or non-Western cultures. …
HEADLINE: RODGERS FAVORITE OF FOUR INDUCTEES; RUNNING
BYLINE: ROB MASON The Ledger
This year's inductees into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame were three former world-record holders, who were also on a U.S. Olympic Team, and a former president of USA Track & Field who was the 1984 Olympic head coach.
Selected to join the other 176 members of the Hall of Fame in the RCA Dome in downtown Indianapolis were Willie Banks, Charles Moore, Bill Rodgers, and Larry Ellis. …
Ellis was an inspirational coach. He coached 13 years at Jamaica High in New York before moving to Princeton University in 1970. There he coached his teams to 11 Heptagonal team titles in track and another eight titles in cross country.
Among the athletes he coached was long jumper Bob Beamon.
HEADLINE: UNITED HEALTH GROUP HMO CHANGES ITS POLICY THAT CHECKS ON DOCTORS' DECISIONS BEFORE TREATMENT
ANCHORS: LINDA WERTHEIMER; ROBERT SIEGEL
REPORTERS: PATRICIA NEIGHMOND
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: This is NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host: And I'm Robert Siegel. Doctors across the country are applauding the decision of one of the nation's largest HMOs to give its doctors more decision-making power. The HMO United Health Group reversed its long-standing policy of requiring doctors to get approval before patients receive certain specialty care. But as NPR's Patricia Neighmond reports, United will still keep a close eye on how its doctors practice medicine.
PATRICIA NEIGHMOND reporting: United Health Group vice president Dr. Lee Newcomer says the HMO isn't completely abandoning cost-control policies. On the contrary, the company hopes to actually save money by no longer micromanaging how doctors practice medicine. In pilot programs across the country, the company has broken even, allowing doctors to provide the care as they see fit. But Newcomer says the HMO will still monitor how many tests, procedures and hospitalizations doctors recommend and compare that to national averages. …
NEIGHMOND: Blecher points to other HMO policies that pressure doctors; things like cutting back on bonuses for those who recommend too many tests or procedures. Fot its part, United Health Group's Dr. Newcomer says the HMO will not use any financial incentives to pressure doctors either way. it will simply check physician practice at year's end. And with that, Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says United Health Group returns to a tried and true management principle.
Mr. UWE REINHARDT (Health Economist, Princeton University): The idea is this is an old--it comes out of a Belgian Henry Fayol who wrote about this first, almost a hundred years ago, that--and he theorized that raather than supervising every worker or every plant within a large firm, what you should do is have standards. And if people cling reasonably close to the standards, you leave them alone but allow them some variation.
NEIGHMOND: And it's only when they deviate too much, says Reinhardt, that employers intervene and correct them.
Mr. REINHARDT: You generally run a company by focusing only on 2 percent to 3 percent of the outliers and it gives the workers more sovereignty and more satisfaction. I was taught that in business school over 30 years ago. It is, to me, astounding that American HMOs are learning about a 100-year-old management principle only at the end of the 20th century. …
HEADLINE: Favorite Web sites for Hurricane info: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
PATRICK L. ABBOTT
Last month, when San Diego County rocked and rolled because of the Hector earthquake, one of the first sources reporters turned to for information was this professor of geology, who's been teaching at San Diego State University since 1971.
Favorite Web sites
Hurricanes: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
http://www.gfdl.gov/ jps/GFDL--VG-- Gallery.html#Hurricane
The lab is part of Princeton University, and Abbott says the work there includes doing computer models of weather phenomenon.
HEADLINE: Powerbeads: can these funky bracelets make you smarter or calmer?
Madonna wears one.
So does Richard Gere.
And the Dalai Lama started the whole thing.
Powerbead bracelets are the happening jewelry of 1999, sort of like a mood ring for the new millennium.
The bracelets, which sell for anywhere from about $5 to $15 at area stores, are "going over like crazy," says Diane Burns, the fine jewelry manager at Boscov's at Park City shopping center. …
New York designer Zoe Metro, who also makes Chinese charm bracelets and puts red linings in her handbags to symbolize good fortune, originally marketed the powerbead bracelets last year, according to the Associated Press. Metro, who studied ancient Asian art at Princeton University, was inspired after seeing the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama wearing a few beaded bracelets. …
HEADLINE: Japanese daily life transformed over the century
BYLINE: By J.L. HAZELTON, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: TOKYO
From a diet of mostly rice and millet to well-massaged Kobe beef and gold-flecked ice cream. A 100 percent literacy rate. The longest-lived people in the world.
Daily life in Japan, for all its emphasis on traditional ways, hardly resembles existence at the beginning of the century.
The changes that snowballed after World War II had their roots in the late 19th century Meiji Restoration government's leap to modernity.
Imagine a rigid society, says Princeton University historian Sheldon Garon. You are born a farmer. Or a merchant. Or a samurai. And there you stay. Until 1868.
"All of a sudden there are opportunities," he says. "A peasant can send his son to college, and thousands and thousands do."
Commerce opens up. No longer are toll barriers scattered every 10 or 20 miles, between feudal domains. "All of a sudden you can wander freely anywhere in Japan," he marvels. …
HEADLINE: S. African tragedy helps woman find her calling; Marylander funnels U.S. aid to projects in black township
BYLINE: Gilbert A. Lewthwaite
SOURCE: SUN FOREIGN STAFF
GUGULETU, South Africa -- Maggie Barker of Maryland is here in this impoverished black township near Cape Town to help spend millions of Uncle Sam's tax dollars.
Barker, 23, a graduate of Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, is drawing up a list of development programs in communities like this around the Cape of Good Hope. The programs will be funded through an $8.6 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
She is a coordinator with the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, named after the Fulbright scholar from California who was beaten and stoned to death in 1993 by four politically active students in Guguletu, the depressed side of Cape Town that visitors rarely see. Biehl, 26, was in South Africa to help with voter registration for the nation's first all-race election, which ended apartheid in 1994. …
Barker, like Amy Biehl, first came to Africa as a student. With 11 other undergraduates from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Barker studied for six months in 1997 at the University of Cape Town.
When she returned for her senior year at Princeton, she decided to focus her thesis on education reform in South Africa. Her elder sister, Kate, sent her tapes of Biehl's parents speaking publicly on their daughter's death and the foundation.
"My thesis was due, and I needed some inspiration," said Barker. "I listened to the tapes. I realized that the kind of work they were doing in South Africa was what I wanted to do. …
HEADLINE: HEADS UP; New brain findings topple neuroscience
dogma
SOURCE: Science Writer of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Sue Goetinck
The human brain just ain't what it used to be.
It has much more talent than scientists have given it credit for. And some of its newly found talents still haven't appeared in traditional textbooks.
Some of the favorite beliefs of neuroscientists were that adults couldn't grow new brain cells. That the spinal cord is incapable of regenerating. That nerve cells are the only cells doing the information processing in the brain - the brain's other cells are just there for physical support.
All these beliefs are now known to be myths. …
Last month, Princeton University scientists went further, showing in adult monkeys that new cells can grow in the cortex, a region of the brain involved in higher mental functioning like reasoning. The same is likely to be true for people, the Princeton team says. The scientists don't yet know what the newly born cells do in the monkey's brain. It hasn't been shown, for example, that the newly born cells turn into nerve cells used in thinking and reasoning.
In mice, though, studies presented at the neuroscience meeting suggested that newly born cells in the hippocampus participate in processes believed to be involved in memory. …
HEADLINE: ECOLOGY UNDER THE NET OF ESPIONAGE
SOURCE: Trud-7, November 4, 1999, p. 4
BYLINE: Vladimir Alexandrov
HIGHLIGHT: THE RECENT FSS SEARCHES IN THE APARTMENTS OF TWO SCIENTISTS DEMONSTRATE THAT THE RUSSIAN SECURITY SERVICES HAVE NOTHING SACRED LEFT ANYMORE WHATEVER.
During the night between October 27 and 28 in Moscow officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSS) conducted a search in the apartment of Joshua Handler, an American scientist and staffer of Princeton University who is doing his internship in the Institute of the US and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Simultaneously, in the city of Obninsk counterintelligence officers of the Kaluga Regional FSS Department searched the apartment of Igor Sutyagin, Chief of the Department of Military and Political Research of the Institute of the US and Canada. (...)
The FSS officers confiscated documents and typescripts (mainly the materials of Sutyagin's dissertation), two computers, various reference books, and floppy discs. (...)
The FSS officers' "catch" in the Moscow apartment of the American scientist was also considerable. According to Handler, the author of dozens of works in the sphere of radiation and nuclear security, the "visitors" confiscated working materials, typescripts, notebooks, and a computer.
The search in Handler's apartment put him out of countenance. In a conversation with our journalist he noted in bewilderment, "My work did not harm Russia's security in any way, and I have always did my best to provide for agreement between our countries in the sphere of nuclear armament. Nobody has ever passed any classified materials to me." …
Who: People in the News
HEADLINE: Avon taps insider for makeover
BYLINE: Dana Canedy
DATELINE: NEW YORK
NEW YORK - Andrea Jung has a major makeover ahead of her.
Ms. Jung was appointed Avon's president and chief operating officer Avon Products Inc. last week, slightly more than a month after warning investors to expect disappointing financial results soon.
The promotion of Ms. Jung, comes less than two years after a high-profile executive search in which she and three other women at the company were passed over in favor of Charles R. Perrin, an outsider with no experience in direct selling or cosmetics.
Ms. Jung becomes the fourth chief executive of a Fortune 500 company who is a woman, and the second to be named this year. She joins Carleton S. Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, Jill Barad at Mattel and Marion Sandler at Golden West Financial. …
A graduate of Princeton University, she also serves as a board member of General Electric. …
HEADLINE: New Technology Investment Fund Says It Has Raised
$600 Million
BYLINE: By LAWRENCE M. FISHER
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 7
Redpoint Ventures, a technology-focused venture capital firm created in August through the combination of Brentwood Venture Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, plans to announce on Monday that it has raised $600 million in its first fund -- an amount thought to be the largest effort for a first-time technology fund.
Redpoint, based in Menlo Park, Calif., plans to specialize in Internet businesses, including companies devoted to broad-band -- or high speed -- telecommunications technology for Internet use. …
Redpoint's institutional investors are all previous investors in Brentwood Venture Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, including ARCO, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Harvard University, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, Princeton University, Rockefeller Foundation, Stanford University, Pfizer Inc. and Yale University.
HEADLINE: CATCHING A COSMIC WAVE
SERIES: SPECIAL REPORT
Take an idea from Einstein's singular mind about invisible waves rippling through space. Mix in a vast swath of southeast Louisiana farmland. Add $371 million and stir. What you get is a mammoth science project under construction near Hammond that is key to a worldwide effort to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
BYLINE: By Mark Schleifstein Staff writer
Eons ago, in a galaxy unimaginably far, far away, a pair of neutron stars among the densest, heaviest objects in the universe -- completed a death spiral and crashed into each other with a cosmic bang.
The collision created waves of gravity that rippled the very fabric of the universe much as a dropped pebble disturbs the surface of a quiet pond.
In 2002, scientists in rural Livingston Parish will begin searching for such waves, which have been moving at the speed of light -- 186,291 miles per second -- for millions of years on their way to Earth.
The new Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, to be inaugurated Friday, is designed to confirm the existence of those gravity waves, a basic and still mysterious cosmic force predicted early in the century by the visionary physicist Albert Einstein. In the process, scientists will be gaining insight into black holes, the birth of stars, galactic collisions and other astrophysical events in which can be glimpsed the very origins of the cosmos, said Barry Barish, LIGO director and a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
With luck, LIGO scientists eventually may be able to identify gravity waves created by the Big Bang that is believed to have created the universe and is thought to have powered its expansion ever since. …
Einstein posited gravity as one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. But while anyone who has ever taken a spill is intimately familiar with it, even Einstein could not prove that gravity's individual particles -- gravitons -- moved as waves through space.
A breakthrough was achieved by Princeton University physicists Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse who in 1974 began tracking a pair of neutron stars that were orbiting each other.
According to Einstein's theory, if gravity waves existed, the loss of energy the waves represented should have caused the stars to speed up as they spiraled closer and closer together.
"They tracked the stars for 15 years and they exactly fit Einstein's theory," Barish said. …
HEADLINE: Medicare patients feel pinch as HMOs respond to
federal budget cuts
DATELINE: TRENTON, N.J.
New Jersey's 190,000 Medicare HMO members are beginning to feel pinched. That's because federal budget cuts have led to HMOs scaling back benefits and increasing the monthly premiums they charge Medicare beneficiaries.
The HMOs say they need to cut perks because of the Balanced Budget Act, passed by Congress in 1997.
The law created Medicare+Choice, which went into effect beginning this year. The program includes a new funding formula that decreases the fees government pays HMOs for some medical services. Billions of dollars were cut from the Medicare budget.
"This is a situation where Congress is waiting to see how the industry shakes out," Glenn Taylor told the Gannett New Jersey Bureau for Sunday's editions. Taylor is the programs and advocacy manager for the American Association of Retired Persons' northeast region.
"The problem is what's happening while it shakes out," Taylor said. …
Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University health care economist, said it is no surprise HMOs are having trouble. Companies are good at delivering efficient health care for healthy people but are not great at managing health care for the ill, he said.
"Now we're learning that privatizing Medicare is not going to get us out of the soup," Reinhardt said.
HEADLINE: Nets make radical changes in their predictable
offense
BYLINE: BOB CONSIDINE; STAFF WRITER
EAST RUTHERFORD - Who knew the Nets would be this bad this early? Apparently everyone in the NBA, with the exception of the Nets.
Point guard Stephon Marbury said New Jersey's 0-3 start can be attributed to an offense that sneaks up on no one.
"When a team comes in to scout us, it's high pick-and-rolls and down screens and that's it," Marbury said yesterday in preparation for the tonight's game against visiting Washington. "These are all basic plays. There's no flairs. There's no back picks. There's no counters. There's no misdirection plays. You don't have that. You don't have three or four options."
Radical offensive changes are in store for the disappointing Nets, who have been outscored by 34 points in three games.
The most prominent switch will be the implementation of a two-guard front offense - inspired by former Princeton University coach Pete Carril, who taught it to Nets assistant Eddie Jordan at Sacramento.
The two-guard offense will allow either of the guards to bring the ball up the floor, which, in turn, should force movement and produce a less-predictable flow of the ball. …
HEADLINE: Activist spirit drummed up; Working it out / Diane E.
Lewis
BYLINE: By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff
During a protest last month, a group of Harvard University students threw bags of garbage at the base of John Harvard's bronze likeness, then draped a T-shirt with the words "Janitor for a Living Wage" above the statue's feet.
The real John Harvard might have cringed at the sight of the broom that someone in the crowd had set at the statue's legs.
But in the eyes of the students who demonstrated that day in Harvard Yard, the message was clear: Strip John Harvard's likeness of its prestige, add a broom and other tools of the janitorial trade, and the icon seems no different from the average working man. Except for one thing, students said: The average service worker can't make a living wage.
Nearly 20 years after campus activists brought the antiapartheid movement to Harvard, a new crop of students are demanding higher wages and benefits for the people who prepare their meals, maintain their dorms, and ensure their safety by patrolling university grounds. …
Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and many others have seen a rise in student activism following a lull dating back to the 1980s, when many had set their sights on making - and spending - money. …
HEADLINE: C.K. WILLIAMS, CAPTURING COMPLEX HUMAN THOUGHTS
BYLINE: R.D. POHL; Special to The News
"I think that the primary business of poetry in our time -- or at least poetry as I conceive it -- is to offer evidence," writes poet C.K. Williams in an essay entitled "Contexts" pubblished in his 1998 collection "Poetry and Consciousness."
"Because our capacity for blindness, for forgetfulness and for distortion is so limitless, we have to be reminded again and again of what is really in the world, or what is before our eyes and what is within us . . . (because) each of us is in some undeniable sense responsible for all of the identities of all our fellows," continues Williams.
This dual focus on both the structure and grammar of consciousness and the social and moral world in which consciousness is engaged distinguishes Williams as one of the most important voices in contemporary American poetry. At their best, his poems come close to capturing the interconnectedness and complexity of human thought in its pre-conscious form -- how one memory or image can trigger another seemingly unrelated memory or image with which it is, upon reflection, deeply aand profoundly linked.
Williams, who will deliver the 23rd annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Poetry Reading at 8 p.m. Friday in 250 Baird Hall on the University at Buffalo's North Campus, is the author of 15 volumes of critically acclaimed poetry, four books of translations, a collection of essays, and numerous other writings ranging from plays and film scripts to a forthcoming prose memoir. A professor of English and Writing at Princeton University, he has been short-listed for most of America's major literary awards, and in recent years received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 (for his volume "Flesh and Bone"), the Harriet Monroe Award from "Poetry" magazine (1993), the Pen/Voelker Career Achievement in Poetry Award (1998) and American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1999). …
HEADLINE: Forbes polishes his style
BYLINE: Mark Siebert
SOURCE: Register Staff Writer
Retired schoolteacher Don Templemeyer came to see Steve Forbes in Carroll with a single typewritten question in his hand:
"If elected, will you work for and enact legislation to make it illegal for a woman to kill her child at any time -before, during or after birth?"
Four years ago, in his first and unconventional run for the Republican presidential nomination, Forbes might have stammered something about abortions being bad and then launched into an explanation of his flat tax.
This is the new Steve Forbes.
Templemeyer's question on abortion was answered with an emphatic "yes" even before he had a chance to unfold the scrap of paper.
The new Forbes has built a grass-roots campaign organization in Iowa and nationally. He still looks more startled than happy when he smiles -chin down, unblinking eyes peering through his round glasses -but he's more polished than four years ago. …
Forbes told officials at Princeton University, where he earned his bachelor's degree and is now a trustee, that he would no longer donate money as long as the school employs a professor who favors allowing parents to euthanize severely disabled infants.
Doubts linger about Forbes' transformation. His economic conservatism is without question, but critics are leery of his conviction to conservative social issues such as opposition to abortion and gay marriages. …
HEADLINE: Political crisis in Pakistan and US foreign
policy,
THE INDEPENDENT
BYLINE: Ruksana Kibria
Since the end of Cold War the United States has been making efforts at embarking on a new course in its foreign policy. At the official level there is a commitment to promote democracy, free market economy and human rights, among other things, and as such it is expected to be qualitatively different from its Cold War foreign policy. The post-1991 world order is perceived to have ushered in an era where the above-mentioned goals could be achieved with greater ease than before.The basic goal of US foreign policy is to promote an international order that would lead to global prosperity, peace and stability, which in turn would enhance security of the United States. …
The corollary to this approach is that, the overthrowing of democratically elected governments through military coups d'etat would be considered as a reversal of the current worldwide trend at democratisation. …
A contributing factor in the downfall of the Sharif government was the humiliating withdrawal from Kargil, the decision to disengage having been taken after consultation with the US President Bill Clinton. The Pakistan Army was manifestly displeased with this decision. It is not known how far Nawaz Sharif was aware of the price that he was soon to pay for this.The immediate cause of the coup was the apparent dissatisfaction that was generated when the Chief of Staff of the Army was dismissed two weeks after being appointed by the Prime Minister. This was regarded as an attempt at destabilising the military, the most efficient and disciplined institution in the country. …
However, the indignation that General Musharraf expressed about his dismissal, during a recent press conference in Islamabad, suggests that it was perceived more as an affront to his personal self-esteem than as a threat to the corporate interests of the army. The second charge is something that could be brought against most of the civilian governments in the Third World. This can be attributed to the weakness of political institutions in "follower" democracies, where power usually becomes concentrated in the hands of a few powerful figures. Prime Minister Sharif was deemed to have become "autocratic," but then a number of elected leaders in the developing countries have acted in that manner. Atul Kohli of Princeton University has insightfully analysed the syndrome, which deserves to be quoted at length:
"A further recurring consequence is that whenever the ruling elite are threatened, further centralisation of power is a readily available alternative. Because centralisation of power in individuals nearly always further emasculates fragile institutions - strong institutions do constrain the power of individuals- there is a built-in incentive in new democracies for leaders to undertake periodic deinstitutionalisation. Weak institutions and personalistic rule thus become vicious and mutually reinforcing processes. As long as a democracy remains more an affair of a few elite and less an established framework that dwarfs the leaders, only exceptional leaders are likely to resist the tendency to maintain personal power at the expense of institutional development." …
HEADLINE: What's it all about, alpha?: Gore's feminist adviser
sees beta where there should be some beast
BYLINE: NICHOLAS WADE
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Alpha males dominate wolf packs, boss baboon troupes and lord it over harems of elephant seals. Like other mammals, human groups also foster alpha males. But though the leadership abilities are valued, many societies are uncomfortable with other alpha traits, like aggressiveness, temper tantrums and indiscreet expression of the drive that spurs the pursuit of alphadom in the first place - sexual access to plenty of women.
Perhaps excessive surprise has greeted reports that Naomi Wolf, a consultant to Al Gore, told the vice-president that he was a beta male who needed to become an alpha. What stirred the commotion, of course, is that a feminist writer was caught advising a man to play out of the male rulebook. Little wonder that Wolf was furiously backpedaling last week on the significance (though not the fact) of her advice.
But her critics miss the point that her proposal was surely sound. …
In most human societies, there is more room for the sexes to play out their different agendas. ''Put simply, in our evolutionary history it seems likely that a woman's value was usually her reproductive value, and a man's value was his resource value,'' writes Bobbi S. Low of Princeton University in her forthcoming book Why Sex Matters (Princeton University Press). Her thesis is that men have always striven to command the wealth or prestige and that women will seek to assure their children are protected.
Even in today's societies, Low argues, each sex advertises the qualities desirable to the other. Men sport gold chains or BMWs to signal wealth while women, with clothing, cosmetics or liposuction, strive for the young and healthy look, whose basic message is reproductive fitness. ''The specifics change across time and societies, but the desired result does not,'' Low writes. …
NOTE: A version of this story first appeared in The New York Times.
HEADLINE: IN PERSON; Out of Leonia, A First Novel
BYLINE: By RICHARD TRENNER
DATELINE: PRINCETON
WORKING in a room of her own a few years ago, Linda D. Cirino wrote a tragic love story set in Nazi Germany even though she had been to Germany exactly once in her life: to change planes.
Ms. Cirino, a longtime resident of Leonia, had published a few nonfiction books, most notably "Literary New York," a literary walking tour of the city. But she had never had a novel published -- and first novels are notoriously difficult to get in print.
In time, though, her agent found a publisher in England. The London-based Women's Press, advertising the work as "an extraordinary, beautiful and touching novel about prejudice, integrity, self-knowledge and courage," published it as "The Egg Woman" in 1997. …
A year ago, Ms. Cirino took a chance and sent a copy of the book to the Ontario Review Press, a small Princeton-based publishing company owned and operated by Raymond Smith, a former English professor, and his wife, Joyce Carol Oates, the celebrated author and a professor at Princeton.
Acting at a speed nearly unheard of in the deliberative world of book publishing, Mr. Smith offered Ms. Cirino a contract within about a week of receiving the text of her novel. …
HEADLINE: BLACKBOARD: Q.&A.
BYLINE: By ABBY ELLIN
Can adults learn as easily as children? Do learning ability and memory retention diminish with age? With the number of college students over age 30 doubling since 1970, the questions seem particularly relevant. Two experts were consulted on the subject -- Elizabeth Gould, a neurobiologist in the department of psychology at Princeton University, and Andrew Lerner, a psycchologist in the New York City public school system who also teaches "Adult Learning," a class that explores how adults learn, for the continuing education department at the New School for Social Research.
Do children have a neurological advantage over adults?
Dr. Gould: Children's brains are much more plastic, so they're more capable of forming synaptic connections. That's why they have an easier time learning things like foreign languages and musical instruments.
But your research suggests that learning ability can be enhanced.
Dr. Gould: In one study, we used a technique that labels newborn nerve cells in the brain. After marking these cells in adult rats and monkeys, we had some rats learn certain tasks. Those animals had more new nerve cells surviving. The animals with no learning lost most of their new nerve cells; the cells died. This study showed that learning is important for the survival of new cells in the adult brain, and that it helps produce new neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with learning and memory. Learning constantly modifies the structure of the brain.
People who continue to read are much less likely to experience memory loss with aging than those who are more passive and don't exercise their mental capacity. These findings are a classic case of "use it or lose it." …
HEADLINE: ENDPAPER; But Does It Work?
BYLINE: By ALAN B. KRUEGER; Alan B. Krueger, a former chief economist of the Department of Labor, is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is writing a book entitled "Education Matters," to be published next year.
We run from one fad to another in education, from phonics to whole language and back to phonics, from subject-based to holistic learning, from curriculum-based to child-centered learning, from neighborhood to magnet to charter schools, from old to new to whole math, from English-only to bilingual education to language immersion.
With education growing as a voter concern, politicians have been quick to martial dueling remedies of their own. Republicans propose expanding charter schools and diverting funds from failing schools to finance vouchers. Democrats want to reduce class size and install computers in the classroom.
Indeed, how we teach our children shifts with the winds of philosophies and politics, leaving many observers dizzy and dismayed.
"The sad truth is," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once lamented, "American schools, by and large, do not know how to teach. The ineffectiveness in teaching reading skills to many young people, whether white or black, poor or rich, strongly indicts foundations and government for not spending funds effectively to find out what different kinds of reading experiences are needed by youth with various learning styles at various points in their life."
Thirty years later, we still know little about the effectiveness of the tools in vogue: school vouchers, charter schools, school-to-work transition programs, summer school, year-round schooling, extended-day schooling, tracking, school uniforms and small schools.
Dr. King was correct to look to research to shed light on this darkness. But therein lies the problem: education suffers from a lack of scientifically sound studies.
The federal government spent $14 billion on space exploration last year, but less than $300 million on research to improve education. The primary research function of the Department of Education has been to administer tests and collect data. Less than 1 percent of its budget goes to research, with even less to conduct and evaluate studies.
Controlled experiments are especially rare. With insufficient funds and little tradition in experimental methods, most researchers rely only on observations in a handful of classrooms, without any concrete measure of results. Findings are weak or inconclusive. …
HEADLINE: COLLEGE & MONEY; Financial Aid for the Bourgeoisie
BYLINE: By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN; Andrew Ross Sorkin reports from London for the Business Day section of The Times.
CHRIS CORNISH has a solid annual income of $140,000 from his own software business. He and his wife, Sandra, own three cars, including a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and live in a four-bedroom house in New Canaan, Conn.
The Cornishes do not sound like naturals for financial aid. Nonetheless, their daughter Jordana, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, got $22,150 in aid this semester in the form of a $13,950 grant and several low-interest loans. Their daughter Charissa, who took time off before entering her sophomore year at William and Mary College, received a $23,000 aid package, mostly in low-interest loans. …
Financial aid is no longer strictly for paupers, at least not paupers by traditional standards. As the cost of higher education hovers between $20,000 and $30,000 a year at private institutions and $8,000 at public ones, even affluent families are finding their wallets too thin. …
"We have more people at higher levels of income getting financial aid," said Thomas C. Keane, the director of financial aid and student employment at Cornell University, where 508 families with incomes over $100,000, 79 of them earning more than $150,000, received need-based grants last year. At Princeton University, 126 freshmen were eligible last year despite household incomes in excess of $105,000.
"The costs are going up faster than families' income is going up," Mr. Keane said. "Now there are programs so that anybody can get money, at the very least through a loan." …
HEADLINE: Fellowship program
Neda Brown, a junior political science major, is among nine students nationwide selected for the U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program.
Through the program, minorities are urged to enter foreign service. The program is administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
All costs for Brown's junior and senior years at Bennett will be paid through the program, which also will pay for her to attend graduate school. She plans to attend Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for graduate studies.
Participants in the program complete internships after their junior years. Brown will do two internships: one at a U.S. embassy and one in Washington. She will enter foreign service after completing graduate school.
Brown is a member of the Bennett Scholars and is a Presidential Scholar and an All-American Scholar. She is a member of the Political Pacesetters and is corresponding secretary for the Student Government Association.
SECTION: EDITORIALS
HEADLINE: 2000: YEAR OF THE OEDIPAL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN?
BYLINE: JOHN JACOBS
Fathers and sons has always been an important theme in American politics, both metaphorically and literally. Henry Adams, the great Harvard historian of the late 19th century, for example, considered his life a failure because he never became president, following his father, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, and his grandfather, John Adams, who succeeded George Washington. …
Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents, worried early in his career about how his generation could possibly match the astonishing contributions of the Founding Fathers. Saving the Union during the Civil War certainly provided him that opportunity. …
"Aside from the Kennedys, you don't get many dynasties or Oedipal stories since FDR," said Fred Greenstein, a Princeton University presidential scholar. "But as a story about the current campaign, the rebellion against fathers works." …
HEADLINE: Access to Answers: Progress in the future may mean
taking a more inclusive view
BYLINE: Kathleen Newroe
Progress in the future may mean taking a more inclusive view
What does 1984 mean to you now?
Maybe it was the year you were born, or you or your parents celebrated a 25th wedding anniversary, or it was the year you graduated or had the 10th-year high school class reunion.
If you are relatively young, 1984 seems a long time ago; if you are relatively old, 1984 seems like yesterday.
But Nineteen Eighty-Four, as penned by George Orwell in 1949, will always signify the future as terrifying, or tranquil(izing) as it may turn out to be. …
There are diverse claims as to the time, place, and personage(s) responsible for the invention of the computer per se. (Remember when a computer co-starred with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the 1957 movie version of The Desk Set?)
Likewise, the PC or personal computer, and modem-driven science-military-industrial link-ups, bulletin boards, the World Wide Web, and the Internet are not easily dated, even though they are within the scope of recent history.
Medical technologies and techniques allow us to be born earlier and die later than ever before in history. Is that what we want?
Just within less than the last half-century abortion has become legal, yet the needs of unwanted children have grown. Magnanimous acts of foster care and adoptions have not matched the increase of births to underage, sick, or chemically dependent mothers. …
Princeton University has hired, and seated in a tenured chair at Princeton's Center for Human Values, Peter Singer, a professor who thinks it's OK to kill infants who are born inconveniently disabled. …
HEADLINE: ON THE WEB: 'Net loves covering favorite topic:
itself; MICROSOFT A MONOPOLY
BYLINE: Frances Katz, Staff
The Internet loves nothing more than reporting on itself. All the usual online news suspects are ready for nonstop coverage of the decision. Every online news organization from CNN to trade publications like TechWeb is ready to refresh readers' memories with details of the Microsoft vs. the Justice Department suit with breaking news and commentary that should go on well into the weekend.
The latest news and information can be found from a variety of perspectives. The Department of Justice Web site (www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_index.htm) will give you facts in U.S. Department of Justice Microsoft Antitrust Case Filings. It is the place to go for the official legal news and actual rulings.
Microsoft has its own version of events. The software giant's official response to the DOJ's suit can be found at
www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate/default.htm. …
Government Witnesses
ON INTEGRATING THE BROWSER
Glenn E. Weadock Consultant
Surveyed 13 large corporations that said they did not regard the browser as part of the operating system - as Microsoft contended - and many found adapting their software to Windows with a bundled browser a costly inconvenience.
Edward W. Felten Computer scientist, Princeton University wrote a program that he said stripped the browser out of Windows. The technical experiment was intended to support the allegation that Windows and the browser are seperate programs and not one, as Micosoft asserts.
HEADLINE: Primate research defended; Animal tests often the
only option, scientists say
BYLINE: By Karen Hsu, Globe Correspondent
Using the brains of two squirrel monkeys, Bertha Madras, professor of psychobiology at Harvard, was able to develop a non-invasive imaging chemical to help in the early detection of Parkinson's disease in human beings.
The research has proven critical to understanding the disease and potential treatments because Parkinson's is usually far advanced by the time its symptoms emerge.
Madras is one of about 50 researchers who work with mankind's primate cousins at the Harvard-owned New England Regional Primate Research Center, which stands on 150 acres in Southborough. Groundbreaking work at the center has led to the discovery of an AIDS-like syndrome in monkeys, and also proof that AIDS is caused by a virus, that the herpes virus can cause leukemia, and that nicotine is addictive.
The findings have put Madras and her colleagues on the cutting edge of medical research, but also on the front lines of an escalating battle between scientists and animal rights activists and extremists out to stop experimentation on primates and other mammals. …
But the same characteristics that make them suitable for testing makes activists think they are worthy of protection. And there's no getting around the fact that even more unpleasant things sometimes happen to the creatures. Many primates, officials won't say how many, involuntarily sacrifice their lives for scientific research intended to benefit humans.
Even animal-rights advocates who reject using violence to protest the research have reservations about testing with primates. Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer, one of the intellectual founders of the animal rights movement, condemned those who sent the razor letters last week, but said that many current practices of animal testing cannot be morally defended. And he says higher-level primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are particularly deserving of protection.
"There are very careful studies that [ such primates] are self-aware beings with rich and complex emotional and social lives," Singer said. "On that basis, they should have special status and not be used for harmful experimentation."
Singer, whose 1975 book "Animal Liberation" spurred the animal-rights movement, said, "The strength of the movement stands on a firm moral footing, but this action [ the razor letters] clearly shifts the sentiment towards the researchers because they are targeted in a manner that virtually no one could support." …
HEADLINE: U.S. VERSUS MICROSOFT: THE COURTROOM; In a Contest of
Conflicting Facts, It Finally Came Down to Whom the Judge
Believed
BYLINE: By ROB FIXMER
It was a case in which 26 witnesses put forth a bewildering number of contradictory viewpoints as fact, in which a videotape sullied the legendary brilliance of the world's wealthiest man, in which two million pages of documents included thousands of e-mail messages that at times made various figures in the case look greedy, ruthless, egomaniacal or just plain dishonest.
All this was handed not to a jury but to a single federal judge whose job it was to determine what was fact and what was not. Yesterday, he made his calls.
The Justice Department and 19 states suing the Microsoft Corporation in the landmark antitrust suit produced witnesses that portrayed the software giant as an overreaching monopolist, wielding its market power to thwart competition. Microsoft, the government said, prodded industry partners and rivals to favor its products over competing software and bundled its free Internet browser into its industry-dominating Windows system in a predatory scheme that threatened the long-term welfare of consumers. …
But the most memorable thing about the testimony of Microsoft's witnesses was not what they said to counter the government's case but how they often withered under cross-examination by the government's lead trial lawyer, David Boies.
The most notorious example was an attempt to counter government testimony from Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist, who had demonstrated a program that he said stripped the Internet Explorer browser from Windows. This suggested that Windows and the browser were separate programs and not one, as Microsoft insisted.
James Allchin, a senior vice president, came to the stand armed with a videotape that was supposed to prove that the browser had been so tightly integrated into the Windows 98 operating system that it was impossible to remove. But under questioning by Mr. Boies, Mr. Allchin conceded that, unknown to him, the video had been pieced together from shots of programs running on several different computers, and thus did not really show the impact of deleting the browser. …
November 6, 1999
HEADLINE: The more the merrier
BYLINE: Alison Motluk (Miami Beach)
HIGHLIGHT: A key to depression, how people grow gullible with age and the secret of human speech featured at last week's meeting in Miami Beach. Alison Motluk was there to sniff out the best stories
PROZAC stimulates the birth of new brain cells in rats, say scientists from New Jersey. The finding gives clues to what causes depression in people, how drugs like Prozac relieve it and why the effect takes so long to kick in.
Just over a year ago, researchers showed that people grow new neurons all the time. This overturned a long-held belief that brain cells, unlike cells in other parts of the body, are not replaced when they die.
Barry Jacobs and Casimir Fornal at Princeton University put together findings from several different brain studies. They knew, for instance, that depressed people have a smaller hippocampus - a structure that is involved in learning and memory - than healthy people.
They also knew that chronic stress can slow neuron birth, or neurogenesis, in the brains of rodents. Stress is thought to contribute to depression. …
The team gave daily injections of Prozac to five rats for 21 days. Five control rats were injected with saline. During the final 7 days, they also gave the rats a chemical called BrdU, which labels new neurons. When they examined the rats' brains, 69 per cent more new neurons had appeared in the brains of the Prozac-treated rats compared with the controls.
Jacobs and Fornal believe that the waxing and waning of neurogenesis in the hippocampus may be an important factor in explaining why people slump into depression and why they recover with SSRIs. …
HEADLINE: Under a cloud
BYLINE: Charles Seife (Washington DC)
HIGHLIGHT: When it comes to arms control, logic can't compete with party politics and paranoia
The latest attempt to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, lies dead on the floor of the US Senate. The CTBT, created back in 1996 to stop nuclear weapons proliferating throughout the world, still needed to be signed by another 18 countries - including the US - before it came into force. The US rejection effectively kills the agreement.
Republicans who dominate the Senate claimed the CTBT was dangerous: not only was it impossible to detect rogue states' clandestine tests, it threatened the reliability and safety of America's nuclear arsenal. Dismayed Democrats and international observers dismissed the Senate's move as reckless party politics. Thirty-two American Nobel prizewinning scientists attacked the logic of the decision, claiming that technology no longer required the US to explode weapons in order to test the reliability of its nuclear arsenal. …
The Stockpile Stewardship Program can't test a bomb from the explosion of its first stage to the ignition of its second stage. But it can verify that a bomb with a well-understood design is working because all its individual components are in good order.
"We understand the weapons very well," says engineer Frank Von Hippel, of Princeton University's Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives. This is why he says that non-nuclear testing is sufficient to ensure that a weapon will perform as advertised. "I think that the Stockpile Stewardship Program is even more than we need for reliability." Jon Wolfsthal, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, agrees. "The hawkish view is that our weapons will not remain reliable and safe, but they misunderstand that stockpile stewardship is actually working today." …
HEADLINE: Ethics should get back to true theology and moral
theory
BYLINE: Rev. JACK NICOLAY
I remember hearing about a confirmed bachelor friend who decided to marry, and his group of bachelor cronies jokingly said that it was a sign of the impending apocalypse. (The end of the world as we know it.) Ha Ha.
Looking at the news lately caused me to think of the reality of said apocalypse, and the truth that we are in dire need of a divine shake-up. I shudder to think what a Holy God thinks of our once great nation. May God have mercy on us.
"Ethicist" Peter Singer minces no words when he argues that the disabled and the unwanted should be killed. Not just passive euthanasia, but active, eugenic euthanasia for infants, the sick, and the elderly - everyone, to use his words, whose "life is not worth living."
In Germany, where memories are still fresh, he is compared to Hitler's theorist, Martin Bormann. In Australia, he has been called the country's "most notorious messenger of death." Wherever Singer speaks, protesters in wheelchairs chain themselves to the barricades that have to be erected around his lecture sites.
In the United States, however, Singer is given an endowed chair at Princeton University. This is a prestigious position at one of America's most prestigious universities, joining a faculty that once included Jonathan Edwards and J. Gresham Machen. We've come a long way, but in the wrong direction. …
HEADLINE: Vietnam haunts US campaigners
BYLINE: Ben Macintyre in Washington
Key candidates in the presidential race made defining personal choices in their response to military service, writes Ben Macintyre in Washington
SOME 30 years ago four young men faced the grim moral and philosophical dilemma posed by the Vietnam War. Like so many American males who came of age in the 1960s, they made a series of defining personal choices.
Today, the decisions they made and the actions they took are reverberating through the presidential election campaign, for how the four leading candidates responded to the war has become central to their campaigns, for better or worse. …
Mr Bush has insisted that he joined the guard because he wanted to fly fighter jets, and not to avoid the conflict in Vietnam. "He didn't dodge the military," Craig Stapleton, a longtime Bush confidant told The Washington Post. "But he didn't volunteer to go to Vietnam and get killed either."
Nor did Bill Bradley, the former senator and basketball champion, whose approach to the war and the draft was perhaps the most carefully calculated of all. In 1966, his final year as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he wrote to his academic mentor at Princeton University seeking advice on what to do about military service.
As a professional basketball player with the New York Knicks, Mr Bradley could have bypassed waiting lists to get into the military reserve. Instead, in 1967, aged 24, he took advantage of an entirely legal but not widely publicised option that enabled people without prior military service to obtain a place in the Air Force Reserve. …
HEADLINE: Wichita Art Museum hires new director
DATELINE: WICHITA, Kan.
The Wichita Art Museum has hired a new director, ending a 10-month national search to fill the vacancy left when former director Inez Wolins resigned in December.
The museum on Wednesday hired Charles Steiner, associate director of The Art Museum, Princeton University, to head the museum best known for its Roland P. Murdock collection of early American paintings. …
His work at Princeton and at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art makes him more than qualified for the job, Higdon said. …
HEADLINE: Newly Formed e-MEDx Introduces First Web-based
Disease and Care Management Technology
DATELINE: BETHESDA, Md.
New suite of software solutions revolutionizes care management across the entire healthcare spectrum
A new company, e-MEDx, Inc., was formed today with seasoned executives from both the healthcare and healthcare information technology industry to introduce the first full suite of software solutions for managing the entire continuum of care over the Web, from utilization management to case management and disease management. …
Jonathan C. Javitt, M.D., M.P.H., Vice Chairman and Chief Science Officer
Jonathan Javitt serves as vice chairman and chief science officer of e-MEDx. Dr. Javitt previously founded and served as chairman and president of Certitude, Inc., where he developed the Managed Care Expert(TM) a patented software application for forecasting the medical utilization and financial implications of managed care contracts. Dr. Javitt holds an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.D. from Cornell University, and a M.P.H. in health management from Harvard University.
HEADLINE: A Better Idea Has Replaced 'In Loco Parentis'
BYLINE: GLENN C. ALTSCHULER and ISAAC KRAMNICK By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER and ISAAC KRAMNICK
A few months ago, an article on the front page of The New York Times announced a "revolution" in undergraduate life, reporting that colleges and universities are bringing back in loco parentis with a regime of rules and regulations. The Times claimed that students now seem less hostile to guidance by college officials, and that baby-boomer parents are increasingly insisting that faculty and staff members do more to supervise students outside the classroom.
According to the Times, many institutions now ban parties on the campus if an adult is not present, prohibit students from rushing a fraternity or sorority in their first semester, and have established "living and learning communities," with professors residing in the dorms.
The Times is only partly right: In loco parentis is not really making a comeback, but living-and-learning communities may be changing students' lives.
In the 19th century, the golden age of in loco parentis, academic regulations covered virtually all aspects of students' lives, from libido to laundry. For instance, in 1885 the Princeton University faculty resolved that "should any students continue to have their washing done in town as heretofore, it must be done under the supervision of the College office." …
The ballyhooed return of in loco parentis, it seems to us, is little more than a series of new rules -- adopted to minimize liability and litigation -- to regulate the consumption of alcohol on campuses. Significantly, since suuch rules have been on the books, drunken students have virtually never been disciplined, dorm rooms have almost never been inspected, and binge drinking has reached epidemic proportions. …
HEADLINE: Population And Debt
Sir, - Headlines heralding the birth of the world's six billionth child forced me to conclude that the population controllers were again trying to whip up hysteria about "out-of-control" world population, even though they have been wrong before in their predictions.
While the population of the world has increased since the 1800s, food production has increased much more rapidly; rice production has risen by 40 per cent and wheat production has more than doubled. A number of major studies have concluded that there is still a large potential for world food production. Professor Jacqueline Kasan, professor of economics at Humboldt University, California, confirmed this in a talk she gave in Dublin a couple of years ago.
The director of population research at Princeton University, Ansley J. Cole, states that of the 31 highly developed countries, 21 have a birth rate below replacement level. "More coffins than cradles" is the expression used, a development which brings other social and economic problems with it. …
The population controllers come into these countries with their anti-family policies of contraception, sterilisation and abortion, and, as one speaker put it: "They have a policy of killing the poor of the world, and it's as if a man would come into your house and say: 'I will help you but first I will kill your children.' They don't see people as important; they only see them as problems." …
Yours, etc.,
Roisin Barr, Pearse Road, Sligo.
SERIES: STORIES THAT SHAPED THE CENTURY / From the Pages of the Los Angeles Times
HEADLINE: STORIES THAT SHAPED THE CENTURY; EINSTEIN UNVEILS THE
SECRETS OF PHYSICS
BYLINE: ABIGAIL GOLDMAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Albert Einstein did not receive great press at first for his most famous work--probably the most well-known, if not widely understood, scientific postulate of the 20th century--the theory of relativity.
Indeed, his 1921 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded not for his seminal work, but for his 1905 efforts on the photoelectric effect. The Los Angeles Times article from 1949, heralding Einstein's "latest discovery," was actually describing just an addition to the earlier work that ought to have been front-page news.
Einstein's greatest theory was alternately misunderstood and castigated, but even during Einstein's lifetime, it was revered enough that many considered him the world's greatest living scientist. …
Einstein held strong moral convictions.
He advocated respect for individual rights, peace and socialism. But Germany's vicious anti-Semitism convinced Einstein of the need for a Jewish homeland. He was teaching at Caltech when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Vilified at home, Einstein accepted a permanent teaching position at Princeton University in 1933. …
HEADLINE: Irish Poetry Travels East
BYLINE: By Anna Andreeva
Close your eyes and think of Ireland, and three things come to mind: lush countryside, Guinness stout and literature. The last one - unlike Guinness, which has been in Moscow for some time - makes its first official visit to town this week. The Irish Poetry Festival, which runs through Nov. 9, started Thursday at the Gramophone club.
Sponsored by the British Council and the Irish Embassy, the festival brings six poets and a wealth of literary tradition to Moscow for six days of readings and educational workshops. Of the poets, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Frank Ormsby are from Northern Ireland. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, John Montague and Thomas McCarthy are from the Republic of Ireland. …
Paul Muldoon, winner of the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize for his "The Annals of China" and the Irish Times' 1997 Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, is one of Ireland's best-known contemporary poets. He is employed as a professor at both Oxford University and Princeton University. …
HEADLINE: Study Links Perfect Pitch to Tonal Language
BYLINE: By JAMES GLANZ
Most native speakers of languages that use tones to convey meaning may have a form of perfect pitch, according to new research. The results may suggest that many or even most babies are born with perfect pitch but lose it if they do not learn a tonal language or undergo early musical training.
Most people find it easy to perceive and sing musical tones relative to each other, a skill called relative pitch, but perfect pitch -- the ability to identify any note by name or to sing a given note without hearing a reference note beforehand -- is much lesss common. Perfect pitch turns up in no more than one person out of 10,000 in Western countries, according to some estimates.
The languages studied in the new research were Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, two major languages in which different rising and falling tones can impart different meanings to the same combination of vowels and consonants. For example, the Mandarin word "ma" can mean mother, hemp, reproach or horse depending on whether the spoken tone is flat, rising, falling, or falling and then rising. …
There remains the question, which Dr. Deutsch is attempting to answer with new research, of the precise connection between perfect pitch in music and tonal speech.
Dr. Perry Link, who teaches Chinese language and literature at Princeton University, says that he doubts the connection is direct. Native Chinese speakers, he says, are often unable to identify the tones they are correctly using, just as English speakers may use the language properly but be unable to parse their sentences grammatically. Absolute-pitch musicians, however, can explicitly name each tone they hear. …
HEADLINE: Feared, revered, misunderstood -- and all because of
hair
BYLINE: ALIAH D. WRIGHT
SOURCE: Gannett News Service
After finishing his workout at the gym, actor Keith Hamilton Cobb was reading at the juice bar when he felt someone touching his shoulder- length dreadlocks, he tells the authors of "Dreads."
"It's very beautiful," a woman told him. "It's not real, is it?"
"Yes, it's real."
"It's not real," she told a guy across the bar, unconvinced.
"OK, it's not real," Cobb told her, frustrated.
"But can you wash it?" She asked.
Sensing a way out of the conversation he told her: "No. In fact, it's filthy, so I wouldn't touch it if I were you."
She stood there for a moment, then declared, "You're probably not old enough to remember, but 20 years ago, Bo Derek was the first person to wear her hair like that."
(Actress Derek wore her hair in cornrows not dreadlocks in the movie "10" and was not the first person to wear her hair "like that.")
Such encounters are typical for some dreadwearers in this country. And even though the wearing of dreadlocks has surpassed religious and racial boundaries, it is not uncommon for dreadwearers to be ogled, fired or expelled from school for wearing locks and braids, says Noliwe Rooks, a history and African American studies professor at Princeton University and the author of "Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women." (Rutgers University Press, $14.95)
"That's not to say that everybody who wears locks to work around a corporate setting is getting fired," Rooks says. "In certain settings, where people have high incidents of client contact, the supervisors seem to think it casts a whole negative image on the whole company or will frighten the customers away." …
HEADLINE: Obituary; Richard Spohn Brokaw, physical chemist, at 76
Richard Spohn Brokaw of Strafford, Vt., a renowned physical chemist, died Oct. 31 as a passenger aboard EgyptAir Flight 990 that crashed off Nantucket en route to Cairo, Egypt. He was 76.
His wife, Virginia Chaplin, also died in the crash.
Born in East Orange, N.J., Mr. Brokaw graduated from the Putney School and later from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa., with honors in chemistry. …
After the war, Mr. Brokaw obtained a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University. He worked for NASA at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he specialized in combustion research and the physical chemistry of high temperature gases. …
HEADLINE: Karl Waage, 83, Paleontologist Who Ran a Yale Museum, Dies
Karl M. Waage, a paleontologist and former director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, died on Oct. 18 at Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Conn. He was 83.
Apart from running the museum and helping to train a generation of geologists and paleontologists in 40 years at Yale, Dr. Waage was chiefly interested in studying the fossil animals in sediments from the sea that stretched from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico 100 million years ago. …
He received a bachelor's degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1946, both from Princeton University. He joined the department of geology at Yale in 1946, became a full professor in 1967 and was chairman of the department from 1973 to 1976. …
HEADLINE: EDWARD CONGDON ROGERS, 91, of FAIR HAVEN
EDWARD CONGDON ROGERS, 91, of FAIR HAVEN, died Wednesday at home. He retired in 1975 as vice president from Irving Trust Co., New York. He served in the Army during World War II as an aide-de-camp to Gen. Gage at Fort Hancock. He was a member of the Rumson Country Club and the Sea Bright Beach Club. He was a graduate of Princeton University. Born in Omaha, Neb., he lived in Monmouth County for 50 years.
He was predeceased by a daughter, Leslie R. Shilling; and a sister, Martha Ann Rogers. Surviving are his wife of 67 years, Grace Fischer Rogers; a son and daughter-in-law, Richard and Ann; two grandsons, Bryan and Shawn Rogers of Memphis, Tenn.; and a granddaughter, Laura R. Shilling of Locust, Middletown.
A memorial service will be held at a later date. His body was donated to the University of Medicine and Dentistry.
HEADLINE: William Chastain Shelton, Labor Department Official, 83
William Chastain Shelton, 83, who retired from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1977 as assistant commissioner for foreign labor and trade, died Nov. 1 at a hospital in Miami. He had heart ailments.
Mr. Shelton, who moved to Miami from Silver Spring last year, was born in Athens, Ga., and raised in Washington. He was a graduate of Central High School and Princeton University. He did graduate work in chemistry and economics at the University of Chicago. …
HEADLINE: Garrick Grobler, 35
Garrick Grobler, 35, a Washington lawyer and a partner in the firm of Ross, Dixon and Bell, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Nov. 3 at his home in Washington. The D.C. Medical Examiner's office said the death was a suicide.
Mr. Grobler had been with Ross Dixon since moving to Washington in 1989. He specialized in trial work from document reviews to depositions to travel for long trials across the country. He became a partner in his firm in 1996.
He was born in Easton, Md., where during his boyhood he hunted and sailed on the Miles River. He was an honors graduate of Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis on Afrikaner politics after living in South Africa and working as a welder at a factory in the northern Transvaal. While at Princeton he played rugby and sailed. He also graduated from the University of Virginia law school, where he met his wife, Anne Margaret Grobler. …
HEADLINE: ROBERT LINN; Classical composer; 74
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES -- Classical composer Robert Linn, whose more than 80 works have been performed on six continents, has died. He was 74.
Mr. Linn died Oct.28 at St. Vincent's Hospital from complications of cancer, according to a Monday announcement from the University of Southern California, where he was emeritus professor of the Thornton School of Music. …
Born in San Francisco, Mr. Linn studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and Roger Sessions at Princeton University before attending USC, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in music.