Soundbites

Here is a sampling of quotations from Cornell University faculty, students and staff that have appeared recently in the national and international news media:

"Suddenly the computer became a telescope for the mind, a way of exploring inaccessible processes like the collision of black holes or the frenzied dance of subatomic particles -- phenomena that are too large or too fast to be visualized by traditional experiments, and too complex to be handled by pencil-and-paper mathematics."

--Steven Strogatz, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, discussing the first "computer experiment" conducted by Enrico Fermi in 1953, in an op-ed in The New York Times, March 4.

"There's a lot of hogwash out there."

--Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors Laboratory in the College of Human Ecology, in an article that advises on products with good ergonomic design, in the March issue of Popular Science.

"In programming, it's free game. It's whatever the producers of these programs decide to show."

--Rosemary Avery, professor of policy analysis and management, discussing concerns about the amount of alcohol drinking portrayed on television's reality shows, in USA Today, Feb. 18.

"... we've done it at great sacrifice. We seem to have jettisoned our position of being conscientious intellectual activists for career mobility and academic success."

--James E. Turner, professor of Africana studies, speaking at the Conference on the State of Black Studies in New York, commenting on the success black scholars have had in publishing books related to African-American studies, on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Feb. 7.

"[Value stocks] are not particularly risky ... [and] ... may simply represent good value for investors. In one or two years we will see companies start to change the way they use their cash resources. Instead of buying back shares, they will start paying dividends."

--Roni Michaely, professor of finance, Johnson Graduate School of Management, in a story citing his research with colleagues, in The New York Times, Feb. 7.

"The enemy-release hypothesis argues that invaders' success results from reduced attacks by natural enemies from their native habitat. The biotic-resistance hypothesis says that invaders' impacts are limited by interactions with native species, including natural enemies, in their new habitat. Our study found both factors are important in determining whether an invading species thrives or struggles to survive."

--Alison Power, professor of science and technology studies and dean of the Graduate School, describing a new Cornell study that examines how alien plant species can successfully take over new territory, in The Independent (London), Feb. 6.

"The historical imagination ... is not something the literary imagination can ignore in fictionalizing history, because modern minds care about both. Only the best practitioners know how to solve the difficult problem of reconciling and integrating them."

--Cushing Strout, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, emeritus, in the winter issue of Partisan Review, cited in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 3.