Cornell University News Service Releases
January, 2000
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Index to all monthsFor the full text of any story, click on the filename at the end of the description. These stories are also available via anonymous FTP at cunews.cornell.edu. Electronic queries may be made to cunews@cornell.edu.
Tompkins County Red Cross offers disaster services training
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University's Public Service Center is encouraging members of the Cornell community to take advantage of training courses in disaster services being offered by the Tompkins County Chapter of the American Red Cross in February and March.
The Red Cross offers emergency aid to people in crisis from natural disasters and other emergencies, like fires. The Tompkins County chapter has aided dozens of students over the past few years who have been forced to leave off-campus apartments because of fires. The Red Cross also sets up mass shelter facilities to house people during communitywide disasters. If such a disaster occurs in Tompkins County, Cornell facilities may be used for shelters, and the Red Cross would ask for volunteers from campus to help operate them. Red.Cross.Disaster.tng.lgk.html (January 31, 2000)
John Lewis to speak at Cornell's Martin Luther King Jr. observance, Feb. 3
ITHACA, N.Y. -- John Lewis, congressman from Georgia who has been a leader in the Civil Rights Movement for more than three decades, will speak at Cornell University's annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration Thursday, Feb. 3, at 4:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel.
Cornell President Hunter Rawlings will introduce Lewis at the event, which is free and open to the public. The Cornell gospel choir How Excellent will sing. Lewis.King.lgk.html (January 28, 2000)
Jane Brody talk highlights Health Awareness Week, Feb. 7-14
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The 20th annual Health Awareness Week on the Cornell University campus is scheduled for Feb. 7-14, and it will feature a free lecture Feb. 9 by Jane Brody, author and New York Times Personal Health columnist.
The annual week of health-related information and educational activities on campus is sponsored by the Gannett: Cornell Health Services' Clinical Volunteer Program and co-sponsored by Cornell Fitness Centers. The theme for the week is "Take Charge of Your Health," focusing on preventative medicine and healthy lifestyles. Health.Awareness.Wk.html (January 27, 2000)
Harvard economist Juliet Schor to discuss decline of leisure time Feb. 1
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Juliet Schor, a professor of women's studies at Harvard University and author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure, will give a free and open lecture titled "Time, for a Change" on Tuesday, Feb. 1, at noon in the Faculty Commons of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall on the Cornell University campus.
Sponsored by the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, the lecture will cover the acceleration of daily life, the causes behind it and alternative life-styles. Schor will meet with Careers Institute faculty and postdoctoral and predoctoral fellows during her one-day visit. juliet.schor.ssl.html (January 27, 2000)
Milstein family makes $10 million gift to Architecture, Art and Planning
ITHACA, N.Y. -- A plan to build a new gateway to Cornell University -- and create a much-needed facility for its architecture program -- will become a reality thanks to a gift of $10 million from Irma Milstein and her family.
The gift honors Irma's husband, Paul. One of New York City's leading developers of residential and commercial real estate properties, he is considered a visionary in his field by many. Milstein.gift.lm.html (January 27, 2000)
Royal Society of New Zealand elects Shayle Searle, Cornell statistics professor, honorary fellow
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The Royal Society of New Zealand has elected Shayle R. Searle, Cornell University professor emeritus of biometrics, an honorary fellow. The Royal Society is the counter part of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
The Royal Society bestows the fellowship on scientists who have "contributed significantly and with excellence to New Zealand science." Searle.bpf.html (January 27, 2000)
Board of Trustees to meet in New York City Jan. 27-29
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The Cornell University Board of Trustees will hold its first meeting of 2000 at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, Jan. 27 through Jan. 29.
The full board will meet in open session from 1:45 to 3:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 28, and in closed session Saturday, Jan. 29, from 9 to 11:45 a.m. in the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Education Center in the medical college's Harkness Medical Research Building, 1300 York Ave. Among topics of discussion will be a report from Cornell President Hunter Rawlings. The board is expected to approve 2000-01 tuition rates for the endowed colleges. Trustees.advance.jp.html (January 27, 2000)
At Cornell Feline Health Center, new cat book author's muse is Dr. Mew
ITHACA, N.Y. -- If the new book from the director of Cornell University's Feline Health Center reads like "What Your Cat Wants You to Know about Kitty Care," that's not surprising.
Author and veterinarian James R. Richards had lots of inspirational help with his ASPCA Complete Guide to Cats (Chronicle Books, ISBN 0-8118-1929-9) from one of the best-cared-for cats in the country: his purring office mate, Dr. Mew. catbook.hrs.html (January 25, 2000)
1-800-KITTY-DR, nation's only feline consultation service, puts Cornell veterinary college experts on the line for anxious cat owners
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The 1-800-KITTY-DR phone rings in Cornell University's Feline Health Center and veterinarian Fiona Hickford is on the line, ready to answer questions for a consultation fee.
KITTY_DR.hrs.html (January 25, 2000)
Robert F. Holland, scientist who helped usher in the age of hygienic, aseptic packaging of milk, dies at 91
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Robert Francis Holland, whose early research as a Cornell University food science professor helped usher in the age of the aseptic milk carton in the United States, died in Ithaca, Jan. 16, 2000. He was 91.
Every schoolchild during the last 50 years who has opened a small carton of milk in a lunch cafeteria can thank Holland. He pioneered by bringing a prototype Tetra Pak milk-carton filling machine, the first in the nation, to Cornell University's dairy plant in 1956. While Holland did not invent the Tetra Pak carton -- a container shaped like a tetrahedron, or four-sided triangle -- he was the first in the United States to test its efficacy. Because it was considered somewhat unwieldy for milk, the tetrahedron-shaped container ultimately gave way in popularity to the gable-top aseptic container. OBIT.Holland.bpf.html (January 25, 2000)
Popular 'Mind and Memory' public lecture series begins Jan. 24
ITHACA, N.Y. -- David Feldshuh, Cornell University professor of theatre, film and dance and artistic director of the university's Center for Theatre Arts (CTA), will launch the popular "Mind and Memory" lecture series Monday, Jan. 24, from 2:55 to 4:10 p.m. in Uris Auditorium on campus. Feldshuh's lecture, free and open to the public, is titled "Creativity and the Actor."
"Mind and Memory: Explorations of Creativity in the Arts and Sciences," directed by Diane Ackerman, poet, author and visiting professor in the Society for the Humanities, is a four-credit course that features public lectures by Cornell faculty members and guests on Monday afternoons throughout the spring term. As the course title suggests, the lectures explore the nature of creativity in art as well as science and the dynamic role of memory in learning and discovery. mind.memory.html (January 21, 2000)
Unprecedented NASA grant supports Native Americas journal
ITHACA, N.Y. -- In an extraordinary partnership with NASA, the Akwe:kon
(ah-GWAY-go) Press at Cornell University published a double issue of its award-winning journal, Native Americas, titled "Global Warming, Climate Change and Native Lands." Released in January, the special issue features the work of 20 Native American writers and scholars. Nat.Am.NASA.html (January 21, 2000)
Study contradicts latest Supreme Court ruling in Virginia death penalty case
ITHACA, N.Y. --The Supreme Court unexpectedly issued a decision today that is a virtual death sentence for petitioner Lonnie Weeks. The ruling is directly contradicted by the findings of a study at Cornell University Law School. The Supreme Court held today in Weeks v. Angelone that when a capital-sentencing jury asks for clarification of a critical sentencing instruction, the trial court is under no obligation to answer them. The defendant, Weeks, argued that the jurors who sentenced him to death were confused, and didn't understand the law, which is why they asked for clarification. The five-member court majority rejected the claim. The court presumed that the jury, despite its question, understood the law. The chance that the jury was confused, wrote Chief Justice Rehnquist, was "at best" only a "slight possibility."
But a study to be published in March in the Cornell Law Review belies the Supreme Court's conclusion. The study empaneled 154 mock jurors in Virginia, where the real case was initially tried. Some received the same instructions as the actual jury in Weeks. Others received the clarification the judge could have provided, but didn't provide. The study found that jurors who received nothing but the original instruction were far more confused and more likely to impose the death penalty than those who received the clarification. The results demonstrate that, more likely than not, Weeks, the defendant in the capital case, is under a sentence of death simply because the jurors' question went unanswered. Garvey.law.release2.html (January 19, 2000)
Thousands of North Americans will log on Feb. 18-21 for Cornell-Audubon 'Great Backyard Bird Count 2000'
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Concerned that changes in climate and landscape are affecting birds in North America, scientists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society are asking volunteers across the continent to log on Feb. 18-21 at http://www.birdsource.org/ and tell them where the birds are in the Great Backyard Bird Count 2000.
Last winter, more than 42,000 reports were received at BirdSource, the interactive web site developed by the Cornell University lab and National Audubon. Results, in the form of colorful maps and charts, are available at the web site for all to view as quickly as reports arrive over the Internet. (Directions for participation are at the end of this news release.) GBBC_2000.hrs.html (January 19, 2000)
Cornell web sites provide expert information on hot nutrition topics and answer questions
Children's sorting of mastodon debris-in-a-bag could help explain climate change12,000 years ago
Robert R. Wilson, Cornell physicist and designer of particle accelerators, died Jan. 16 in Ithaca
Community Martin L. King Jr. Day Celebration at GIAC is Jan. 17
Thanks to lack of snow, Jack Frost is neither gnawing, nibbling nor even nipping on anyone's nose
Cornell and University of Vermont receive $3.8 million USDA grant to help cultivate budding food-product businesses
Black hole producing massive shock waves
State awards grants to Cornell to preserve endangered library materials
1999 drought topped year's most significant weather events in Northeast
Veterinary College uses forensic 'gold standard' to probe for trace chemicals in animal-poisoning cases
Cornell institute receives $3.5 million grant renewal to continue studies of how working couples cope
Harold D. Craft named vice president for administration and chief financial officer
Cornell awarded $8.5 million loan from Pew Trusts
New book traces Holocaust through five decades of literature, film
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets may trigger a quick weight loss, but it's only temporary and largely due to water loss, not body fat. Such a diet on a long-term basis also would probably promote chronic diseases. So says a Cornell University nutritional sciences professor on "Ask The Nutrition Expert," a recent feature on Cornell Cooperative Extension's Food and Nutrition World Wide Web site.
The overall site provides research-based information on food, nutrition and health, and food safety. The "Ask The Nutrition Expert" feature at
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University scientists are enlisting the help of schoolchildren to analyze tons of stuff that surrounded skeletons of the Chemung mastodons, the two extinct elephant-like creatures that died near the present-day Watkins Glen , N.Y., just as the last Ice Age was ending.
Five-pound bags of matrix (the paleontological term for material around a fossil) are offered to school classes, youth groups and anyone willing to sort though lots of little bones, shells, fossils, plant materials, rocks and clay -- with one warning for the squeamish: The bags might contain 12-millennium-old mastodon dung. mastodon.baggie.hrs.html (January 17, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Robert Rathbun Wilson, the experimental physicist who designed some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators used to study the fundamental nature of matter, died Jan. 16 at home in Ithaca. The former director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies and of the Enrico Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) was 85.
Wilson joined the Cornell physics faculty in 1947, after heading the Manhattan Project's Experimental Nuclear Physics Division in Los Alamos during World War II and serving briefly on the faculty of Harvard University. At the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, he designed a series of increasingly energetic particle accelerators that led to construction of the Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring (CESR) at the facility that now bears his name, the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory. RRWilson_obit.hrs.html (January 17, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- A community program to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. will be held Monday, Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Day, at the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC), 318 N. Albany St., from noon to 5 p.m. The program is free and open to all.
The annual celebration includes a luncheon, a keynote speech, workshops and performances by area choirs and the Latin Tops. This year's keynote speaker is Cal Walker, associate director of the Learning Strategies Center at Cornell University. Two hours of workshops will follow the luncheon, and they will include beadmaking, an elders speak-out, a youth speak-out, life-sized self-portraits, shadow puppets and a presentation and discussion of the video White Power: A Portrait of Hate. The program will conclude with dessert and choir performances. Day care will be provided free of charge for children 18 months to 5 years old, from 2 to 4 p.m. MLK.Day.at.GIAC.html (January 14, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Got snow?
Probably not if you live in the northeastern United States. Many cities and states across the region are setting or tying half-century records for the least amount of snow during this part of the season, according to climatologist Keith Eggleston at the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University. NRCC.NoSnow.bpf.html (January 12, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., and the University of Vermont will receive a four-year, $3.8 million grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to nurture small food-processing ventures into solid businesses by funding the Northeast Center for Food Entrepreneurship, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced Jan. 10.
"Entrepreneurship is increasing in the rural and urban landscapes of the Northeast. It is an important concept to support," says Olga Padilla-Zakour, Cornell assistant professor of food science and director of the Northeast Center for Food Entrepreneurship. "With this funding, we will be able to provide entrepreneurs with all the tools and information they need to start a food venture correctly." USDAGrant.bpf.html (January 12, 2000)
ATLANTA -- Something really shocking is going on in a microquasar, or black hole, dubbed "Old Faithful," some 40,000 light years from Earth. It seems to be behaving like a giant particle collider, with massive shock waves generating eruptions every 45 to 90 minutes.
This is the second time that Old Faithful, the first known microquasar in our galaxy, the Milky Way, has been observed to be acting strangely. Two years ago astronomers presented evidence, from X-ray and infrared observations, that the microquasar is sending out jets of hot gas at close to regular half-hour intervals. Eikenberry.blackholes.deb.html (January 11, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- New York State Librarian and Assistant Commissioner for Libraries Janet M. Welch recently announced three grants totaling more than $390,000 to Cornell University Library for cooperation in preserving endangered research materials.
These competitive grants are part of the Coordinated Preservation Program, enacted in 1984. They provide funds for cooperative activities among 11 comprehensive research libraries designated in education law: Columbia University; Cornell University; the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library; the SUNY centers at Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo and Stony Brook; New York State Library; New York University; Syracuse University; and the University of Rochester. NYS.Library.grants.html (January 11, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The drought that devastated agriculture in the northeastern United States was the most significant of 9 major weather events in the region last year, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) at Cornell University.
Dry conditions during the second half of 1998 served as prologue to the 1999 drought. After a wet January 1999, the months of February through August received only 76 percent of normal precipitation, making it the third driest February-August period in 105 years of record-keeping. Precipitation deficits for the 14 months ending August 1999 ranged from 6 inches to more than 14 inches across the region, according to Keith Eggleston, a senior climatologist at the center. NRCC.Top9.bpf.html (January 10, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Substances that are poisonous to animals can now be subjected to the same chemical scrutiny given to materials in high-profile human cases -- including the O.J. Simpson murder trial. That's because the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine has equipped its Analytical Toxicology Laboratory for the 'gold standard' in forensic testing: LC/MS/MS, or liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.
The state-of-the-art instrumentation already has proved its worth by detecting and confirming the presence of a horse-killing chemical that other established analytical techniques could not positively identify, according to Jack Henion, director of the laboratory and a professor of toxicology at Cornell. With his colleagues, Joseph Ebel, director of laboratory operations, Kerry Manzell, research support specialist, and a research group headed by Timothy Wachs, the team is responsible for detection and characterization of toxic substances that cause poor health or death in animal cases brought to the New York State College of Veterinary Medicine. API_2000.hrs.html (January 6, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Even though women work -- and prefer to work -- fewer hours than men, they invest more of themselves in their jobs than do male workers. That is just one finding from the Cornell Couples and Career Study at Cornell University, which includes one of the most detailed databases on the work and family careers of couples.
The study is part of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute which has just received a $3.5 million, three-year grant renewal from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The renewal will allow the institute not only to conduct a follow-up study on the 2,000 respondents in the Couples and Career Study but also to launch a new study of 1,000 couples in three communities in upstate New York. family.careers.ssl.html (January 6, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings today (Jan. 3) announced that he will recommend to the Board of Trustees the appointment of Harold D. Craft Jr. as vice president for administration and chief financial officer, effective Feb. 1, 2000.
Craft has served as vice president for facilities and campus services since 1993. The new position will replace that of senior vice president, now held by Frederick A. Rogers. Craft.vp.hnd.html (January 4, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University has been awarded an $8.5 million interest-free, seven-year loan from The Pew Charitable Trusts, for the development of programs in ethical reasoning and information sciences.
The award will fund course development in ethical reasoning and information sciences; the position of director of ethics and public life; and a new faculty position to help oversee an interdisciplinary approach to developing courses and training graduate students in the ethics of information sciences, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings said. Pew.grant.html (January 4, 2000)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- In the last decade of the 20th century, we saw a virtual cottage industry of books and films on the Holocaust, everything from an unexpurgated Diary of Anne Frank to Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning tragicomic film "Life Is Beautiful." In contrast, comparatively few Holocaust-related works were produced in the decade following World War II, when the horrific slaughter occurred. Dan Schwarz, professor of English and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, maintains there's a reason for this.
In his new book, Imagining the Holocaust (St. Martin's Press, Dec. 1999), Schwarz traces the evolution of major works that are often used in teaching about the Holocaust and makes an argument that the kinds of Holocaust stories that are possible to tell not only change over time but build on what has come before. Schwarz discusses the book on "New York and Company," Jan. 6 from noon to 12:45 p.m., on National Public Radio's WNYC-AM station, 820 on the AM dial. Schwarz.Holocaust.book.html (January 4, 2000)