Khaled Abou El Fadl, recently appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom by President George W. Bush, will deliver a free public talk titled "Islam and Human Rights" Friday, Sept. 19, at 5 p.m. in Auditorium D of Goldwin Smith Hall on the Cornell University campus. Abou El Fadl, a visiting professor at Yale Law School and professor of law at the University of California-Los Angeles, is one of the leading authorities in Islamic law in the United States and Europe. He teaches Islamic law, Middle Eastern investment law, immigration law and courses related to human rights and terrorism. He also works with various human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights. (September 17, 2003)
Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America since 1995, will be the keynote speaker at the closing banquet for the Engineers Without Frontiers USA (EWF-USA) first national conference Sept. 17-20 at Cornell University. Offenheiser, who is a Cornell graduate, will speak Sept. 20 at the Clarion Hotel near the Cornell campus (the public is invited to attend his talk, which will begin at about 8 p.m., without charge). Boston-based Oxfam America is part of an international confederation of 12 organizations cooperating to combat suffering and poverty in more than 100 countries. (September 16, 2003)
Süleyman Demirel, the former president and four-time premier of Turkey, will give a public lecture Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 8 p.m. in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall at Cornell University. He will speak on "Turkish-U.S. Relations: New Political Landscape of the Middle East since the Collapse of the U.S.S.R." The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is part of Demirel's three-day visit to Cornell, during which he will meet faculty and administrators to acquaint them with Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Project, known as GAP, for Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi. The visit will involve discussions of possible joint initiatives involving Cornell, the State University of New York system and the Turkish Higher Education Council. (September 16, 2003)
Cornell University's Department of Food Science announced that Crowley Foods Inc. of Albany, N.Y., with a score of 90.6 out of a possible 100, is the producer of the highest quality milk in New York state for 2003. Upstate Farms of Buffalo came in second place with a score of 87.9. Rounding out the top five high-quality milk producers in the state were: Stewarts Processing Corp. of Saratoga Springs, Parmalat/Sunnydale Farms of Brooklyn and Wendt's Dairy of Niagara Falls. The selection is part of the New York State Milk Quality Improvement Program and is sponsored by the New York Milk Promotion Order. Analytical testing is done at Cornell. (September 15, 2003)
Cutberto Garza, professor and former director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University, has been reapppointed director of the division.
The Corporation for National and Community Service, which administers the AmeriCorps program, has awarded the Cornell University Public Service Center's Raising Education Attainment Fellowship Challenge (REACH) program with 25 AmeriCorps educational awards, totaling $27,000. The funds will support 25 REACH/AmeriCorps fellows, who will work with local nonprofit organizations to mobilize Cornell students to help tutor and mentor children in the Ithaca area and in surrounding schools and communities. REACH is a student-driven and -initiated program at Cornell established in 1999 to coordinate and strengthen services provided to Ithaca area schools and community agencies. It includes REACH fellows as well as America Reads Challenge (ARC) and America Counts Challenge (ACC) federal work-study students. Fellows recruit, mobilize and organize a diverse group of student tutors, helping them gain the necessary resources, peer support and leadership skills to assist in enhancing the academic achievement of area children in pre-K through ninth grade. (September 15, 2003)
The Tower of Babel might get built after all. While thousands of different languages are spoken around the world, 90 percent of them are dying and are expected to vanish in the next few decades. But Cornell University engineers have come up with a mathematical model that for the first time quantifies "language death" and may offer strategies for those who want to preserve an endangered language. (September 11, 2003)
A team of Cornell University graduate students has taken third place in the 2002-03 SiGe (Silicon Germanium) Design Challenge, sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC). The team of Daniel Kucharski, Drew Guckenberger and Jing-Hong Conan Zhan, graduate students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded a prize of $10,000 for an optical fiber transceiver designed to operate at frequencies up to 10 gigabytes per second. The device combines on a single chip the jobs currently done by three chips in converting electrical signals to and from optical pulses in fiber-optic transmission. (September 10, 2003)
Good moos: Cornellia, the plastic cow that has been missing from atop the Cornell University Dairy Bar since Aug. 27, was found early this morning in a paddock at the large-animal facility at the university's College of Veterinary Medicine. "Cornellia was returned unharmed, except her red ribbon was missing. We replaced it with a yellow evidence ribbon," said Lt. David Nazer of the Cornell Police. He believes Cornellia was taken as a prank. (September 10, 2003)
It may soon be possible to produce a low cost, high-value, high-strength fiber from a biodegradable and renewable waste product for air filtration, water filtration and agricultural nanotechnology, report polymer scientists at Cornell.
Sheila C. Johnson, philanthropist and co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), will give a public address on the Cornell University campus Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 4 p.m. in the Statler Hotel Ballroom. Johnson's address is part of the Moses and Loulu Seltzer Lecture Series at Cornell and it is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the talk. Both events are sponsored by Cornell's university-wide Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise Program. (September 9, 2003)
