It's June 2002 and the desks in Alan Fiero's seventh-grade science classroom are empty. But the students from Farnsworth Middle School in Guilderland, N.Y., aren't on vacation.
New marriage-promotion welfare rules proposed by the Bush administration will violate poor women's privacy rights and will not work, says a position paper written by three academics associated with Cornell University. The rules are expected to be reintroduced in the House of Representatives next week as part of the welfare bill, and brought to a vote as early as Tuesday, Feb. 11. (February 7, 2003)
Donald R. Viands has been named associate dean of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and director of the college's Office of Academic Programs. Viands, whose appointment became effective Jan. 1.
Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach for America, will be speaking on Cornell University's campus Monday, Feb. 10, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in Barnes Hall Auditorium. Kopp's talk, "A Simple Idea and an Extraordinary Vision," is free and open to the public. It is part of the Park Leadership Speakers series sponsored by Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. (February 6, 2003)
Families, school children and community groups throughout North America are expected to participate in the seventh annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), Feb. 13-16.
At a time when birds in North America face survival challenges -- ranging from loss of habitat to introduced predators and diseases such as West Nile virus -- ornithologists are counting on birders of every age and skill level to keep their eyes open Feb. 14-17. That's the date for the sixth annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), an Internet-based event that last winter had 47,000 participants identifying millions of commonplace and rare birds. "This time we need every birder to join us," said Frank Gill, senior vice president of science of the National Audubon Society. "The Great Backyard Bird Count has become a vitally important means of gathering data to help birds, but it can't happen unless people take part. Whether you're a novice or an expert, we need you to take part and help us help birds." (February 05, 2003)
Richard Cahoon, vice president of Cornell Research Foundation, Cornell University's technology licensing and marketing arm, has been appointed interim director.
A tiny, voracious fly called the swede midge, which already has eaten its way across eastern Canada's cabbage and broccoli fields, now is threatening to descend on crops in states along the northern U.S. border. On Feb. 11 an educational session on the swede midge will be held for registered growers at the 2003 New York State Vegetable Conference in Liverpool, N.Y
Johann Peter Krusius, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University and a co-inventor of an important new flat-screen television and video technology, died of cancer on January 30, 2003, at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca. He was 58. At Cornell, where he was a former director both of the Joint Services Electronics Program and the Electronic Packaging Program, he led a research group that designed and developed techniques for joining color ßat-panel television and video screens to make large active matrix LCDs (liquid crystal displays) made up of three panels tiled together into a single, seamless piece of glass. (February 4, 2003)
In this world of instant Internet information, the use of scholarly documents in writing term papers at U.S. colleges and universities has plummeted and the use of undependable Web resources has soared. Despite this grab-the-information-and-go attitude, there is good news from the stacks. A Cornell University library sciences study shows that when instructors set minimal bibliographic guidelines for doing research, the number of citations of scholarly materials used returns to levels of the pre-Internet world. Online scholarly resources can range from the Congressional Record to academic research reports. (February 3, 2003)
Andrew Simpson, a senior geneticist with the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in São Paulo, Brazil, will discuss the challenges that remain in decoding the human genome in a lecture at Cornell University on Wednesday, Feb. 12, at 4 p.m. in Room G-10 of the Biotechnology Building. His lecture, titled "Transcriptomics: The Link Between Sequencing the Human Genome and Human Biology," is free and open to the public. It is the third in a series of lectures sponsored by the Cornell/Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Partnership. (January 30, 2003)
