Whenever Cornellians and campus visitors confess they must have missed the fabled Cornell Plantations, planners of the newly revised "Cornell Plantations Path Guide" politely disagree.
With the genomes of humans and several insects, animals and crop plants mapped or sequenced, biologists are turning their attention to single-celled algae no thicker than a human hair. Among the possible payoffs: crops requiring less fertilizer, a source of renewable energy and a new source for novel proteins.
ARECIBO, P.R. -- Arecibo Observatory, the world's most sensitive and largest radar-radio telescope, is inaugurating an annual lecture series named for William E. Gordon, who was professor of electrical engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., when he conceived of an instrument to study the properties of the ionosphere, the Earth's upper atmosphere. The inaugural lecture will be given Tuesday, Nov. 12, by Harold Ewen, a retired engineer who was a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in 1951 when he designed and built a horn antenna that would make the first detection of a hydrogen radio emission from interstellar space. Ewen will speak at 3:30 p.m. in the Angel Ramos Foundation Visitor Center at the observatory. The lecture is open to the public without charge. (October 24, 2002)
Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings assumed the chairmanship of the Association of American Universities (AAU) at its annual fall meeting held Oct. 20-22 at Emory University, after serving a one-year term as vice chair of the group. He succeeds Robert Berdahl, president of the University of California-Berkeley. John T. Casteen, president of the University of Virginia, was elected vice chair. (October 24, 2002)
The Cornell University Department of English will host a conference "Some Futures for the Twentieth Century," Oct. 25 and 26 in Goldwin Smith Hall D. All talks, including a post-conference reception and Saturday luncheon buffet, are free and open to the public. "In the wake of the millennium, scholars of British and U.S. 20th-century literature and culture are exploring innovative ways to think about their period -- a period that now has not only a beginning but an ending," said Molly Hite, Cornell professor of English and conference coordinator. "They are basically asking: What exactly was the 20th century?" (October 23, 2002)
The Cornell University Department of English will host a conference "Some Futures for the Twentieth Century," Oct. 25 and 26 in Goldwin Smith Hall D. All talks, including a post-conference reception and Saturday luncheon buffet, are free and open to the public. "In the wake of the millennium, scholars of British and U.S. 20th-century literature and culture are exploring innovative ways to think about their period -- a period that now has not only a beginning but an ending," said Molly Hite, Cornell professor of English and conference coordinator. "They are basically asking: What exactly was the 20th century?" (October 23, 2002)
Frank H.T. Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University, has been named winner of the American Geological Institute's (AGI) most prestigious award, the Ian Campbell Medal. Rhodes, an internationally renowned geologist and educator, will receive the award during the Geological Society of America (GSA) Presidential Awards Ceremony in Denver on Sunday, Oct. 28. Rhodes also is professor emeritus in the Cornell Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. (October 23, 2002)
After an investigation by the Ithaca Fire Department and Cornell Police, a Cornell student has been charged in connection with a fire that occurred in a fraternity house Oct. 18. Firefighters extinguished a fire in a mattress in the Zeta Psi fraternity, 534 Thurston Ave., at 11:53 p.m. on Oct. 18. The department's Fire Investigation Unit determined the cause of the fire as "incendiary." (October 22, 2002)
Michael Sturman, an associate professor of human resources management at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, was named editor of the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly as of July 2002.
Jewish leadership camps are big business today, with parents lining up to enroll their high school-age children in them, but the effectiveness of such programs has never been measured quantitatively -- until now. As part of a senior thesis research project, Noah Doyle, an undergraduate in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) from Commack, N.Y., is measuring whether such programs actually create leaders. "To what degree do the participants transfer the skills learned over the summer to their everyday lives? And how do such programs specifically develop Jewish leadership?" he asks. (October 21, 2002)
The New York Space Grant Consortium has been awarded $99,421 by NASA in one-year funding to help train and prepare the space agency's future workforce.
What can corporate-bound MBA students learn from trainers with the Ruckus Society, which normally teaches nonviolent social action techniques to anti-corporate activists? Apparently plenty. On Sept. 22, 40 students in senior lecturer Jan Katz's World Geopolitics class at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management spent five hours learning from three staff members of the Oakland, Calif.-based organization. The Ruckus Society, which grew out of a drive to protect federal forests from corporate interests in 1995, teaches environmental and human rights groups how to run effective social action campaigns, including such high-visibility techniques as hanging from billboards to get their message heard. (October 21, 2002)
