Helene R. Dillard, Cornell University professor of plant pathology, has been appointed director of Cornell Cooperative Extension and associate dean of Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and New York State College of Human Ecology. She succeeds D. Merrill Ewert, who took the position of president of Fresno Pacific University, Fresno, Calif., this past summer. Dillard's appointment begins Oct. 1. (September 30, 2002)
"Sex in the Stacks: A Zwickler Memorial Symposium on Sexuality and the Archives" will be held in Cornell University's Kroch Library Saturday, Sept. 28, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the library's Level 2B. It is free and open to the public. Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grants, made possible by support from the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation, have been awarded for the first time this year to provide financial assistance to scholars conducting research on sexuality with sources in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The first two Zwickler fellows -- Professor Leisa D. Meyer, College of William and Mary, and Professor William B. Turner, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee -- have done extensive research with Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection this summer. Additional funding for Meyer was provided through Cornell Law Professor Martha Fineman's Dorothea S. Clarke fund. Meyer, Turner and a panel of scholars will report on their research findings during the symposium and discuss the practicalities and theoretical considerations involved in conducting original research in human sexuality. (September 26, 2002)
More than 10,000 cars and easily three times that number of pedestrians crisscross the Cornell University campus each weekday. The number of times pedestrians travel a crosswalk and contend with oncoming traffic approaches a million times per week. Now, the ground rules for this interaction have changed. On campus, pedestrians now have the right of way in all crosswalks. Motorists and cyclists must yield to pedestrians -- slowing down and stopping if necessary. Drivers racing with pedestrians to get to intersections and cyclists weaving through crosswalks will be subject to enforcement penalties issued by Cornell Police. Throughout the fall, this will be enforced as part of the rules and regulations associated with the university's Campus Code of Conduct; by January 2003, it will be enacted as state law. (September 26, 2002)p>
Just as a network of highways was planned and built to bring goods to isolated pockets of the country, so we must act now to fund and build a national information network, says Matthew Drennan, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. Those places that already have invested heavily in the information economy are doing much better than those still relying on manufacturing and distribution, observes Drennan in The Information Economy and American Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Drennan shows how information-economy expansion benefits even the urban poor, a finding disproving earlier claims. (September 25, 2002)
Edna O'Brien, one of Ireland's foremost literary figures, will give a fiction reading as the first event in the new Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading Series Oct. 3.
If you think that summers are getting hotter, you could be right -- depending on where you live. Summers are heating up if you live in or near any major U.S. city. But in rural areas, temperatures have remained relatively constant. "What surprised me was the difference in the extreme temperature trends between rural and urban areas," says Arthur T. DeGaetano, Cornell associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, who reviewed temperature trends from climate-reporting stations across the United States over the past century and examined data from the last 40 years in greater detail. "I expected maybe a 25 percent increase for the urban areas compared to the rural ones. I didn't expect a 300 percent increase across the U.S." (September 25, 2002)
Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and computing and information science at Cornell, has been named a 2002 fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Revolutionary scientific thinker Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, a leading software system for technical computing and symbolic programming, and chief executive of Wolfram Research Inc., will present a lecture Wednesday, Oct. 2, on the Cornell University campus. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be in David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall at 7:30 p.m., with a question period scheduled for 8:30. (September 24, 2002)
The directors of two leading national anti-sweatshop organizations will present "Sweatshops Around the World: Reports from the Field" at Cornell on Oct. 1, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. The program, which is free and open to the public.
Rob Ryan, founder of Ascend Communications and Entrepreneur America, will be honored by Cornell University, Sept. 26 and 27, as Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year for 2002.
Earlier springs with warmer temperatures over the past 30 years have prompted a ubiquitous North American bird species, tree swallows, to begin laying eggs, on average, a week or more earlier.
