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)
The contents of the world's largest collection of nature sounds and videos of birds in their natural habitats soon will be accessible to the general public via the Internet, thanks to a gift of computer equipment to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology by EMC Corp.
Gene Network Sciences (GNS), a fledgling cancer-research company started by Cornell University graduate students and financed by Cornell business students, has been awarded a $2 million federal Advanced Technology Program (ATP) grant. ATP is administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and makes annual grants that are matched by industry. GNS was founded two years ago, and just 10 months ago it received funding of $125,000 from the Cornell Big Red Venture Fund, a venture capital group operated by students of Cornell's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. The investment was the fund's first in biotechnology. (October 21, 2002)
Cornell University Police, with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cortland Police Department, the Tompkins County District Attorney's office and the New York State Police, have completed a five-month investigation into the possession of child pornography. Robert E. Mosher, 39, of 3 Garfield St., Cortland, was arrested Oct. 17 at the New York State Police barracks in Owego, N.Y., and charged with two counts of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child, an E felony. Mosher was issued an appearance ticket to return to Ithaca Town Court on Monday, Nov. 11, at 9 a.m. (October 18, 2002)
D. Tyler McQuade, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, has won a $200,000 early career award from the New York State OfÞce of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) for research that strives to create polymers that mimic biological materials. The award is one of 10, totaling $2 million, given by the research agency to scientists across the state who are performing their research in the life sciences, biomedical sciences or in other life science-enabling disciplines, such as materials science and chemistry. (October 18, 2002)
Rami, Luna, Raven and Magpie, four "ambassador" animals from the Colorado-based Mission: Wolf program, will visit the Cornell University campus Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. in Robert Purcell Union for an educational presentation sponsored by Ecology House. The program about the natural history and current status of wild wolves is open to the public, free of charge, and children are particularly welcome. In their 15th annual fall visit to the Ithaca area, Mission:Wolf wolves and educators also will visit Dryden High School Oct. 28 at 7 p.m., in a visit sponsored by Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County and the Dryden Youth Commission. (October 18, 2002)
Glenn Murcutt, an architect from Down Under who has a one-person practice, is billed as an "ecological functionalist" and doesn't use a computer, took the architectural community by surprise last spring when he was named the winner of the Pritzker Prize, a lifetime achievement award that is architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Now Murcutt has another surprise: The designer of houses on Australia's rugged promontories and bluffs, who runs his Sydney practice alone and works mainly on private commissions, is coming to Ithaca to deliver a public lecture at the State Theater Thursday, Oct. 24, at 6:30 p.m. The event, which is free and open to all, is part of the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture series sponsored by Cornell University's Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. (October 18, 2002)
A major symposium at Cornell University on democratic reform and poverty alleviation in Africa will take place Oct. 24-26. The event is sponsored by Cornell's Institute for African Development in collaboration with the university's Poverty, Inequality and Development Initiative and Binghamton University's Center on Democratic Performance. Justice Johann Kriegler of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, that country's highest court, is the keynote speaker. His talk, "Democratic Reform in Africa," will take place Thursday, Oct. 24, at 6 p.m. in the Biotechnology Building's first-floor conference hall on Cornell's campus. It is free and open to the public. (October 17, 2002)