Brighten up: If you’re still in the dark about making your University City home brighter and more attractive, there’s help. UC Brite, the University City District program that assists homeowners who purchase exterior lighting for their properties, is now accepting applications for lighting projects this spring. Property owners interested in installing outside lighting have until May 17 to submit participation agreements to the UCD. For more information about UC Brite, call D-L Wormley at the UCD, 215-243-0555, ext. 229.

“Justice” is served—in print: “Justice Talking,” the syndicated radio program produced by Kathryn Kolbert of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, is now available on paper, in the form of a syndicated column distributed by Knight-Ridder News Service. The column, which made its debut April 12, will provide 30 pro-and-con essays a year on legal issues, drawn from the debates aired on the program. The radio show, which taped its 100th installment April 15, also continues to collect kudos. The program on the 2000 Presidential election was selected as a finalist for a Sidney Hillman Foundation Media Award in the radio/television category, and the legal reference site Legalengine.com named the “Justice Talking” Web site its Site of the Week March 4, calling it “by far the best collection of audio archives on the Web for important legal issues of the day.” Kolbert herself also won an award recently (see “Awards & Honors”).

Welcome the old grads back: Commencement is just around the corner, and with it Alumni Weekend, May 10-12. Serving as an Alumni Weekend volunteer lets you experience the fun and festivities of Penn class reunions without actually having to take classes and graduate first—and you even get fed for your efforts. If you would like to serve as an Alumni Weekend volunteer, call Isabel Mapp, faculty, staff and alumni volunteer services director, at 215-898-2020.

Penn in ink: In an effort to provide irrigation water for farmers, Iraq is building a dam on the lower Tigris River that will innundate the ancient city of Assur in about five years. As a result, The Christian Science Monitor reported April 4, archaeologists are scrambling to excavate as much as they can from the site, a task made harder by international sanctions. “The loss of a place like Assur, which was a world capital, would be a catastrophe for archaeology,” said Richard Zettler, who is the associate curator-in-charge at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. …Nurse burnout, it turns out, is a problem on both sides of the Atlantic. The Independent of London ran a story March 26 on the difficulty Britain’s National Health Service is having hanging on to the thousands of new nurses who graduate each year. Linda Aiken, the Leadership Professor of Nursing, whose study of U.S. nurse burnout was widely cited last year, told the paper, “I found that three in 10 nurses in England and more than two in 10 in the U.S. said they planned to leave the profession in the next year.”