5/18
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Hearing about AIDS through the grapevine
In Kenya and Malawi, the prevalence of HIV in the adult population is often at 30 percent and higher, usually fairly equally distributed between men and women. Sociology Professor Susan Watkins has traveled to small villages in these countries to research the effects of gossip on the dissemination of information about AIDS. “We’re trying to figure out what people are doing to protect themselves and how they’re sorting that out in these conversations with other people,” Watkins said.
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Play it again, David
“World Cafe” host David Dye is on vacation the week of May 8, which gives the Cafe staff a chance to dust off some of their favorite recent shows for you to enjoy all over again. There’s also great new stuff from next door (Marah, May 5) and halfway around the world (Japan’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, May 17) to round out the next two weeks. Thursday, May 4 Singer/songwriter David Gray performs music from his latest album, “White Ladder”
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Freshmen get dean
Lorraine Sterritt, Ph.D., will be the College of Arts and Sciences’ first-ever Dean of Freshmen, beginning July 1. Sterritt, who comes here from Harvard, where she was Associate Dean of Freshmen for Academic Affairs, will be responsible for overseeing the College’s recently overhauled freshman advising system and for planning the College’s newly expanded orientation for new students. Before her four years at Harvard, Sterritt worked with freshman and sophomores at Princeton, where she earned her doctorate in French literature.
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Yu Hsiu Ku
The Center City apartment of Yu Hsiu Ku, Ph.D., is chock full of the stuff of a full and rich life. On the bookshelves are binders holding the thousands of Chinese poems he has written; some time this year, they should be joined by another volume — a collection of 100 of those poems translated into English for the first time.
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American power not permanent
Popular wisdom has it that “globalization” might just as well be “Americanization” — that the world is losing its cultural diversity to the sweep of the United States, and that no military political power can stop the deadening march of McDonald’s, Coke, and “Seinfeld” to the far reaches of the earth. Fareed Zakaria doesn’t agree.
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Survey kicks off honor code revival
First the good news: Cheating is a violation of their personal honor code, said 93 percent of Penn students who responded to a University Honor Council (UHC) survey on cheating. Next, the bad news: Nearly half of respondents didn’t think that copying homework was cheating. And even worse, nearly 40 percent believed fabricating lab data was OK. Hello-o. Fabricating lab data OK?
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Handle with care
The executive director of the Hillel Foundation at Penn was the latest victim of a recent rash of terroristic threats across the country, according to the University Police. All of the incidents reported so far have been similar to the one that threatened Rabbi Howard Alpert at Hillel April 25. In each case, someone received either a letter or package filled with a substance that the sender claimed was anthrax or an anonymous phone call from a person who claimed to have placed the potent toxin inside a building.
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“Whatever you do, you’re going to have to kill one of the holy cows of cosmology, throw away one thing that people believe a lot in.”
Max Tegmark, assistant professor of physics, on how new photographs taken by a balloon-borne telescope suggest the most popular version of the Big Bang theory may need some adjustments (The New York Times, April 27)
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“We’re not the resource for ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’”
We were intrigued by a factoid that crossed our desk a few months back: the State Data Center, the clearinghouse for statistical information about Pennsylvania, had cited the University of Pennsylvania Library’s reference desk as the most-frequently-consulted resource in the state for data on the state. We thought that was a big deal. Actually, it’s really trivial. It’s only a small part of the reference desk’s mission.
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Two Guggenheims, 11 Fulbrights
Among 182 scholars and artists designated to receive this year’s John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships are Penn faculty members Hai-Lung Dai, Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of Chemistry, who will study chemical reaction control, and Robert Blair St. George, Ph.D., Professor of Folklore and Folklife, who will study the spoken language and oral poetics in early New England.