News Archives

Films that question

This year's edition of the Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival, which stops at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Feb. 26-28, features several works that ask provocative questions. Question Number One: Who owns the stories of indigenous cultures on display in Western ethnographic museums such as Penn's?

Temps find steadier work at Penn's Job Center

By Sandy Smith Looking for work, or looking for workers? Short-term or long-term? The Penn Job Center has you covered. The Job Center, operated by Todays Penn Partnership since last July, offers one-stop shopping for people looking for and offices looking to fill support positions. The center deepens the partnership between Penn's Division of Human Resources and Todays Office Staffing, which has been providing temporary office staff to the University since 1995.

Reefer Madness update

Thomas Anthony (Brian Appel, C'01) and Mary St. Helen (Ryan Baber, C'02), who are not quite hip enough, are supposed to reach out to youth in a video against drug abuse, a sort of play within Mask and Wig's play, "From Here to Maturity." The all-male show will continue tonight, tomorrow and Saturday, and March 18 and 19 (the 20th is sold out) at their clubhouse, 310 Quince Street. For information and tickets, call 898-6791 or 898-9999, mailbox WIG.

Fantasy getaways

The dream spring break vacation of an area travel agent probably includes a land free of spring break travelers trying to arrange their dream spring break. Fantasy vacations may differ in locale, but our writer on Locust Walk noted a few similarities. Warm weather is a common one, as are foreign lands and, well, foreign bodies. Meg Thompson, Wharton, Class of '00 "Ideally for spring break I'd like to be stranded on a desert island with nothing except that cute actor David Borneaz and a bottle of tanning oil."

Beck is back

What does a world-rock sensation do for an encore? "World Cafe" listeners can find out March 12, when Beck talks with host David Dye about his latest album. There's plenty of good stuff before and after that, though: Thursday, Feb 25 V2 recording artists Mercury Rev perform work from their latest album, "Deserter's Songs" Friday, Feb 26 Liz Phair joins David for a performance and interview featuring music from her latest album, "Whitechocolatespaceegg"

Class soaks up alcohol information

While alcohol use on campuses overall is on the decline, there's still a hangover: a larger percentage of the students who do drink, drink heavily. A group of Penn students are enrolled in a General Honors seminar aimed at identifying alcohol-related problems at Penn and devising student-led approaches to reducing them. The 12 students in the new seminar include drinkers and teetotalers, students acting out of altruism and out of enlightened self-interest. John Buchanan (C'01) falls into that last category.

Five win Sloan Fellowships

Five Penn faculty were named recipients of the coveted Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Fellowships, awarded annually to promising young faculty. Each of the five will receive a two-year grant of $35,000 for their research. The recipients are:

CONFERENCE CALL

"I'd cook something, and my friends would say, you should do a TV show."

Photo by Jeff Duckworth

Joshi in NAE

Aravind K. Joshi, Ph.D., the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and Director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Joshi's election recognizes his four decades of research in cognitive science. His research specialty, natural language processing, draws on computer science and linguistics to study how computers can process text and speech to understand language structure in useful ways.