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George Weiss
Penn Trustee George Weiss (W ’65) began the Say Yes to Education Foundation in 1987 with a promise to 112 fifth-graders at West Belmont Elementary School in West Philadelphia: Graduate from high school, and I’ll pay for your college education. Sixty-two percent of those Belmont students graduated from high school, as opposed to 43 percent for that census tract in 1990.
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Students' summer school stops the clock
Lincoln Ellis (C’03), Linda Oh (C’02) and Rosanna Tran (C’03) didn’t take classes this summer. Instead, they learned lessons that aren’t found on any ivied campus. Oh said people in her community usually showed up over an hour late for workshops she planned. “In the beginning we were like, What’s wrong with these people? But we stepped back and said, What’s wrong with us? We’re so stuck in living by the minute hand. In Xilitla, most people don’t have watches or clocks.”
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A reluctant speaker explains herself (briefly)
Sylvia Plachy couldn’t have been happier. Her train from New York was delayed en route to Philadelphia, which meant that she arrived at the Arthur Ross Gallery too late to deliver her scheduled talk on her photography exhibit, “Repros.” “I don’t like to talk,” she said about public speaking. “I get very nervous.”
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Fave clubs
Somewhere out there, is a club or campus organization for everyone. You can visit dolphin.upenn.edu/~oslaf/orgmain.html to help you find yours, and you can read our random sample, which includes some not listed on the web page. DAN MATISOFF, COLLEGE ’02 “Red and Blue Crew. It’s the basketball boosters club. I really enjoy going to basketball games, and they organize a lot of that stuff.”
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In a Finding with Broad Safety Ramifications, Study Says Infants' Skulls are Only a Fraction as Strong as Adults'
PHILADELPHIA Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that an infant skull is only a fraction as strong as that of an adult, a finding that could greatly enhance the safety of young children. The results, published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Biomechanical Engi-neering, indicate that at birth a child skull has just one-eighth the strength of an adult skull.
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Soccer and family fuel a winner
Women’s soccer star Kellianne Toland (C’01) wants you to know she has a great family. “My parents have only missed three games — home and away. They’ve driven to Yale, to Dartmouth, to Brown.” When her friends need a hug — she lives with seven others who all know each other through soccer — they ask Toland if her parents are coming to campus. “They’re surrogate parents,” said the youngest of three and a graduate of Nazareth Academy, a Catholic girls’ school in Northeast Philadelphia.
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Scientists Decipher the 'Zip Codes' That Direct Cells in the Bloodstream to Bodily Tissues Where They are Needed
PHILADELPHIA Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University have pinpointed a fundamental mechanism that controls how cells coursing through our blood "know" when to exit the bloodstream and go to work in the body tissues. The secret, they report in the Sept. 26 is-sue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, are so-called "Goldilocks molecules" that bind blood cells to the walls of veins and arteries neither too strongly nor too weakly, but with just the right level of adhesion.
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C. K. Williams
It was a homecoming of sorts. Here was C.K. Williams (C’58), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, sipping coffee in a Starbucks on South Street, a street he remembers well from his 25 years of residence in Philadelphia. But today’s South Street is a far cry from the funky, artsy strip he remembers. “The word ‘tawdry’ came to mind as I was walking up, which is sad,” he said. It wasn’t the same Center City, either — all those tall skyscrapers, he said, “sort of tore the heart out of Center City.”
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New students get a map for campus life
This was not your father’s New Student Orientation (NSO). And the new students gobbled it up. Crazy and not-so-crazy classes gave them a taste of academic life. Music, dance, poetry and museum exhibits linked students to the campus’ rich cultural life. Tours of the neighborhood and Center City oriented the Class of 2004 to the world around them. These activities were part of seven action-packed orientation days, beginning Aug. 31.
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The multiple versions solution
Benjamin Pierce had a problem that besets almost everyone who works with files on more than one computer. He couldn’t keep track of the various versions of files on his laptop and workstation. Pierce, being an assistant professor of computer and information science, however, knew how to solve the problem. He could create new software. “I was pounding my hands and saying, Why can’t I figure this out?” he said. “So I said, Why don’t I take a weekend and write a little tool? “That was four years ago, and now I’m still writing my little tool.”