Heather Davis

Let me say this up front—I am not a cyclist. Sure, I’ve ridden bikes before, but never in the city. I’ve never shared the road with a stream of cars. I don’t even own a bike.

INITIATIVES/Penn launches an urban institute to address problems and potential of city living By 2006, the world’s urban population will reach 6 billion. A new center at Penn plans to devote extensive resources to studying the well-being of these city dwellers and the urban environments in which they live.

When browsing through toys, wine or other products, consumers may not necessarily flock to the cheapest product. According to research from Marshall Fisher, Wharton professor of operations and information management, people may actually shell out more money for a product they do not understand.

For those who use wireless technology to send e-mails or quickly check a fact on the Internet, the grass just got greener. That’s because over Spring Break, Penn’s wireless service provider, PennNet, expanded its wireless coverage to include College Green. In the coming months, it will continue to expand around campus.

By day, Larry Moses is the man with the booming voice and hearty laugh who leads diversity training for fraternities and sororities and advises the Bicultural Inter-Greek Council.

In one of Filmon Mebrahtu’s films, an African taxi driver expresses frustration and fear after a Senegalese driver is killed on the job. In another, a hair braiding salon owner laments the lively social life she left behind in her native Mali.

In our lengthy search for Penn people to answer our question this issue—”What picture, actor or actress should have gotten an Oscar nomination but didn’t?”—we may have inadvertently stumbled across the reason why the ratings for the Academy Awards telecast keep dropping each year: It seems people aren’t going to see first-run films like they used to, at least not at Penn.

The Tlingit people of Sitka, Alaska, recently welcomed home a treasured object. Nearly 90 years after it was last worn, the Raven-of-the-Roof hat—a Native American headdress from the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s collection—was flown back to its original home for use in a Coho Salmon clan memorial potlatch, or feast.

Senior Biosafety Officer Tom Boyle usually gets involved with infectious waste issues, performs laboratory audits and reviews recombinant DNA registration documentation to ensure the safety of Penn employees.

Could President Bush’s ambitious plan to send humans back to the moon, to Mars and beyond inspire the same excitement that the first moon race did in the 1950s?