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February
4 - 10, 2005
This internal publication contains information about recent coverage
of Carnegie Mellon that appeared primarily in national newspapers, magazines
and online publications. Please note that some sources may require registration
or a subscription in order to access their information online.
Please send comments and suggestions to thomas@cmu.edu
The media coverage archive is available at www.cmu.edu/clips
From February 4 - 10,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 149 references to the university in worldwide
publications. Here is a sample.
National News Stories
Nature | February 10
MSNBC.com | February 9
CIO Magazine | February 8
San Francisco Chronicle | February 4
The Chronicle of Higher Education | January
28
Student Experience
Observer-Reporter | February 9
C/Net | February 7
Arts and Humanities
Chicago Tribune | February 9
The New York Times | February 8
San Jose Mercury News | February 6
Post-Gazette | February 6
Post-Gazette | February 5
Information Technology
USA Today | February 10
Space.com | February 9
Post-Gazette | February 7
Biotechnology
Post-Gazette | February 7
Environment
The Christian Science Monitor | February 10
Tribune-Review | February 7
Local News Stories
Post-Gazette | February 9
Tribune-Review | February 8
Post-Gazette | February 7
International News Stories
International Herald Tribune, France | February
9
-
-
National News Stories
Nature | February 10
In the early Universe, while galaxies were still forming, black holes
as massive as a billion solar masses powered quasars. Supermassive black
holes are found at the centres of most galaxies today, where their masses
are related to the velocity dispersions of stars in their host galaxies
and hence to the mass of the central bulge of the galaxy. This suggests
a link between the growth of the black holes and their host galaxies,
which has indeed been assumed for a number of years. But the origin
of the observed relation between black hole mass and stellar velocity
dispersion, and its connection with the evolution of galaxies, have
remained unclear. Here we report simulations that simultaneously follow
star formation and the growth of black holes during galaxy–galaxy
collisions. We find that, in addition to generating a burst of star
formation, a merger leads to strong inflows that feed gas to the supermassive
black hole and thereby power the quasar. ***Lead author, Tiziana
Di Matteo, is an associate professor in the Mellon College
of Sciences at Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=
/nature/journal/v433/n7026/full/nature
03335_fs.html | back to top
MSNBC.com | February 9
The energy created when black holes merge contributes to star formation
while blowing gas to the outskirts of a galaxy, and this creates a limit
as to how much the black hole can consume, a new computer simulation
shows. The work helps confirm what astronomers have increasingly suspected
in recent years, that black holes are integral players in the process
of galaxy building. It also meshes nicely with several observations...suggesting
that a galaxy's star content is directly related to its black hole.
"In recent years, scientists have begun to appreciate that the
total mass of stars in today's galaxies corresponds directly to the
size of a galaxy's black hole, but until now, no one could account for
this observed relationship," said Tiziana Di Matteo,
associate professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon.
"Using our simulations has given us a completely new way to explore
this problem."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6940627/
| back to top
CIO Magazine | February 8
I was meeting this week with the CEO of a venture capital-backed company,
and he was looking for some advice. I had invested in his first company
that he sold to Johnson & Johnson. I had introduced him to his current
company. I knew him, the company, and most of the people involved. Shortly
after our discussion began, I stopped him dead in his tracks: "You’re
spending 90 percent of your time, energy and resources trying to fix
problems, and only 10 percent on building your business. Does that seem
right to you?" I want to pose that query to each of you CIOs. ***This
piece was written by Frank Demmler, Associate Teaching
Professor of Entrepreneurship, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie
Mellon.
http://www2.cio.com/higher/report3307.html
| back to top
San Francisco Chronicle | February 4
President Bush was doing relatively well as he explained Social Security's
financial troubles in his State of the Union speech the other night.
"In 2018," he said, "Social Security will be paying out
more than it takes in. And every year afterward will bring a new shortfall,
bigger than the year before." Then came this: "By the year
2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt." Groans
could be heard from the audience in the Capitol. Watching from home,
Stephen Spear, an economics professor at Carnegie
Mellon, tried to make sense of what he'd just heard. "It's
just not true," he told me afterward. "It was nothing but
fearmongering."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
/chronicle/archive/2005/02/04/BUGV4B5D1J1.D
TL&type=business | back to top
The Chronicle of Higher Education | January 28
The vast majority of the country's colleges got richer in 2004, ending
a three-year losing streak for many of them. Endowments earned an average
return of 15.1 percent in 2004, the highest since 1998. The uptick follows
investment losses in 2001 and 2002 and a modest 3-percent return in
2003, according to an annual survey of 741 colleges, sponsored by the
National Association of College and University Business Officers, that
was released this week. ***Carnegie Mellon was listed
among the top 100 colleges showing gains. Carnegie Mellon showed a 17.5%
gain in 2004.
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51
/i21/21a00101.htm | back to top
Student Experience
Observer-Reporter | February 9
Al Newell, vice president of enrollment at Washington & Jefferson
College, estimates he receives about two dozen college applications
from home-schooled students each year. Most, if not all, Newell says,
are accepted...Mike Steidel, director of admissions
at Carnegie Mellon University, said there are about
30 home-schooled students currently enrolled, and his office receives
about a dozen applications from home-schoolers each year. "In all
honesty, they're some of our strongest applicants," Steidel said.
More than a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon, in partnership with Pennsylvania
Homeschooler's Association, a support agency for home-schooling families,
developed a policy for evaluating home-schooled applicants.
http://www.observer-reporter.com
/308148370216346.bsp | back to top
C/Net | February 7
Comments from Harvard's president have reignited a debate about the
declining presence of women in the information technology field. Although
research points to differences between male and female brains, scholars
point to other factors in explaining why women have been logging off
from computer careers. Meanwhile, reformers working to reverse the trend
can point to at least some success...[One] focus is reforming college
computer science programs to make them less about weeding out weak students
and more about encouraging all comers to succeed. Carnegie Mellon
University has been something of trailblazer in this respect.
In 1995, a paltry 7 percent of undergraduates enrolled in Carnegie Mellon's
computer science school were women. Now, after instituting changes--comparable
to affirmative action sans quotas--designed to attract women six years
ago, women enrollment is closer to a third. While still requiring high
test scores, especially in mathematics, the school no longer puts as
much weight on prior programming experience. Freshman accelerated-programming
classes generally level the playing field by the student's sophomore
year, said Lenore Blum, a Carnegie Mellon computer
science professor.
http://news.com.com/Opening+doors+for+women+
in+computing/2100-1022_3-5557311.html | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Chicago Tribune | February 9
So long, soccer moms in minivans. Hello, hot moms in miniskirts. Americans
may still feel the same way about apple pie, but the image of Mom in
the sentimental land of June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson is undergoing
what some might call an extreme makeover. From the voluptuous, fictional,
40-something "Desperate Housewives" of Wisteria Lane to such
svelte real-life pushers of prams as actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia
Roberts, mothers in popular culture rarely have been portrayed as so
stylish, so seductive and so, yes, sexy...If "there are no ugly
mothers on Wisteria Lane," as Kathy Newman, an
English professor and specialist in media studies at Carnegie
Mellon University, pointed out, neither is there a simple definition
of what makes a mom hot. Teri Hatcher, who plays the divorced, work-at-home
mother of a teenage daughter on ABC's soapy suburban series "Desperate
Housewives," appeared on the February covers of two quite different
magazines--the upscale fashion book Harper's Bazaar and the down-and-slightly-dirty
"lad mag" FHM. Each had a decidedly different take on the
new hot mom.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld
/chi-0502090315feb09,1,7365258.story?coll=chi
-newsnationworld-hed | back to top
The New York Times | February 8
There comes a point in every great mystery when a confusing set of clues
begins to narrow. For scientists who study autism, that moment may be
near, thanks to a combination of new tools for examining brain anatomy
and of old-fashioned keen observation. Within the last year, several
laboratories have reported finding important new clues about the mysterious
syndrome that derails normal childhood brain development. For the first
time, they say, a coherent picture is emerging...A third clue, from
the laboratory of Dr. Marcel A. Just, a neuroscientist
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reaffirms
the odd circuitry in autism. In a study published in November, he found
that people with autism remembered letters of the alphabet in a part
of the brain that ordinarily processes shapes. That is, the subjects
used a basic sensory region to deal with higher-level concepts. "Autism
results from a failure of various parts of the brain to work together,"
Dr. Just said. "Distinct brain areas work independently. People
with autism are good at details but bad at conceiving the whole."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005
/02/08/health/08brai.html | back to top
San Jose Mercury News | February 6
A year before his grandmother died, Scott Sandage sat
down with a tape recorder and asked her to talk about her life. She
told him how she used to hear her husband crying at night. Sandage's
grandfather was an immigrant kid whose parents pulled him out of school
to work in the brickyards in Mason City, Iowa. Surviving the Depression
as a traveling salesman, he then started making mattresses, one at a
time. He made mattresses for 35 years, taking custom orders in a small
shop, scraping by. He would tell his wife he felt like a failure --
I'm not smart enough to keep the family together; you graduated from
high school, I didn't even graduate from grade school -- and she would
always try to buck him up. Still, she would hear him weeping. After
telling this story, Sandage says, his grandmother was quiet for a long
time. Then she said: "He was a darn good man." Sandage was
19 at the time. He went off to college, part of the first generation
in his family to do so, and ended up as a historian at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His new book, "Born Losers:
A History of Failure in America," is a serious work of cultural
history, built on a decade of research.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews
/news/editorial/10831408.htm | back to top
Post-Gazette | February 6
The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser,"
concludes Scott Sandage in his densely packed history
of capitalism's dark side. What is that dream -- a chicken in every
pot, a full lunch pail, a new house, two SUVs in the garage, Patriots'
season tickets on the 50-yard line? Sandage, a history professor at
Carnegie Mellon University, says it's more than just
achieving financial success. In America, "achievement and identity"
are one and the same, he writes, drawing on a popular definition of
that dream in the 1931 "The Epic of America" by James Truslow
Adams: "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,
but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall
be able to obtain to the fullest stature of which they are innately
capable and be recognized by others for what they are."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05037/453045.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | February 5
Last one to smile in "The Happiest Day" is an indefatigable
curmudgeon. The exhibition of video-based art by Hilary Harp
and Suzie Silver at Pittsburgh Filmmakers pays homage
to 1960s and '70s performance art, but its tongue-in-cheek style and
snazzy presentation steal the show. The artists have produced re-enactments
of early performances, but you don't have to be familiar with those
to enjoy the present work, both because it has a personality of its
own and because many of the performance pieces themselves included references
long part of the cultural canon...The artists, both Carnegie
Mellon University faculty, also present individual re-enactments
within boxes or gilded frames, calling to mind, among others, museum
dioramas, Joseph Cornell, Victorian shadow boxes and Old Masters. Their
plasma screens embedded within planes of two- and three-dimensional
flora and fauna, the miniature motion-filled worlds materialize somewhat
like daydreams lapsed into on a warm afternoon. Improbable but possible,
they exist in the realm of imagination that lies just outside of vision.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05036/453035.stm
| back to top
Information Technology
USA Today | February 10
When William "Red" Whittaker, now the Fredkin
Professor of Robotics at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University, was entering college and looking for something
to specialize in, he considered a number of fields for post-graduate
work. Ideally, he wanted to enter a field where the work had not reached
an endpoint so that he could still make a significant contribution,
yet he also wanted to work with his hands. Robotics fit both of those
needs perfectly — "It's what I was born for," he reflected
in a recent interview with SPACE.com. Indeed he was.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics
/2005-02-09-red-robots-racing_x.htm | back to top
Space.com | February 9
When William "Red" Whittaker, now the Fredkin
Professor of Robotics at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University, was entering college and looking for something
to specialize in, he considered a number of fields for post-graduate
work...A self described "old man of the trade", Whittaker
is celebrity in the rarified world of robotics, having won many awards
for his innovative designs which have applications on Earth and in Space.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology
/whittaker_boldly_050209.html | back to top
Post-Gazette | February 7
It's back to the races for Carnegie Mellon University
and robotics pioneer William "Red" Whittaker.
Entries for two robotic racers were submitted last week to the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency for this fall's $2 million Grand Challenge
race. The Red Team, headed by Whittaker, once again entered Sandstorm,
a heavily modified 1986 Humvee that dominated the field in last year's
inaugural Grand Challenge race in California's Mojave Desert. And Red
Team Too, headed by electrical engineer Kevin Peterson, has entered
Highlander, a converted H1 Hummer provided by its manufacturer, AM General.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05038/453785.stm
| back to top
Biotechnology
Post-Gazette | February 7
Robert Murphy is a biologist, but to hear him talk,
you might figure him to be a real estate agent. Which is to say, Murphy's
obsession is "location, location, location." It's not enough,
he says, to determine the structure and function of the thousands of
proteins in a cell. You can't understand what a protein does in a cell
without knowing where it is in the cell, any more than you can understand
the role of wood in a house without knowing whether it is in the house
frame, in its furniture or in the fireplace. For decades, researchers
have peered through microscopes, studying fluorescently tagged proteins
to determine their location in cells. But in the emerging age of proteomics
-- as biologists attempt to understand all of proteins in an organism
-- that process is too slow, too labor-intensive and too subjective.
Now Murphy, a professor of biological sciences, machine learning and
biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University,
has developed an automated method for locating proteins in cells and
determining which other proteins occupy similar locations.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05038/453783.stm
| back to top
Environment
The Christian Science Monitor | February 10
They're scattered all around the United States, more than 1,200 of them,
waiting for cleanup. Some are old military bases or abandoned factories.
Others are gas stations with leaky underground tanks. And they're only
the beginning of a long, arduous task. Over the next 30 years, the US
may have to clean up as many as 350,000 Superfund sites at a cost of
up to $250 billion, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
One solution is to find cheaper cleanup technologies. One of the most
promising innovations right now involves microscopic iron particles.
At least four teams of researchers are using these "nanoparticles"
to attack some of the most vexing underground pollutants..."Developing
new technologies capable of locating and effectively treating areas
contaminated with subsurface pollutants is difficult," says Greg
Lowry, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. "This is because it is often difficult
to locate the exact site of contamination because records are poor for
many old waste sites and the primary contamination sources, such as
storage tanks, were removed many years ago.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210
/p14s01-sten.html | back to top
Tribune-Review | February 7
State officials say it's impossible to predict the next outburst of
a flooded mine in western Pennsylvania, but a study of underground mine
pools from northern West Virginia to central Westmoreland County has
found that abandoned mines are filling with an estimated 1.4 trillion
gallons of water. "All of those abandoned mines have water pools
to some extent," said Tom Rathbun, a spokesman for the state Department
of Environmental Protection...a study conducted for West Virginia University's
Water Research Institute digitized mine maps and computed data about
underground mine pools from northern West Virginia to the Export and
Delmont areas. It found that between 1980 and 2002, mine closures have
resulted in rising water levels in mines throughout the region...several
researchers from WVU, Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh worked on the study.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review
/trib/westmoreland/s_301074.html | back to top
Local News Stories
Post-Gazette | February 9
One way to elude police after mugging someone is to hit another victim,
and then another, continuing to strike as officers are tied up processing
the previous scenes. That was the formula of a man who may be responsible
for 20 robberies in Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside and Downtown over
the past several weeks, police said...And he hit multiple times in short
succession. That meant that as police were rushing to one scene, he
was already hitting another victim, [Sgt. Aaron] Beatty said. To catch
him, Beatty needed enough officers so that some could respond to scenes
of crimes that had just occurred and others could stay put, staking
out areas where the robber had struck before and maintaining a perimeter
to keep him from escaping. So when a call reporting a man fitting the
robber's description in Shadyside came in at 10:45 Monday night, dozens
of officers from the city and from the University of Pittsburgh and
Carnegie Mellon University were ready.***Please note
that prior to the arrest, Carnegie Mellon Police Chief Creig
Doyle was interviewed by local television stations WPXI and
Fox News about the robberies. Chief Doyle discussed measures being taken
by the campus police and offered viewers safety tips.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05040/454936.stm
| back to top
Tribune-Review | February 8
If the Bush administration succeeds in privatizing a piece of Social
Security, at least two corporations in Pittsburgh could see some of
that money-management business fall in their laps. That is, if they
will want to pursue it. "Money managers will all be competing aggressively,"
said Robert Dammon, professor of financial economics
at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon
University. "There will be money to be made by investment managers,
but the amounts they charge will be extremely low because that's the
basis on which they'll be competing." The lure could be very tempting.
Nearly 68.2 million Americans would be eligible to open a private investment
account when the plan would be implemented in 2009, given population
estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review
/business/s_301302.html | back to top
Post-Gazette | February 7
There's lots of "scene" at the Beehive Coffeehouse on the
South Side, with its incessant stream of local hipsters in varying shades
of arty, bohemian chic. But that's not the only thing that lures Oakland
art student Rachel White to spend hours ensconced there, surrounded
by the cafe's brightly colored walls and kitschy decor. She's there
for the free wireless Web. "I would never pay for wireless Internet,"
she said. Frustratingly, her local options remain pretty slim...On the
other hand, several local businesses that make Wi-Fi available for a
fee through Oakland-based Telerama Internet don't seem too concerned
about losing customers -- yet. "I don't think we have enough people
in here [surfing the Web] to offer it for free," said sales clerk
Piama Habibullah at Kiva Han, an Oakland coffee house..."Most students
aren't going to pay for it -- they don't have to," she added --
both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
University offer free Wi-Fi to students, faculty and staff.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05038/453206.stm
| back to top
International News Stories
International Herald Tribune, France | February
9
There comes a point in every great mystery when a confusing set of clues
begins to narrow. For scientists who study autism, that moment may be
near, thanks to a combination of new tools for examining brain anatomy
and of old-fashioned keen observation. Within the last year, several
laboratories have reported finding important new clues about the mysterious
syndrome that derails normal childhood brain development. For the first
time, they say, a coherent picture is emerging...A third clue, from
the laboratory of Dr. Marcel A. Just, a neuroscientist
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reaffirms
the odd circuitry in autism. In a study published in November, he found
that people with autism remembered letters of the alphabet in a part
of the brain that ordinarily processes shapes. That is, the subjects
used a basic sensory region to deal with higher-level concepts. "Autism
results from a failure of various parts of the brain to work together,"
Dr. Just said. "Distinct brain areas work independently. People
with autism are good at details but bad at conceiving the whole."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005
/02/09/healthscience/snaut.html | back to top
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