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June 10
- 16, 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 June 10 - 16,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 235
references to the university in worldwide publications. Here is a sample.
National News Stories
The Washington Times | June 14
Boston Globe | June 12
Student Experience
Discovery Channel News | June 16
CNN [ASSOCIATED PRESS] | June 15
Arts and Humanities
Tribune-Review | June 16
Post-Gazette | June 16
Post-Gazette | June 15
Post-Gazette | June 15
Information Technology
Discovery Channel News | June 15
Washington Post | June 12
Post-Gazette [Knight Ridder] | June 9
Biotechnology
Post-Gazette | June 16
Philadelphia Business Journal | June 10
Environment
Post-Gazette | June 16
Tribune-Review | June 15
Knight Ridder Newspapers | June 15
Tribune-Review | June 12
Regional Impact
Tribune-Review | June 10
Local News Stories
Post-Gazette | June 15
Post-Gazette | June 12
Post-Gazette | June 12
Post-Gazette | June 12
International News Stories
Gulf Times, Qatar | June 16
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National News Stories
The Washington Times | June 14
An agreement reached by rich countries on Saturday would for the first
time eliminate the entire principal on more than $40 billion in loans
owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations, rather than just lowering
payments or reworking terms. Since 1996, wealthy nations have taken
incremental steps to pare back the debt of the world's poorest countries,
but still have left them trapped in a cycle of borrowing to pay off
old loans, rather than using all of the new funds to invest in health,
education, infrastructure or other economic-development initiatives
... "The cancellation of this debt constitutes an important step
toward the consolidation of an environment conducive to the social and
economic development of Mozambique," Armando Emilio Guebuza, the
country's president, said ... Critics charge that those old debts have
been merely paid with new loans. "For more than two decades, a
system of 'defensive lending' has miraculously matched the dates and
amounts of repayment and interest schedules to disbursements under 'new'
loans to create a perpetual rollover of defaulted debt obligations,"
said Adam Lerrick, director of Carnegie Mellon
University's Gailliot Center for Public Policy.
http://washingtontimes.com/business/
20050613-093848-7895r.htm | back to top
Boston Globe | June 12
If the dog ate your shoe while you were getting ready for work, or you
were rear-ended during your commute, pick another day to talk to your
boss about why you deserve a raise, a promotion, or perk. So says Jennifer
S. Lerner, the Estella Loomis McCandless associate professor
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Lerner
and three Carnegie Mellon researchers say a person's emotions can govern
how well he or she will do in negotiations with others. The researchers
report that incidental emotion, or "emotional hangovers,"
play a key role in how successful those talks will be. Incidental emotions
are those lingering feelings of anger, sorrow, rage, or anxiety that
can plague you after you've had a bad encounter, an accident, or experience
some other stressful situation that might have nothing to do with your
job. In other words, emotions don't evaporate when you're ready to sit
at the bargaining table. They linger and are just as likely to be present
when you're ready to sit down and talk.
http://bostonworks.boston.com/globe/
out_field/archive/061205.shtml | back to top
Student Experience
Discovery Channel News | June 16
Even as electronic media becomes more and more interactive, radio remains
as passive a form of entertainment as it was a century ago. But a team
of students from Carnegie Mellon University have developed
Roadcasting, a collaborative, mobile radio system that will allow car
drivers and anyone else with a computer, a wireless connection and digital
music files to not only broadcast their own station, but influence the
play lists of other Roadcasting DJs transmitting in the area. "We
all felt the current radio system was still stuck in the 20th century,"
said project member Mathilde Pignol, who now works as an interaction
designer at eBay.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/
20050613/roadcasting.html | back to top
CNN [ASSOCIATED PRESS] | June 15
Companies hunting fresh ideas for innovative products are tapping college
students to design running shoes, furniture, vehicles and even heating
pads. A Boston-based running shoe company has taken provisional patents
on designs by students at Carnegie Mellon University.
In Michigan, a small furniture company is developing a product line
based on designs by University of Cincinnati students. "With so
many companies outsourcing and competition increasing in the new global
economy, innovation is what gives businesses the edge they need to compete,"
said Craig Vogel, director of the Center for Design Research and Innovation
at the University of Cincinnati. "More of them seem to be realizing
what university students can offer."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/
06/15/student.design.ap/ | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Tribune-Review | June 16
Take it as a clue: the odd, persistent sounds that emanate up Penn Avenue
are telling visitors there's more to the Three Rivers Arts Festival
than what can be found at Gateway Plaza and Point State Park. Those
sounds are part of "SOUNDSCAPEpgh." What Pittsburgh artist
Jeremy Boyle describes as "a persistent exterior installation/performance"
brings unusual sounds to part of our not-so-unusual urban space. Boyle
and a small cross-disciplinary student collective from Carnegie
Mellon University created the piece specifically for the festival.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
entertainment/arts/s_344011.html | back to top
Post-Gazette | June 16
The second annual Pittsburgh Pride Theater Festival opens tonight with
eight one-act plays on lesbian, gay and bisexual themes. The plays are
half comedies and half not. Quite accidentally, [Ted] Hoover [,festival
playwright, director and co-producer] says, there has emerged a theme
of family, whether the kind of families we're born into or the ones
we choose. Hoover is directing the play by Milan Stitt,
head of the dramatic writing program at Carnegie Mellon
University.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05167/522049.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | June 15
Hilary Robinson, head of the School of Art and Design
at the University of Ulster, United Kingdom, is the new dean of the
College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.
The appointment, announced yesterday, is effective Aug. 1. She succeeds
Martin Prekop, who has led the college for 12 years and will rejoin
the College of Fine Arts faculty, Carnegie Mellon said. Robinson has
been a member of the University of Ulster faculty since 1992. Widely
published, she was trained as a painter in the 1970s and has worked
as an artist and as a freelance arts administrator, critic and lecturer.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05166/521627.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | June 15
A life-sized, somewhat robotic "WWI Allied Soldier," made
of rusting auto and other scrap parts and wearing a gas mask, looms
forebodingly, like a spectral warning. An electric-blue, 3-foot-long
ceramic hand, "Blue II," that holds in its palm the brick-red
date "Nov. 2" arranged in the block configuration of artist
Robert Indiana's famed "LOVE," silently references the last
presidential election. "They and I feed every damn day," a
full-sized air compressor, like those found in art studios, realistic
except that it's powder blue and made of Styrofoam, draws attention
to the contested boundary between life and fantasy that art resides
in. They're all part of the "University Exhibition," a fresh
and lively display of contemporary sculpture presented by The Pittsburgh
Society of Sculptors at the PPG Wintergarden in conjunction with the
Three Rivers Arts Festival ... The three sculptures described above
are by, respectively, Quinn Hulings, an undergraduate student at Slippery
Rock University; Joseph Mannino, a professor at Carnegie
Mellon University; and Adam Welch, a graduate student at Indiana
University of Pennsylvania.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05166/521498.stm
| back to top
Information Technology
Discovery Channel News | June 15
Robotic vacuum cleaners automatically sweep up messes, but the
random path they travel across the floor can sometimes leave dirt untouched.
Now the manufacturing company Vorwerk in Hamlin, Germany, has partnered
with Infineon in Munich to develop an electronic carpet that wirelessly
navigates a self-propelled robot over every square inch of a floor,
and can even direct the machine to revisit sections it unintentionally
missed. The system uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology,
similar to that found in the automatic pay lanes of highway toll booths.
To date, RFID technology has been used mainly for tracking items —
such as in retail shops on clothing to prevent theft. Although navigation
is a new use, assistant professor Burcu Akinci, an
expert in RFID applications at Carnegie Mellon University
thinks the Smart Carpet system is entirely feasible. Her only reservation
lies with conditions that render other electronics unusable. "If
the whole room gets flooded, then I think the robot wouldn't be able
to navigate easily," she said.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/
briefs/20050613/smartcarpet.html | back to top
Washington Post | June 12
Computers can remember complex bits of data effortlessly, but people
routinely fumble that task. Naturally, one of the big trends in computing
security is making users memorize complex passwords -- then regularly
wipe those from their memory in favor of equally obscure replacements.
To judge from the stern advice handed out by banks, Internet providers
and information technology departments -- often, I suspect, after prodding
by accounting departments and liability lawyers who don't want to be
blamed for a security breach -- computer security hinges almost entirely
on you choosing a string of letters, numbers and symbols in an order
that has no correlation to any word or phrase that has ever been spoken
or written in English or any other language. That's fiction ... This
is because passwords aren't stolen in ways you might expect; a bad guy
doesn't sit down in front of your computer and start typing in guess
after guess until he succeeds. In the real world, accounts are usually
cracked in two ways -- only one of which can be slowed or stopped by
the use of a sufficiently inscrutable password. "If you go back
10 years ago, password cracking was the way to do things," said
Marty Lindner, a senior member of the technical staff at the
CERT Coordination Center, the network-security center founded at
Carnegie Mellon University in 1988. Now, however, he said that
phishing and other social engineering attacks are "far more prevalent,
far more devastating than anything else."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061
100171_pf.html | back to top
Post-Gazette [Knight Ridder] | June 9
One measure of how effective battlefield robots have become, says a
top Pentagon robotics official, is that the enemy has begun to target
them. Reconnaissance robots, such as the backpackable Dragon Runner
developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and those
that dispose of unexploded mines and bombs have shown that they save
soldiers' lives, Hudson said yesterday during a break in the Joint Robotics
Program Working Group meeting at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel Pittsburgh.
The success with small ground robots, as well as with unmanned aerial
vehicles, or UAVs, has bolstered confidence as the armed forces move
toward larger vehicles, such as Carnegie Mellon's 1-ton Gladiator recon
robot, which will have longer range and, eventually, operate autonomously.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05160/518296.stm
| back to top
Biotechnology
Post-Gazette | June 16
Finding a chemical that can target a disease is akin to finding a needle
in a haystack. So the National Institutes of Health, with the aid of
the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and eight other academic
centers, has decided to analyze the haystack. As part of the NIH Roadmap,
a new initiative meant to jump-start research leading to new treatments,
Pitt researchers will receive $9 million over the next three years to
analyze the biological activity of hundreds of thousands of chemical
compounds. Pitt's operation will fill all of the 10th floor and part
of the ninth in its new Biomedical Sciences Tower 3 and involve collaborators
in Pitt's chemistry department, Carnegie Mellon University
and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. ...one of Pitt's
strengths was its expertise in optical imaging techniques, including
fluorescent dye techniques developed at Carnegie Mellon's Molecular
Biosensor and Imaging Center.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05167/522342.stm
| back to top
Philadelphia Business Journal | June 10
One of Pennsylvania's strategies for creating a legacy for BIO 2005
is to re-establish links with the hundreds of biotechnology company
executives who got their start in this region. That's the idea behind
the state's June 20 "Welcome Home" reception being sponsored
by Cephalon Inc. of Frazer. "We were reluctant to do just another
party," said Robert Grupp, Cephalon's vice president of corporate
affairs. "We wanted to do something to illustrate how far the life
sciences industry has come in this region. ... As much as we like talking
to each other, we didn't want it to be Pennsylvania people talking to
other Pennsylvania people." Working with eight colleges -- University
of Pennsylvania, Temple, Drexel, University of the Sciences, Penn State,
Lehigh, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh
-- Cephalon created a list of biotechnology executives from outside
the region who got their start here.
http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/
stories/2005/06/13/story5.html | back to top
Environment
Post-Gazette | June 16
Coal-burning power plants have taken their lumps on pollution, but increased
investment in coal gasification technology by electric utilities could
dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions without damaging the economy,
according to a new Carnegie Mellon University study.
The 75-page report, commissioned by the Pew Center on Global Climate
Change, says such technology combined with carbon capture and sequestration
could all but eliminate carbon dioxide emissions in 50 years as new
power plants are phased in. Granger Morgan, a co-author
of the report and head of Carnegie Mellon's Department of Engineering
and Public Policy and co-director of the Electric Industry Center, said
that the $250 billion electric utility industry should be required to
invest 1 percent of its revenues -- more than triple what they do now
-- to further develop such advanced technologies.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05167/522393.stm
| back to top
Tribune-Review | June 15
Allegheny County's streams and rivers could be getting cleaner from
the decline of industry and the introduction of environmental protection
laws -- or broken sewers and an antiquated sewage system could be making
them dirtier. Because no government agency regularly tests the waters,
nobody knows exactly how much the pollution levels in the county's three
rivers and 53 streams change from year to year, Tim Collins,
director of Carnegie Mellon University's 3 Rivers 2nd
Nature Project, said Tuesday. For the past four years, the project,
consisting of artists, scientists and a policy expert, has tested the
county's waterways and examined water quality policies in Western Pennsylvania
to help residents and lawmakers make decisions about stream and river
use. The organization presented results of its study yesterday at a
symposium on the Carnegie Mellon campus in Oakland.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/pittsburgh/s_344152.html | back to top
Knight Ridder Newspapers | June 15
Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Yucca Mountain. For the past 25 years,
a nuclear industry already saddled with prohibitive costs and radioactive
waste struggled in the face of the worst fears about nuclear power.
But the atom is rebounding. The Senate this week is debating energy
legislation that includes tax incentives, loan guarantees and federal
liability protection for new reactors ...The partial meltdown of a reactor
at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 resulted in tighter government
regulations but transformed the public's abstract apprehension into
real fear. Over the past two decades, however, reactor technology has
improved, global warming has emerged as the most profound environmental
worry and the energy industry has realized that coal, which accounts
for 52 percent of electricity production in this country, would require
expensive technology to reduce pollution. "It really doesn't make
a lot of sense to be building just conventional coal plants if that
commits us to 30, 40 years of high emissions or, alternatively, to very
high costs of fixing that," said M. Granger Morgan,
head of the Engineering and Public Policy Department at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/
krwashington/11902670.htm | back to top
Tribune-Review | June 12
Diesel fuel -- it's greasy, smelly, and a nuisance if you're caught
in a bus' exhaust smokescreen.
There exists, however, a substitute that doesn't pollute lungs, air,
ground or water; a fuel that can be pumped directly into existing diesel
engines without major modification. This fuel saves crude oil because
it is produced using nonpetroleum raw materials found on farms and in
fast-food restaurants. And its exhaust fumes smell like french fries
or popcorn. The fuel is biodiesel. And its been in use since Rudolph
Diesel invented his namesake engine in the 1890s, using peanut oil as
fuel. Now, entrepreneur Richard C. Jackson and a group of Carnegie
Mellon University scientists and technicians are close to introducing
a system that produces biodiesel fuel that they say is faster, cheaper
and safer than other processes now used. The key to their process is
the use of microwaves and a Carnegie Mellon-developed chemical catalyst
to process nearly any plant oil, rendered animal fat, even used cooking
oil into biodiesel. The Carnegie Mellon teams has applied for patents
on some components of the process.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
business/s_342262.html | back to top
Regional Impact
Tribune-Review | June 10
Seagate Technologies Inc. on Thursday unveiled a line of new disk drives
with advanced technology made possible in large part by work done at
its Pittsburgh research center. The new drives -- which provide bulk
storage for computing devices -- are aimed at handheld devices like
Apple's iPod digital music player, computer game consoles, digital video
recorders and automobile navigating and entertainment systems ... Seagate
established its Pittsburgh research center in 1998 to capitalize on
the intellectual capital of Carnegie Mellon University's
Data Storage Center and moved into its new Strip District building in
2002.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
business/s_342714.html | back to top
Local News Stories
Post-Gazette | June 15
Marcia Long bounced on the twin bed in her dorm room and, in her bright
Tennessee trill, said, "This is pretty comfy. I expected a board.
She flopped back, kicked a shapely leg in the air and giggled. In her
week-long stay at New House at Carnegie Mellon University,
Long, 58, is revisiting the compact world of the college girl -- two
twin beds, two desks, two closets in the wall and a roomie from Hawaii.
A yet-uncounted number of athletes at the Summer National Senior Games
this month have stayed in Oakland dormitories. Most events not being
held in North Park are nearby, making convenience the main selling point.
But nostalgia has its value. It doesn't matter how old you are: If you
lived in a dorm in college, the minute you step back into one, old sensations
begin to seep from the store of life experience and can, if you're in
a certain frame of mind, make you a little giddy.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05166/521620.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | June 12
The Securities and Exchange Commission's top economist made an interesting
observation on executive compensation last week at a forum on the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act. Chester S. Spatt, who has taught at Carnegie
Mellon University since 1979, was the luncheon speaker at the
session, sponsored by Spatt's other employer, Carnegie Mellon's Tepper
School of Business. The meeting was designed for executives and lawyers
who have to deal with the 2002 law, the most ambitious revision of securities
law since the Great Depression. Spatt's speech covered a number of aspects
of doing business in the post Sarbanes-Oxley world: the role of boards
of directors, executive compensation and employee stock options. The
latter has been the subject of much debate in recent months.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05163/519939.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | June 12
Highway robberies such as the one that took the life of Dr. Gulam Moonda
are among the rarest of crimes. Alfred Blumstein, a
criminologist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
said they usually fall into two categories -- random attacks and murder
conspiracies disguised as random attacks. Comedian Bill Cosby's only
son, Ennis, died in one of the nation's most publicized roadside robberies.
Cosby, 27, had the bad luck to get a flat tire on a dark Los Angeles
freeway. Along came a thief who spotted him and his $130,000 Mercedes-Benz.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05163/520336.stm
| back to top
Post-Gazette | June 12
When officials entrusted with public pension funds invest it in risky
hedge funds or use it to purchase rare coins or take control of an airline,
many taxpayers scratch their heads. Sometimes unusual investments work
out. Sometimes they flame out. And sometimes the public has no knowledge
of how the investments are made or how they fare. But they certainly
raise the question of who's minding the store when it comes to the $2
trillion held in state and municipal pension plans across the country,
or in less visible funds such as those used to pay workers' compensation
benefits ... "I find the people we deal with take their fiduciary
responsibility very seriously," said Fred Nesbitt, director of
the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, a nonprofit
advocate for public pension plans. "There are some isolated cases
of people not using common sense, or getting greedy." Robert
Strauss, a public policy and economics professor at Carnegie
Mellon University, was more skeptical. He said that cases of
"self-dealing" -- in which public pension trustees or their
associates benefit from a fund's activities -- are not uncommon.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05163/520343.stm
| back to top
International News Stories
Gulf Times, Qatar | June 16
Over the next three days, senior executives of Switzerland’s leading
industrial, life sciences and health companies will be briefed on the
merits of establishing operations at the Qatar Science & Technology
Park (QSTP), it was announced in a statement yesterday. The ties between
Switzerland and Qatar has strengthened in recent months with a visit
of Swiss government and education officials to Doha last December, and
again this April when leaders of several Qatar Foundation institutes
travelled to Zurich for an address to the Global Medical Forum. The
science park has already attracted blue chip companies such as EADS,
ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Shell and Total. Such tenants enjoy access to
the region’s brightest students and faculty at co-located campuses
of Carnegie Mellon University, Texas A&M University,
Weill Cornell Medical College and a to-be-set-up $900mn teaching and
research hospital.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/
article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=40880&version=
1&template_id=36&parent_id=16 | back to top
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