May - Jun 2005 Issue

The Pratt School of Engineering and Saudi Arabia's Effat College, a privately funded women's college, will collaborate on the first undergraduate engineering curriculum for women in Saudi Arabia.Kristina Johnson, Pratt's dean, and Haifa Jamal Al Lail, dean of Effat College, signed a cooperative agreement January 30. The effort is funded by a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State's Middle East Partnership Program Initiative.

 

 "Tweet Mystery of Life," Duke Magazine, July-August 1994 (view the original article)

 

At age fifty-seven, Donna Cohen has a number of credentials she could boast about.

 

 Speaking at Duke Law School in March, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Daniel Ayalon, said that Israel seeks peace with all its neighbors. He went on to describe peace as more than just a strategic option.

 Listen and repeat: language-lab life.Les Todd.

 

 In discovering that monkeys will "pay" in fruit juice to see images of other monkeys, neurobiologists Michael Platt and Robert Deaner have discovered a highly useful animal model for studying autism.

Tweet Mystery of Life(Originally published in the July-August 1994 issue)

 

 Wells: new accent in chapel pulpit.Chris Hildreth.

Paper DebateI'm a bit mystified why an ownership change at Durham's newspaper would be something to be addressed in Duke Magazine ["Gargoyle," March-April 2005], but, granting that's reasonable, I'm truly unable to comprehend why it would be addressed solely in an unrebutted opinion column.

 

 

 Winners three: Chandler, left, Hwang, and Blair.Jim Wallace.

Take a journey back into the most vivid memories of your life. For me, there's the terrifying childhood attack by a deranged rooster; the gut-roiling public embarrassment of a forgotten speech; and, ah yes, the sweet, transporting taste of my first kiss. Such memories don't just benignly percolate up in our minds, like the mundane recall that we need to buy bread at the market. Rather, they envelop our consciousness in a nerve-tingling fog of sensory remembrance.

On a cold, clear March morning, eight Duke seniors file into a basement room in the West Duke Building. They are typical students, indulging in typical pre-class talk about weekend plans and weeknight sleeplessness--except that they're all dressed in military uniforms, and their seminar room is filled with wall displays detailing subjects like "Group Leading Procedures" and "Warrior Ethos." The students jump to attention and salute as their ROTC instructor, Lieutenant Colonel E.

Seth Grossman '71 attended Duke during the era of student unrest, joined the National Guard to avoid the draft, and went on to make a living as a lawyer.Joyce Hobson Johnson '68 organized protests and was a founding member of the Afro-American Society in the late Sixties.Julia Yang Bedell '85, a Chinese American, earned her master's in science from Duke in 1987 and became a scientist, teacher, and mother of two.

Last January, Mark Pike '04 and Blaise Dipersia '03, friends and former roommates, became co-proprietors of a model 21T color photo booth. The booth is located on the second floor of the Bryan Center, appropriately halfway between a row of vending machines and a film theater.

 

 Crows make tools, pigeons can discriminate cubist from impressionist styles of paintings, and parrots can understand the meanings of words and carry on conversations. Despite all these findings by scientists, the term "birdbrain" has remained an insult. But all that could change if a new system of bird-brain-structure nomenclature created by neurobiologist Erich Jarvis and his colleagues comes into wide use.

 

 

Jon Gardiner

 At ultralow temperatures, matter plays exotic physical tricks that fascinate physicists and offer insights into its fundamental nature. At 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero (about -460 degrees Fahrenheit), matter can become "superfluid," flowing without friction. Even more strange, superfluid matter placed in a container would spontaneously rise up the sides and flow over the top.

 Photo: Les Todd.

  Sloan: the injustice of caps. Les Todd.  

 Noël Bakhtian B.S.E. '05 has received a 2005 Winston Churchill Scholarship to conduct graduate study for a year at the University of Cambridge in England.

 Sampling soil and water: Richardson with Marsh Arabs

Everyone tells me that once you leave Duke, the best way to get a job is through networking, but what does that really mean?

 Lemurs' boss: Yoder and her new charge

 Duke's board of trustees approved a 5.1 percent increase in tuition, fees, and room and board for undergraduate students in the coming academic year. Trustees also approved a 7.7 percent increase in financial aid to help offset increased costs to the more than 40 percent of Duke students who receive financial support.

 James H. Semans, a professor emeritus of surgery at Duke, who combined a career as a leading medical scientist and physician with a passion for the arts and charitable causes, died at his Durham home April 21. He was ninety-four.

 Jim Wallace.

  Pelican and Pelicant By Sarah Froeber '68. Illustrated by Kim Mosher. Toucan Press Inc., 2003. 35 pages. $17.99.

 

 Gathering in early March for its annual winter meeting, the board of directors of the Duke Alumni Association (DAA) spent most of the weekend engaged in strategic planning, after hearing from the arts and sciences dean about the successes of Duke's past strategies.

Simon: Off to camp

 Iraq is not Vietnam, and today's college generation is not the Vietnam-era generation of war protesters. (Of course, there's no Vietnam-era draft threatening to sweep them up.) This spring's most memorable student protest concentrated on workers' rights, not right and wrong decisions in foreign policy.