National News for September 26, 2005
Wednesday October 05, 2005 Category: News Permanent Link
The following is a sampling of recent major news stories, courtesy of Cornell News Service:
A Dry Place to Study
New York Times, Sept. 20
Article about Cornell and other institutions’ decision to come to the aid of students displaced by Hurricane Katrina heavily features Cornell efforts and Cornell’s Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, Glenn Altschuler.
“This is a labor of love and compassion and humanitarian assistance,” said Mr. Altschuler, dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University.” I have been in academic life 35 years, and I have never seen people pull together as quickly and as effectively as on this occasion.”
Cornell Vet School sends aid to stranded pets
Associated Press, Sept. 12
Original story about Cornell coming to the assistance of stranded animals in Louisiana appeared in myriad outlets nationally and regionally in New York state and in Louisiana on stations such as KATC-TV in Lafayette. The follow up story about the second team sent from Cornell also received several regional hits.
Pets left stranded by Hurricane Katrina are getting some aid from Cornell University.
Four veterinarians and a couple fourth-year students from the school’s College of Veterinary Medicine headed to Baton Rouge yesterday to help care for an estimated one-thousand animals left sick, injured or stranded by Katrina. Read the full story here.
On Their Feet for a Better Living
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 18
Article about efforts of workers of the Hilton in Glendale, CA to unionize quotes Cornell Professor Kate Bronfrenbrenner.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University and who has spent the last 15 years studying employer campaigns against unions said: “An overwhelming number of employers aggressively oppose organizing efforts and use everything legal and illegal to intimidate, threaten and coerce workers to vote against the union.”
She added that “the hotel industry has got very wealthy people running it who make enormous profits and have largely immigrant workforces that are paid very low wages and who are treated poorly by supervisors and often by customers.”
Union hotels, she said, are entirely different.
“Union hotels have good jobs where you can send your kids to college, have regular hours and a home life…. In Las Vegas, if you work in a hotel, that’s a high-class job. Hotel work in Las Vegas is like auto work in Detroit. It made the middle class.” Full story here.
Feds Plan Temporary Cities for Evacuees
Associated Press, Sept. 16 (picked up by media outlets nationwide including Newsday)
Article about the enormity of the post-Katrina rebuild quotes Cornell Professor Rolf Pendall.
“The whole process is just staggering,” said Rolf Pendall, professor of urban and regional planning at Cornell University. “I’m left speechless by the prospect of getting people resettled and giving them a semblance of their former life.” Full story.
Cornell U. Professor’s New Software ‘Learns’ Languages
New York Times (picked up from U-Wire/Cornell Daily sun) Sept. 9
Think a language-learning robot sounds like science fiction? The day may not be as far off as it seems, in light of new software, developed by Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman, with colleagues from Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The soon-to-be-patented program—“Automatic Distillation of Structure,” or “ADIOS,” for short—can derive a language’s rules of grammar, and then produce sentences of its own, simply from blocks of text in that language.
