Mathematics major and goalie Trevor Koenig has been named national player of the week by USA College Hockey after back-to-back shutouts last weekend against Vermont and Dartmouth. The 2-0 wins bring Koenig's goals against average to 1.91 and his saves to .938. He is the first ECAC goalie to record back-to-back shutouts since the 1984-85 season. Koenig, a junior, has now played nearly 174 scoreless minutes, about 15 shy of the ECAC record. The back-to-back shutouts also were the first for the Dutchmen since the 1938-39 season. Senior Chris Ford scored his 100th point with an assist on the second goal
against Dartmouth. In other sports, the women's swim team competes at states this weekend at Rensselaer. The men's swim team seeks their third straight state title when the College
hosts the Upper New York State Collegiate Swimming Association championships Feb. 27
through March 1.
Students Appeal For Release Of Hien Dinh Phan
Union students had prepared more than 600 letters as of Feb. 19 appealing for the release of Hien Dinh Phan, a political prisoner of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The father of Minh Phan '96, a current GMI student, the 77-year-old Phan has been held since his arrest in 1981 on charges that he opposed the Communist regime. Letters are being sent to Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet, President Le Duc Anh and the Embassy of Socialist Republic of Vietnam in Washington.
Read MoreDinner, Church Building Benefit Burned Churches Of South
More than $1,000 was raised to benefit burned churches of the South this week in a fundraiser sponsored by Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and a number of other campus organizations.
The groups sponsored a benefit dinner on Feb. 18, and for the past week have sold
shingles to build a church in the Reamer Campus Center. Members of the structural
department of campus operations donated their time to build a strikingly-detailed replica
of a church.
For The Record
Therese McCarty, associate professor of economics, and Stephen Schmidt, assistant professor of economics, recently presented a paper, “A Vector Autoregression of State Government Expenditure,” at the annual conference of the American Economic Association. The paper is to be published in the May 1997 issue of the American Economic Review.
Donna Burton, government documents librarian, has published reviews of two
documents reference tools in recent issues of Journal of Government Information.
Her evaluation of 1995 Updates/2000 Forecasts Edition Demographic Sourcebooks on
CD-ROM, what she calls “an expensive and relatively uninspired attempt to mimic
the print version of the product,” appears in the July/August issue. A Guide to
Information at the United Nations from the U.N. Department of Public Information,
which Burton determined would serve as a handy resource for those seeking information from
U.N. sources, was reviewed in the May/June issue of JGI.
Todd Burgman, assistant professor of finance, has published “An Empirical
Examination of Multinational Corporate Capital Structure” in The Journal of
International Business Studies. The paper examines the impact of political risk and
exchange rate risk on the financing behavior of multinational corporations.
Jay Newman, R. Gordon Gould Chair of Physics; Jeremy Goverman '96; and Louis
Schick, a physics teacher at Burnt Hills High School; have published an article, “The
Bundling of Actin With Polyethylene Glycol 8000 in the Presence and Absence of
Gelosin” in the September 1996 issue of Biophysics Journal. Supported by an
NSF research grant, the work describes the effects of an inert small crowder molecule, PEG
8000, on the polymerization and aggregation properties of actin protein filaments. The
study attempts to mimic the crowded conditions present inside living cells using a much
simpler system in order to better understand the control of force generation by actin
within cells. The state of the actin molecules was measured using intensity and dynamic
laser light scattering and phase contrast and fluorescence microscopy. Also, Newman had a
second paper published by Biophysical Journal in January 1997 with colleagues in
Italy. The paper, titled “Mesoscopic Gels at Low Agarose Concentration: Perturbation
Effects of Ethanol,” presents the results of joint studies to better understand the
structure of agarose gels. Although agarose is very commonly used in gel electrophoresis
to, for example, study high molecular weight DNA, its structure and interactions in the
gel-state are not well understood. In the presence of ethanol, Newman and colleagues found
that the initial steps in the gelatin are quite different, agarose forming globular shapes
instead of extended rod-like structures that form in pure water. These solvent effects may
also be important in the more general phenomenon of protein folding.
Martha Huggins, Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology, was interviewed
recently by Estado de Sao Paulo, a national newspaper in Brazil, and by TV
Bandeirantes, a Brazialian television network, on Brazilian torturers, the topic of
her 1993 research and the subject of a talk she gave recently at Columbia University. She
is author of the forthcoming book, Political Policing: Internationalizing U.S. Security
Through Assistance to Latin American Police (Duke University Press).
At Schaffer: Sawcutting Done; Pile Driving Set To Start After
“It's not really as bad as we thought it would be” was the oft-heard comment from Schaffer Library staff and patrons this week as workers were completing three days of sawcutting 10-inch concrete floor slabs at the east side of Schaffer Library.
The operation, necessary to remove a “bump out” section of the 1961
structure, was expected to produce a continuous, shrill noise. Instead, it produced a muffled vibration that one librarian described as “a dentist's drill, but without the
pain.” Noise in other buildings was almost unnoticeable.
Meanwhile, pile driving — which will place support columns down to 15 feet in firm
bedrock — is scheduled to begin after the end of exams on March 21, lasting for up to
three weeks. The operation is expected to produce a loud, rhythmic noise that will be
audible over most of campus, but especially in adjacent buildings. Hours of pile driving
will be weekdays from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., occasionally as late as 4:30 p.m.
The Olin/Schaffer Impact Committee will provide timely updates to the campus community
through the WWW construction news site, (available from the College home page or by using
the URL: www.union.edu/PUBLIC/SGAO/const.html);
on conspicuous bulletin boards in Schaffer Library and Reamer Campus Center; and in the Chronicle
and Concordiensis.