News - 2004
September
'Campaign Dashboard' Featured in New York Times
September 12, 2004
An innovative text analysis tool developed by Hugh Downs School of Human Communication Professor Steven Corman and W.P. Carey School of Business Professor Kevin Dooley is making national news. The software device, known as The Crawdad Campaign Tracking Dashboard analyzes the dynamic content of press releases, speeches, and blogs of the Bush and Kerry 2004 presidential campaigns. The Dashboard is updated daily and presents themes and trends over the past week, including top words, measures of tone, focus, and intensity, the Crawdad Mud Meter, and Crawdad Image Nets. The Dashboard results are computed without human intervention, so they represent a completely unbiased analysis of campaign communications. The technology made national political news when it was featured in the New York Times' "Political Points" column.
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September 2, 2004
Arizona State University's Center for Asian Studies will begin its fall film series with "Together," Sept. 1, and conclude it with "Lost in Translation" Oct. 6.
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September 2, 2004
How does Alexander McCall Smith create memorable and lovable characters such as Mma. Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's intrepid female private detective and owner of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency? And what's E.L. Doctorow's secret for putting a spin on history and weaving tantalizing tales? The Piper Center for Creative Writing announces its 2004-2005 reading series.
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August
August 17, 2004
You probably know Paul Krugman for the widely syndicated opinion pieces that he writes for the New York Times , where he is one of the paper's (and the country's) most read columnists. If you have read Krugman, you also know that he wields a sharp pen and is no fan of the current administration, but don't let that make you dismiss him as just another political pundit - he's also a brilliant economist. Krugman will be in the Valley on September 22 to deliver Arizona State University's 11 th annual Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Distinguished Lecture at Gammage Auditorium at 7:30 p.m .
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August 17, 2004
Kicking off its 2004 - 05 lecture series, ASU's Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict brings to the Valley Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., one of the nation's top analysts of American politics, and an important leader in the national discussion of the role of religion in public life. Dionne will speak on a subject that could not be timelier - the role of religion in the upcoming presidential election.
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June
June 15, 2004
Mary Margaret Fonow, currently associate professor of Women's Studies at Ohio State University and Fellow in the Center for the Study of Law, Social Science and Policy in the Moritz College of Law at OSU has been named Director of the Women's Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.
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June 15, 2004
Robert E. Page, Jr., formerly professor and chairperson of the Department of Entomology at the University of California at Davis, has been appointed to be the founding director of Arizona State University's School of Life Sciences, a new multi-disciplinary unit formed in July 2003 with the merger of the former departments of Biology, Microbiology and Plant Biology.
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June 15, 2004
As of July 1, 2004, the college is adding four divisional deans for undergraduate programs and for the faculties of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, replacing a past administrative organization of three associate deans for academic programs, personnel, and research and facilities. The divisional deans will report to ASU Vice President and Dean David A. Young.
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June 15, 2004
Dr. Richard J. Aspinall, recent Director of the National Science Foundation's Geography and Regional Science Program, and award-winning expert in the use of GIS data in the geographic analysis of environmental issues, has been appointed as Chair of Arizona State University's Department of Geography.
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May
May 21, 2004
For years most astronomers have imagined that the Sun and Solar System formed in relative isolation, buried in a quiet, dark corner of a less-than-imposing interstellar cloud. A new theory challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing instead that the Sun formed in a violent nebular environment - a byproduct of the chaos wrought by intense ultraviolet radiation and powerful explosions that accompany the short but spectacular lives of massive, luminous stars.
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May 14, 2004
Leah Gerber, Assistant Professor in Arizona State University's School of Life Sciences, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER Grant is specifically designed to help promising young scientists at the beginning of their careers become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
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May 12, 2004
An exhibition opening May 12 at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City will feature major findings from a six-year-long archaeological excavation at the Pyramid of the Moon in the ruins of Teotihuacan, the Western Hemisphere's first major metropolis and the seat of a mysterious 2000-year-old civilization.
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April
April 14, 2004
This year, for the second year in a row, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology has won one of the highest honors given to graduate students in anthropology-related disciplines.
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April 13, 2004
ASU planetary geologist and Mars explorerer Philip Christensen has been pleasantly surprised -- and a little overwhelmed -- with a very strong response to a new educational outreach program, "Rock Around the World."
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April 12, 2004
Arizona, the country needs your input on space exploration. More specifically, it needs your inspiration. On Friday, April 30, ASU is hosting "Exploring Our Place In Space: A Community Forum" at 7:00 pm in Gammage Auditorium. Sponsored by the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies, the event will feature a panel of space pioneers and policy makers discussing the challenges of the nation's new Space Exploration vision and responding to audience questions and comments. The event is free and open to the public.
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April 7, 2004
As any biochemist knows, genetic change is really chemical change, and so it follows that if you want to really see how evolution happens, you need to see how it affects biochemistry. A genetic analysis searching for the evolutionary history of nitrogenase, the critical enzyme system that helps life use atmospheric nitrogen, has shown some interesting evolutionary relationships between the key metabolic processes of bacteria, and revealed some mysterious new chemical pathways that are not yet understood.
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March
March 31, 2004
New finds from an open-air archaeological site in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania have intriguing implications for the evolution of modern human behavior, including further indications that symbolic thinking developed in humans earlier than the currently accepted date of about 35,000 years ago.
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March 30, 2004
The 2004 A. Wade Smith Memorial Lecture Series on Race Relations will present a lecture by a man who is both a scholar and a firsthand witness to global social change - Ray Suarez, Senior Correspondent for PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and former NPR reporter and host.
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March 30, 2004
Bones, it is said, tell tales, but in the case of the bones of hominids or human ancestors the story has become complex and convoluted, as paleoanthropologists try to decipher relationships between a host of similar species with subtly shifting characteristics in a spotty fossil record. A novel method has been developed that may prove to be a valuable tool in clarifying the picture.
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March 11, 2004
Charles Kimball, an expert on the religious dynamics of the Middle East and the sources of religiously-based violence, will be delivering a lecture entitled, "When Religion Becomes Evil" as part of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict's (CSRC) "Religion and Conflict: Alternative Visions" lecture series. The free public lecture is scheduled for 7:00 pm on March 25, 2004 at the ASU College of Law Great Hall (Armstrong Hall, room 113).
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February
February 24, 2004
David Pearson, an ASU research professor in the School of Life Sciences, has brought together government officials, educators and environmentalists in several Latin American countries to participate in workshops that bring biodiversity to the forefront of their country's economic and environmental focus.
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February 20, 2004
Politicians, government officials, local reporters and even sophisticated urbanites may be able to claim that they have a handle on "what makes Phoenix tick," but if you want to really find out how the city lives and breathes, you would be well advised to come to Arizona State University on Monday and listen to what the urban researchers have to say.
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February 20, 2004
In perhaps the final round in a long-standing argument about the fundamental chemistry of water, the authors argue that the currently accepted temperature at which water in the glassy state softens into a liquid (known as the "glass transition") is incorrect due to mistaking an "experimental artifact" for the glass transition itself. The finding re-establishes the conclusion that the amorphous solid form of water crystallizes before this softening ever happens.
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February 20, 2004
Experiments involving the syntheses of organic compounds show that the exclusive
chirality of the proteins and sugars of life on Earth - their tendency to be left- or right-
handed, could in fact be due to the chemical contribution of the countless meteorites
that struck the planet during its early history.
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U.S. State Department spokesman to speak at ASU
February 17, 2004
Phil Reeker, from the U.S. Department of State will speak about "US Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy" at ASU on Thursday, February 19, 2 p.m. in Coor Hall Rm. 174.
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February 9, 2004
Hair matters -- ASU sociologist Rose Weitz has published a major sociological examination of the cultural importance of hair entitled, Rapunzel's Daughters: What Women's Hair Tells Us about Women's Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The book is based on historical research, observations at hair salons, interviews with 74 girls and women and a variety of focus groups. Weitz's study examines hair's relationship to sexuality, age, race, social class, health, power and religion, among other things.
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February 5, 2004
Azar Nafisi, the author of the current nonfiction hit, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is the first speaker this spring in the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict's "Alternative Visions" lecture series. Nafisi will give a free public lecture entitled "Reading Lolita in Tehran: Women, Religion and Global Politics" at 7:00 p.m. February 5 in the College of Law Great Hall. A book-signing will follow. Though the event is free, tickets are required.
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February 4, 2004
President George W. Bush has named Arizona State University Professor of Geological Sciences Laurie Leshin to the President's Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy, a commission that he announced would be formed in a speech on January 14.
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February 4, 2004
Kurt Wüthrich, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist famous for his work in using nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the structures of proteins and nucleic acids, will give this spring's Eyring Lecture in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University.
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January
January 27 , 2004
The landing site for Opportunity, the second of the Mars Exploration Rovers, promises to test the theories of ASU planetary geologists, who have studied the site extensively from orbit.
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January 12, 2004
White dwarf supernovas have given us most of the iron that the Earth is largely made of and helped us measure the size and age of the universe, but exactly what kind of star causes these explosions has remained a matter of debate. Now, astronomers believe that they have shown that a specific type of binary star system causes the phenomenon and predict that observed systems of this type will evolve into white dwarf supernovas.
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