Feb. 6, 2005

Carolina in the News

Here is a sampling of links and notes about Carolina
people and programs cited recently in the media:

International Coverage

Unleashing genetic diversity
The Scientist (United Kingdom)
In this week's Science, researchers report that polyphenisms - distinct phenotypes emerging from identical genomes - can evolve through genetic stabilization of a stress-induced phenotype. The authors suggest that complex traits, such as color change, may evolve suddenly when a mutation in a developmental hormone reveals previously hidden genetic diversity. The study makes an important contribution to understanding how polyphenic systems could evolve, according to David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study. "We don't know a lot about the origins of these kinds of polyphenisms," Pfennig said.

National Coverage

Why Let the I.R.S. See What the S.E.C. Doesn't?
The New York Times
Imagine a company that makes a practice of keeping two sets of accounts. One version is revealed to the public through periodic Securities and Exchange Commission filings and public announcements. The other is never made public and conveys a markedly different picture. ...A study published in 2003 concluded that the benefits of disclosing additional tax information would outweigh any costs. It was conducted by David L. Lenter, a lawyer now on the staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation; Joel B. Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan; and Douglas A. Shackelford, an accountant at the University of North Carolina.

Teens face barriers to fitness
USA Today
Teens in poorer minority neighborhoods have very few places to exercise, which might be one reason they are more likely to be overweight than adolescents who live in more affluent areas, researchers say. ..."We thought that community recreation centers, parks and YMCAs would be found equally in more and less advantaged neighborhoods, but the more affluent areas are more likely to have a wider range of facilities — not just fancy gyms," says Penny Gordon-Larsen, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina's Schools of Public Health and Medicine.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/feb06/pediatricspg020106.htm

not milk?
The Chicago Tribune
You know it like the Pledge of Allegiance: "Milk helps build strong teeth and bones." ... "Our work promoting preventive medicine through healthy eating--with a focus on a plant-based diet--does overlap with PETA's work in the sense that they also are promoting vegetarian and vegan diets and compassionate living," said (Amy Joy) Lanou, an assistant professor of nutrition in the department of health and wellness at the University of North Carolina.

The Professor as Instant Messenger (Opinion-editorial column)
The Chronicle of Higher Education
I pride myself on keeping up to date with the latest technology. I regularly use computers in my classroom and have long been a fan of the educational potential of online discussion groups. So I was completely taken aback when a colleague informed me of something she had recently learned from her students: Teenagers no longer check their e-mail. ...Kathryn Wymer is a postdoctoral lecturer in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

How to Get Women Into Computer Science (Letter to the editor)
The Chronicle of Higher Education
I was pleased to see your article on the need to attract more women to computing and the in-depth discussion of the types of supportive learning environments that have been created at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. ...These programs are generally built around the interrelationships among information content, information technologies, and the people who need and use them. It is the knowledge of, and skill to integrate, all three elements that attract students and make them highly desirable graduates. At the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we have information-science programs at the undergraduate and master's levels. These programs have consistently achieved a 50/50 gender distribution over the past 10 years. José-Marie Griffiths, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

State & Local Coverage

Faster toward degrees (Editorial)
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Ah, the college years! Minimum responsibilities, expanding the intellect, plenty of food, high-quality or not. Such memories. Nelson Schwab III, chairman of the board of trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill, wants to put some limits on that, at least on the fifth and sixth years of what used to be a four-year college career. Schwab is on the right track, and other schools in the 16-campus University of North Carolina system ought to consider how to move students reasonably along.

A survivor's enduring gift
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
The teenage girl, a Jew, stared down a Nazi soldier and dared him to shoot her in the basement where she huddled on a black day in World War II Poland. ...She and her family have given away a large part of her life savings. More than $650,000 of it will go to UNC-Chapel Hill to help establish a $1 million professorship in Jewish history and culture. The bulk of the Jewish studies donation comes from the most unlikely place on Earth: Germany.

Town wary of UNC's plan
The Chapel Hill Herald
Town officials have a lot of questions they want UNC to answer before they're ready to fully embrace the latest Carolina North planning committee. For example, the university agrees the town has zoning power over the Carolina North property within Chapel Hill, right? And it doesn't intend to try to bypass that authority, right? ...UNC wants to build the Carolina North satellite campus over several decades on its land west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, to include millions of square feet of research and office space, homes and shops. The council and university have agreed in general that they'd like to create an entirely new zoning district to cover the Carolina North property.

A lot to consider: Parking spaces may change
The Chapel Hill Herald
When you paint the walls and put in some sharp new furniture in one room of the house, the other rooms can start to look a little dull. On West Rosemary Street, considering all the redevelopment work under way and planned there, the parking lot owned by UNC on the north side of the street soon could stick out like one of those rooms in need of new life. But the university is working on it, said Nancy Suttenfield, vice chancellor for finance and administration at UNC.

Family Legacies Exhibit
"The State of Things," WUNC-FM
For the Saar family, art isn’t just a profession it’s a family guild. This spring the Ackland Art Museum showcases the first joint exhibit with mother Betye Saar and her daughters Lezley and Alison Saar. The exhibit explores the Saars’ experiences as mothers, daughters and mulattos. "The State of Things" is the statewide public affairs program airing live at noon and rebroadcast at 9 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays and 6 a.m. on Saturdays.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/dec05/familylegs121205.htm

Notable
The Chapel Hill News

Yasmin Saikia, an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC, has won an Indian book award for the best book in social sciences.

Marshall McCoy, associate professor in the department of emergency medicine in the UNC School of Medicine, has been elected to the board of directors of the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Services.

Edwards: U.S. needs to be inspired
The Associated Press (N.C.)
America needs leaders who understand that the country needs to be inspired again, former Sen. John Edwards said Friday. ...Edwards now heads the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina law school and has previously said he has not decided whether he will run for president in 2008.

Service checks up on Mom's care if you can't
The Charlotte Observer
...Geriatric-care managers make sure aging clients are treated well. They offer an array of services, from arranging doctor visits to recommending nursing homes and keeping tabs on health care workers. ..."The biggest problem is the lack of requirement for licensure," said Florence Soltys, a professor of medicine and social work at UNC-Chapel Hill. "You have people just hanging up a shingle and calling themselves care managers."

Behold the super spectacle
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
$83,333 per second. No, that's not what Ben Roethlisberger will earn for endorsements if the Pittsburgh Steelers win the Super Bowl. It's what companies will spend to air Super Bowl commericals this year. ...It's a great forum for introducing a new product. "If you really have a piece of news, boy, what a launchpad," says Robert Lauterborn, advertising professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. "If you are saying the same old thing, forget it."

Students download complete lectures
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
College students who decide to keep snoozing rather than make a mad dash for a morning class might soon find it easier to hear what they missed -- word for word. ...At UNC, some professors in the business school are leery. Sridhar Balasubramanian, an associate professor of marketing, worries that podcasts make it too easy for students to listen to lectures on the run without giving the professor undivided attention. "I don't see it as revolutionizing anything," Balasubramanian said.

Story surveys check N&O accuracy
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Newspapers must be accurate. We're criticized for all kinds of sins -- unfairness, bias, negativity -- that are mostly in the eye of the beholder. But there is no disputing whether a newspaper gets the facts right. ...Another frequent complaint was that the article didn't present enough of the source's side of the story. "I believe the choice of 'commenters' was not a balanced set of informed persons," William Roper wrote, in reference to a story about the UNC Health Care System, which he heads.

Not enough reasons (Letter to the editor)
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Regarding "Liar! Liar! Where's the fire?" much of what was said was interesting, but when questions of why a person shouldn't lie were raised, the answers were unsatisfying. The answer was usually: In the long run, it is in the individual's (or the organization's) self-interest to tell the truth. Lying might earn you a bad reputation, which can be harmful in a number of ways. Who would buy a product from an organization or partner with an individual with a reputation for lying? ...Justin Jeffrey, UNC Parr Center for Ethics, Chapel Hill.

Illiterate and enslaved, this poet persisted
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Before he was free from slavery, before he even learned to write, George Moses Horton, at 32, had his first book of poetry published. Horton was a slave living in Chatham County for 65 years, beginning when he was about 3 years old. ...When he carried fruit to the University of North Carolina for his master, he would spout improvised poems for the students on campus to hear, and they began to offer him money, books and clothes in exchange.

Where faith and ambition meet
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Eugene Flood Jr. is seated at the Hammond C3 organ in the downstairs study of his sprawling home, singing snatches of gospel songs and talking business. For the CEO of Smith Breeden Associates, a multibillion-dollar investment management firm in Chapel Hill, work and faith are never far apart.

Expectations trickling down to preschools
The Greensboro News & Record
Teresa Cotter felt the panic. The Summerfield mother of two had quit work to be a stay-at-home mom. She played with her two young sons, sang to them, read to them and recited the ABCs, but she feared it just wasn't enough. ..."Education is famous for its pendulum swings ... and there is a major push toward basic skills, a major push toward academics right now," said Sharon Ritchie, senior scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.

PR experts discuss what to do when a company angers its customers
The Asheville Citizen-Times
Employees of office supply chain Staples and Susan Roderick, head of beautification nonprofit Quality Forward, were outside the company's Merrimon Avenue store discussing possible landscaping a few weeks ago when a motorist hollered, "Your building is ugly!" ..."You want to be sure that stories don't get written without your point of view ... and you don't want things to get out of hand," said Robert Lauterborn, a former public relations executive with General Electric and International Paper who now teaches advertising at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Hispanics moving into growing construction field
The Greenville Daily Reflector
Jose Leal points to a collage of geometrically arranged 3-by-5 inch photographs pinned to a wall inside a construction-site trailer on W.H. Smith Boulevard. ... In fact, a report issued in early January by the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill noted that as of 2005 the construction industry employed 42.2 percent of the state's Hispanic workers. Wholesale and retail trade comprised 11.5 percent, manufacturing 10.7 percent and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, 9.2 percent.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan06/economicimpact010306.htm

Growing concerns
The Independent Tribune (Concord)
The construction boom that ignited across Cabarrus County in the late 1990s is having what Cabarrus County Schools assistant superintendent Jim Amendum calls a “bubble effect” on the area’s high schools. ...“Freshmen come to us and we tend to throw them in without explaining GPAs, what an SAT looks like and what you need to graduate and go to (the University of North) Carolina,” Morris said. “You look at graduation rates and most high schools will tell you that a lot of high school freshmen float through school and don’t get involved and eventually drop out. We don’t want that to happen here in Kannapolis.”

N.C. pushes for larger share of military spending (Opinion-editorial column)
The Chapel Hill News
...But the truth is the military is already here, said John Kasarda, the director of UNC's Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and another speaker at the roundtable. UNC received $11.1 million in defense spending in fiscal 2005, out of about $580 million in total contracts and grants to the university. This week, military statisticians will be training at Meadowmont, where the business school has a conference center. The school also has a program that teaches the Navy's top officers "the business of defense," Kasarda said.

Reporters shed light on reality of war (Letter to the editor)
The Chapel Hill News
Bob Woodruff joins an increasingly long list of incredibly brave journalists who have attempted to illuminate the insanity and reality of war. ...UNC-Chapel Hill's journalism students are fortunate in not only having a journalism department, but are within a stone's throw of one of PBS's first-rate broadcast affiliates, airing as well as producing, substantive investigative journalistic pieces.

Cleaning plan draws concerns
The Chapel Hill Herald
Depending on whom you ask, a pilot cleaning method at UNC could be in the best or worst interests of the university's housekeepers. With the technique, informally known as "team cleaning," housekeepers specialize in one area, such as vacuuming or bathrooms, instead of doing a variety of tasks. At an employee forum meeting last week, staff members and student activists blasted both the method and how university administrators are implementing it.

Deeper understanding (Letter to the editor)
The Winston-Salem Journal
Referencing "Deep study..." (Jan. 29), about Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman, the fact that UNC-Chapel Hill has appointed Ehrman as chairman of the department of religious studies is another example of liberal anti-Christian educators pushing their agenda on taxpayers. I am sick of academia in our state attempting to replace belief in God with belief in man.

Issues & Trends

Snow: future holds jobs for "city of looms"
Reuters
A biotechnology research campus due to rise on the grounds of a shuttered textile factory symbolizes the ability of the U.S. economy to weather global challenge, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Friday. ...Last year, Dole Foods and the University of North Carolina launched a joint venture to build a biotechnology research center to house nutrition and plant and science institutes, a math school for girls and a community college campus, among other facilities on the 264-acre site.

Secretary says hub will better lives
The Charlotte Observer (Raleigh)
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow praised David Murdock's planned biotech campus in Kannapolis Friday as an example of innovation and transformation. ...
The campus will focus on Murdock's interests in health and nutrition. He owns developers Castle & Cooke Inc. and Dole Food Co., which will have a significant presence at the campus, along with N.C. State, UNC-Chapel Hill, and potentially Duke and other universities.

Stoking a fire for learning
The Arizona Daily Star
On the wall in Robert Shelton's Chapel Hill office are two large photographs of the twin Keck telescopes on the towering Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. ...Sue Estroff, a professor of social medicine and former chair of the UNC faculty, said there isn't anything inauthentic about Shelton. "He's not always right and he's not always going to have the answer first — he doesn't lead with his ego, and that's very rare with people at his position," Estroff said.
Related Link: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/
northern_california/13791476.htm

Should your cash go to college with your kid? (Commentary)
The Charlotte Observer
Should you pay for your child's college education? It's a question many parents don't ask. They're more likely to wonder if they have a choice. But there are two questions really. The first is financial. Can you afford it? The second is philosophical. Is it your parental responsibility to pay for Harvard, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill or Central Piedmont Community College?

Politics or academics at N.C. universities? (Opinion-editorial column)
The Charlotte Observer
When the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina selected a new president last fall, the vote was unanimous. Erskine Bowles was the man for the job. A Greensboro native, he had a varied background: undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, M.B.A. from Columbia University; experience as an investment banker, friend and fundraiser for Bill Clinton, head of the Small Business Administration and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; twice-defeated Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from North Carolina.

Building Blitz: Construction transforms UNC system, colleges
The Winston-Salem Journal
There was plenty of room for a class of makeup artists to learn the art of a perfect black eye at the N.C. School of the Arts one Saturday morning last fall. ...UNC-system officials spent much of 2000 traveling around the state, making the case for new facilities, first to legislators and then to voters. In Winston-Salem, local college officials made their case at chamber-of-commerce breakfasts and other events. They handed out green-and-white campaign stickers and led politicians around aging laboratories and rundown classrooms.

Our View: State reliance on privately funded salaries poses ethical problems.
The Fayetteville Observer
It turns out the museum isn’t the only state institution heavily reliant on private money. Foundations supplement pay of university coaches, researchers, museum employees, veterinarians and musicians. The practice is legal, not necessarily a problem. When a foundation helps aquarium personnel keep up with developments in aquatic care, that’s helpful. If donations allow the symphony to travel more, who could reasonably object?

Jim Renick's legacy (Editorial)
The Greensboro News & Record
Understated, not overstuffed, Jim Renick prefers doing to talking. Accordingly, his speeches tend to be short, breezy affairs. Blink and you might miss one. ...A&T has added new graduate degrees, expanded its honors curriculum and last year received accreditation for its journalism department, becoming only the second such program in the state, beside UNC-Chapel Hill's, to earn that distinction.

UNC student renters try neighbors' patience
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Pine Knolls is a curious mix of white and black, young and old, hard rockers and hard workers. Nowhere are the juxtapositions more evident than at 719 S. Merritt Mill Road, otherwise known as the house that brought the slogan "You Honk, We Drink" to the historically black neighborhood.

Produced by News Services, Carolina in the News is an e-mail sampling of current news media coverage about Carolina people and programs, as well as issues and trends that affect the university. Stories usually will be online and available free for a limited time - often one to two weeks. Expiration dates before stories move to archives vary by media outlet. Some outlets require free user registration or a subscription.

Carolina in the News is also posted daily to the News Services Web page, http://www.unc.edu/news/clips/index.shtml.

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