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Volume 122, Number 22 February 26, 2003
Top Story

Provost's office searching grades for inflation trend
The provost’s office has recently launched an examination of grade patterns to determine whether grade inflation is a significant problem at RPI, according to Provost Bud Peterson.

FULL STORY

 

News

Senate attempts to bring out fans

New chair leads bio department

to your health

Ed/Op

Staff Editorial
Women’s hockey deserves support of campus

Editorial Notebook
Wasted time causes grief

Editorial Notebook
Off campus living cheaper, but watch where you walk

Top Hat
Positions still open on RNE commitee

Turbine purchased for use in research

Derby
E-Board approves new clubs

My View
Safety not priority when class in session after winter storm

Letter to the Editor
Bad decision to have class

My View
Campus.News bulletin still not justified, despite arguments

Features

Bands bring original songs to Battle

Atkinson yearly attraction draws crowds

Dave Barry
Jai alai brings fitness to Barry’s life

Sheer Idiocy opens for entrancing hypnotist

Mix of music, fashion, talent

Sports

Women lock up second with UC sweep

Men’s hockey drops weekend, settles in 11th

Hoops to face UC, Hamilton in playoffs

RPI track and field record falls at Denault Invitational

Geer, Hartman qualify for national championships

Rensselaer in Brief
Death toll mounts from anti-drug campaign
Over $550,000 of seed funding grants was provided to 12 research projects on campus by the Office of Research. The money is primarily intended to fund graduate students developing new ideas and to help these projects generate preliminary data in order to pursue external funding.

The projects were chosen from 53 applications and represent more than 30 faculty members from four academic schools and nine departments. Their topics cover a wide spectrum, from nanofabrication to mammalian cells and human cognition.

Projects are selected based on their innovativeness and the probability of their securing major funding from outside the campus. The Research Seed Funding Program, which provided the funds, reviewed last year’s seed funding mid-term and found that the program is accomplishing its stated goals, with the recipients making significant progress and authoring proposals to major funding agencies.

Vandals at Union
From broken windows to broken electronic card readers, Union College can claim the title of most vandalized campus in the Capital District. Their incident blotter boasts between eight and 11 individual acts of vandalism every week. The most popular targets are easily accessible ceiling tiles, but exit signs are also frequently demolished. The bills for unclaimed damages are passed on to students, with some having to pay more than $100.

Other area colleges don’t have numbers anywhere near that. The University at Albany, which has eight times more students than Union, sees only one or two instances of vandalism per week. Here at RPI, Public Safety has only seen one act of vandalism in the past few weeks.

Union has tried a variety of solutions to suppress the vandalism, including assigning three public safety officers to routinely patrol the dorms, but every measure has had only limited success.

Bright outlook
A study by Manpower, Inc., found that Capital District employers have optimistic outlooks for business this year, with an average expected staff growth of 26 percent and 57 percent saying they expect their revenue to grow.

Troy, in particular, has bold plans: 47 percent intend to add personnel in the spring season, while 53 percent of respondents intend to maintain their current payrolls. None are predicting that they will need to cut staff. As recently as three months ago, 13 percent were expecting to have to cut staff before 2004.

This is above the national average, where only 22 percent of employers intend to increase their staff during the spring months, nine percent foresee cutbacks, and the remaining 63 percent plan to maintain their status quo.

Gun sales rise
Local arms dealers have seen a marked rise in the purchase of firearms lately, and attribute the growth to fears about terrorism and war. One merchant has seen sales 30 percent greater than last year, which was his best in the near 20 year history of his business.

Another says he has been selling shotguns, semiautomatic rifles, and civilian versions of the AK-47 and M-16 at the rate of about half a dozen per week.

The dealers say they haven’t seen this kind of business since the weeks before Y2K and the Gulf War. They estimate that about half of their business is now for home protection.

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