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.
