The Week in Brief

Cantab fans attending the Harvard-Penn football game a few weeks ago may have glimpsed a little more crimson than they cared to see. During an innocent game of Red Rover during the halftime show, the pants of Harvard President Larry Summers "slipped to his thighs," according to the Boston Herald, exposing a pair of tight, red briefs ("Harvard Pres. Bottoms Out at Half-Time Festivities," 11/14/01).

To entertain the thousands of fans who would later watch Harvard seal its Ivy League championship, Summers, along with several notable Harvard professors, dashed onto the field and orchestrated the children's game.

"They all ran out on the field, clasped hands and yelled to the president, `Red Rover, Red Rover, Larry Summers come over,'" a fan told the Boston Herald. "And he ran over."

During the havoc created by Summers' charge against the wall of professors, his pants slipped, revealing "crimson-colored briefs that were in a wedgie," according to the witness.

Some sources dispute the Boston Herald's claim, however, pointing out that Summer's sweatpants only sagged a few inches and that he quickly pulled them back up. "President Summers insists that he wore white on the day in question," President Richard Levin, GRD '74, said. "No one here is really sure if it happened," a spokeswoman for the Office of News and Public Affairs at Harvard said.

Later, The Yale Herald contacted a spokesman from the Harvard Press Room ,who also declined to comment. "That's not an area of Harvard we're going to talk about," he said.

—Joe Light

Yale researchers stand up to falling down

What is the leading cause of accidental injury in Connecticut? Not accidental gunshot wounds or car accidents, but something far more common: falling down. In 1996, this often overlooked health issue caused more injuries than any other type of accident, according to the Connecticut Hospital Association. Falling also accounted for more than twice the cost associated with automobile accidents; in one year, unplanned trips to the floor cost $200 million—more than any other kind of accident.

Beginning in 1994, Mary Tinetti, Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health, launched a research project in conjunction with Quinnipiac University to find ways to keep people on their feet. Tinetti found that one-third of falls can be avoided. The research of Tinetti and her partners made way for a new health-care cause: fall prevention.

"Falls have been a sleeping giant, hidden from view but dramatically driving up the health services utilization and costs," Yale research scientist Dorothy Baker said. "With older people, we need to take a broader view and ask if the person can function safely, and to go that extra step to identify and reduce the risks of injury."

Scientists and community members formed the Connecticut Collaboration for Fall Prevention and launched a five-year effort in August 1999, targeting 83,000 elderly individuals in the Hartford area. Research is continuously modified for clinical practice, and information and guidelines are provided to caregivers. Clinicians are informed about minimizing fall risks by modifying the home environment and monitoring drugs that cause dizziness.

The work that began in Connecticut has quickly gained momentum and scope. More and more clinicians are joining the fall prevention effort, and Baker and others have toured the world sharing their findings.

—Ellen Thompson

Physics professor wins top prize

Yale Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Nicholas Read was "very excited and very honored" to win the 2002 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize in October. Considered the most prestigious prize in its field, the Buckley award's stated purpose is "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics."

Condensed matter physics "looks at solids starting from the electronic level," Read explained. Scientists apply quantum mechanics to large numbers of atoms in order to study how matter behaves under different conditions. The science underlies all modern electronics and led to the invention of the transistor, which is the basis for semiconductor and computer technology.

Read won the prize for his research with semiconductors, which was published in the science journal Physical Review in 1993. Read made electrons move in only two dimensions, "like billiard balls on a pool table," within a small semiconductor chip. He then put the highly cooled chip into a magnetic field that was perpendicular to the two dimensions of the electrons. Under these conditions, new states of matter can be observed. "With very low temperatures in a very high magnetic field, quantum mechanics becomes important in the movement of the electrons. Electrons form a kind of liquid, which is different from usual liquids.  This new liquid is really what we've discovered," Read said.

—Jane Pek

Around the Ivies

Barnard Mathematics Professor David Bayer will appear in the upcoming Russell Crowe film A Beautiful Mind, a biography of schizophrenic Nobel Prize mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. He will play Crowe's hand double.

Beyond the manicures that came with the job, Bayer helped explain Nash's theories to the actors and writers. He was also given the task of recreating calculations that Nash would have written. A Beautiful Mind plays for wide release starting Wed., Jan. 4, 2002.

Princeton

Princeton Township has it in for Bambi and a couple hundred of his friends. The municipality has a new deer management program that seeks to reduce the local deer population from between 1,300 and 1,600 to about 500.

Animal rights groups are protesting the decision. The New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance described the destruction process as a "painful method of slaughtering." In conjunction with the Mercer County Deer Alliance and the League for Animal Protection Voters, the group is distributing videos of deer being killed.

White Buffalo, a wildlife management firm from Connecticut, will be hired to catch deer and destroy the animals. The minimum cost is $400 per deer kill.

Cornell

You might say it's a case of "revenge of the nerds." In a tight competition, a team of computer science majors from Cornell edged out a team from Columbia to win the Greater New York Regional competiton for the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates (ACSU) programming contest. In addition to prestige, the team, called Big Red JLM, earned a berth at the world championships in Hawaii next March.

Cornell has never won at the international level. To do so, it will have to topple the Russian juggernaut, the team from St. Petersburg State University, which has been undefeated for the past two years.

— Compiled by Jo Lim and Matthew Ferraro from The Columbia Spectator, The Daily Princetonian, The Cornell Sun, and The Brown Daily Herald

Heard

—John Lapinski, Introduction to Statistics: Political Science

"There's a certain pain that only comes from Adam."

—Stanley E. Flink, Ethics and the Media,

in reference to getting punched in the "family jewels"

Index

2. Of those days, number of days transfers were allowed: 0

3. Number of free alternatives to the dining halls during the break, in alternatives: 0

4. Number of times I fought with squirrels for stale nuts, in brawls: 14

5. Number of times I won: 0

6. Number of packages of noodles my mother sent me, in packages: 43

7. Number of times I worked up the energy to cook the noodles, in cooking sessions: 0

8. Number of times I ate my noodles dry: 13

9. Number of times the lady who sells flowers in front of Au Bon Pain felt sorry for me and offered to give me a flower for free: 3

Sources: 1) Server at the Law School Dining Hall; 2) experience; 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) personal knowledge; 8) the bite smarts; 9) just thought I'd throw this one in to engender more sympathy. —Compiled by Phuoc La

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