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Washington -- It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker. Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible - his whole activity is. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/04/MNB01ML0O6.DTL#ixzz1idxOZQsa

And the winner of New York City's high-tech campus sweepstakes appears to be... Cornell, by $350 million dollars. Mayor Bloomberg is expected to announce the news later today at the New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and the Ithaca-based Ivy is apparently so eager to get started they want to have their first classes going by next September—a year earlier than the Bloomberg administration initially asked for! The rush to anoint Cornell ahead of the original January announcement deadline comes days after Stanford abruptly dropped out of the race just as Cornell announced a record-breaking $350 million donation to help it...

Expect even more flags at Republican campaign events. And if the Democrats were wise, they might well strip the stage of flags altogether, suggests a new Cornell study, the first to look at the political impact of the flag's image on Americans. The research finds that for up to eight months after glimpsing the stars and stripes, voters of all political persuasions shift toward conservative Republican attitudes and voting behavior. "Part of the reason we think this effect is so durable is because we primed people with the flag while they were thinking about their voting choices," said Melissa J....

If you read online reviews before purchasing a product or service, you may not always be reading the truth. Review sites are becoming targets for "opinion spam" -- phony positive reviews created by sellers to help sell their products, or negative reviews meant to downgrade competitors. The bad news: Human beings are lousy at identifying deceptive reviews. The good news: Cornell researchers are developing computer software that's pretty good at it. In a test on 800 reviews of Chicago hotels, a computer was able to pick out deceptive reviews with almost 90 percent accuracy. In the process, the researchers discovered...

Giuliani is scheduled to speak at Cornell’s convocation May 28 at Schoelkopf Stadium. His selection as the first Republican to speak at this Ivy League school follows a long list of Democrats since 1984. In 2010, the school selected then-Democratic U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “It is encouraging to see that there’s a consideration of the other side, which I know a lot of us hadn’t thought was the case,” a member of the Cornell Republicans told the Cornell Daily Sun earlier this week.

It's an incendiary topic in academia -- the pervasive belief that women are underrepresented in science, math and engineering fields because they face sex discrimination in the interviewing, hiring, and grant and manuscript review processes. In a study published Feb. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell social scientists say it's just not true. It's not discrimination in these areas, but rather, differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, the H.L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, and...

ITHACA--The Cornell University Police Department shut down the second annual “Epic Snowball Fight on the Arts Quad” Wednesday, apprehending a student, confiscating tin shields and knocking over a six-foot snow penis. Chief of Police Kathy Zoner said CUPD officers did not plan on breaking up the event but had to do so in response to a call-in complaint. The officers decided that the event had to be stopped because it was “putting both people and property at the potential for injury and damage,” Zoner said. As a police car approached from the western end of the quad, the hundreds of...

While it's tempting for conservatives to cheer the termination of the liberal blowhard from MSNBC, I have a bad feeling that the Obama administration will try and use this to ram through some of their proposals for regulating broadcast content and the internet. Despite the fact that MSNBC will still feature liberals Matthews, Maddow, O'Donnell and Schultz as their big "stars," and despite the center-left bent to the big three networks and CNN, liberals are already using the Olbermann firing to advance the myth that there is nothing out there to balance against "Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the vast...

Paul M. Kintner Jr., professor of electrical and computer engineering and head of the Global Positioning Systems Laboratory at Cornell, died at his home in Ithaca Nov. 16 after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 64. Kintner was an internationally recognized authority on the interaction of radio signals, both natural and man-made, with space environments, particularly the ionsophere and magnetosphere. His studies included the effect of the space environment on GPS signals. During the 2009-10 academic year, he served as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State, advising the government on GPS, navigational satellite...

Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future Written By: Ben Goertzel Date Published: November 4, 2010 According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward — from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) — but we can’t perceive the future. But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point. In...

Nonprofits have long used the honor roll, a list of benefactors prominently displayed, to inspire others to make gifts. In the last school year, seniors at Dartmouth College and Cornell University turned that tactic on its head, creating a sort of dishonor roll of peers who failed to donate to the class gift. At Dartmouth, the lone student in the graduating class who held out, Laura A. DeLorenzo, was excoriated in the student newspaper and on The Little Green Blog, a student Web site, which also ran her picture. Raising the stakes for the student fund-raisers was the potential of...

Article here.

The irony evident in the two part article in Cornell Alumni Magazine (July-September 2010), on “Cornell in the Cold War” by Professors Glen Altshuler and Isaac Kramnick, made me laugh. The subtle-as-a-sledgehammer attempt to appear scholarly while ridiculing conservative anti-Communists was also disturbing. For example, they describe Dean Malott (Cornell’s last conservative president): “Publically, Malott, the self-proclaimed conservative, defended dissent and free thought” as if that is something a conservative would never do when he defended the admitted Communist professor, Phillip Morrison. Malott called upon “thinking citizens to stand behind the principles of freedom of thought and expression.” I wonder...

A Cornell sociologist is launching a new study to develop methods of identifying covert social networks, including terrorists who are preparing attacks, human traffickers and drug smugglers, among other groups. Matthew Brashears, assistant professor of sociology, has received a three-year, $797,000 grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for the study that aims to help the U.S. government thwart terrorist attacks. "We're very excited to have a chance to do this kind of work," said Brashears, who wrote the grant proposal with sociology doctoral candidate Michael Genkin. "It's becoming very difficult in the modern age to interdict decentralized criminal activities....

Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered. However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte... George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes....

Prof. Michael Lynn, marketing and tourism, surveyed 374 waitresses about their perceived “sexiness,” breast size and other physical characteristics and correlated these results with the amount of tips the waitresses received. His results indicate that evolutionary instinct trumps the ideals many patrons profess. Though most customers say they reward service, Lynn reports that quality of service has less than a 2-percent effect on the actual tip. Instead, he found that waitresses with larger bra sizes received higher tips — as did women with blonde hair and slender bodies..... Lynn explained that his study could be useful to a potential waitress...

Ezra Cornell, a generous man concerned deeply about his country and its culture, when he created his eponymous university in 1868 said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” Professors at Cornell (my grad school alma mater and partial source of rent) have stretched old Ezra’s words to the limit. How? The “English department will begin offering a new concentration in cultural studies to English majors. The concentration will allow students to study different mediums and forms of culture, including literature, film, the Internet and music in terms of ‘historical, social, and political...

ITHACA, NY-Two months after an Africana professor allegedly called two black graduate students “black bitches,” members and allies of the Africana community — undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and alumni alike — have begun to speak out more fervently about the issue. Earlier this year, Prof. Grant Farred, English and Africana studies, invited two of his advisees — both female graduate students who wish to remain anonymous — to attend a Feb. 5 and 6 conference at the University of Rochester entitled “Theorizing Black Studies: Thinking Black Intellectuals.” The two students arrived late to a conference panel, after which Farred...

A dragon will rise from the depths of Rand Hall Friday. After weeks of preparation, first-year architecture students will enliven a tradition established by Willard Straight 1901, more than a century ago: Dragon Day. Festivities will commence at 1 p.m. on University Avenue. . . . However, since last year’s Dragon Day, a New York state environmental regulation prevents the century-old ritual to conclude in fire. To avoid pollution, the state’s Department of Conservation recently enacted a law that only allows the open burning of agricultural products, like solid wood. This makes it illegal to burn paint, burlap and steel...

So far this year, three Cornell students have leaped to their deaths in the famed gorges of Ithaca. This comes a year after a graduate from a decade ago was found dead at the bottom of one of them after having inexplicably returned to campus.

Ithaca, NY — Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, will speak at Cornell University's senior convocation May 29. Pelosi, the first woman to be speaker of the House, represents San Francisco in Congress. The senior convocation, part of graduation weekend at Cornell, is open to the public.

NEW YORK — About half a dozen protesters greeted John Yoo, University of California Berkeley law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general, outside the Cornell Club on Tuesday night, where he spoke as part of a scheduled stop on a tour promoting his new book Crisis and Command. The protesters waved signs that read, “Torture is a War Crime! Prosecute!” and “John Yoo: War Criminal” and welcomed opportunities to speak to pedestrians about the issue as they passed by. The controversy stems from several memoranda authored and co-authored by Yoo during his time at the Department of Justice from...

Eliot Spitzer's potentially explosive secret e-mail account he used during his days as New York's attorney general and governor could be made public in a court ruling within days. Amid claims of a two-year cover-up, a low-key legal fight has sought hundreds of e-mails from a private account that Spitzer operated "surreptitiously" at his offices to avoid a public paper trail, court documents claimed. Some of the e-mails in the account wound up as the basis of media reports about Spitzer's role in the "Troopergate" scandal this year, in which his office assigned state troopers to dig up dirt on...

Rally Decries Crimes of Columbus; Stresses Importance of Native Cultures October 9, 2009 - 4:02am By Margo Cohen Ristorucci Propped against a podium in Ho Plaza, a poster of Christopher Columbus sat with the message “Hate, Lies, Torture, Slavery and Oppression” inscribed along his face. Anticipating the Oct. 12 holiday, Native American Students at Cornell organized a rally yesterday called "Indigenous Day Rally: Rethinking Columbus." Alia Jones ’10, co-chair of NASAC, explained that the event was aimed to both challenge Columbus Day and to raise awareness about present indigenous communities. “Question: why should the United States of America celebrate Columbus...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- President Obama has announced his intention to nominate a native Ithacan and Cornell graduate to a key post in his administration. Mary J. Miller is up for the position of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets. Miller grew up in Ithaca and received her bachelor's degree in government from Cornell. She is now the vice president of T. Rowe Price, a Baltimore-based investment firm. The post Miller is up for advises the treasury secretary on financial markets, government debt and credit and lending. Miller must first be confirmed by the Senate.

You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high...

Friday, September 11, 2009, a 20 year old student at Cornell University, Warren Schor, pictured left, died of complications from the swine flu. IvyGate Blog chose the tragedy as an occasion for mockery and silliness...When Warren Schor died last week, IvyGate published this article, originally under the byline of Molly Fitzpatrick, now under the byline of Adam Clark Estes. The article mocks Schor's death and the administration attempts to encourage students to stay healthy by practicing good hygiene. So intent was IvyGate on its mission of mockery that they couldn't even get the dead student's name right in the original...

The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology – which forms the acronym Crap. The journal, which claims to subject every paper to the scrutiny of other academics, so-called "peer review", accepted the paper. Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, who was behind the hoax, said he wanted to test the editorial...

CEN NYC: “The Ramifications of Carbon Mitigation Paradigms: Can the Public Win when Politics Overshadow the Science of Engineering?” featuring Power Plant Developer, Adam Victor ‘74 At this event we’ll explore Adam’s experiences as an energy entrepreneur and passionate supporter of a stronger, more self sufficient USA. Adam is what’s called a PPP or Private Power Producer (i.e. he builds his own power plants). We will discuss what Adam calls the “politicization of engineering” as well as what he views as a necessity for energy solutions for our world. We came across Adam after he was recently interviewed by The...

NEW YORK—Former Vice President Al Gore thinks that financial markets are to blame for environmental problems. Gore, speaking at a Cornell University-sponsored roundtable in New York City on Wednesday (June 3), told the audience that the "tyranny of short-term horizons” forced companies to maximize returns on a short-term quarterly basis. This, the panelists said, undermined long-term progress in combating environmental ills, such as global warming. This "tyranny of short-term horizons is not limited to investing but also to politics," said Gore. But the Obama administration has an opportunity to lead the world, he said, especially at the forthcoming United Nations...

A joint study by Cornell,Harvard and Yale universities reveals conservatives more easily disgusted than liberals by squeamish things like maggots and questionable toilet seats. The concern for "safety" influences their ideology.

Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch? If so, chances are you're more conservative -- politically, and especially in your attitudes toward gays and lesbians -- than your less-squeamish counterparts, according to two Cornell studies. The results, said study leader David Pizarro, Cornell assistant professor of psychology, raise questions about the role of disgust -- an emotion that likely evolved in humans to keep them safe from potentially hazardous or disease-carrying environments -- in contemporary judgments of...

A campus Christian group that receives funding from the student activity fee is coming under scrutiny after a student was asked by advisors to step down from its leadership team when he told them that he had openly accepted his homosexuality. This incident is also raising questions about the effectiveness of campus mechanisms for addressing instances of discrimination. Chris Donohoe ’09, who joined the Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship when he was a freshman, said he had been openly struggling to reconcile his sexuality with his faith in Chi Alpha before he was asked to step down from the leadership team...

As Cornell University faces greater need for donations in the current recession, it also faces having to get more funds with less money as a result of the economic crisis. In order to better focus its fundraising efforts to meet its needs and in response to the university cutting its budget by 5 percent, Cornell’s Department of Alumni Affairs and Development recently laid off 41 employees, around 10 percent of the department’s workforce. Richard Banks, associate vice president for alumni affairs and development at Cornell, said the positions were cut based on which positions were least crucial. He said Cornell...

Fortunately, we have Keith Olbermann to point out that Rush Limbaugh did not accurately quote the preamble to the Constitution in his CPAC speech last weekend. I'm not sure what scam Olbermann imagined Rush was trying to put over on the American people by saying conservatives believed in the "preamble to the Constitution" and then quoting words from the Declaration of Independence -- but Olbermann put an end to that cruel deception! These small-time opportunities to show off by correcting someone else's teeny-tiny mistakes are the lifeblood of Olbermann's MSNBC show, "Countdown." Olbermann is no more capable of not correcting...

WWW.ANNCOULTER.COM OLBERMANN'S PLASTIC IVY by Ann Coulter March 4, 2009 Fortunately, we have Keith Olbermann to point out that Rush Limbaugh did not accurately quote the preamble to the Constitution in his CPAC speech last weekend. I'm not sure what scam Olbermann imagined Rush was trying to put over on the American people by saying conservatives believed in the "preamble to the Constitution" and then quoting words from the Declaration of Independence -- but Olbermann put an end to that cruel deception!  These small-time opportunities to show off by correcting someone else's teeny-tiny mistakes are the lifeblood of Olbermann's MSNBC...

ITHACA, NY--Love — or, at least, lust — was in the air on Ho Plaza yesterday at 12:15 p.m. A group of roughly 20 students lined up to hold a colorful banner that read “QUEER KISSIN’ … in progress” and then proceeded have a queer kiss-in, which lasted about five minutes. Direct Action to Stop Heterosexism sponsored the event, according to kiss-in participant Ashley McGovern ’09. She explained that heterosexism is “kind of like homophobia except heterosexism has to do with all facets of society … so the normalization of heterosexuality in society.” Heteronormativity refers to the idea that heterosexuality...

Six University Presidents are touring Iran to increase “collaboration in science and higher education” at the same time the nation’s religious government is moving closer to developing an atomic bomb and taking steps to censor more information from its citizens. According to CBS News: The presidents of six leading U.S. universities are touring Iran, the latest in a series of exchange visits involving senior academics and scientists. The American academics include the presidents of Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Rice Universities. "We believe it is important to maintain and renew academic ties between our two countries as a means of laying...

the Cornell Coalition for Life clashed with the College of Engineering administration on Wednesday morning when Dawn Warren, administrative assistant, removed the organization’s “Elena Campaign” signs from the Engineering Quad. The CCFL is a non-partisan, pro-life advocacy group on campus. According to the CCFL, the Elena Campaign is composed of “a series of light-hearted educational signs with pictures and text detailing the biological development of an unborn child.” Tristen Cramer, former CCFL president, explained that the signs did not contain political statements, but rather “biological facts on fetal development,” including ultrasound images and text. According to Cramer, the group put...

The Cornell Review controversy over printing an article about campus “ghettos,” “bitter minorities” and affirmative action became even more pronounced yesterday when students proposed a resolution to the Student Assembly to ban the use of the Cornell name by the biweekly journal’s title. The article, “What to Expect: The Angry Minority,” said students in program houses — only at Cornell because of affirmative action and scholarships — complain about brutal oppression from “whitey.” Students Nikhil Kumar ’11, minority representative-at-large, and Nicole Rivera ’09, president of the Minority Business Student Association, brought the resolution to the table. “As a student here...

Climate change and its effects on ecosystems is the No. 1 crisis facing the world, according to Cornell faculty -- but it is a phenomenon not easily reversed. The most important problem that is more easily solved? Insufficient education in science, critical thinking and environmental issues.That is according to a new study that surveyed Cornell's academic staff on the world's leading crises. The new study is published online in Frontiers e-View and will be published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. How Cornell faculty rate the world's most important and the most solvable problemsOn a 5-point scale,...

Can you be an obscure, self-indulged, theory-laden, post-modern scholar and manage to be an effective university president?  University of Wisconsin at Madison is hoping “yes.� It has picked Biddy Martin, Cornell provost and women’s studies professor, as its new chancellor. Her best-known work is a little something called Femininity Played Straight, which features chapters entitled “Sexualities without Gender and Other Queer Utopias� and “Teaching Feminism.� The one review that Amazon.com has picked up on the book is truncated to a single sentence, though it pretty much sums up the obtuseness of Ms Martin’s field: “Martin's eccentric use of the body...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University will create a new nanotechnology research center with the help of a $25 million grant from a Saudi Arabian educational partnership. Cornell says the money from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology's Global Research Partnership will be spread over five years. Cornell was among four universities out of 41 that applied to receive one of the grants. Oxford, Stanford and Texas A&M were also selected. The center will study nanomaterials for the use in oil recovery, carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, water desalination, and photovoltaics and solid state lighting.

ITHACA--As international attention on the situation between Tibet and China has increased over the past few weeks while China prepares for the Olympics, a Cornell anthropology professor was the subject of personal attacks posted to two University listservs last week in response to a film screening and discussion she organized on “the prospects for peace in Tibet.” After Prof. Kathryn March, anthropology, began publicizing the event several weeks ago, it immediately provoked a wave of impassioned e-mail responses, most of which criticized the event. A handful of the responses on the listservs were personally directed at March. “I … was...

ITHACA--The Chaplain at Cornell University has announced his support for the racist and anti-American sermons of controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.Speaking on Thursday (March 27) Rev. Kenneth Clarke defended those sermons by Wright, called them “a different style of patriotism.” According to the Ithaca Journal: Clarke challenged the audience to go beyond the sound bites and listen to Wright's entire sermon from Sept. 16, 2001 where he criticizes America. Clarke compared Wright's criticism of America to commentary found in speeches by Fredrick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr.The critiques are not unpatriotic, Clarke said.The statements “reflect a different style of...

In the face of shouting dissenters and shrouded protesters, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stood firmly behind his conviction Thursday that the 2001 USA Patriot Act strengthened America's freedom and continues to protect the country from terrorist attacks. Ashcroft spoke about the need for the change in national security thinking after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 to a crowd of more than 700 at Cornell University's Statler Hall. The former attorney general described his experience on 9/11 and how the increased ease with which a terrorist could cause harm to civilians changed the way the government needed to...

ITHACA, N.Y.--Ben Nichols, a professor emeritus at Cornell University and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who served three terms as mayor of Ithaca, has died. Nichols, a professor of electrical engineering at Cornell for 40 years, died Saturday of natural causes after being admitted to Cayuga Medical Center. Nichols was rooted in the American left and spent much of his life in politics. He was born on Staten Island in 1920 to parents who were Communist Party members. He helped his parents organize a union, supported the Spanish Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s,...

Writing a conservative column is an art, and like any art, it takes talent. Despite what you may assume, however, the ability to write a conservative column is not a genetic trait that one simply does or doesn’t possess; you too can learn to write a conservative column. In fact, consider it your civic duty. Just follow the pointers below. One note before we commence. In the same vein of my last column, which dealt with media coverage of Iran, this column is about framing and language. It is not about the substance of conservative thought, nor do I mean...

Cornell University has been making an effort in recent years to foster diversity and tolerance, promoting concepts like gender-neutrality to ensure the comfort and safety of students who Gwendolyn Dean, coordinator of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered or Questioning Resource Center called “gender non-conforming.” One event at Cornell featuring a gender-neutral environment occured last fall in the form of Hillel-sponsored speed dating. Ga’avah, Cornell’s LGBTQ Jewish group, held speed-dating for members of the LGTBQ community upstairs in Trillium. Graduate students also had a speed-dating event on the second floor, so that, according to Nomi Fridman, Ga’avah’s faculty advisor, no one...

ITHACA--Amid preparations for the arrival of an Iraqi judge involved in the trial of Saddam Hussein, local law enforcement and public officials are expressing concerns about exactly what will be needed to keep the judge — and his family — safe. Based on their limited research, police say the judge — Ra'id Juhi Hamadi Al-Saiedi, who is to be the Cornell Law School's first Clarke Middle East Fellow — has been the target of assassination attempts and they don't have enough information to assess the risk he represents and prepare for it. “Cornell University Administration representatives confirm that they have...