SPORTS: Charlotte, N.C., was a unanimous choice yesterday to be the NFL's newest city in the league's expansion. Page 11.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VOL.103,NO.48
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1993
(USPS 650-640)
Group seeks graduation speaker
Student organizes committee to find well-known figure
The Committee for Speakers at Commencement is drawing up a proposal for the KU Commencement Committee that would bring a speaker to the ceremony this May.
By Shan Schwartz Kansan staff writer
"We're looking to bring in a big name — someone who everyone would recognize and get the crowd excited," said Carrie Campbell, St. Paul.
A group of KU students has organized to try to bring a prominent speaker to campus for the commencement ceremony.
Minn., senior. "I want people to be able to look back and have something to remember their graduation by."
In addition, Student Senate passed a resolution on Oct. 20 that supports the addition of a well-known figure to commencement ceremonies and that asks the commencement committee to review the proposal.
But administrators have some concerns about adding a big speech to the commencement ceremony.
After talking with several seniors and student organization leaders, she formed the speakers committee. She said student response had been positive.
Campbell said she had approached KU administrators with her idea and had received little response but had been told to submit a proposal to the commencement committee.
Jim Scaly, assistant to the chancellor, said
that the commencement ceremony was kept short because of the graduates' long procession from the Campanile to Memorial Stadium.
The procession usually lasts 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and the ceremony is less than 30 minutes long, Scally said.
Scaly said consideration should be taken for senior citizens or people who require physical assistance.
Scally said there was no history of inviting a keynote speaker to commencement ceremonies. He said that invited speakers included the chair of the Board of Regents, the head of the University of Kansas Alumni Association, the governor and the chancellor.
"But the remarks that are made are kept deliberately brief," Scally said. "There are people who sit in the stadium from 2:30 until 5, and on a hot summer day that can be tiring. We have concerns for the well-being of the people who are there."
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"After people have sat there for an hour or two, it seems excessive for them to pay attention to a serious speech," Scally said.
Scally also said he did not know how the University could pay for a featured speaker.
"I think it's highly unlikely that we would accept their proposal because there's no money in the budget for something like that."
David Stevens, Wichita sophomore and forums coordinator for Student Union Activities, said that a well-known public figure sometimes had charged up to $10,000 for a speaking engagement.
"But to bring a speaker to our commencement may not really cost anything," Stevens said. "It might be an honor."
Stevens said that SUA supported the idea of inviting a prominent figure to speak at commencement and that SUA would help the speaker committee with its proposal.
Lawrence pathologist ponders Einstein's brain
Studies fail to uncover significant differences in great thinker's mind
By Tracl Carl
Kansan staff write
When Thomas Harvey, an 80-year-old pathologist and Lawrence resident, performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein in 1955, he decided to keep a little something.
Today, 38 years later, he still has Einstein's brain.
He keeps what is left of the mind that came up with the theories of relativity in three jars and 12 boxes of microscope slides in his small apartment on Massachusetts Street. The jaws have small chunks of pink brain floating in formaldehyde.
"I realized that his brain ought to be analyzed," Harvey said. "The family didn't realize I was going to keep it."
"He was different from other people," Harvey said. "We want to see if we can see why he's different."
They learned the next morning when they read it in the New York Times that not all of Einstein had been cremated and scattered over the Delaware River. They were upset at first, he said, but they were a science family and eventually agreed to let him study the brain on the condition that publicity about the findings would remain in scientific journals only.
But he has found nothing out of the ordinary.
Marian Diamond, a University of California at Berkeley professor of neurology, thought she had found something significant when she noticed an increase in Einstein's number of oligodendroglia cells, which feed the cells that support the nervous system.
After the family's consent, he took pictures of the brain, then he took it to a lab in Philadelphia that could slice it thin enough for microscope slides. Since then, Harvey has studied representative sections of each part of the brain and a total of about two-thirds of the brain.
"To her, this indicates that that area of the brain was more active and needed more nourishment," he said.
Right now, Harvey and other scientists
Picking his brain
After photographing the brain, Harvey cut it into separate sections. Sections were labeled, covered with a protective material and put in formaldehyde. Small parts of each section of the brain were sliced thin enough to be put in a microscope slide and preserved for future study. So far, Harvey said, he has noticed nothing extraordinary about the physical aspect of Einstein's intelligence, although a professor at the University of California at Berkeley said she thought she found a significant number of cells that support the nervous system.
Source: Kansan staff reports Dave Campbell / KANSAI
are busy focusing on the structure of Einstein's DNA. Rutgers University found that Einstein, who died of arterial disease, had the same chromosome pattern of other people with arterial disease.
Harvey met Einstein once when the scientist was a patient at a hospital in Princeton, N.J. Harvey was in charge of the lab at the hospital.
"His physician asked me to do some lab work on him," Harvey said. "I usually sent a technician, but this time I went myself."
Harvey said he had admired Einstein for his ideas and for his humanness.
Harvey said he would probably give the brain to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Yale University's medical school in Princeton or the Hebrew University in Israel.
"He was a very friendly, informal person," he said. "He would understand about studying his brain."
Harvey's roommate, Ahillea Maurellis, is a graduate student at KU and, like Einstein, is a physicist. But he does not study Einstein's brain.
"It's no different than any other dad," she said. "He always had a sort of library that he kept it in."
Virginia Mossalie, Harvey's daughter, lives in Kansas City, Mo. Having a father who studied Einstein's brain did not seem out of the ordinary, she said, and she never took the brain to school for show and tell.
"He's a great cook," Harvey said.
John Gamble / KANSAN
Thomas Harvey, Lawrence resident, was the pathologist for Albert Einstein's autopsy in 1955, and he decided to keep the scientist's brain. Harvey has been studying Einstein's brain for 38 years in order to determine any differences between it and a normal brain.
Network connects colleges
By Chesley Dohl
Kansan staff writer
KU computer experts ventured into a computer project unlike any other in Kansas two years ago.
This fall, their efforts were rewarded with a $682,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a computer communication system called the Kansas Research and Educational Network.
"There have been other errors with video networks," said Jerry Niebaum, director of academic computing services. "But in my 12-year tenure I don't know of any other project like it in the state involving community colleges, private colleges and universities working together."
If the plan goes as scheduled, next fall at the push of a few computer buttons each of 33 different junior, private and public colleges, including the University of Kansas, will be able to share library and a wide variety of other information with each other.
Only five junior colleges and five private colleges decided not to join the network.
But more important, Niebaum said KANREN already was joining professors.
"We've found the network has connected people rather than machines," he said. "Professors are talking to professors, and they're sharing information and ideas. Other forms of communication inhibit collaboration, but KANREN encourages collaboration."
The grant will pay for KU's installation costs, and there will be no additional costs after the network is connected, Niebiaa said.
Someday, the system will connect the state's high schools and junior highs. The network currently is designed for faculty use at the state's universities, but Niebaum said it may be available to KU students in the coming years.
Across the state, near the Colorado border, Colby Community College has its KANREN network in place, and teachers are patiently awaiting the arrival of software and a hookup from Fort Hays State University, said Rich Jewitt, computer center director at Colby Community College.
"Instructors are chimping on the bit to get on the network line," Jewitt said. "The network will provide us out in western Kansas with invaluable amounts of information."
It is the responsibility of each college or university to pay for individual software and connection hardware.
"Luckily we already had the needed hardware for the network hook up," Jewitt said. "But still, the software all will cost us as much as $2,000."
In December, Ottawa University and Johnson County Community College will be used by KU computer experts as test sites for the KANREN system, Jewitt said. The institutions will test the network, evaluating its problems and successes.
"The plan is to add one system per week to the network," he said. "At that rate we should be linked, off and going in a year's time."
Reincarnated classic
KU graduate Harold Harvey has enjoyed recent acclaim for his 1961 cult horror film, "Carnival of Souls."
Page 9.
Plant anatomy class will use trees to examine theory
By Kathleen Stolle Kansan staff writer
With a smile brighter than the Mona Lisa's, Michael Christianson watched as tree limbs tumbled from the sky yesterday.
As facilities operations tree specialist T.J. Reyes felled limb after limb with a chain saw, fellow workers below sliced out about 30 select limb junctures for Christianson. Junctures occur at the point where a single limb splits off into two or more branches.
Christianson, assistant professor of botany, plans to use samples from two freshly cut trees to test a theory originated by Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci.
"Opportunities like this are ones not to be passed up." Christianson said, standing in the limb-littered yard behind Watkins Scholarship Hall.
Christianson's plant anatomy class will use the samples to test a da Vinci theory, which correlates the surface area of the branch below the juncture to the surface areas of the branches above the juncture.
Christianson said da Vinci believed that the square of the diameter of the juncture's stem was equal to the sum of the squares of the diameters of the branches above the juncture. Da Vinci often used findings from his scientific experiments and observations to provide more accurate depictions of flora and fauna in his art.
Although scientists have challenged da Vinci's measurement theory, Christianson said no one had developed a better system
"No one's come up with a real convincing theory," he said.
Graduate teaching assistant Sara Tala-ferro, who helped to gather the samples, said the class would conduct a test of the da Vinci theory in three weeks, when a
wood anatomy lab was scheduled.
She said she anticipated the students would find the theory faulty because it was too simplistic.
"There's just a lot of variation in growth of trees or in any plant, so factors like dry seasons or rainy seasons, disease and soil types contribute to growth," she said. "And that wouldn't be accounted for in those simple measurements."
"It was just a matter of time before they fell," he said.
Steve Helsel, associate director of landscaping for facilities operations, said the trees, both of which were locust, were cut down because of age and ant infestation. Both trees, which had been alive about 50 years, were dead or hollow in parts.
The project that killed two birds with one stone may have affected squirrels, too. Jan Gimius, custodial supervisor for the scholarship halls, said she fed peanuts to squirrels that lived in the trees.
da Vinci's theory KU anatomy students are testing da Vinci's tree branch theory.
The theory states the square of the diameter of the first branch (A) equals the sum of the squares of the diameters of the branches above the juncture (B and C).
Source: Kansan staff reports
Dave Campbell / KANSAN
"They bred in that tree," she said, pointing to the first to be cut down. "They had their babies in there."