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Newsmakers |
Not your mother’s home ec As President Bush encourages Americans to shoulder more responsibility for their own financial well-being, Michigan Public Radio reporter Bill Poorman wondered where to turn to learn how to manage his 401-K and make wise choices about his health-care plan. “Shouldn’t there have been a class somewhere along the way on how to manage the economics of the home?” he asked on the NPR program Sound Money, before launching into a feature on the changes in home economics, including discussion with UGA Family and Consumer Sciences Dean Sharon Y. Nickols. “Our work goes all the way from molecular studies looking at the impact of genetics on dietary absorption of certain nutrients to very large social demographic studies looking at population trends in anticipation of needs for housing, for instance, or the care for the elderly,” Nickols said. “More and more, our society is finding that there are unmet needs, issues related to youth development, to the way we use our environment, to financial resources, parenting. All of those are what I call front-page issues on the newspaper.” In response to Poorman’s question whether family and consumer economics is a “girlie” field, Nickols said, “In my own college right now we have 27 percent of our undergraduate majors are male. At the graduate level about a third of our students are males and on our faculty we have about 40 percent of our tenure-track faculty are men.” Transforming the United States NPR’s All Things Considered reported on the death of evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr at the age of 100. UGA historian Edward Larson discussed Mayr’s immigration to this country from Germany, part of an exodus of top-flight German scientists who transformed U.S. science. “He made it from a good solid scientific community, on par with others in the world, to the finest science community in the entire world, the dominant scientific community,” Larson said. Good start? UGA political science professor Loch Johnson wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune reviewing the early performance of Porter Goss as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He concluded that Goss had made a good beginning: “Goss, too [like his predecessor George Tenet], may succumb to the sirens of the White House, but my sense of him is that he is likely to uphold the sacred standard of professional objectivity for intelligence officers and speak truth to power. Whether power will listen is, of course, another matter.” Secret soldiers The Kansas City Star (and other papers) reported an Associated Press story that the French government will award the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, to the seven surviving CIA pilots who flew supply missions to French troops in what is now Vietnam. They flew as “civilian employees” of Civil Air Transport, a CIA front company, in unarmed cargo planes. They knew that if they were captured or killed they would not be acknowledged as U.S. government employees, but they also have been denied retirement benefits on the grounds that they were technically not government employees. The French award is thus a welcome commemoration. The AP reporter questioned UGA historian William M. Leary, who has written extensively about covert CIA air operations in Asia, about the news. “The pilots of Civil Air Transport flew a variety of deeply covert and often hazardous missions for the CIA, sometimes at the cost of their lives,” Leary said. “They were the true secret soldiers of the Cold War.” Kim Carlyle of the UGA News Service monitors coverage of UGA in local, state and national media. Contact her for information about these or other stories in the news. |
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