This weekend I wrote about Misha Angrist, the Duke geneticist taking part in a Harvard med school survey through which his DNA will be decoded and made public.
If this interests you, a couple links you may want to check out. The Harvard study's website is here, and Misha's personal website, where he occasionally blogs about his experiences, is here.
A Duke health system administrator and the founders of the Durham Rescue Mission will be honored this weekend by the Durham chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The honorees at the chapter's 34th-annual Freedom Fund Award Dinner are MaryAnn Black, Duke University Health System's associate vice president for community relations, and Ernie and Gail Mills, founders and operators of the Durham Rescue Mission.
The award dinner will be held Saturday night at the downtown Durham Marriott.
Black is the former chair of the Durham Board of Commissioners and has a master's degree in social work from UNC Chapel Hill.
Because we need another Duke/Carolina showdown...
The two universities have found another way to compete: a blood drive.
November donations to blood drives on the two campuses will be tallied and compared, with the winner announced at halftime of this year's football showdown between the two schools on Nov. 29.
As you may have read in a previous post here in Campus Notes, plenty of universities are struggling as endowments dip and budgets get tight.
But at Duke, officials don't expect to have to make budget cuts, says Tallman Trask, one of Duke's top administrators. In a question-and-answer session posted to the Duke news website, Trask said the university is in decent shape.
At least for the moment.
A snippet:
"We're not intending to impose any immediate or specific budget cuts right now. My biggest concern is about our expectations going forward. We don't currently have problems in our operating budget, but we could create problems by trying to take on more than we can afford. I think any changes will manifest themselves in our inability to do some things we wanted to do in the future."
He continued:
"Our employee benefits will be just as generous as they were this year, and it is too early to determine salary increases for next year. I think people at Duke are more secure here than at any other place they might work."
At Duke University, political science students can now take courses from someone who weathered the storms of a campaign for governor.
Michael Munger, chairman of Duke's political science department, finished a distant third as the state's Libertarian gubernatorial candidate. He got about 3 percent of the vote. Sounds like he got trounced, right?
In fact, Munger is encouraged by his vote totals and says it enforces his belief that there is room for a real, viable third party in state politics.
In campaigning, Munger learned some valuable lessons.
One, he's no Paul Harvey. Also, at least three percent of North Carolinians would trust him with their cat.
He learned some other stuff as well and told us about it. Here's what he had to say:
Duke historian John Hope Franklin is calling Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election this week "one of the most historic moments in the history of this country.
Check out more of what he has to say here.
If you went to Duke a half-century ago and wax nostalgic for long evenings breaking bread with your classmates at the campus dining hall, the university's library magazine has just the thing for you.
Click here for an exhaustive history of dining at Duke and the impact of Theodore Minah, who took over as dining chief in 1946.
As the magazine reports, he arrived at Duke at a time when students were irritated by wartime food rationing, poor dining policies and an unprepared cooking staff.
I love this snippet from a suggestion box way back in 1945:
"We know things are tough all over, but can't we have any silverware? Restaurants seem to have steaks or good cuts of meat now. How about the Union? Must we eat chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken (poorly prepared too)? Will we ever have pitchers of cream on the table at breakfast likelast year? Why continually run out of food?"
Duke University will once again test out its new emergency warning system today (Thursday).
The system, put into place earlier this year, underwent some testing last month and the university subsequently tweaked it a bit, adding two sirens to enhance its campuswide coverage.
The sirens will blare intermittently today between noon and 2 p.m. If you're on campus and hear it, remain calm. The university requests that you do not panic or call 911. It's just a test.
The plan calls for a first siren on East Campus near Trinity Avenue followed by another siren on the West Campus quad. Once those sirens are tested, the entire system will blare for about a minute. You might hear loud tones and a recorded message.
So basically, if you planned to bring a sleeping baby for a walk around campus today, you might want to re-think that plan.
Duke is one of many universities to invest in a campus warning system following the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech where a crazed gunman on a shooting spree killed more than 30 people.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will speak at Duke Law School next Saturday, Nov. 8, at 9:30 a.m. during a dedication ceremony for the school's recent expansi
The school recently opened a 4,000-square-foot addition. Over the last several years, the law school has renovated all classrooms, added two new wings of offices and meeting rooms as well as a new suite for the school's clinic. The library has been renovated as well.
Michael Munger, the Duke political scientist running for governor under the Libertarian banner, gets some pub in Reason Magazine.
