Designed to get more news from around the University into the Gazette, "News Across Harvard" provides a forum for each department's happenings as they concern the University community at-large. Tell us about newsworthy events in you office: awards won, new appointments in your department, major organizational changes or initiatives, retirements, and so forth.

Submissions must be written in newspaper style (third-person rather than first) and be 150 words or less. Please include a phone number in case there are questions. The Gazette reserves the right to edit all items, and regrets that it cannot publish items regarding personal milestones, such as births, engagements, and weddings.

Submissions must be e-mailed to hunews@harvard.edu, and will run on a space available basis.

Kennedy School of Government/Harvard Business School

Third Annual International Development Conference Meets

Leading experts in business, government, and academia discussed "Profits, Poverty, or Progress? Forging a Better Balance Between the Public, Private, and Non-Governmental Sectors" at the third annual International Development Conference last week.

Conference speakers, drawn from the foremost thinkers and leading figures in their fields, included Nancy Barry, president of the Women's World Banking; Michael Fairbanks, Monitor Co.; Paulo Conde, mayor of Rio De Janeiro; Betty Bigombe, ex-minister of State for Pacification of Uganda; Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development; and Deborah Sparr, professor at Harvard Business School.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Center for Astrophysics Staff Members Win Awards

Five staff members at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) were honored Feb. 14 for winning awards from the American Astronomical Society.

Former CfA Associate Director for Theoretical Astrophysics and Professor of Astronomy A.G.W. Cameron was honored for "a lifetime of preeminence in astronomical research" with presentation of the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship; and Associate Professor of Astronomy Alyssa Goodman received the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, given annually to an astronomer not yet 36 years old who has made "outstanding achievements in observational astronomy."

In addition, Center Director Irwin Shapiro, who is also Paine Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics, received the Gerard P. Kuiper Award of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences for his "outstanding contributions to planetary science"; and, Trevor Weekes, leader of the Gamma Ray Collaborative at the Smithsonian's Whipple Observatory in Arizona, was awarded the Bruno Rossi Prize by the Society's High Energy Astrophysics Division for his "significant contribution to high-energy astrophysics."

Earlier, Joan Najita, a Center postdoctoral fellow, was named the winner of the Annie Jump Cannon Award for 1996. This prize, which is administered and presented by the American Association of University Women in cooperation with the American Astronomical Society, is given annually "to a woman for distinguished contributions to astronomy."

Harvard University Libraries

DFAP Announces Availability of Web Site

The Digital Finding Aids Project (DFAP), which was created in February 1995 by the Harvard University Library Automation Planning Committee, has opened its new Web site at http://hul.harvard.edu/dfap/.

The DFAP is charged with planning and overseeing the design and deployment of a new computer application system to store, search, and retrieve digital finding aids in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) format for all Harvard-Radcliffe repositories in a shared database. The Web site includes a history of the project to date; Harvard guidelines for using SGML for finding aids based on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a proposed national standard; repository-specific versions of the guidelines; and a growing number of SGML-encoded finding aids. Users must have an SGML-aware viewer to use them; a link is available at the site.

The goal of the Project is to simplify and improve access to Harvard-Radcliffe's large and varied collections of primary source material. The project is a collaborative effort involving curators, archivists, catalogers, electronic text specialists, and library systems workers.

According to Leslie Morris, chairperson of the Project, the DFAP is the first step toward establishing a strong administrative structure for the creation and technical support of SGML-encoded finding aids at Harvard.

Information Technology

ABCD Technology Group Embarks on "Grand Rounds"

The ABCD Technology in Education working group has embarked on "grand rounds" to visit instructional computing facilities and talk with faculty and staff around campus. The group, which comes under the University's ABCD Committee -- an informal association of faculty, administrators, researchers, and students -- meets the first Wednesday of every month. On March 5, the group will meet at the Graduate School of Education in Gutman Library from 4-5:30 p.m. April and May meetings will take place at FAS and the Medical School, respectively. Other events include the first Harvard Symposium on Multimedia and Education on May 8 as part of the ABCD-sponsored Multimedia Fair at the Kennedy School of Government.

For further information, contact David Eddy Spicer, co-chair of the working group and assistant director of the Case Program at the Kennedy School, by phone at 496-6251 or by e-mail at david_eddy_spicer@harvard.edu.

Maple Site License Announced

The Harvard Maple site license group announces the availability of Maple V release 4 for the following platforms: Windows 95, Windows 3.1, Macintosh (68000 + Power Mac), OS/2, Sun Solaris, SGI, IBM, and DEC. Maple is a symbolic mathematics package. The site license covers all Harvard-owned computers in addition to those used by faculty and employees as well as full-time graduate students. For more information, visit Maple's Web site at www.maplesoft.com.

Department of Music

Music Center Aids Graduate Composers

The Harvard Computer Music Center, an affiliate of the Harvard Electronic Music Studio, was created in the summer of 1994 for use by graduate composers in the Department of Music. Since that time, Harvard composers have produced dozens of works on the Center's state-of-the-art equipment.

Last fall, the Harvard Group for New Music presented the first full concert of music written at the Center, constructed on a tape and performed with a live soloist. The pieces were "Behind the Veil," for piano and tape, by Brian Hulse; "Idioma," for piano and tape, by Sean Varah; "Aureole," for bassoon and tape, by David Horne; "Fantasy," for French horn and tape, by Kurt Stallman, and "Resound," for piano and tape, also by Horne. Hulse, Horne, and Stallman are doctoral candidates in composition. Sean Varah is assistant director of the Center.

The Center was designed and installed by Varah under the direction of Mario Davidovsky, Fanny P. Mason Professor of Composition. It was designed to allow intensive work on high-speed and computer music workstations. Each of the Center's three studios is completely soundproofed, and equipped with its own professional sound system. The Center augments the existing Harvard Electronic Music Studio, which was founded in 1968 and features a full-scale analog tape studio, in addition to digital sound equipment.

Department of Physics

Milestone at Harvard Cyclotron

On Jan. 24, 1997, the Harvard Cyclotron treated its 7,000th patient. Designed originally for physics experiments, the 160MeV (million electron volt) proton synchrocyclotron has been used almost exclusively for radiation therapy since 1961, specializing in the treatment of benign and cancerous tumors in the head and neck region. Patients are referred through Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston.