"These toadfish are the world's ugliest fish, so they need the best mating call they can get. They sit there and essentially whistle at females."
--Larry Rome, associate professor of biology, explaining the toadfish's use of his super-fast twitch muscle, the fastest known muscle in vertebrates (The Washington Post, Monday, August 12)
"Kids are the unseen stakeholders in the American workplace."
--Stewart Friedman, director of the Wharton Leadership Program, summarizing his study which found the greater a mother's degree of authority, freedom and control over decision making on the job, the fewer behavior problems in her kids (The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, July 31)
"Every place that I have examined where community policing has occurred, there has been a dramatic drop in crime, particularly in violent crime."
--Marvin Wolfgang, professor of criminology, discussing efforts to combat youth crime (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Wednesday, August 14)
"It's a prescription for social disaster -- another act in a 20-year-old tragedy in which federal and state governments have abandoned our nation's cities."
--Michael Reisch, professor of social welfare, criticizing the latest welfare reform law (The Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, August 16)
"It is one of the most horrible dilemmas for a couple because it is faced most often by people who are trying very hard to have a baby -- and then they turn around and have to talk about abortion."
--Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics, commenting on the difficulties involved with a fetal reduction operation (London Evening Standard, Monday, August 12)
"It was pretty challenging and I've learned a lot about the history of computers. It was amazing to learn that a lot of advanced concepts of computers, such as parallel computing, existed 50 years ago."
--Wallace Wong Ming-yap, visiting exchange student who worked on the award-winning student project to recreate the processing power of ENIAC on a single silicon chip (South China Morning Post, Thursday, August 15)
[Many expected to find] "a lot of craziness--kooks--when it came to political talk radio. But they found that this is largely not true."
--Joseph Turow, professor of communication, said of the graduate students who worked on the Annenberg study of talk radio (Los Angeles Times, Thursday, August 15)
"I think people will increasingly ask themselves: Is my getting something for less really worth the price the entire community pays?"
--Edward Shils, G. W. Taylor Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurial Studies, in an article on anti-superstore sentiment and the so-called Wal-Mart effect, where the opening of a superstore actually decreases the total number of jobs in a region (Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, August 13)
"That's the stereotype. And it's wrong. Fundamentally, they are very, very similar. But the press for Hillary Clinton has been negative.... And the press for Elizabeth Dole has been largely positive. What that suggests is she has been more artfully crafting an image, because if you look at the reality of their lives, they are functionally similar."
--Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of Annenberg, comparing the media's portrayal of Hillary Rodham Clinton to Lady MacBeth and the portrayal of Elizabeth Dole to Cinderella (The Arizona Republic, Sunday, July 14)
"People are walking around who don't have this CCR-5 molecule, who can't get infected and who are healthy. So you could knock this protein out, protect against HIV, and it won't cause side effects."
--Robert Doms, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, discussing the discovery (by him and his colleagues) of a gene mutation that results in the absence of a protein necessary for HIV infection (The Atlanta Journal, Friday, August 9)
"What do kids watch? They watch MTV. If you're going to get the kids interested in science, you've got to do it in a manner they're accustomed to. I want [elementary school teachers] to learn the culture of childhood today."
--Ryda Rose, professor of education, describing her strategy for helping teachers teach science better (The New York Times, Sunday, August 4 )
"It may have less to do with whether you love your mother."
--Jay Amsterdam, professor of psychiatry, explaining his research on a possible link between viral infections and clinical depression (Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, July 23)
"Personal trading by fund managers may be allowed by law, but it makes us queasy."
--Leo Katz, professor of law, commenting on practices within the mutual fund industry (The Washington Post, Sunday, June 30)
"You have teachers and principals and superintendents who are wedded to the old idea that if you ... get an education, you can make it, you can defy the odds and have a decent standard of living. [But] the William Penns of the world are not really equipped with the resources to deliver these people out of their circumstances."
--Elijah Anderson, the Charles and William L. Day Professor of Social Science, explaining the bleak situation facing graduates of William Penn and other inner-city high schools (Los Angeles Times, Sunday, June 30)
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