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Duffield Hall Opens DEDICATION SET FOR OCTOBER 7

CONSTRUCTION OF DUFFIELD HALL IS nearly complete, and the building will be formally opened at a dedication ceremony on October 7, 2004.Work on the $70 million nanotechnology center, designed by the architectural firm of Zimmer Gonsul Frasca, began in June 2001. It is named for David Duffield '62, founder and former CEO of PeopleSoft Inc., who has provided major financial support for the project.

Situated on the eastern end of the Engineering Quad, Duffield is connected to Phillips and Upson halls by a large, enclosed atrium with dining and meeting areas. Its three floors house research facilities for the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF), the NanoBiotechnology Center (NBTC), and the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR), including a 26,000-square-foot "clean room." There are also twenty-eight individual labs, as well as offices for nineteen faculty and more than 100 graduate students from six departments. The project also included a $4 million reshaping and relandscaping of the Engineering Quad; the remaining green space has been leveled, with steps leading up to Duffield's western entrances.

Bush or Kerry? STUDENTS HOLD MOCK ELECTION

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WON'T CAST their votes for U.S. President until November 2, but Cornell students will state their preference a little sooner. Mock Election 2004, a student-led program that kicked off with a voter registration drive as students returned to campus, continues with a series of lectures and debates that will culminate in an online vote on October 18–21. "It's my hope that Mock Election 2004 will help to reverse the alarming trend of youth political apathy," says Michael Zuckerman '06, president of the Mock Election Steering Committee. Among the scheduled speakers are U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Alan Keyes '71, the Republican candidate in this fall's U.S. Senate race in Illinois. The debates will include a face-off between Richard Trumka, secretary/ treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and Thomas Donahue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over job outsourcing.

Mock Election 2004 continues a tradition that stretches back to 1916, when faculty and students cast 1,759 votes in a straw poll conducted by the Daily Sun. Woodrow Wilson topped a field that included Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, and a halfdozen other candidates. For information on this year's event, go to: http://mockelection.cornell.edu.

Can't Stop the Music NAPSTER GOES TO COLLEGE, AGAIN

service Napster was all the rage on college campuses, with millions of users downloading billions of songs. A wave of legal challenges from the music industry shut Napster down in 2001, but now it's back on campus, this time with Cornell's blessing, as a legitimate subscription service.

The University joined six other schools in offering all students free Napster subscriptions for fall 2004. The financial deals worked out by the individual institutions varied, but in Cornell's case the one-year pilot program cost $210,000, most of which will be covered by an anonymous corporate donation, plus $25,000 from the Division of Student and Academic Services. Students have access to Napster's library of 800,000 songs, but only via streaming or so-called "tethered" downloads that can be played on PCs but not burned onto CDs or used in portable MP3 players. (Napster isn't compatible with Apple computers or iPods, either--only students running PCs with Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP need apply.) For $0.99 per song, students can choose to buy files for permanent download. In fall 2005, the Student Assembly will vote on whether to continue with the service, which will eventually be available at a reduced annual subscription rate that is likely be $20 per student. Napster is currently priced at $10 a month.

The University's embrace of legal file-sharing comes after years of mounting concern over online music piracy. In a press release, Dean of Students Kent Hubbell '67, BArch '69, said that it is a "commercial and technological experiment to come up with a method by which this generation of young people can . . . learn about the appropriate use of protected intellectual property." It's also a way to ease the off-campus Internet traffic that file-sharing generates: most of the Napster downloads are expected to be handled by an on-campus cache server.

Breaking New Ground AFRICANA CENTER EXPANDS

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER STUDENT PROTESTS AND A takeover of Willard Straight Hall led the University to establish a center for academic studies of the African diaspora, Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center has moved one step closer to the Spring 2005 opening of a newly renovated and expanded facility. President Jeffrey Lehman '77, Provost Biddy Martin, and ASRC faculty joined members of the Cornell Black Alumni Association and a drum ensemble at a public groundbreaking during Reunion weekend. The $4.23 million project will also include the construction of a 5,480-squarefoot addition to house the John Henrik Clarke library and a multipurpose room.

During construction, the library has been moved from the Center's Triphammer Road location to Olin Hall. Classes will also be held on central campus. Principal architect for the project is Ralph Jackson of the Boston-based firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott. "Credit goes to all our students and members of our community who fought very hard thirty-five years ago to establish the center and to James Turner, the founding director and faculty member, who over the years worked very hard to maintain it, develop it, and call for its programmatic and intellectual expansion," said acting director Salah Hassan. "Cornell has become a better educational institution as a result of the events of 1969."

Meanwhile, in Space CASSINI PROBES SATURN, MARS ROVERS KEEP ROLLING

AS THE CASSINI-HUYGENS SPACECRAFT approached Saturn after a seven-year, 2.2- billion-mile journey to study the giant planet and its moons, Cornell astronomers played key roles. On June 23, senior astronomy researcher Peter Thomas, a small-satellite expert, described unusual geographical features--including exposed water ice--on the small moon Phoebe; a week later, vice provost for physical sciences and engineering Joseph Burns, PhD '66, helped thread the craft through the planet's outer rings during a treacherous orbital insertion. Astronomy chairman Joseph Vererka serves on Cassini's imaging team, as does professor Steve Squyres '78, PhD '81, who was lead scientist for the two geological rovers that have been operating on Mars since January.

Those rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to far exceed their original three-month life expectancies. By the end of July, both craft had doubled their mission durations, despite the arrival of a power-draining Martian winter and a number of age-related infirmities. In early August, Spirit was climbing the steep Columbia Hills searching for rocky outcroppings, while Opportunity continued to investigate ancient bedrock features deep in the bottom of a stadiumsized crater called Endurance. The August 6, 2004, issue of the journal Science was devoted to eleven papers based on data from Spirit, including an overview by Squyres, who reported that no evidence had been found to support the pre-mission hypothesis that the rover's Gusev Crater landing site was a former lake.

Diamond Anniversary PLANTATIONS CELEBRATES 60 YEARS

On August 15, the Cornell Plantations, the University's 3,000-acre official botanical garden and arboretum, marked its sixtieth anniversary. Festivities included a jazz quartet, the debut of a basil-lemon ice cream created by the Cornell Dairy, and a guided tour around Beebe Lake.

The Plantations includes bogs, fens, gorges, glens, wet and dry meadows, and woodlands throughout the Cayuga Lake region, attracting close to 100,000 visitors each year, and traces its beginnings to the 1875 construction of Sage College, which included an arboretum. Current collections within the Plantations include the International Crop and Weed Garden, the Willard Straight Rock Garden, the Muenscher Poisonous Plants Garden, and the Mullestein Winter Garden. Plans for expansion include development of a tropical conservatory and renovation of the Lewis Education Center. "There were several false starts," says Plantations director Donald Rakow. "It wasn't until Liberty Hyde Bailey came up with the name and enunciated the vision of a modern public garden in 1944 that the Plantations really got its start."

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