By Leigh Ann Sobehart & John Harvith

A summary of notable stories in the media involving Pitt people, programs, research, training, or events.

• On March 10, the Associated Press reported on an elite science competition for high school seniors, the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), which was held earlier that week in Washington, D.C. Andrew Yeager, professor of medicine and pediatrics in Pitt’s School of Medicine, was featured in the article that was picked up by a number of media outlets, including ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CNN.com, Newsday, and The Washington Post.

In the article, Yeager, the competition’s head judge, was quoted as saying, “It [the competition] restores, for those who need it, and enforces for others, that we have incredible future leaders in science and technology.”

Yeager has been involved with the Intel STS, America’s oldest and most highly regarded precollege science competition, since the late 1970s. The competition can boast that former finalists have gone on to win 100 of the country’s top science and mathematic awards, including five Nobel prizes.

The Intel STS stresses to student competitors the importance of being able to communicate their often complex work in terms the general public can understand.

Yeager, expounding on the caliber of student competitors, was quoted as saying, “If we wanted to look at students who had factual knowledge of science, we could easily do that by administering some standardized test. That’s not what our mission is. We’re looking for those [students] who go beyond that, who show creativity, analytical skills, and leadership skills.”

• An article in the March 11 Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Pitt was one of 75 colleges to receive grants from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Laura Schaefer, assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Gilbert C. Walker, associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Chemistry, were named as principal investigators in the article.

The DOD plans to award $27 million to the institutions and principal investigators named in the article. Schaefer’s project is called “Interactive Visualization in Turbulent Combustion and Microscale Energy Systems.”

Schaefer, along with colleague Peyman Givi, William Kepler Whiteford Professor in Pitt’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, submitted the project to the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program. The funds will be used to acquire a virtual reality graphics-design engine. Walker’s project is titled “Tunable Infrared Laser for Use in Infrared Nearfield Microscopy.”

“The awards will finance equipment to be used in current or future research,” the article stated.

• Alcoa Professor of Manufacturing Engineering Barthlomew Nnaji was the focus of an article in Africa News on March 12. The article reported that Nnaji had sent a letter to the All Nigeria’s People Party (ANPP), informing the party’s chair of his decision to withdraw from the Enugu East senatorial election. Nnaji had been nominated as the ANPP candidate for the 2003 general election.

The article went on to describe Nnaji’s commitment to the development of his native country, saying, “The sincerity of purpose that motivates him is indisputable.”

Nnaji’s letter of resignation apparently expressed his dissatisfaction with the current political climate in Nigeria.

The article contained this excerpt from Nnaji’s letter, “My decision to withdraw from party politics for the time being owes to the fact that the 2003 general elections will not be determined by development visions and programmes of the political parties and their flag-bearers. The election will rather be determined by ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, dangerous propaganda, character assassination, money, bribery, corruption, gerrymandering, abuse of incumbency at every level, violence, thuggery, criminal forgery, serial murder, arson, falsification of election results and other old sorrows of history which have kept Nigeria’s development at a low level.”

To Nnaji, the Nigerian condition is appalling, the article states. The country lags behind many third world countries of Asia and Africa in the area of development; poverty is rampant, and yet some Nigerians have become extraordinarily wealthy by what Nnaji called “the most unconscionable looting of the country’s resource[s].”

Despite his disenchantment with the current condition of his homeland, Nnaji remains hopeful that he can be an agent of change for Nigeria, the article said.

“It is only natural that I should explore ways to work toward effecting fundamental changes in society so that Nigeria could with dignity step into the 21st century with the rest of the world,” Nnaji’s letter was quoted as saying.

• An Associated Press story from March 14, picked up by the Toronto Star, the Kansas City Star (Mo.), Newsday, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among others, featured Dennis Galletta, associate professor of business administration in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. The story described a recent study conducted at Pitt, which found that using spell-check software can diminish the quality of one’s writing.

About half of the 33 undergraduate students who made up the study’s sample were asked to proofread a Microsoft Word document containing the editing characters provided by the spelling and grammar-check tools. The other half of the sample was asked to proofread the same document without the editing characters.

Without the spelling and grammar software, students who had earned high scores on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) made nearly one-third as many mistakes in editing the document as students with comparable SAT scores who used the spell-check software. The software is so sophisticated, Galletta said, that some have come to trust it too thoroughly. “It’s not a software problem, it’s a behavior problem,” Galletta was quoted as saying.