Purdue Notebook

October 1, 2004

Campus activities

– Purdue student registration for spring semester 2004-05 begins on Oct. 11. Students should make an appointment with their academic advisers now, unless the school in which they are enrolled provides them with special instructions for registration. The spring semester begins Jan. 10.

– A key witness in the federal government's case against the tobacco industry will speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 13 in Stewart Center's Loeb Playhouse. Victor DeNoble, former Philip Morris researcher, will talk what he says are tobacco industry efforts to keep smokers addicted. His visit, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Student Wellness Office of the Purdue Student Health Center in collaboration with the Tobacco Control Partnership of Tippecanoe County.

Faculty and staff honors

– The 2004 Blackwell-Tapia Prize has been awarded to Rodrigo Banuelos of Purdue's mathematics department. The 2004 Blackwell-Tapia Conference and Prize Presentation will be Nov. 5-6 at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, located on the UCLA campus. Banuelos will receive a $3,000 honorarium and a plaque for his work. On Nov. 6, he will deliver his prizewinner's lecture, "Isoperimetric inequalities in probabilities, geometry and PDEs." [cb]

– Two faculty members from the Patti and Rusty Rueff Department of Visual and Performing Arts won awards for their concept of a database-building device that allows neighbors to borrow household items. Steve Visser, associate professor, and Scott Shim, assistant professor, created the BLU ("Borrow, Lend, Unite") Network, which is a device that builds a database of objects neighbors are willing to lend. Prospective borrowers then connect to the database through a BLU module into a phone line that connects to other BLU machines in the area to indicate their needs. The device won honorable mention from I.D. Magazine's 2004 Annual Design Review. It also won the Award of Excellence in the 2003 Tawain International Design Competition.

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