Community Briefs

Friday, November 6, 1998

Community Briefs

American Red Cross gets set for blood drive

The American Red Cross is scheduled to hold a blood drive at the
John Wooden Center from Nov. 16 through Nov. 20. The drive will
benefit both the Red Cross and UCLA campus organizations.

The week before the drive, each participating UCLA organization
will be asked to submit a sign-up list of intended blood donors,
and each will receive $5 for every donor who signed up and gave
blood.

UCLA campus organizations can sign up to participate for the "$5
program" with Kristina Schoenrock at (310) 445-9926.

Memorial service

to be held for Postel

A memorial service for UCLA alumni and Internet pioneer Jonathan
Postel will be held today at 11 a.m. in USC’s Bovard
Auditorium.

Postel, who earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at UCLA, was
one of the first to join a research project to build the ARPANet,
the precursor to today’s Internet. He spent 21 years of his career
at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and made many
contributions to computer networking and Internet management.

Postel died unexpectedly Oct. 16 at St. John’s Hospital in Santa
Monica, at the age of 55. The memorial service will be webcast live
at http://www.usc.edu/webcast/postel. For additional information,
call (310) 822-1511.

Research award given to education professor

Marcia Bates, a professor in the Department of Information
Science at UCLA’s Graduate school of Education & Information
Studies, was presented with the 1998 Research Award of the American
Society for Information Science on Oct. 28.

The award recognizes Bates for her research contributions in the
field of information science, and has only been presented eight
times in the last 57 years.

Bates’ recent work on the Getty Online Searching Project was
considered by the award jury to be particularly significant. In
that project, she focused on the way in which Humanists search for
information in an electronic environment.

Other honors include an award for best paper published in the
Journal of the American Society for Information Science in the area
of research tactics in 1980, and election as a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990.

Fossil shows birds older than previously thought

The fossilized jaw of a parrot dating from the last days of the
dinosaurs is the earliest known fossil of a modern land bird, says
a scientist from UC Berkeley.

The find, in conjunction with other recent evidence, provides
strong evidence that modern birds evolved long before most
scientists thought.

An analysis of the find, excavated from Cretaceous deposits in
eastern Wyoming, appears in this week’s issue (Nov. 5) of the
British journal Nature.

"This find suggests that by the end of the Cretaceous period,
around 65 to 70 million years ago, modern birds were an important
group, at least in North America," said author Thomas Stidham, a
graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC
Berkeley.

"These data also indicate that modern bird groups, including
parrots, may have been relatively unaffected by the mass extinction
at the end of the Cretaceous period," he wrote in a scientific
correspondence in Nature.

Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports

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