Homewood switch to five-digit dialing pushed back a month

The implementation date for the five-digit dialing process for the Homewood communications system is now scheduled for Jan. 26, 2001. The changeover was initially targeted for year-end.

Telecommunication Services officials said the date was pushed back because more planning was needed to coordinate the multifaceted changeover.

Hopkins teams play in Coaches vs. Cancer basketball duo

The university will host a Coaches vs. Cancer basketball doubleheader at 6 and 8 p.m on Friday, Jan. 5, in the White Athletic Center, Homewood campus. The regularly scheduled games square off the men's and women's varsity basketball teams of Johns Hopkins and New York University. Proceeds from the event go to the American Cancer Society.

Coaches vs. Cancer, founded in 1993 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches and the American Cancer Society, is a national program intended to promote healthy lifestyles for young people and to raise money for cancer research, education and patient services. Entering the 1999-2000 basketball season, the event had raised $10.6 million. Tickets for the doubleheader are $2 for adults and $1 for students.

Homewood Security alert

Security and the Baltimore Police are looking for a man believed to be responsible for a series of recent thefts of university equipment. The suspect is described as a white male, 25 to 30, 6 feet, 195 to 200 pounds, stocky build, brown hair and brown moustache.

He was seen at 11:26 a.m. on Dec. 8 leaving Latrobe Hall, carrying a computer CPU in a black trash bag, by a Homewood employee, who alerted Security. The suspect was last spotted running south in the 3100 block of Hargrove Alley. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and blue jeans and carrying a small dark bag with red trim.

Anyone observing this individual should immediately contact JHU Security at 410-516-7777. Those with information regarding the Dec. 8 incident should call Security at 410-516-4600 or the Northern District Police at 410-396-2455.

Conference on American and English empires draws 125

As Paul Kramer was doing research on the U.S. relationship with the Philippines, he thought it interesting the number of times he found evidence that Americans were looking to Britain for advice on how to colonize. John Plotz has been looking closely at the issue of portability, or how Britain managed to transport and plant its culture around the world through its empire.

When the two assistant professors got to talking, the idea for a conference was born. Kramer, in the History Department, and Plotz, in English, put out a call for papers. They expected 50 to 100 applications and got more than 200, and "all very solid," Plotz said.

For three days last month, some 125 conference attendees and presenters met at Homewood for "Pairing Empires: Britain and America, 1857 to 1947."

"The settlement of America, just the frontier hypothesis of American settlement in the 19th century, has incredibly interesting parallels to the way in which the British spread out overseas," Plotz says, "the difference [being] between the land empire of America and the overseas empire of Britain."

The papers presented at that conference, along with an audio of an interview with Plotz, are available online at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/audio-video.

Student on 'Millionaire'; others can play for JHU online

Jonathan Mills, a senior in The Writing Seminars, will represent Johns Hopkins on the college edition of ABC's popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, to air at 9 p.m on Thursday, Dec. 21.

Hopkins also is one of 25 schools participating in ABC's Enhanced TV Interactive College Challenge, done in conjunction with the show's college edition broadcasts, airing Dec. 19 to 21. Ten schools will compete during each telecast by engaging in an online competition. To play on Dec. 21, log on to www.abc.com and click on the Enhanced TV button. The game allows its participants to answer the same questions as the television contestants in real time.

Near Eastern Studies to show daily photos from dig in Egypt

The Near Eastern Studies Department will dedicate a page on its Web site to display images and relevant information on an upcoming Hopkins-coordinated archaeological endeavor in Luxor, Egypt.

The page will include daily photos of the excavation work, letters from the field, an aerial view of the site, a reference map and background on the time period--Early New Kingdom. The first images will likely appear on Jan. 4, with subsequent ones to run for the next four weeks.

The excavation work, a collaboration of Hopkins and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, is of a roughly 10-acre parcel, part of the Temple of Karnak. Betsy Bryan, chair of Near Eastern Studies, is heading up the dig and will be assisted by 11 Hopkins graduate students and one undergraduate, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She has been making winter field trips to Egypt since 1994.

Bryan said one of their goals is to uncover the temple's enclosure wall as it was in 1500 B.C. The area outside this enclosure also might produce some clues to ancient domestic habitation, she said.

The site address is http://www.jhu.edu/~neareast/egypttoday.html.