PREVIOUS
NEXT
Lamont Weekly
Report – September 16, 2005
OFFICE
OF THE DIRECTOR
P.O. Box 1000, 61 Route 9W Palisades, New York 10964
<> REPORT
SUMMARY <>
- Letter from the Director
____________________________________
<> LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR
I spent Tuesday in Houston with Lamont Development Director
Sarah Huard - we had a series of meetings most notably with
the Head of Exxon Mobil Upstream research Mike Cassiani and
with Lamont Alum David Lammlein. There was no visible impact
on the city of Houston resulting from the additional 200,000
folks they have living there as a consequence of the evacuation
of New Orleans - with one notable exception: there were no
rental cars available - zero - the airport rental car center
was a ghost town. Anyway that was a very successful day, despite
spending a small fortune on taxis.(By the way, Steve Cassiani
spoke casually of a 5 billion barrel oil field discovery off
West Africa. How much does a barrel of oil go for nowadays?
Around $70 actually - so that is $350 billion. To put this
in context the annual budget of the NSF is approximately $5.5
billion)
The event on Wednesday that deserves recognition is the brilliance
of our external relations department (Ken Kostel and Mary
Tobin) in managing to engineer the publication of Joerg Schaefer's
front page article in the Metro section of the New York Times,
talking about his Surface Exposure Dating work in Central
Park. The timing of this could not have been better as Wednesday
evening was our first appearance before the Orangetown Planning
Board presenting, in an extremely preliminary way, our ideas
for the new Geochemistry Laboratory building. Needless to
say all the members received copies of Joerg's article, with
explanations of why this new building is so important to the
development of this line of research. This whole presentation
went very well, although we did not escape until 1045pm.
Clearly insomnia is going to be a prerequisite for the completion
of the planning approval process for our new building!
Thursday was consumed by a day trip to the Red Carpet Club
in Denver airport for a meeting of the Ocean Council, upon
which I serve. The Directors of the nation's major ocean Institutions
are
making excellent progress in crafting a plan for the merger
of JOI and CORE (the two non-profits in DC that represent
our community). No ideas yet on what this new Corporation
will be called, but when established it will provide a single
powerful institution to DC that will lead both advocacy on
the Hill and the management of major ocean programs, like
the drilling program and ocean observations (e.g. see www.orionprogram.org).
And now on to a completely different topic
As I stated in my letter to the Lamont community dated July
20th, while I am confident that everyone shares a commitment
to insuring that the working environment on the Lamont Campus
is free from
discrimination and sexual harassment, we cannot take this
for granted and we must work hard to insure that we maintain
a working atmosphere that is positive, supportive and free
from intimidation. In order to provide us with an outside
and independent view of whether our goal is being achieved
Associate Provost Susan Rieger of the CU Office of Equal Opportunity
and Affirmative Action is, at our request, beginning a study
to provide us with recommendations on how to improve the quality
of our working environment. I do not know whether Susan will
contact you or not - our HR Dept has randomly selected names
from all segments of the Campus. And if your name happens
to be on the list Susan will contact you to determine whether
you wish to talk with her or not - your choice. It is an important
process so I do encourage everyone to talk with Susan and
express their opinions clearly and honestly. But this is one
hundred percent a voluntary activity.
I have to spend three days in DC next week working with the
Marine Mammal Commission. To prepare my brain for that particular
challenge, I think I will sleep all weekend.
Have a good one,
- Mike
____________________________________
You can subscribe / unsubscribe to the Lamont
Weekly Report mailing list.
– To subscribe - send your request
to:
majordomo@ldeo.columbia.edu
Subject: Request
The following command must be in the BODY of the message not
in the subject:
subscribe lamont-l <email address>
– To unsubscribe - send your request
to:
majordomo@ldeo.columbia.edu
Subject: Request
The following command must be in the BODY of the message not
in the subject:
unsubscribe lamont-l
<email address>
If you have questions
or problems send e-mail to the list owner:
owner-lamont-l@ldeo.columbia.edu
|