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
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<> 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

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