Glass from the past
As the sun rises upon Homewood House, the richness of all
available light pours into its front hall by way of a fanlight
and sidelights that border one of two main doors to this historic
building. Likewise, the glaring light of the setting sun is
controlled, and displayed, through a differently designed
fanlight and sidelights around a door on the opposite side of the
structure. The house, built in 1801, also has unusually large
windowpanes, used to capture the sun's rays.
Light and sparkle were inherent aspects of the
neoclassical style, and in the Carroll family's Baltimore home--a
house that exemplified this architectural design--glass played an
Even broken glass served a purpose for the
building, as trenches uncovered in archaeological digs in the
1980s were found to contain unusually large quantities of broken
wine bottles mixed in with the soil. These types of trenches used
glass to help improve drainage away from the house.
FUSE is open for business
The moment the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer team has
been waiting for finally came last week.
FUSE, they told the American Astronomical
Society, is open for business. And since the proof of any new
business is in its product, they presented 25 scientific posters
filled with tantalizing new data gathered in the orbiting
observatory's first few months of activity.
One highlight, described at a press conference
in Atlanta, was new evidence on the origins of a cloud of hot gas
that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy, stretching out 5,000-10,000
light-years in a football-shaped halo.
Teach Baltimore students make
Baltimore City elementary students who regularly attended Teach
Baltimore, a local summer school program, made significant
academic gains this year, says a new Hopkins study.
Education researcher Geoffrey Borman has
released the first-year results of a three-year longitudinal
study that tracks the impact of Teach Baltimore, an academically
intensive summer program that trains university students to
provide eight weeks of summer reading and writing instruction to
low-income Baltimore City elementary students. The study involves
about 450 elementary school children from five different sites in
high-poverty areas of the city.
Borman, a researcher at Hopkins' Center for
Social Organization of Schools, says the results have
implications for education policy-makers struggling with issues
like year-round schooling, mandatory summer school and preventing
what is called the "summer slide effect" for poor children.
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