The Chronicle T h e i n d e p e n d e n t d a i ly at D u k e U n i v e r s i t y
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2010
ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTH YEAR, Issue 64
www.dukechronicle.com
Kenan-Biddle Kristiansen details ESPN’s evolution partnership nets 91 apps from Staff Reports THE CHRONICLE
A new collaborative effort providing funding to students at Duke and UNC received more than 91 applications, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta confirmed in an e-mail yesterday. The Kenan-Biddle Partnership is a $150,000 initiative that will distribute up to $50,000 annually over three years to projects at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that encourage interaction between the two campuses. Grants will be distributed in grants of about $5,000. The initiative’s deadline was extended to Nov. 22 after no applications had been submitted as the original Nov. 15 deadline approached and several students requested extensions. “It’s huge, especially given that the mission of this grant, which is to create cross-university partnerships,” said Duke Student Government President Mike Lefevre, a senior who will serve on the committee that will select which proposals to fund. “There are a lot of grant partnerships at Duke and UNC separately, but this is the first entrepreneurial initiative that actually challenges applicants to deal See kenan-biddle on page 7
margie truwit/The Chronicle
Larry Kristiansen, ESPN’s vice president of event production, spoke as the keynote speaker at “Business in the Wide World of Sports,” at the Fuqua School of Business Monday. He discussed the rise of ESPN in sports media, dating back to its founding in 1979. by Alex Zempolich THE CHRONICLE
Risk and innovation, underscored by a devotion to supportive teamwork—these are ESPN’s keys to success, noted one of its chief executives. Speaking at the Fuqua School of Business Monday night, Larry Kristiansen, ESPN’s vice president of event production, discussed the evolution of the sports me-
dia giant since its creation in 1979. Ever since the network acquired NFL television rights in the early 1990s, Kristiansen said, it has continued to diversify and innovate on a large scale. “The yellow projection of the firstand-10 line in football... the K-Zone visual in baseball, all of these were projects we invested in earlier.... Now we have ESPN3.com and ESPN 3D,” he said. “But
we don’t want to rest on our laurels. We started out in trailers, and now we have to take shuttles around. We are constantly changing.” As the keynote speaker at “Business in the Wide World of Sports,” Kristiansen continually stressed the importance of risk-taking in business, even summoning See kristiansen on page 7
Q&A with Brian Hare
chelsea pieroni/The Chronicle
Brian Hare is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, which studies dogs to better understand their cognitive abilities.
Problems with ePrint frustrate students, Page 3
Brian Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology, is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, which tests dogs brought in voluntarily by their owners in order to understand more about the cognitive abilities of dogs. The Chronicle’s Maggie Spini spoke with Hare about the center, which has been open since last Fall and hopes to come up with ways to train dogs to become even better at helping people. The Chronicle: What are your long-term hopes for the Duke Canine Cognition Center? Brian Hare: What we’d really, really love to see is some of the things that we learn here at the Duke Canine Cognition Center be applicable to real-world problems. Either helping people teach dogs to be better at finding bombs, or to be better companion animals to, say, children with autism or helping people with disabilities. The medical community is also getting more and more excited about using dogs in different ways to help people. There’s a huge supply problem—there are not many dogs available, and it’s very labor-intensive to train these dogs to help people. So, if we could understand dog psychology, we might make the whole process easier and there would be more dogs that are better at helping people. TC: Can you tell me more about what you were studying around the time the center opened?
BH: We were studying trust. For example, how is it that dogs form a trusting bond with a new person? It’s very interesting to know how social creatures form bonds with one another because that’s a very important thing that social animals do. A lot of developmental disorders in people may be related to problems in forming bonds with people. From a scientific perspective, dogs are a really interesting model of social bonding. Specifically, social bonding is important with dogs because if you’re a dog, one of the big challenges you have, particularly if you’re a shelter dog or a working dog, is having to learn to trust new people, because you’re going to have a new handler or a new owner.... Further, if they form a trusting relationship with a stranger, does that trust generalize to lots of contexts, or is it when they form a trusting relationship in one context, is it only in that context that they trust someone? TC: Have you started any new tests on the dogs since the opening? BH: We’re also very interested in how dogs navigate.... There hasn’t been much research on how dogs navigate.... What are the predictable errors that dogs
ONTHERECORD
“Any self-respecting university would encourage students to explore new ways of thinking and living....”
—Second-year grad student Ken Ilgunas. See column page 15
See hare on page 6
Curry flourishes in role off the bench, Page 9