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Fighters: Brad Pitt and Edward Norton speak out about their roles in the controversial and violent new film 'Fight Club.’	7
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Two-faced: The USC football team showed two sides Saturday: one great, one ugly in its 25-24 loss.	OA
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dtrojan@usc.edu
http://www.usc.edu/dt
DULY TROJAN
NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
October 19,1999 Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 35
Senate looks to increase fund
Building a mystery
Campaign: Donations are being sought to raise endowment by at least $50,000
By MEREDITH COOPER
Staff Writer
Though the Student Senate Endowment — which will provide funds for student scholarships, leadership programs and student activity fee supplements — has been inactive for two years, the organization is renewing efforts to bring it back to life.
Senate hopes to increase the endowment’s current balance of $50,000 to $100,000 by December 2000. Interest earned from the principle will be available for student use, said Tyler Kelley, Senate president and a senior majoring in international relations and political science. If its goal is met, an estimated
$5,000 to $8,000 in interest will accrue, he said.
The endowment will fund annual scholarships to incoming freshmen who demonstrate strong leadership qualities and leadership development programs such as retreats. As a long-term goal, Senate hopes to supplement the student activity fee, making it financially independent of the university, said Tyler Stonebreaker, endowment director and a senior majoring in business administration.
“We want to build it up to the point w'here it can really benefit students,” Kelley said.
The fund was created in 1996, but was inactive after its founder, JSmes Lewis, graduated. This year, Senate decided to revive the fund and created the position of endowment director. Managing the endowment w'as previously a responsibility of the Senate treasurer, but “it’s definitely a full-time job,” Stonebreaker said.
Having someone actively man-
I see Senate, page 3 I
Kevin Faust I Daily Trojan
Futuristic visions. First-year architecture students display class projects outside Watts Hall Monday.
Campus recycling program lacking support
Ecology: Activists say university should be more involved; officials believe student apathy is at fault
By KENNETH FULLER
Staff Writer
USC’s recycling program — which has until next year to reduce the total waste the university generated in 1994 by 50 percent — has sparked the concern of campus-based Student Action For the Environment, though university officials say waning student and faculty support minimizes the effect of its implementation.
“Interest in recycling has gone up and down,” said Sheldon Kamieniecki, director of environmental studies and faculty adviser for SAFE. ‘There have been points where there is a strong commitment and times
when there just hasn’t been. I think it depends on who is heading up the recycling program on campus at the time. For a university that places a great deal of importance on environmental studies, I think we could be doing a better job.”
In order to meet the guidelines of California Assembly Bill 989, USC and other institutions w'ere required to reduce the total amount of waste they produced by 25 percent before the year 1995. The university is required to reduce that amount by another 50 percent in the year 2000. According to Facilities Management, USC has eliminated a total of 2,748 tons of land fill waste since it started recycling in 1994.
Yet some recycling programs already in effect have done little more than place a sign over a normal trash receptacle — a sign largely ignored by those disposing of the bin’s contents, Kamieniecki said. This can be seen in the trash collection at lower Commons, where the polystyrene designated for recycling is often thrown out along with the rest of the garbage, he said.
“I’m sitting in there, and the guy is just throwing it all together. It’s a sham,” Kamieniecki said. ‘This is not a liberal, conservative, republican or democratic issue. It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s an issue for everyone.”
Last year at SAFE’s request, Cafe ’84 began offering reusable plates and utensils for those who did not want to eat off of styrofoam, but only about 10 people a day ask for them, said Desiree Brown, restaurant manager.
Students and faculty must work with the programs already in place in order for them to be more effective, Betty Davis, director of the Facilities Management recycling program, wrote in a letter to the Daily Trojan.
“No matter how many containers we put out, without everyone doing their part to use them they become expensive statues,” she wrote. “One of the biggest problems we have with recycling is the contamination of recyclable goods with non-recyclable material. This causes us to either spend man hours to eliminate the
I see Recycle, page 12 !
“For a university that places a great deal of importance on environmental studies, I think we could be doing a better job.”
Sheldon
Kamieniecki
advisor
SAFE
Professors create machine that knows how to listen
Technology: System
can decipher the spoken word better than human beings
By VALERIE ZWEIG
Staff Writer
Not only is the Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speaker Independent Speech Recognition System a mouthful, but it understands a mouthful as well.
Created by biomedical engineering professor Ted Berger and research assistant professor Jim-Shih Liaw, the machine has the ability to recognize speech better
than humans.
While such machines generally break each word into tiny parts, analyze each piece separately and then put the word together, they usually fail because they are very sensitive to noise. But the system Berger and Liaw have created uses electrical currents to decipher words.
“Because it is sensitive to patterns, it doesn’t look at each little piece particularly by itself,” Berger said. “It looks to see if this part is followed by that part is followed by this part — it looks for several different things in a row separated by different times.”
The machine adds the pieces together, but unlike others that will stumble, if all parts to the word are not present, it can make educated
guesses.
“We ask it to find what’s common about the eight different inputs that come from eight different speakers saying the same word,” Berger said. “So the signals are eight different signals, but what we tell it is there’s something common about the eight different signals. You figure out what it is by changing your temple sensitivity until you give me for those eight different input the same output. As soon as you can give me the same output, you have figured out the word.
“We write programs that involve rules like that, that allow the network to change itself, and so it learns on its own.”
Seeking to create a machine
that will replicate destroyed brain cells, Berger and Liaw’s system is based on human cells.
“(We are) first studying the brain and studying the parts of the brain that are involved in pattern recognition, and we’re discovering those principles upon which those parts of the brain perform pattern recognition,” Berger said.
Using that information, they develop mathematical models and computer simulations and software.
“This machine wasn’t developed to model speech recognition, rather to model the brain,” Berger said.
Berger and Liaw, who have been conducting research for the past 10 to 15 years, built the actual device in about two years. They
hope their machine will be able to help those who are deaf or hearing impaired, air-traffic controllers and possibly even the U.S. military.
“The reason we can do so much better than other people is because we have approached the problem in a very different way,” Berger said.
Currently, the machine is “a software package, basically, that runs on a workstation” and will soon be made into a computer chip, Berger said.
The Defense Advanced Research Project and Agency, a company whose mission is to generate next-generation technology, funded much of the technology and research, which cost millions of dollars.