Friday, 24 July 1987 Washington, DC

1. DOE GIVES IN TO CONGRESS AND EXTENDS DEADLINE FOR SSC PROPOSALS.
A rider to the fiscal 1987 Supplemental Appropriations Act, attached by Senator Pete Domenici (D-NM), requires DOE to delete Section 2.2.2.2 from its Invitation for Site Proposals for the SSC. What this refers to is the offer of financial and other incentives by states that hope to win the giant collider by throwing money at it. The notion that the SSC might go to the highest bidder in a kind of auction got virtually no support in Congress. So DOE rules out such offers in the evaluation of proposals. But, instead, it suggests the states may want to include information about financial incentives to defray the $4.4B price of construction and the annual $370M cost of operation in a sealed envelope that DOE promises not to open until after the site is finally chosen. The procedure has the ring of Hollywood's Academy Awards about it: "And now the envelope, please." The site selection procedure also came in for criticism by a group of 38 House members who objected to the 4-month period for preparing proposals. They originally wanted 4 more months and settled for only 1. The deadline for proposals was extended from 3 August to 2 September. But while DOE goes ahead assuming the SSC will be approved, Congress has yet to say the accelerator is A-OK to launch.

2 . US TEAM WINS THREE BRONZE MEDALS AT INTERNATIONAL PHYSICS OLYMPIAD.
The winners in the second year of U.S. competition (two Tennesseans, Bryan Beatty of Knoxville and Normand Modine of Oak Ridge, and Eli Glezer of San Diego) were among 125 who took part in the XVIII Physics Olympiad, held July 2-13 in Jena, East Germany, this year. Their performance matched that of contestants from the USSR. Of the three gold medals, two went to students from Romania, one to a youth from the Netherlands.

3. PHYSICS PhDs IN THE US REBOUNDED 10% LAST YEAR OVER 1985,
but foreign nationals got more than two-thirds of the total. The increase in physics doctorates was greater than in any of the other sciences with the exception of computer sciences, which jumped 28% from the previous year. The statistics are from a study, conducted for NSF, of graduate enrollments at all 325 doctorate-granting institutions in the US. The NSF report indicates that the number of foreign students enrolled full-time in graduate science and engineering programs in 1985, the last complete year available for all students, increased 8% over 1984 and that US citizens in graduate schools dropped another 1%. Foreigners made up 26% of the total graduate science and engineering enrollment, by contrast to 10 years ago when the proportion of foreigners was 17%. A comparison of field choices shows marked differences between foreign and US grad students. Fields of choice for foreigners were civil, electrical and mechanical engineering, in which the foreign proportion was 45%.



Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.