"Chefs bring about love affairs. They're about creativity, entertaining, feeding, and nurturing," says Noel Cullen, a MET School of Hospitality Administration associate professor, in Nation's Restaurant News. Profiled in the magazine's January issue, Cullen says, "You cook something, you make it beautiful, and someone eats it. It's like a concert. It's there to be appreciated in a live situation."

"When some individual makes a fortune in the stock market, we have a tendency to assume that that was because he knew," says Zvi Bodie, an SMG professor of finance, speaking on PBS's February 8 Nova documentary Trillion Dollar Bet. "Of course the individual himself is happy to reinforce that belief: 'Yes, I was a genius. I always knew Microsoft was going to make me rich.' But what you don't see are the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people [saying], 'I always said ABC Company was going to make me rich.' And ABC Company went bust." The documentary details efforts by economists to use mathematical techniques to guide investment strategy at Longterm Capital Management.

"If we are to get serious about mathematics education, we need to end the debilitating reign of educational fads in the classroom," writes BU Chancellor John Silber, in an op-ed piece in the February 7 Boston Herald. "Research in schools of education resembles the quota-driven factories of the Soviet Union," he continues. "Year after year, these would produce goods for which there was no market demand and which would pile up in warehouses. Educational researchers similarly produce new educational theories simply because that is what they are paid to do."

In a story in the February 10 New York Times, Allen A. Mitchell, a MED professor and an expert on birth defects, is cited among experts who pressured the Food and Drug Administration to disallow selling supplements for such common pregnancy-related conditions as morning sickness. "To open the floodgates to unfettered marketing of dietary supplements to pregnant women, without the need for any information on safety, never mind efficacy, just seems to be inviting thalidomide all over again," he says. Thalidomide is a drug that in the 1960s caused birth defects all over the world except in the United States, where it never received approval.

In a Boston Globe story February 7 about children witnessing family violence, Bessel van der Kolk, a MED professor of psychiatry, says, "Traumatized children come to us from well-regarded places where they have been labeled -- bipolar disorder, conduct disorder, overanxious disorder. But the labels in no way catch the totality of what the kids are going through."

"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.