Last week Thronson, along with the other winners, were notified they will receive the scholarships, which cover tuition, fees, books, room, and board up to $7,500 for each of the next two years.

A junior specializing in biotechnology, she’s the daughter of Jeff and Kay Thronson of Watertown, S.D., and a 1999 graduate of Watertown High School. She intends to pursue a doctorate in biomedical research.

Thronson was selected for a Goldwater award from a field of 1,155 students who were nominated by the faculties of 491 colleges and universities throughout the country.

The scholarship program honoring Sen. Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. It is the premier undergraduate scholarship in these fields.

The Goldwater Foundation, in its 14-year history, has awarded 3,632 scholarships worth $33 million.

DEPUTY CHIEF TALKS
ON RACIAL PROFILING
IN APRIL 17 DEANS’ LECTURE
Wayne Arnold, Deputy Chief of Police in Moorhead, will talk on “Racial Profiling” at 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 17 in Center for Business 109 as a feature of Minnesota State University Moorhead’s Dean’s Lecture Series.

Arnold’s talk will cover the background surrounding the issue, both locally and nationally, and discuss why there’s so much public concern about profiling. He’ll also review data concerning traffic stops and profiling.

Arnold, who earned his master’s degree in public administration from MSUM, is a 25-year veteran with the Moorhead Police Department. The talk is free and open to the public.

That honor belongs to the St. Paul Colored Gophers, who won the Championship of Black Baseball in 1909.

Major-league baseball had drawn a color line to keep African-American players out of baseball, but Black players established teams and leagues of their own. One of the greatest Black players in Minnesota was Minneapolis's own Bobby Marshall, a member of the 1909 champions.

The story of Marshall and Black Baseball in Minnesota is the subjects of the Tri-College History Lecture for 2002, to be presented by MSUM history professor Steven R. Hoffbeck at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 17 in King Hall Auditorium. Hoffbeck's presentation, entitled "Seeking a Level Playing Field: Bobby Marshall & Black Baseball in Minnesota, 1907-1925," is free and open to the public.

Hoffbeck will show photographs of the history of African-American baseball players in Minnesota and talk about the challenges of writing a book about Black history in Minnesota. His current book project, tentatively titled "Black Baseball in Minnesota: 1880-2002," has recently received a research grant from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Hoffbeck serves as the general editor of the project, supervising the writing efforts of a team of seven writers ? some historians, some journalists, some baseball researchers ? who are capturing the stories of great Black teams and players in Minnesota over the past 140 years. He has also written the chapter on the St. Paul Colored Gophers, the team that captured the 1909 championship.

Hoffbeck, who teaches U.S. History classes and directs MSUM’s Social Studies Program, specializes in the regional history of the Upper Midwest, He’s published several articles in “Minnesota History” and “North Dakota History” on topics ranging from the history of root beer stands, to aviation, agriculture, street pavements, and fishing

Hoffbeck's book, “The Haymakers: A Chronicle of Five Farm Families,” received a Minnesota Book Award for 2001. Published by Minnesota Historical Society Press in 2000, the book relates the history of everyday people, using sources such as diaries and oral history.  The Red River Valley Heritage Society also presented its "Award for Historical Publication" for 2001 to Hoffbeck

Admission is $1and all food tickets are 50 cents.

Students and community members representing more than 10 countries will exhibit items from their homeland, cook their unique foods and share their culture.

The event is sponsored by MSUM’s Office of International Student Affairs.

The event is designed to get a better understanding of just what hip-hop music is and how’s it’s developed using computer technology.

Three information events are scheduled that afternoon:
*J. Griff (Jeff Griffin, an NDSU graduate) and Prevose’, (Don Ferguson, an MSUM graduate), both Twin Cities hip-hop musicians, will demonstrate how they make their music using computer technology at 2 p.m. that day in the MSUM Library Porch.
* Aaron Davis, an MSUM graduate who works in entertainment law with the Patterson, Thuente, Skaar & Christensen firm in Minneapolis, will discuss the legalities of sampling and entertainment law in general at 3:30 p.m. in the MSUM Library Porch.
* A panel discussion for parents and young people who want talk about hip-hop will start at 4:30 p.m., also in the MSUM Library Porch. It will be moderated by MSUM philosophy professor Ted Gracyk, author of “Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock,” and “I Wanna Be Me,” two books that take a philosophical look at rock and roll.

The concert, emceed by Prince Charles (Charles Hinton, an MSUM graduate), is being called the “Roll Wit Me Hip Hop Show.”  Starting at 8:30 in MSUM’s Roland Dille Center for the Arts Hansen Auditorium, it will include a light show by D’nardo Coluci from Minneapolis and a break-dancing show along with performances by J. Griff, J-Sauce and DJBUCKNASTEE & UNKNOWN.

The afternoon conference is free and open to the public. The evening concert costs $5 at the door.

The conference, following the theme "Espectaculos: Life is a Stage," begins at noon Thursday.  To register or for more information, call Abner Arauza at (218) 236-2721, or e-mail arauza@mnstate.edu. Registrations will also be accepted the day of the conference. Cost is $25 for students (free to MSUM students), $45 for non-students.

The highlight of this year’s conference is an exclusive viewing of “The Other Conquest/La Otra Conquista” from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday in MSUM’s Weld Hall Glasrud Auditorium followed by a discussion with the movie’s cultural consultant. The movie tells the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico from the perspective of the indigenous population. It’s the original production in Spanish, with English subtitles. Universal Studios will release the English version in May.

The executive producer of the movie is legendary tenor Placido Domingo, who is also the father of Alvaro, the film’s producer.

Keynote speaker Dr. Juan Benitez who teaches Chicano and Latino Studies at California State University, Long Beach, will address the conference at a 5:30 p.m. dinner Thursday in the student union ballroom. An announcement of this year’s Outstanding Latino Student Awards will be made then.

The conference will include several workshops, ranging from how to find funding for cultural project and integrating Latino culture in the classroom to multiculturalism in the workplace to an abbreviated photographic history of Mexicanos in the Red River Valley. Screen writer Josof Sanchez will also present workshops on movie making, writing

Local Latinos will also read from their original short stories, poetry, essays and literature from 3 to 3:50 p.m. Friday, also in CMU 220B.

For more details, visit the conference web site at: ww.mnstate.edu/notas.

All films in the series will be shown in Weld Hall’s Glasrud Auditorium. Admission is $2.

Films scheduled:

*  “Wild Strawberries” (1957) at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 29. Bergman’s film follows an elderly professor on a journey back home, to relive and retell the meaning of his life. Swedish with English subtitles. 93 minutes.
* “Wages of Fear” (1952) at 7:30 p.m.  Saturday, March 30. This film by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot is a suspense thriller. Often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, Clouzot creates a character study of four men who must drive treacherous mountains in a truck filled with nitroglycerine to help extinguish an oil field fire. French with English subtitles. 138 minutes.
* “Dead of Night: (1945) at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 31. This film by English directors Basil Cavalcanti, Robert Dearden and Charles Crichton Hammer is a series of supernatural tales told by a group of people in a remote country home. 100 minutes.
* “Battle of Algiers” (1966) at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 5. A graphic war film by Gillo Pontecorvo, it chronicles Algerian fighters struggling against French colonialists, told from both sides. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, including best director. French and Arabic dialogue with English subtitles. 123 minutes.
“Oyster Princess” (1919) and “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1925) starting at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 7 in a silent film double-feature. “Oyster Princess” by German director Ernst Lubitsch is a lampoon of American social manners and one of his earliest works. 49 minutes. “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” is an animated feature by avant-garde German director Lotte Reiniger loosely based on The Arabian Nights. English intertitles. 61 minutes. Both films will be accompanied with original scores by David Knudtson on the Weld Hall Wurlizter pipe organ.
* “Whiskey Galore” (1949) at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 12. English director Alexander Mackendrick takes a hilarious look at what happens when a small Scottish island runs completely out of whiskey. This film is also known as “Tight Little Island.” 82 minutes.
* “Black Orpheus” (1959) at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 14. This is Brazilian-French director Marcel Camus’ adaptation of the Greek myth about unrequited love. It’s filled with music, dance, elaborate costuming and the exotic Brazilian landscape. It won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. 100 minutes.

The festival, directed by film studies specialist Rusty Casselton, is sponsored by MSUM International Films. For details, contact Casselton at 236-4622.

April is the cruelest month, according to poet T.S. Eliott. Unless, of course, you were born in April.

It’s not rocket science, but a study by a Minnesota State University Moorhead professor confirms a basic psychological concept: We like to feel good about ourselves, so we attach a certain amount of cachet to literally anything associated with ourselves

To wit: Odds are, your favorite month is the one you were born in.

“Technically, it’s called the ‘mere ownership effect,’” says Gary Nickell, an MSUM psychology professor who recently conducted a piece of research to test the theory. “It simply means that people tend to like their own belongings, no matter how trivial, over things that don’t belong to them.”

It’s a survival trait, he said, just one of a myriad ways the human psyche makes itself feel good about itself.

“One study in this same area,” Nickell said, “ found that subjects softened their negative evaluation of Rasputin, the so-called mad monk of Russia, if they thought they shared the same birthday.”

So, in an attempt to confirm this same hypothesis, Nickell conducted an informal classroom demonstration, followed by a more methodical analysis, on whether people tend to attach more positive views to the month they were born in than the other 11 months of the year.

“As expected,” Nickell said, “68 of the 83 college students in the study liked their birth-month significantly more than their average non-birth month—even if they were born in the dead of winter. Most of the students who didn’t prefer their birth month, however, were born in January (6 out of 16).”

Of course, another explanation is that people tend to prefer their birth month because they have more exposure to it. “They use it on their drivers licenses, job applications, passports and bank accounts,” he said.

But some researchers have suggested the birth dates are not trivial self-associations for most people, Nickell said. “Birthdays possess an empowering feature than many other associations do not. It’s distinctively related to the self.”

It may be built into the species, a form of self-enhancement that acts as a survival mechanism to fight off depression and insert a sense of meaning into our lives. “Other studies have show that people also tend to prefer the letters that occur in their own name more than the letters that don’t..”

It’s not an earth shaking concept, he said, but it makes sense and provides us with a little more knowledge about how we adapt to life.

Nickell conducted the research with the help of MSUM undergraduate psychology students Katie Pederson and Cassie Rossow.