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The University of Colorado at Boulder is giving a new twist to the old joke about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb – at the CU campus the serious question is how many lightbulbs are there to change? The answer to that is about to rise significantly with news that the Vice Chancellor for Administration, Paul Tabolt, has approved the budget allocation of $100,000 for new lighting.

Twelve South African Mandela Scholars have arrived at the Economics Institute to undergo 3 months of graduate preparatory training before pursuing master's and doctoral programs in American universities this fall. The highly prestigious Mandela Economics Scholarship Program was established by the U.S.–South African Binational Commission under the leadership of South African President Thabo Mbeki and Vice President Albert Gore.

James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, D.C., will deliver the keynote address at a national workshop in Boulder on July 11. Witt will speak on the opening day of the 24th annual hazards research and applications workshop hosted by the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Fulbright Scholar Program has awarded grants to three University of Colorado at Boulder graduate students for research and study abroad during the 1999-2000 academic year. The grants are used to support graduate study and research abroad in a student's academic field or to receive professional training in the creative and performing arts.

Editors: A library of photographs and slides is available from this yearÂ’s trip. Contact Kent Zimmerman 303-492-8484. It just keeps getting better and better Â… thatÂ’s the verdict on CU-BoulderÂ’s second annual Colorado traveling seminar, which looks set to become a regular fixture on the university calendar. At 6 a.m. on May 17, the Monday after commencement, this road show rolled out of Boulder taking 20 people on a tour-with-a-difference to southern parts of the state.

Sun Microsystems of Sunnyvale, Calif., has donated $195,000 in major computer equipment to the University of Colorado at BoulderÂ’s space program that is expected to strengthen CUÂ’s already formidable international role in astrophysics. The donation includes 13 new workstations, two computer servers and two state-of-the-art disk arrays. The Sun equipment will be used by undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral students and faculty, said Michael Shull, chair of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department.

From computers and fuel supplies to emergency services and snow plowing, systems at CU-Boulder are being tested and checked to ensure they can cope with anything the so-called Millennium Bug can throw at them. "Guarded optimism" is the key phrase among the many people contributing to the Y2K contingency plan as the university prepares itself for any possible problems.

Middle school girls who will enter the seventh or eighth grade this fall are invited to attend an Energy Education Workshop offered by the Women in Engineering Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In the months leading up to the new millennium, people can expect some eye-catching meteor showers in the night sky but nothing on the cataclysmic, world-threatening scale of the movie "Deep Impact." ThatÂ’s the prediction from Katy Garmany, professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder and director of the universityÂ’s Fiske Planetarium. Garmany says star-watchers who can escape the glare of city lights and find a nice dark place in the mountains or grasslands of Colorado could be rewarded with a couple of spectacular shows.

A state-of the-art, $962,000 optical-measurement facility based at the University of Colorado at Boulder funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles will be dedicated on campus at the JILA facility June 28. A joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, JILA was founded in 1962. JILA is world-renowned for its innovative developments in lasers and optical science.