Research

Investigations
> > After Enron, what's an audit committee to do?
Ask Roman Weil how to prevent another Enron, and the V. Duane Rath professor of accounting in the Graduate School of Business tells a parable about leases. "If a company leases a plane from another company," he posits, "whose balance sheet should list the plane?" The company leasing the plane doesn't own it and won't think to list it as an asset. Then again, because the lease is long-term the plane's lessor has essentially removed it from its inventory and turned a profit on it-so why, the leasing company's managers demand of their accountants, should the plane sit on its balance sheet?
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> > The politics of free trade
Free trade, most observers acknowledge, brings long-term economic gain. But does it also carry political consequences? Lloyd Gruber, associate professor in the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies, believes it does-and notes that they may be negative.
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> > A time before East vs. West
The stark, otherworldly images of Afghanistan filling newspaper pages and television screens have made many Americans feel exactly that: as if the Middle East is another world.
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Coursework
> > Rude rocks and mossy caverns: A grand tour of English gardens
Never mind what the end of civil war and 1688 meant for the British monarchy and Parliament-it's what happened to gardens that Kimerly Rorschach wants her students to consider on this drizzly February afternoon.
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Doctoral studies
> > It's a really, really, really, really small world after all
Raghu Parthasarathy used to consider the big picture, but now he attends to the small details. As an astrophysics major at the University of California at Berkeley he became more interested in the tiny electronics of the telescope's inner space than the swirling clouds of outer space. Switching his focus from radio astronomy to semiconductors, the Ph.D. candidate in physics has moved to the other end of the scale-he measures in nanometers rather than parsecs.
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> > A scholar in training
A hand gets grabbed. A foot gets stepped on. Something that should not be touched gets touched. A wallet gets picked from inside a kimono sleeve in a momentary impulse.... Caring parents must not let their darling daughters ride the train during rush hour," writes Maeda Hajime in Sarariman monogatari (The story of the salaryman), his 1928 handbook for young Japanese men.
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> > The mating game
The birds do it, the bees do it-even the monkeys in the trees do it. So why don't human beings do it? Ask James Roney. The "it" in question involves courtship displays, and the Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Human Development observes that humans go about it differently than our branch-swinging cousins.
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Citations
> > He smells, she smells
Women apparently prefer the odor of men who are genetically similar to themselves, according to research reported by postdoctoral fellow Suma Jacob, AB'91, PhD'98, MD'01; Martha K. McClintock, the David Lee Shillinglaw distinguished service professor in psychology; and human-genetics professor Carole Ober in the February Nature Genetics. The study, which had women sniff T-shirts that men had worn for two days, found that a woman's preference is based on the man's genetic match to her paternal genes.
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Syllabus
Students dig deep into gardening theory with Christopher Thacker's History of Gardens (California, 1979). Thacker traces the origins of gardening back to the natural paradises of Greek myth and surveys the shifting trends of garden design through the ages: the Renaissance in Italy, France, and England; the reign of Louis XIV, who set the standard for the formal French garden at Versailles; 18th-century England, when the landed gentry took up gardening.
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