Clarion 2003-09-24 Vol. 79 No. 02

              Wednesday, September 24, 2003
'Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour"
Volume 79 * Number 2
Outside
the
Bubble
Kelly Kirby
Contributing Writer
World
Three American soldiers were killed and 13
were injured in Iraq during a combination of
mortar and roadside
bomb attacks on Saturday
and Sunday. U.S. troops
have ;lost 165 soldiers
since President Bush
called an end to major
combat on May 1.
Nation
Hurricane Isabel cut
electricity from over 6
million people in the Mid-
Atlantic states.; Utility
crews are at work, but
power companies say it
will. take time to rebuild
equipment. Meanwhile,
the: shortage'of food* ice,
and water is leaving local
residents distressed.
Minnesota
Three University of
Minnesota students were
killed in a house Fire near
Dinkytown on Saturday.
The 3 students, 2 females
and 1 male, were not saved,
while several of their roommates escaped saTcly from
the two-story home.
Authorities are not yet sure
of the fire's origin.
44
Heart and soul"
of biology department passes away
Timothy Goddard
Editor-in-Chief
Popular and respected biology professor Weldon Jones suc-
cumed to a rare, agressive neural viral infection and passed
away at Methodist Hospital
Sunday morning, leaving the
college and department shaken
along with a huge hole lo fill.
"Weldon's been the life of
this place ever since he's been
here," said Ian Johnston, biology professor. "He's the heart
and soul of this department... he
poured his life into students. He
didn't have a family, but he literally substituted his own family for the students."
Echoing those sentiments,
Senior biology major Scott
Youdas, who worked closely
with Jones on his research last
fall, described him as "an amazing teacher... Sometimes when
teachers cancel class, you're
happy because you don't have
go to class... with Dr. Jones, you
were sad that he canceled it,
because you'd leam so much."
"He could have been making
tons of money doing research,
[but instead] he'd sacrifice his
time for the students" Youdas
added. "You'd come in and see
him here at two in the morning."
Theresa
DeGolier,
head of the
biology
department
called Jones
"a servant
leader" and
"one of the
most humble people"
she had
ever met.
"This
Biology professor
will be hard on everbody," said
DeGolier. "It's a collegue, a
friend, a brilliant
scientist...Weldon was a mentor
to a lot of people."
Jones came to Bethel in 1982
after receiving his bachelor's,
master's and doctoral degrees at
Harvard University and doing
post-doctoral work at Stanford.
Since then, Jones received the
Faculty Excellence Award for
Teaching and in 1995 was
selected as the Minnesota
Professor of the Year by the
Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching.
In his time here, he took
three full-year research sabbaticals, including
one at Harvard
and one at the
Mayo clinic. Last
year was his third
sabbatical, at R &
D Systems in
Minneapolis, and
he was planning
to return to teaching this fall. This
summer he presented research
that he and students, including Youdas, had
done on a gene related to
prostate cancer.
Aside from doing research
teaching most of the cell and
molecular biology-related
courses at Bethel, Jones also
served as the faculty advisor to
Bethel's award-winning chapter
of Tri-Beta, the national biological honor society.
Jones began having trouble
with his balance around Labor
Day of this year and soon after
lost a great deal of motor control and his speech began to
slur. "I can't walk or talk very
well," he said during an interview on September 16, "but
there's no pain." During the
interview, Jones also expressed
gratitude to the Bethel community for the many cards and
notes he had rccieved.
The disease was only recently diagnosed as a virus that
aggressively attacked the cerebellar tissue at the base of the
brain, an area that contributes to
balance and motor function.
Jones had spent the last few
weeks at Methodist Hospital
and then in the St. Louis Park
Health Care center. This week
he had been planning to leave
for either Maine or
Massachusetts in order to be
near siblings during recovery.
He is survived by two sisters
and five brothers
Funeral arrangements were
undetermined before press, but
the President's office will be
passing along information when
it becomes available.
Worms and viruses infecting campus computers
Meika Vogel
Contributing Writer
Information Technology
Services has been putting in
extra hours in recent weeks due
to widespread vims and worm
infections on faculty and student computers. Two major
Windows security problems hit
around the same time and
resulted in two worms and one
virus that affected hundreds of
computers on campus.
On August 12, a worm called
"MS Blast" infected Bethel's
network. "Very few computers
were protected when that one
hit, so we were taken by surprise," said Brent Nordquist,
Director of Server Systems.
Since its arrival, about 20 computers have been infected with
"We were
taken by
surprise."
the MS Blaster worm. The reason this worm spread so quickly
through the network was
because it infected one computer and then went on to the other
computers in the network.
This worm led to .n^—^—
the release of
another a few
weeks later, a worm
called "Welchia."
This worm was created as a "good"
worm that was supposed to spread like the MS
Blaster worm had and clean it
from infected computers.
Although it was a "good" worm
it still had to be removed from
the 300 computers it had infected. "It created so much network
traffic that it hurl more than it
helped," said Nordquist.
The third major problem to
hit Bethel's network was a virus
called the "So Big" virus. It hit
on August 20. At its peak,
25,000 e-mails containing the
virus were coming through
Bethel's mail server every day.
Unlike the worm, this virus
_____ could only be spread by
e-mail, so a person had
to open an attachment
in order for it to infect
their computer. Because
all incoming e-mail to
    Bethel's   network  are
~~ scanned and because all
of the faculty computers have
virus protection software, the
virus didn't hit until studenis
started coming back to campus.
Recently, Microsoft
announced a new security threat
to Windows, and Nordquist is
"waiting for the next big virus
or worm to hit." Because of this
possible threat and others in the
future. Nordquist recommends
that students take action to prevent their computers from being
infected.
There are two options. One is
to download all updates to
Windows from Microsoft's
website, and the other is to
install vims protection software
at www.mcafee.com. The ITS
department has a license for this
program that covers all students, so it is free to install.
Contact extension 6500 for
details.
Although these viruses and
worms created a great deal of
extra work for the ITS department, no permanent damage
was done. "We worked some
late nights and had to reload
windows onto a few machines,
but no one reported any lost
data," said Operating Systems
Analyst Dave Schlenk.