Community BRIEF

PAC Numbers Will Increase From Five to Seven Digits

Beginning next year, students wishing to make phone calls outside Harvard will have to enter a seven digit personal access code (PAC) instead of the current five digit number.

In mailings to students last week and this week, the Harvard Telephone office announced the new policy, which officials said was designed to reduce misdialings of PAC numbers.

"We have probably about 50 instances per month of students that notify us that they have a call on their account that they didn't make," said Jack C.Wise, the client services manager at the Office for Information and Technology, who works with the Harvard student phone office.

Wise said the incorrect charges on phone bills are "almost always the result of a misdialed PAC code."

"We rarely see a deliberate attempt to defraud the system," he said.

Wise said he checked with other universities to see how they dealt with misdialed PAC codes, and found that they used codes with six to 13 digits.

"What we wanted to do is make it as convenient for the student as possible, so we're changing it from five to seven digits," he said.

Returning students will merely add 77 onto their current five digit PAC code, Wise said. Incoming students will receive fully random seven digit numbers.

"With the turnover that we have here every year with the new classes coming in and out, students will change their codes over the years." Wise said.

In four years, the PAC codes will be fully random seven digit numbers and Harvard will have fewer misdialings.

Wise said he thinks the change will be more convenient for students despite the longer PAC codes.

"I think overall it will definitely be more convenient in the long run because students won't have these calls appear on their bills, Wise said. The Crimson Staff AWARDS

Three Students Win Awards For Overcoming Disabilities

Three undergraduates last week were awarded the Peter H. Wilson Memorial Scholarship as students with disabilities who make special contributions to the Harvard community.

The recipients of the awards, which carries with it a cash prize, are Dunster House resident Kathryn Frucher '95 and Leverett House residents Brent J. Foster '97 and Douglas M. Pravda '97, who is a Crimson editor.

"The [winners] are people who deal with their disability in ways that contribute to the community in some special way, either by being inspiring in how they handle their own problems or in things they do for other people or in their spirit," said Associate Registrar Thurston A. Smith.

Smith, director of the Student Disability Resource Center, said the students were nominated by their senior tutors or house masters and selected by a small committee.

Foster, in particular, was singled out by Smith as an especially "extraordinary guy." A history concentrator, Foster is at home in Des Moines, Iowa, on medical leave struggling with cancer.

"Mr. Foster's own struggle with cancer has brought him wide admiration' on campus," Smith said "We were really happy to be able to help his family in this way."

The awards are given each year in memory or Peter H. Wilson '88, who died of cancer in his senior year at Harvard but "possessed a zest for life and a positive approach to his illness which was an inspiration to all who knew him," according to a statement.   Jeffrey N. Gell OBITUARY

Harvard Graduate and Zoology Researcher Dies

George William Cottrell Jr. "26, a former researcher associated in ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, died last Thursday at the Riverwoods retirement community in Exeter, N.H. He was 91 and had lived both in Cambridge and Hillsboro, N.H.

From 1931 to 1941 Cottrell served as executive secretary of the Medieval Academy of America, a group of scholars who studied the Middle Ages, and edited its quarterly, Speculum. At the beginning of World War II, Cottrell was recruited into the Office of strategic services and served as chief of biographical records in its Division of Research and Analysis.

A native of Detroit, Cottrell returned to Cambridge in 1943 and was an assistant to William A. Jackson, the first librarian of the newly established Houghton Library.

Cottrell took up the study of birds and volunteered for the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he worked untill 1988. He was a director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and served as an editor of James Lee Peters Checklist of Birds of the World.

Cottrell is survived by his wife of 66 years, Annettee Brinckerhoff Cottrell; a daughter, Annette MerleSmith of Princeton, N.J., and a granddaughter.