Theodore R. Sizer, one of the country’s most prominent education-reform advocates, whose pluralistic vision of the American high school helped shape the national discourse on education and challenge longstanding ideas of what a school should be, died on Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass. He was 77. A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Professor Sizer was later the headmaster of Phillips Academy, the preparatory school in Andover, Mass., and chairman of the education department at Brown University. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1997.

Brown University’s leaders on Saturday signed off on detailed plans for the new Warren Alpert Medical School building the school plans to build next year in the Jewelry District. The plans call for the $45 million project to renovate 222 Richmond St. to begin next spring, if city officials give their approval, according to the plan approved by a committee of the Corporation of Brown University, the school’s governing body. The building is scheduled to open in August 2011.

Mark Lurie and co-author Samantha Rosenthal say there is no conclusive evidence that overlapping multiple sexual partners increases the size of an HIV epidemic, accelerates the speed at which the virus is transmitted, or makes HIV more persistent in a given population. “People have just accepted at face value that this is the main thing that’s driving the epidemic,” Lurie said. “But the evidence that concurrency is a major factor is very weak.”

Psychologist Rachel Herz comments on a recent study that suggests “clean” smells might induce people to behave virtuously – the olfactory equivalent of a clean, graffiti-free neighborhood.