Author: Harvard Gazette Online

Before itsy-bitsy, yellow polka-dotted bikinis detonated on American beaches, women had few options for what they sported in the water. The standard bathing suit for a woman at the turn of the 20th century was around nine yards of wool or flannel that covered everything but her head.

Marilyn Morgan, a manuscript cataloger in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, is studying the history of bathing suits in America, uncovering lots of secrets — and skin — along the way.

It’s a project that began more than a decade ago when Morgan was a doctoral student in history writing her dissertation. While researching, Morgan was scouring newspapers when she noticed something peculiar: front-page articles devoted to women swimmers.

“This was in the mid-1920s,” she recalled. “So these women swimmers had Babe Ruth to contend against, and the boxer Jack Dempsey, and yet there were more front-page articles on women swimmers than on Babe Ruth.”

Morgan had never heard of these sportswomen, aside from Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. “You don’t read about this when you read women’s history,” she said. “It’s just not there.

“And yet swimming was advertised as the sport for women, which I found so interesting. Newspapers said women were just naturally better at it. They thought it was this pure form of activity because women weren’t sweating, they weren’t grunting, and you couldn’t see their bodies in the water.”

Her book in progress, titled “Beauty at the Beach: Marathon Swimmers, the Media, and Gender Roles in American Culture, 1900-1940,” examines not only the evolution of bathing suits but also this pioneering troupe of female long-distance swimmers who became a media sensation at a time when other female athletes “were criticized for being too muscular,” said Morgan.

Women would even compete against men, according to Morgan. “First they covered themselves in seven pounds of lard because the waters were so cold,” she said.

Morgan’s book also will cover topics ranging from the development and marketing of women’s swimwear to the roles that female swimmers played in women’s suffrage. She’s also interested in the emergence of bathing suits in Hollywood and their appearance in the Miss America pageant (which caused it to be “shut down in 1927 for being too risqué,” Morgan noted), and on “Learn to Swim” campaigns, which swept the country promoting swimming as a “desirable activity for women.”

“Even at Radcliffe College,” said Morgan, “every woman had to swim to be able to graduate.”

Last fall, the Harvard University Library (HUL) awarded Morgan a three-month leave through the Extended Professional Development Opportunity Program to work on her independent project. Morgan plans on taking weeks off at a time, traveling to Washington, D.C., and New York City, among other places, to continue her research and to write.

“I am extremely grateful for these wonderful resources that the HUL makes available,” said Morgan, who in 2007 received the Douglas W. Bryant Fellowship, also from the HUL.

Morgan says her everyday job collecting and archiving letters, journals, bills, cards, and other artifacts of women’s history involves “imposing order on chaos.” Perhaps to find balance amid the cartons of donations that arrive at the Schlesinger each day, Morgan volunteered last year to teach free yoga classes to Radcliffe Institute staff and fellows inside the Radcliffe Gymnasium — and she’s in the process of being certified as a yoga instructor.

“I feel really lucky that I get to do what I do for work,” said Morgan. “And I like that I can offer something small back to the Radcliffe Institute community.”

In the laboratory of biology professor Gonzalo Giribet, students and fellows are playing “getting to know you” with a haul of rare limpets, deep sea scallops, cold water corals, and ribbon worms.

The 100 or so specimens, gathered during a September cruise in the North Atlantic, will boost scientific knowledge of these mysterious creatures, some of which live 15,000 feet down, and bolster the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s invertebrate collections, of which Giribet is the faculty curator.

“There are not a lot of samples, but some of them are very precious because there are very few specimens known from these depths,” Giribet said.

Collecting is a key part of the work conducted in the Giribet’s lab, which focuses on the world’s invertebrates, which generally get less attention than better-known mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles.

Giribet’s work focuses on the world of crustaceans, insects, snails, corals, and arachnids. He and his fellows and students travel the world sifting leaf litter and diving among reefs to expand knowledge of these little-known creatures. His lab studies invertebrates not only to learn more about their biology, but also about the locales in which they evolved. Noting similarities and differences between related species in different parts of the world, Giribet seeks to shed light on the planet’s geographical history.

By visiting locations that scientists believe were once joined in the supercontinent of Gondwana — which contained many of today’s Southern Hemisphere landmasses — and examining creatures on either side of the rifts that eventually formed, Giribet can test those theories. Closely related creatures in eastern South America and West Africa, for example, would indicate they came from shared ancestor species.

Just last summer, Giribet and some lab members traveled to West Africa to collect velvet worms in Cameroon and Gabon. With only one species of velvet worm there, Giribet said, it was important to collect samples to compare with velvet worms on Caribbean islands and in Central and South America.

Other recent trips took researchers to New Zealand and Fiji. Trips to the Amazon and the Philippines are planned for the coming months.

September’s North Atlantic scientific cruise provided samples from a little-known but biologically important area, the Galicia Bank off Spain. Giribet was one of several scientists invited to participate by the University of Santiago de Compostela, which organized the trip.

The Galicia Bank features a seamount that rises from 15,000 feet deep to within 3,000 feet of the surface. It’s an area of enormous biological productivity and diversity, fed by upwelling waters that bring nutrients to the surface and feed a productive fishery. The area, proposed as a marine protected area by the World Wildlife Fund, is a day’s cruise from shore, Giribet said.

“It’s a really amazing area,” Giribet said. “There’s a huge diversity of cold water, deep sea corals.”

During 15 days at sea, researchers tested several collecting devices, including a benthic sledge, dragged along the seabed and then hauled back onto the ship. In water that deep, Giribet said, roughly six miles of wire had to be deployed before the sledge would reach the ocean bed, an operation that took three or four hours. They’d drag it for an hour and then haul it back aboard.

“One operation at the deepest depths takes eight or nine hours. Then you have to process the samples,” Giribet said.

With so much effort required for such a small time on the seafloor, the ship’s research ran around the clock, with the 60 people aboard divided into three teams on six-hour watches to keep the equipment running.

“The worst was doing the night shift,” Giribet said.

In addition to collecting specimens, Giribet said he was eager to see the ship in operation. Though he’d been collecting around the world for years, he hadn’t participated in deep oceanic collecting, with the important considerations of enormous pressures on top of logistical and scientific issues that would apply to other types of trips.

Collecting is an important activity not just for scientists in Giribet’s lab, but also for his students. Work in the field can be an energizing experience, Giribet said, and allows students to put classroom knowledge into practice during scientific activities. Giribet organizes a collecting trip each year over spring break for students in his class called “Biology and Evolution of Invertebrate Animals.” Students spend a week exploring and collecting on Caribbean reefs.

Each collecting trip requires far more lab time than field time to process, examine, and document the finds. Work in the Giribet lab on the North Atlantic specimens continues today. It involves taking DNA samples, photographing, dissecting, and describing the samples.

“For us, it’s very important to collect,” Giribet said. “You can only work on these things if you go to these places.”

Pozen, a Harvard Business School lecturer, poses long-term solutions for solving the problems of now. From the housing slump and the stock market to the big bank bailout, this book is a blueprint for reform.

Timeless Shakespeare is actually timely, says Garber, a well-known professor who directs the Carpenter Center, in this penetrating text devoted to 10 of the Bard’s foremost plays and the ways they’re inextricably tangled into the fabric of modern culture.

E.O. Wilson, the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus at Harvard, has been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, the highest external honor given by the University of Virginia.

Best known for developing and popularizing the fields of sociobiology and biodiversity, Wilson has promoted the concept of “biophilia,” which suggests that, as humans co-evolved over millennia with nature, they needed direct contact with nature to thrive. This concept creates a challenge for designers and planners to look for effective ways to integrate green features and elements into buildings and neighborhoods of the future.

Wilson is the author of more than 20 books, many of which have received national and international recognition. He has two Pulitzer Prizes for general nonfiction, one in 1979 for “On Human Nature” and the other in 1991, which he co-authored with Bert Holldobler, titled “The Ants.” In the study of ant behavior discussed in the latter work, Wilson argues for a sociobiological explanation for all social behavior on the model of the behavior of social insects.

To read more, visit the University of Virginia Web site.

The first annual Green Carpet awards ceremony will premier this spring honoring Harvard faculty, students, and staff who have made significant contributions to greenhouse gas reduction and sustainability at Harvard.

Approximately 35 awards will be given, ranging from individual to team categories. The event and selection process is being led by the Office for Sustainability (OFS).

Students also will be able to participate in a Green Video competition that challenges undergraduates and graduate students to develop humorous, creative, short video segments that influence viewers to conserve energy.

“The University community has made important progress in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the work of many individuals throughout Harvard’s Schools,” said Executive Vice President Katie Lapp. “We wanted to recognize these efforts and help to inspire our students, staff, and faculty to continue developing creative ways to advance Harvard’s environmental goals.”

Five of the awards will be given to teams based on measurable energy reductions, creativity, and demonstrated teamwork. The specific team awards are Greenhouse Gas Reduction Project, Green Team Project Award, Water or Waste Reduction Project, Capital Project, and Student Project.

Individual Achievement Awards will be given to representatives from each School and major unit.

Green Video Awards will be presented to the contest’s student winner and runner-up who use humor and creativity to help embed sustainability into Harvard life. Videos will be screened at the awards event, which will take place in late April.

Nominations for all of the awards may be made through the OFS website or by email at [email protected]. The deadline for entries is April 15. Submissions will be judged by OFS and representatives from each School. Additional information is available at the Green Carpet Awards Web site.

Indonesia’s 18,000 islands cover a vast oceanic footprint north of Australia. On a map, they look like gathering thunderclouds.

It’s a fitting picture. The predominately Islamic republic is a cultural weather system of sorts, one that anthropologist Nancy J. Smith-Hefner said may show how ancient Islam negotiates its place in the modern world.

Smith-Hefner, a Radcliffe Fellow who is on sabbatical from Boston University, studies social change among Muslim youth on Java, Indonesia’s most densely populated island. Her focus since 1999 has been Yogyakarta, a Javanese provincial capital. It’s a place she made come alive in a Feb. 24 lecture at the Radcliffe Gymnasium.

Indonesians began to convert to Islam as early as the 14th century. Before long, the religion had displaced Buddhism and Hinduism, and today Indonesia is the world’s largest Islamic nation. But until the 1970s, said Smith-Hefner, Muslims there followed a modified style of Islam, blending the teachings of Mohammed with Sufi and folk traditions.

Then came that change in the cultural weather. In the past few decades, a growing fraction of Muslims on Java — most of them young — are embracing what she called more “normative” forms of Islam.

That means more mosques in Yogyakarta and elsewhere, along with more Friday prayer meetings for men, more explicitly Muslim publications on newsstands, and, most visibly, more interest in traditional Muslim styles of dress, particularly for women.

Smith-Hefner said “Islamic restraint” is penetrating a traditional culture that, for instance, is still famous for its shapely, bare-shouldered dancers in form-fitting dresses. “If she doesn’t waddle,” she said of a woman in a traditional dress, stepping from the lectern to mime a shimmy, “it’s not tight enough.”

Coming into style instead are tight, concealing scarves and loose togas, she said, “meant to fully obscure the contours of a woman’s body so the shape of the waist and hips is not apparent.”

The change in cultural weather also means something else, said Smith-Hefner, getting to the heart of her research: a “patriarchal bargain.” In exchange for modern freedoms such as access to work and school, women tacitly agree to avoid any “public show of authority over men.”

Under cover of modesty and restraint, women in this corner of Islam are allowed to value education, exercise personal authority, and live in what is in effect a society of gender equality. This form of Islam is pious and even strict, said Smith-Hefner, but it should not be construed as in defiant contrast to the West.

Men are expected to keep their end of the bargain too, in what the anthropologist calls a “gender paradox” within Islam. (It’s a term coined by religion sociologist Bernice Martin, who noted the same gender bargaining among Pentecostal Christians.)

Men are expected to conform to high standards of personal comportment: that is, to pay more attention to their families; avoid smoking, drinking, and gambling; and refrain from extramarital sex. “It’s not easy” on them, said Smith-Hefner, and the numbers prove it. Among converts to this more normative brand of Islam, women outnumber men two to one.

To explain this gender paradox, Smith-Hefner focused her study on KAMMI, an acronym for the Indonesian Muslim Students’ Action Union. This artifact of Muslim religious activism started in the 1980s “with small communities of observant believers,” she said, and was intended to be “a movement for student morality.”

KAMMI activists — some of them influenced by travel to other Islamic countries — took control of student university groups and state-sponsored religious courses. They were also part of the demonstrations against the dictator Suharto before he stepped down in 1998. The KAMMI demonstrations had one striking feature, said Smith-Hefner: the unusual predominance of women.

Followers of KAMMI do not lobby for an Islamic state or insist on strict sharia religious law, she said. But they do see sharia law as an inevitable part of “gradual moral and societal reform.”

This hope of gradual reform is based on the Islamic notion of kodrat, “one’s divinely determined nature or role,” said Smith-Hefner. For men, that includes leading, protecting, and providing for the household. For women, she said, that includes caring for the household, raising children, and providing “sexual service” to men.

At the heart of this agreement, for both sexes, is modesty and structure, ideas that may create tension with gender roles as they evolve in modernity.

KAMMI practices include an exacting and detailed dress code for women that is meant to temper male desires. There are also strict norms for gender interaction that proscribe limits on greetings, gazes, and dating. “There is no dating in Islam,” said Smith-Hefner. “There is only a pattern of familiarization.”

There are KAMMI marriage bureaus of a sort, which combine the idea of a Western dating service with “old pieties,” she said. Students exchange “bio-data,” a committee suggests a match, and that leads to “several formal meetings,” said Smith-Hefner, at which prospective partners talk about “their visions and principles.”

After this, “most marital decisions occur with surprising rapidity” for couples, she added, “and they never even touch one another.”

This is a “radical departure” from traditional Javanese marriage practices, in which the families play a role in matchmaking, said Smith-Hefner, and is certainly at odds with the Indonesian marriage law of 1974, which gives people the right to choose their own partners.

But marriage bureaus and similar structures offer advantages, she said, especially to women attending universities. The pool of eligible partners with similar attainments is small. So KAMMI helps women to identify matching partners, who often are younger men, said Smith-Hefner.

These strategies also protect educated women, not just from the pressures of male sexuality, but also from men who might not let their partners work. (In strict Islam, whether a woman works is a man’s decision.) That’s always part of the premarital discourse, said Smith-Hefner: “Will the man allow the woman to work?”

Outwardly, KAMMI and its practices might seem to destabilize the concept of a woman’s individual choice. But in fact, she said, they provide “access to other valued ends,” including sexual modesty, education, employment, and incentives for a man to be a better provider.

This emerging style of Islam “is not in opposition to secular modernity,” said Smith-Hefner, “but (it’s) a way of striking a different balance.”

The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus (HGLC) is encouraging all current full-time students at Harvard to apply for the HGLC Public Service Fellowship, made possible with support from The Open Gate Foundation.

The fellowship is a one-time grant of $5,000, and is given to an individual to educate, organize, or otherwise benefit the GLBT community during the summer of 2010. The work can be independent or within an existing nonprofit organization.

The winner will be notified by the end of April and will be required to submit a final report to HGLC by Oct. 15. For more information on the award, visit the HGLC Web site.

In news that’s sure to delight chocolate lovers, a Harvard study finds that a couple of squares of dark chocolate a day might reduce the risk of a hemorrhagic stroke, by 52 percent.

Unfortunately for chocolate fans, though, the same research also found that chocolate does not appear to have a protective benefit for the most common type of stroke.

To read more

As twilight fell over Port-au-Prince that first terrible night after Haiti’s January earthquake, Louise Ivers watched a strange cloud of dust settle over the city. Stirred by buildings collapsing as the late afternoon quake struck, the cloud was pierced only by sound, a rising chorus of screams from across the capital as the toll became apparent.

Ivers, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor, infectious disease specialist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Haiti clinical director for the nonprofit group Partners In Health, was bruised and battered herself. She had been in a conference room, discussing enhanced food aid for HIV/AIDS patients, when the quake struck.

Ironically, the discussion had just digressed to disaster food distribution, with Ivers making the point that after 2008’s devastating hurricanes, officials had to be prepared for the certainty that natural disasters would strike again.

When the shaking began, it knocked Ivers to the floor as if she had been slapped. Everyone in the room was tossed down and repeatedly shaken as they stumbled to the doorway and out to the street. There, confused, they were greeted with devastation.

“Every single building to the right of that building, every single building behind that building collapsed. The wall to the compound collapsed onto the road and killed two people,” Ivers said. “I never thought about earthquakes in Haiti. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought a bomb went off.”

The first minutes passed as if in slow motion. Ivers found herself in a nearby courtyard, when a member of the group there said, “I wish someone was a doctor.”

That snapped Ivers out of her trance.

“I’m a doctor,” she responded. And her world shifted from slow motion to hyperspeed.

The night that followed was utter chaos. Ivers was the only person in the area with medical training, but she was without supplies and had no way to get the injured to the city’s medical infrastructure, which she later would learn had been destroyed.

Her recounting of the night — given in mid-February in Port-au-Prince, where she continues to coordinate earthquake relief — poured out in her Irish-accented speech, as if she were viewing a slowly accelerating moving picture in her head as she talked. Reaching over a fence, a man handed her a baby, one arm shredded to the tendons, urging her to take him to get care. She handed the baby back and told the father to come with her. They would get help together.

She told of passing a “pile” of screaming children, panicked and covered in white dust from the collapsed buildings. During the long, dark hours that followed, she helped however she could: using first-aid kits and yanking license plates off cars to employ as makeshift splints.

“It was just nonstop. There were no other doctors there, nobody in charge, just first-aid kits from cars,” she said.

She tried to treat those she came across. But with no supplies, no trained help, and an overwhelming number of injured, some bled to death as she struggled to save them. The next morning, trucks arrived from the United Nations, and Ivers helped to put four bodies in them. Then a man came up, holding a baby, and asked Ivers to examine him. One look told her the baby was already dead. She looked at the father for a moment, trying to tell whether he understood the situation.

When Ivers broke the news to him, he asked what he should do. He had walked a long way, he said, and wanted to know whether he should walk back with the body. Ivers said that if he wanted, he could put the baby in the truck with the other bodies.

“We helped him put his baby in the back of the truck with the other four people we put in there,” Ivers said. “It was really, really horrific.”

Ivers made her way to a tent hospital that had sprung up on the United Nations compound and, as the only doctor there, found herself in charge. Amid the flood of injured people, she moved constantly during the hours that followed. The first relief to arrive was truckloads of medicine and supplies from Partners In Health facilities in Haiti’s Central Plateau. Next came two doctors from the University of Miami, who pitched in alongside her. Finally, nearing collapse two days after the quake, Ivers rested, falling asleep in the back of the hospital.

When she awoke, other physicians had arrived and were beginning to assume some of the burden, among them three Harvard Medical School faculty members, Brigham and Women’s Hospital physicians, and experienced Partners In Health hands: Assistant professors of medicine Jennifer Furin and Joia Mukherjee and instructor in medicine David Walton.

The task that lay ahead promised many more long days and threatened to overwhelm even those newly arrived, but, for Ivers, help had come.

As a boy in northern England, David C. Parkes was upwards of 12 when he got his first computer. It was an Acorn Electron, beige and clunky, with 32KB of memory and one sound channel. He used it to program his own adventure games, set in mythical lands where visitors hunt for objects like gold or keys.

Parkes has the keys to his own kingdom now, or at least to an office in Maxwell Dworkin, where he is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The academic world he inhabits is not a mythical land exactly, but contains mysteries enough for most of us. Parkes specializes in the arcane mathematical regions where economics and computer science intersect. “If you are working on both,” he said of the two disciplines, “the problems become extremely interesting.”

Parkes is an expert on combinatorial auctions, the bidding and buying of complex packages of goods that is one of the hidden algorithmic underpinnings of electronic commerce.

Combinatorial auctions inform a hybrid branch of economics and computer science that was pioneered in a 1982 paper about landing slots at airports. What a designer is after in such auctions is “optimization” — getting the most efficiency and value from a decision in which possible choices might number in the billions.

It’s no accident that Parkes is interested in operations research too, a branch of complex mathematical decision-making that rose out of Allied logistical demands during World War II. All of his Ph.D. students study it, along with economic theory, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

Operations research is all about “making operational decisions about how to allocate resources — for example, how an airline decides to fly which plane where and when,” said Parkes.

Such complex decision-making challenges a classical idea in economics: that markets are controlled by rational agents. “Humans are not the rational economic actors we like to theorize about,” said Parkes. So his research aims at designing markets that promote simplicity of interaction for market participants.

“We’re in the business of how to solve coordination problems and optimization problems that span boundaries,” he said, and there are many self-interested agents.

Parkes wants to construct mechanisms that simplify the decision making that agents have to do. That requires an intersection of computer science and economics. “The Internet itself is at once a computational system and an economic system,” said Parkes of the complex algorithms that underlie modern life. “You have to understand both.”

Coordinating decision making in the realm of the Internet may prefigure what he calls “a market of minds.” This future ensemble of connected computer systems would be “like an artificial social system,” said Parkes, and provides structure to the idea that intelligence is modular.

Then there is what artificial-intelligence futurists call “singularity,” a point in the future when machines acquire general intelligence that is superior to human intelligence. That may be just 30 years away, said Parkes. “There are all these questions that sound like science fiction.”

In the meantime, he added, scientists have to begin thinking of the ethical implications of such shifts.

Parkes still has the old Acorn Electron in his home office — a reminder perhaps of the happy accidents that he said have made the past two decades a “whirl” — from a state school in his home village of Holmes Chapel, to an engineering science degree at Oxford University, doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a post at Harvard since 2001.

“I had this very early introduction to computers,” said Parkes, whose father is a physicist and whose mother a one-time dental office radiographer. “But I never thought that it was an academic trajectory.”

And yes, there is life outside computer science. Parkes is an avid cook and gardener, and is refurbishing an old Victorian house in Cambridge with his partner, Robert Carr, an artist and architectural enthusiast. “It’s a work in motion,” Parkes said.

In recent weeks, Harvard’s Allston-Brighton neighbors and the Harvard community have been celebrating ice season.

More than two months of free ice-skating for all ages and skill levels began Jan. 16, with the opening of the Harvard Allston Ice Rink. Since then, neighbors and Harvard students have clocked nearly 2,000 visits to the former car dealership turned temporary indoor rink.

During the Boston Public Schools winter recess in February, the rink was open daily, offering children free skating and activities, including a lesson on how to spin. Harvard tapped its own talent in Alise Johnson, a staff member and certified U.S. Figure Skating instructor, to offer students some basic skill lessons — everything from how to stop and skate backward, to embracing their inner Olympian with a spin.

The rink’s immediate success led to extended hours. In addition to the earlier Friday through Sunday session, the rink opened Wednesday evenings to provide ice time to Allston-Brighton children in the Allston-Brighton Youth Hockey Association’s free Learn-to-Skate program and more skating for the public.

The rink also was buzzing on Feb. 26, when Harvard President Drew Faust, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and a crowd of more than 150 gathered to celebrate the awarding of another $100,000 in Harvard grants for local nonprofits.

The event celebrated the second round of Harvard Allston Partnership Fund grants, a University-city-community collaboration that has infused approximately $200,000 over the past two years into 14 organizations that serve the Allston-Brighton community. Menino and Faust took turns at the podium in front of the standing-room-only community room as die-hard local skaters took advantage of the free ice rink in the garage.

“Without the availability of these resources, these programs would not be able to fulfill their missions during these difficult economic times,” said Menino, who underscored the important work that each organization does in the Allston-Brighton community. “With Harvard’s assistance, we’re able to continue great programming that nurtures kids and keeps them busy, just like this skating rink.” In introducing Faust, Menino thanked her for being so available to Boston and Allston.

In another event, on Feb. 16, neighbors skated on the big ice at Harvard for the 21st annual Allston-Brighton Family Skate at Bright Hockey Center. Nearly 50 children, teens, and their parents attacked the ice with their polished skating skills.

For some of the rink’s nearest neighbors, Harvard ice is becoming a habit. David Vu, a 17-year-old resident of Charlesview Apartments, has been skating at the Allston rink often and came to the Bright too.

Vu strapped on skates for the first time when the Allston rink opened and now he’s got the hang of it. “On a scale of one to 10, I’ve gone from zero to seven in a month,” said Vu. Allston ice time will continue in March.

On Sunday, March 14, from 2 to 4 p.m., Allston Village Main Streets will sponsor a community event at the rink, including participation by local businesses. There will be snacks, music, and hot chocolate.

The rink will be open until March 28. The hours of operation are Wednesdays from 6 to 8 p.m., Fridays from 3 to 8 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Alison Brisette contributed to this story.

Coming up: An Evening with Champions, a premier skating exhibition that raises money for The Jimmy Fund, will celebrate their 40th anniversary this spring with their annual show April 16-17. For more information, visit the event Web site.

As a teenager in Iowa, Briget Ganske discovered the magic of photography through a camera she borrowed from her grandparents. Now she has infected Salvadoran youth with her photographic bug.

Ganske HGSE ’10, who is in the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), embarked with other HGSE students during their January break to El Salvador on a mission involving Learning Through Libraries (LTL), a student group and literacy project founded by Jill Carlson ’10, Debra Gittler ’10, and Eleanor “Nell” O’Donnell ’10, all from HGSE. For a week, these HGSE students worked in three schools in Caluco, El Salvador’s poorest municipality, providing literacy training to local teachers and helping to establish three libraries with more than 2,000 donated books.

Wanting to come up with creative ways to engage local children, whose schools had no running water or electricity, Ganske procured digital cameras to educate through storytelling and art. “These kids had never used cameras before, never taken a photograph,” recalled Ganske inside the Gutman Library lobby, where the students’ photographs reside in a special exhibition titled “From Cambridge to Caluco,” on view through March.

“First, we practiced technical aspects, like turning the cameras on,” said Ganske. “They were just so excited to use this technology.”

LTL forged a partnership with art students from the Escuela de Comunicacíon Mónica Herrera in the capital city San Salvador, who then paired up with the younger students as photography mentors. Making lists of what they found important in their lives, the students explored their village and were encouraged to photograph whatever they found meaningful.

“The idea of photographing their daily life was really exciting,” said Ganske. “The kids had so much fun. It was really quite inspiring to see their enthusiasm.”

Life through young eyes was poetically rendered. In photographs featuring primarily family, the students captured their subjects with inherent purity, unblemished by age or self-consciousness. In a photo by a student named Maria and titled “Madre y Hermanita,” a mother’s outstretched arms bear an infant daughter. Kids play by the trees overlooking a river in Karla’s “Amigas y el Rio.” In “Tia” and “Abuelo,” Susana captured her aunt and grandfather in unadorned, but striking, portraits.

“We also experimented with angles, distance, composition, and lighting,” said Ganske, whose lessons were particularly evident in the playful works of a student named Victor. “Cerdo” showcases a pig, his snout in the dirt, dappled by shadow and light. Victor’s other photograph, “El Campo,” displays a diffused sugarcane field with a path emerging into a bright meadow.

The photographs are simultaneously being exhibited in San Salvador, where the students from Caluco traveled to attend their first art opening, which happened to be their own.

What began as a kernel of an idea by Carlson, Gittler, and O’Donnell — who were eating sushi when they decided they wanted to do something significant over their monthlong break — the LTL project now has lasting implications for HGSE. The students involved are hoping to implement the project as a January term course, and are currently negotiating with HGSE administration.

“We don’t consider ourselves to be done,” said Gittler.

Their sushi-fueled idea led to raising $5,000 and collecting a bevy of books, aided by students from Cambridge’s Amigos School and Martin Luther King Jr. School, who gathered hundreds of texts to be sent to El Salvador. LTL purchased high-quality Spanish literature at half-off from Scholastic Books, and the material was shipped for free, thanks to TACA Airlines. Two more libraries are slated to open in Caluco before the semester’s end.

Ganske, who is graduating in May, will most likely stay in Boston to pursue other educational and photographic opportunities with youth. She said her trip to El Salvador was humbling and inspiring.

“The kids realized they too had a story to tell, and that people were interested in their lives and how they saw the world,” she said. “That’s the power of photography: for the artist, the power of self-expression, and for the viewer, the power of connection and understanding.”

The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States has awarded Harvard College seniors Zhou Fan and Yi Sun Churchill Scholarships for 2010-11.

The scholarship program, which was established in 1959, offers American students of “exceptional ability and outstanding achievement” the opportunity to pursue one year of graduate studies in engineering, mathematics, or the sciences at the University of Cambridge, England. The scholarship covers or assists in university and college fees, a living allowance, and travel expenses, and provides the opportunity to apply for a special research grant.

Fan, who will receive an A.B. in mathematics and an M.S. in computer science from Harvard, and Sun, who will receive an A.B. and an M.A. in mathematics and economics from Harvard, will both work toward master’s degrees in advanced study in pure mathematics at Cambridge. Fan, after his year of study in Cambridge, will return to the United States to work on a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, computational mathematics, or statistics. Sun will return to pursue a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematics.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, received the 41st NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work (nonfiction) for his book “In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past” (2009), which expands on his PBS documentary series “African American Lives.”

In Java, Radcliffe Fellow Nancy J. Smith-Hefner studies a functional — if sometimes tense — negotiation of gender roles within Islam. But in some Muslim societies, the tension between genders can lapse into violence. Other Radcliffe fellows can tell that tale.

Last year, Hauwa Ibrahim RI ’09, the first female lawyer in northern Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim Gombe region, talked about the sometimes violent consequences of shariah religious law for women. This year, current Radcliffe Fellow Humaira Awais Shahid, a Pakistani journalist, human rights activist, and former legislator, will present an April 14 discussion on the Islamic and tribal context of violence against women in South Asia.

Shahid has seen gender conflict within Islam escalate into gang rapes, acid attacks, honor killings, forced marriages, and other forms of violence. Legal reforms in Pakistan are slowly improving the picture, including a Women’s Protection Act and a law that protects women from workplace harassment.

Now Shahid is part of an effort to improve things further, on an international scale. Last month, she appeared with U.S. senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer in Washington, D.C., at the reintroduction of the International Violence Against Women Act. If enacted, the law would tie all U.S. international aid to violence against women and girls, and make the issue a diplomatic priority.

Some might argue that the role of House master, which involves managing the social, living, and curricular lives of hundreds of students while teaching and conducting research as a faculty member, is one of the most demanding on campus. Now, imagine taking on the responsibilities of master with a new baby.

Ronald S. Sullivan and Stephanie Robinson began their stint as masters at John Winthrop House in September, 18 days after the birth of their second son, Chase Barrington. Son number one, Trey, was 8. And then there was their 11-year-old pug. “It is a tough juggling act,” Robinson said. “Not the master’s role itself, but having a new baby, which means little sleep for mom, along with the responsibilities that come with the job.”

“We never do anything the easy way,” Robinson said. “We put a lot into the hopper, and then figure out how to make it work.” And so they did. They hosted social events, including sophomore dessert parties to welcome students, tea parties for juniors, and senior wine tastings to educate students about wines and encourage them to drink responsibly. They hosted actor Blair Underwood and participated in several of his artist-in-residence activities. They also had open house parties for nonresident tutors.

“Having a good sense of community is really important to us. We wanted very much to be present, and to have our presence felt. So, we did a lot in the beginning that will surely pay off later.”

Sullivan and Robinson also made history when they were appointed the first African-American House masters at Harvard.

“There is obvious symbolic significance that Harvard has appointed the first African-American masters,” Sullivan said. “There is symbolic significance: that we will sign diplomas. Our appointment is testament to the growth of the University and American culture, in general, that a significant, important position is no longer occupied primarily by people of a single race or ethnic background.” He added, “But, we don’t master any differently. There is no black method of mastering. We are honored to serve in this capacity.”

“The experience of being African-American in the United States brings a different sensibility, brings a different rich heritage that is value-added. It is important to bring who you are, and authenticity to the role. It enriches the community of masters, students, faculty, and staff. We are happy to be a part of history. Hopefully, there will be many more,” said Robinson.

Sullivan, a 1989 Morehouse College and 1994 Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate, is clinical professor of law, director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, and Edward R. Johnston Lecturer on Law. He joined the HLS faculty in 2007 from Yale University Law School, where he was associate clinical professor and founding director of the Yale Criminal Justice Clinic. But he is no stranger to Harvard House life. He was a nonresident tutor at Kirkland House, and later, a resident tutor at Leverett House while in law school.

Also an HLS graduate, Robinson holds a B.S. from the University of Maryland. She is a lecturer on law at HLS, is president and CEO of the Jamestown Project, and is a political commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show. She also served as the chief counsel for Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The “how did you two meet” story could have been written by Noel Coward. They were HLS students and met when they took husband and wife roles in an HLS Drama Society play. “Acting was fun,” Robinson said. “Hill Harper [star of the CBS drama “CSI: New York”] was also in the play with us.”

“We remain in the process of developing a vision” for their new roles as masters, Sullivan said. “We did not want to make wholesale changes in the traditions of Winthrop House. Nor do we want to be unduly captive by the House traditions. We want to retain what is working well, and augment that with our personalities.”

Sullivan and Robinson want to create a more robust Senior Common Room. They plan to host special masters’ teas with guests from around the world. As former actors, they want to bring more arts activities to the House. And, they want more and better sports activities.

“Most importantly,” Sullivan said, “we want to continue to work on scholarship. That’s what this is all about. We want to celebrate the scholar. We have already had special celebrations for those who have received recognition for scholastic achievement, such as the John Harvard Scholars. We want to place emphasis on our students’ being well-rounded individuals. Diversity of interests is very important to us.”

Robert Mitchell is assistant dean for diversity relations and communications in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Kokkalis Program on Southeast and East-Central Europe, which strives to support individuals committed to invigorating the public sector in Southeastern and East-Central Europe by providing fellowships for study at HKS, will host a four-day HKS executive training program May 31-June 3 titled “Leading, Innovating and Negotiating: Critical Strategies for Public Sector Executives.”

The program, designed exclusively for senior professionals in the public and nonprofit sectors in Southeast and East-Central Europe, will offer participants analytical and problem-solving tools that are critical for advancing individual and organizational goals and vital for generating, managing, and leveraging innovation in an era of growing global complexity.

Administered by the Kokkalis Program, the executive training program will take place in Athens, Greece, at the Athens Information Technology institute (AIT).
The deadline for applicaitons is April 26. For more information and application instructions, visit the HKS Executive Education Web site.

Michael O. Rabin of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has been named a 2010 Dan David Prize laureate.

Rabin will share the $1 million prize with Leonard Kleinrock, University of California, Los Angeles, and Gordon E. Moore, Woodside, Calif., who were also recognized in the “Future” category.

The international prize covers three time dimensions — past, present, and future — that represent realms of human achievement. Past refers to fields that expand knowledge of former times; present recognizes achievements that shape and enrich society today; and future focuses on breakthroughs that hold great promise for improvement of the world. Three prizes of $1 million each are granted annually in the fields chosen for the three time dimensions.

Rabin, the Thomas J. Watson Sr. Professor of Computer Science at the SEAS, was recognized for breakthroughs in the field of “Computers and Telecommunications.” Rabin was noted for his “major research results, which have had and which will continue to have a great impact on the shape of computer and communication technology and, in particular, for his work on automata and complexity theory, on probabilistic algorithms, and on ways to improve privacy and create unbreakable ways to encrypt data, making secrecy, privacy and protection ever more crucial to society,” according to the Dan David Prize announcement.

To learn more about Rabin’s work, visit Rabin’s page on the Dan David Prize Web site.

Other Dan David Prize laureates for 2010 include:

Past — in the field of “March Towards Democracy”: Giorgio Napolitano, president of the Republic of Italy.

Present — in the field of “Literature — Rendition of the 20th Century”: Amitav Ghosh, India/New York, for his novels, and Margaret Atwood, Toronto, for her versatile and prolific writing.

Headquartered at Tel Aviv University, the prize is named after international businessman and philanthropist Dan David. The laureates, who donate 10 percent of their prize money toward 20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships, will be honored at a ceremony on May 9 at Tel Aviv University in the presence of Israeli President Shimon Peres.

For more information, visit the Dan David Prize Web site.

Harvard Business School (HBS) is in the business of being green — a color that goes nicely with the black of a healthy bottom line.

One measure of being green is reducing energy use, and HBS trimmed its utility bills by 12 percent from 2006 through mid-2009. Related operating costs dropped too, by almost a million dollars.

And preliminary figures show that, during the same period, HBS also reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent. The 40-acre campus has 33 buildings — 1.5 million square feet — that have to be heated, cooled, and illuminated.

Since 2003, HBS enacted more than 100 energy conservation measures, including low-flow water fixtures and more efficient lighting. The measures were enough to offset 6,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases equivalent to carbon dioxide (CO2), the signature emission.

Greenhouse gas emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels, get trapped in the atmosphere and contribute to global climate change. Reducing such emissions is a Harvard-wide priority. In 2008, President Drew Faust pledged to reduce such gases 30 percent by 2016, with 2006 as a baseline year.

To meet that goal, each of Harvard’s 12 Schools submitted action plans late last year, and a University task force is looking for ways to share and implement the best energy-saving ideas.

At HBS, steep reductions in greenhouse gases and energy use come from two sources, said chief of operations Andy O’Brien: upgraded technology and behavior change.

The new technology has a high quotient of cool.

For one thing, a glittering array of 193 photovoltaic panels tops Shad Hall, creating enough solar electrical power to light 20 homes. Shad also has a new “green” roof: 5,200 square feet of a gravel-like growing medium planted with 9,000 perennials. It’s designed to help insulate the building and slow rain runoff. Estimates suggest that green roofs can offset 10 to 15 percent of a building’s air conditioning energy load.

Less visible — and perhaps less sexy — are the fuel-efficient upgrades to the HBS chilled-water system, which provides the cooling for the air conditioning. There are also occupancy sensors for light and ventilation. “These are smart buildings now,” said O’Brien, “or they’re getting smarter.”

A cogeneration project at Shad Hall offsets close to 500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year. (Cogeneration means using a common fuel source to generate both electricity and useful thermal energy in one place. Waste heat from the Shad operation is used to make hot water.)

At Gallatin and Hamilton halls, residents can use touch screens to monitor energy and water usage in real time, which is an energy management system that is also planned for other HBS residential buildings.

Five HBS buildings have been refurbished to meet a gold LEED standard: Aldrich, Gallatin, Hamilton, McCollum, and Wyss halls. Two more buildings have LEED certifications pending: the Class of 1959 Chapel and McCulloch Hall. LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a code of sustainability standards ranked like precious medals. (Gold, the second-highest ranking, is the standard for any HBS project, said O’Brien.)

Exterior lighting has also been modified to cast light more efficiently and to use less energy doing it. More than 400 fixtures were upgraded.

Even small-scale equipment retrofits can make a difference. HBS replaced the 52-watt blue lights in its campus security phones with 2.6-watt ones that shine just as brightly. The savings amounts to the equivalent of seven tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

To win further energy reductions, HBS wants to build more sustainability into its food service operation. Buying regional produce, for instance, reduces the energy burned in transportation. HBS just finished a comprehensive study of its food service program. “It’s a different look at sustainability,” said O’Brien. “It opened my eyes to many different opportunities to improve our operation.”

But saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not just about oil, bricks, mortar, and gadgets, he said. “It takes the entire community to move the needle.”

That means helping people to modify their behavior in residence halls, dining areas, and classrooms. HBS has a 30-member Green Team looking at novel ways to save energy. At least three student clubs examine environmental issues. And every April HBS hosts Green Week, which includes films, panels, displays, field trips, and other events to raise environmental awareness.

Then there are the Green Living Program “reps,” six M.B.A. students employed part time to monitor waste, recycling, and energy issues around campus. They are funded by HBS and trained by Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS).

Technology is important, but the community affected has to buy in too, said Meghan Duggan, HBS manager of energy and sustainable services. And the price is right for simply changing behaviors, she added. “Occupant engagement doesn’t have to cost anything.”

Don’t forget the meetings, said O’Brien, since communication is an important strategy in reducing energy consumption. Every month, HBS administrators meet to discuss greenhouse gas reduction activities. HBS faculty and staff have similar monthly meetings.

“They are hitting it on all cylinders,” said OFS Director Heather Henriksen.