Author: Harvard Gazette Online

Efforts to prevent childhood obesity should begin far earlier than currently thought — perhaps even before birth — especially for minority children, according to a new study that tracked 1,826 women from pregnancy through their children’s first five years of life.

Most obesity prevention programs — including the national initiative recently launched by first lady Michelle Obama — target kids ages 8 and older. Scientists at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute’s Department of Population Medicine, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, now say that factors that place children at higher risk for obesity begin at infancy, and in some cases, during pregnancy. Their research also suggests that risk factors such as poor feeding practices, insufficient sleep, and televisions in bedrooms are more prevalent among minority children than white children.

“This early life period — prenatal, infancy, to age 5 — is a key period for childhood obesity prevention, especially for minority children,” says Elsie Taveras, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of population medicine and of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), as well as the director of the One Step Ahead Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Almost every single risk factor in that period before age 2, including in the prenatal period, was disproportionately higher among minority children.”

For the study, which appears online March 1 in the journal Pediatrics, researchers interviewed 1,343 white, 355 black, and 128 Hispanic pregnant women at the end of the first and second trimesters, in the first few days following delivery, and when the children were 6 months and 3 years of age. The women also completed questionnaires when the children were 1, 2, and 4 years old.

When compared to Caucasian women, the researchers found that minority women were more likely to be overweight when they became pregnant and Hispanic women had a higher rate of gestational diabetes, both risk factors for childhood obesity. Although the prevalence of two other risk factors — smoking and depression — during pregnancy was higher among African-American and Hispanic women, those rates dropped considerably when the researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status, suggesting that at least those two risk factors may be impacted by income and education levels.

When researchers looked at other risk factors during children’s first five years, they found that African-American and Hispanic infants are more likely than their Caucasian counterparts to be born small, gain excess weight after birth, begin eating solid foods before 4 months of age, and sleep less. During their preschool years, the study suggests, minority children eat more fast food, drink more sugar-sweetened beverages, and are more likely to have televisions in their rooms than Caucasian children.

One commonly held theory is that the presence of these and other risk factors is caused by limited access to health care, poverty, and low educational levels. However, when Taveras and her colleagues adjusted for socioeconomic status, they found that the prevalence of many of the risk factors remained the same.

More likely, Taveras says, the risk factors stem from behaviors and habits passed from generation to generation or that may be culturally embedded. “For a lot of patients I see in my clinic, it’s intergenerational — for example, the grandmother in the home is influencing how her daughter feeds her own child.” That’s especially true when it comes to at what age mothers begin giving their infants solid food or when the mothers decide to stop breastfeeding, Taveras says.

“Sometimes trying to tackle those intergenerational influences can be very difficult, but actually, it’s promising that some of the areas where we did find disparities are modifiable,” Taveras notes. “Anyone who works with families of young children, including pediatricians and child-care providers, can work on these issues.”

The far more difficult task would be to address problems that are related to socioeconomic status. In this study, that didn’t play as large a role because participants had access to good prenatal and pediatric care for their children and were well-educated.

“We found these striking disparities even in this population, where we had racial and ethnic minority families who were of relatively higher education and income,” she says. “Imagine what the disparity would be in a population that’s of lower socioeconomic status.”

That’s a question Taveras plans to tackle next. The goal now is to look at other novel risk factors that might be more common among minority populations — including those that will likely be tied to income and education.

“All of the risk factors that we examined in this study were known factors that have been published in the literature, including some of our own literatures,” Taveras says. “But there are risk factors that are still understudied, that we have a sense are more common, and that’s where we plan to go next.”

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Samuel Arbesman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

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Six weeks after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the country’s leaders are pleading to other nations for tents to shelter the thousands of homeless victims who live on the streets of Port Au Prince. Last week, Cambridge resident Dr. S. Allen Counter, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Foundation, delivered over 150 tents to homeless families in earthquake ravaged Port Au Prince area. Each tent can provide temporary housing for a family of six to eight persons…

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The Harvard Kennedy School of Government has received a $5 million gift from Glenn Dubin, co-founder and CEO of Highbridge Capital Management.  This gift will be used to launch a graduate fellowship fund to support and develop new programs for emerging leaders from the United States and around the world.

The Dubin Graduate Fellowships for Emerging Leaders will be based at Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL).  Dubin Fellowships will be awarded on a competitive basis and will provide full tuition for up to 10 students each year, beginning in the 2010–11 academic year. Fellowship applicants will be judged on demonstrated academic excellence, leadership potential, and depth of commitment to making a transformative impact on the communities they intend to serve.

In addition to their formal course work, Dubin Fellows will have the opportunity to participate in a broad set of supporting activities, including leadership workshops, an interdisciplinary discussion series with eminent practitioners and thought leaders, field experience in a range of settings, and mentorship with Kennedy School graduates.

Harvard Kennedy School Dean David T. Ellwood, who has set increasing student financial aid as one of his top priorities, remarked that the Dubin Fellowships will serve as “strategic investments in outstanding individuals with demonstrated promise.”

“The Dubin Fellowships will transform the lives of their recipients — and perhaps the world they will go on to lead and to serve,” said Ellwood. “We are deeply grateful to the Dubin family and delighted to honor Glenn’s example of distinguished leadership.”

“Glenn Dubin is a rare individual,” said David R. Gergen, director of CPL and public service professor of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. “He brings to his very active philanthropic life the same creativity, strategic insight, and passion that have taken him to the pinnacle of his profession. Coming on the heels of a 2009 donation to support CPL’s teaching and research, this new gift enables us to extend our time-tested model of graduate fellowships supported by robust co-curricular programming. Just as important, Glenn’s engagement with us as a ‘thinking partner’ is leading our center to new heights of strategic innovation and operational excellence.”

“The ideas behind this new fellowship are some of those which have guided my professional and philanthropic life,” said Dubin. “My hope for this program is to identify extraordinarily talented and passionate individuals who have been able to overcome challenges in life, and provide them with a unique experience that will ultimately allow them to make a lasting impact on communities around the world. I am delighted to be partnering with the Harvard Kennedy School and its Center for Public Leadership in this program.”

Dubin is a founding member of the board of directors and former board chair of the Robin Hood Foundation, and a trustee of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.  He is an alumnus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Established in 2000 through a generous grant from the Wexner Foundation, the Center for Public Leadership is celebrating its 10th anniversary of advancing the frontiers of knowledge about leadership and deepening the pool of leaders for the common good.

Natural gas discoveries over the past five years have raised the projections for gas as a major energy source and led to a dramatic expansion in domestic supplies comparable to Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves, a leading industry official said Wednesday (Feb. 24).

Aubrey McClendon, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Chesapeake Energy, the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer, said that new supplies coupled with existing infrastructure improvements make the gas industry ready for a larger role in the nation’s energy picture. McClendon touted natural gas as cleaner than either oil or coal, since it emits fewer pollutants and lower levels of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas largely responsible for human-induced climate change.

McClendon spoke at the Science Center as part of the Harvard University Center for the Environment’s (HUCE) “Future of Energy” lecture series, which has brought an array of voices to Harvard to address energy concerns, from government officials to oil industry executives to clean-energy advocates.

McClendon, who was introduced by HUCE Director Daniel Schrag, Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering, said natural gas has long been considered a good fuel, but has not been thought of as abundant. In recent years, the use of a technique called “hydraulic fracturing” in unconventional yet abundant shale rock has opened new sources for extraction.

“Hydraulic fracturing” is a process in which a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals is injected into a bore hole drilled into shale beds deep underground. The mixture increases the pressure in the rock around the hole until it fractures, releasing natural gas bound up in the rock for extraction.

Such extraction techniques are not without controversy, however. Several protesters decrying hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania attended the event, saying the technique is responsible for polluting drinking water and marring the rural countryside with wellheads.

In a sometimes contentious question-and-answer session, McClendon defended the process, saying that although he couldn’t speak to every company’s industrial practices, Chesapeake Energy has employed hydraulic fracturing more than 25,000 times since the company started in 1989, including 1,000 wells drilled inside Fort Worth’s city limits, with no ill effects on groundwater. Further, he said, natural gas extraction is so common — more than a million Americans have signed leases with gas companies — that it is unlikely that widespread problems would be hidden.

He acknowledged that the wells themselves affect local areas, but said officials are working to reduce that impact, cutting the land needed per well from five acres five years ago to three acres now. He said there are always choices to be made in picking energy sources, and natural gas’ footprint compares favorably with that of the pit mines and mountaintop-removal techniques used in coal extraction.

Natural gas’ new abundance, McClendon said, can change the U.S. energy outlook. In addition to being cleaner than either coal or oil, the gas is cheaper than oil, and its new abundance is likely to push prices down further. An expansion of the industry can provide both economic and security benefits for the nation, he said, by generating jobs and replacing imported oil.

“We believe natural gas is a game-changer,” McClendon said.

At its ninth meeting of the year on Feb. 24, the Faculty Council discussed course planning and spoke with President Drew Faust.

The council will next meet on March 10. The preliminary deadline for the April 6 faculty meeting is March 22 at 9:30 a.m.

Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks. In 1955, she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala., to a white passenger, an act of defiance that became a symbol for the modern civil rights movement.

But few people know the parallel story of Ida B. Wells. In 1884, on a railroad car near Memphis, Tenn., she was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. Wells refused, and it took three men to remove her.

What happened in that railroad car became part of “Ida B. Wells: A Passion For Justice,” a 53-minute documentary released in 1989. Fragments of it were shown recently at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

The showing was part of a little-known but long-running Radcliffe film series, “Movie Night at the Schlesinger Library,” a quiet tradition that rarely fills the 30 chairs in the Radcliffe College Room. In its present iteration, the monthly program started in 2000 and — with a two-year break for library renovations —has run ever since.

Showing one long film was once the norm, said Schlesinger audiovisual cataloger Melissa Dollman, but this year’s series has screened short films related to the library’s collections. Showing with “Ida B. Wells” was “Jeannette Rankin: The Woman Who Voted No,” a 30-minute PBS documentary on the sole member of Congress who voted against entering both World War I and World War II.

Rankin was a lifelong pacifist and peace activist. Her last antiwar effort targeted the Vietnam War. The film showed an antiwar rally. “They can stop the war,” Rankin said simply, by “not supporting it.” Then came a shot of her being helped into a police wagon.

The movie series offers advantages. It’s an intimate venue, with the chairs arrayed in rows of five. It offers unusual fare. One of the next films, playing March 3, is “We Dig Coal: A Portrait of Three Women.” And each set of films comes with expert commentary.

Holding forth on Wells (1862-1931) and Rankin (1880-1973) were Schlesinger manuscript catalogers Marilyn Morgan and Emilyn Brown, both members of the film committee that makes selections for movie night.

Brown outlined Wells’ remarkable life: born the year before emancipation, a teacher by age 14, and a Memphis journalist in her 20s who campaigned against lynching and racial violence. Harried out of the South, Wells settled in Chicago, where she married and continued a restless campaign for racial and gender justice.

Wells, a founder of the NAACP, was a friend of leading feminist and rights leader Susan B. Anthony. (Anthony was disappointed when Wells decided to marry and raise a family.)

Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. On her first day in office (April 2, 1917), the Montana Republican voted against America’s entry into World War I. Though joined in her opposition by 49 males, the move temporarily cut Rankin’s political career short and branded her — in the words of a contemporary — “weak and sentimental.”

Rankin’s pacifism grew between the wars. By 1940 she had been elected again, this time on an antiwar platform. When Rankin voted against America’s entry into war in December 1941, this time she cast the lone dissenting vote. It was an act that for years after brought her hatred.

Both Rankin and Wells, despite their accomplishments, rich lives, and one-time fame, are little known now. “A lot of people get written out,” said Morgan, who has a doctorate in history.

“We have figures who have become obscure,” said Brown of Wells and Rankin. And yet, she added, “They have laid the foundations we stand on.”

The next movie night will take place March 3 at 6 p.m. at 10 Garden St., Radcliffe Yard. The featured films are “We Dig Coal” (1981) and “We’re Here to Stay: Women in the Trades” (1986). For more information, call 617.495.8647. For a list of films playing this season.

Visiting an art museum usually means confronting a kaleidoscope of works. Paintings, objects, and installations can flash past like meteorites.

But a Harvard Art Museum lecture series this year invites art lovers to pause and focus on single works. During the “In-Sight” discussions, an art expert shows the audience how one example can open a window onto the culture, society, and history of an age. (The next lecture is March 3.)

The first lecture last fall centered on the left hand of a Japanese Buddha figure. The lacquered wood remnant was an entry point into understanding the sculpture, architecture, and religious traditions of 13th century Japan.

The second lecture looked at an Edward Burne-Jones watercolor. Set in context, it revealed the romantic temper of 19th century England, along with the materials, collecting habits, and reproduction techniques that informed art in that age.

This semester, audiences at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall have been guided so far through two disparate works from the 20th century: one an iconic religious image and the other a photograph that documented a social trend.

On Jan. 13, curator and historian Ivan Gaskell led the audience through a nuanced look at “Jesus Christ as the Divine Mercy,” a 1934 oil-on-canvas by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, an obscure landscape painter and Polish veteran of World War I. That painting today is “among the most widely venerated images in contemporary Roman Catholicism,” and the object of cult-like adoration worldwide, said Gaskell, who is the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator at the Harvard Art Museum.

The shimmering, romanticized image — inspired by a nun’s vision — depicts a robed Jesus, right hand raised in blessing. Two rays, one red and one pale, emanate from his breast. Below, in Polish, is the legend: “Jesus, I trust in You.”

Though art and religion “have parted ways” in the modern West, Gaskell said, “Divine Mercy” is a fine case study on the power and durability that an image may command despite having limited aesthetic value.

In the Feb. 17 lecture, curator Michelle Lamunière used a gelatin silver print from around 1908 to explore how early photography could document social ills. Such pictures had many uses. They were pleas for change, and devices to underscore contrasting middle-class values such as thrift, order, and good hygiene.

“Twins When They Began to Take Modified Milk,” by an unidentified photographer, depicts an impoverished mother holding her scrawny babies. Behind her is a cramped, messy room. The picture was taken for the Starr Centre Association, a social reform society in Philadelphia. It was intended to advertise the benefits of pasteurized milk for infants.

“Twins” is one of about 4,500 photographs and 1,500 graphical illustrations on deposit at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, remnants of a Harvard Social Museum collection started in 1903. By 1907, it was housed in Emerson Hall as an exhibition arm of the new Department of Social Ethics, which in the 1930s was absorbed into Harvard’s sociology program.

The museum’s collection of realistic photographs was the brainchild of Francis Greenwood Peabody (1847-1936), Harvard’s Plummer Professor of Christian Morals from 1886 to 1912. Modeled after the Musée Social in Paris, it was designed to awaken “Harvard students ill-equipped for social challenges of the age,” said Lamunière, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museum.

But the Harvard Social Museum also displayed the “tension between sentimental appeal and science” that marked realistic photographs of that age, she said. Are “Twins” and photographs like it sentimental glimpses into impoverished parallel worlds? Or are they useful social documents, subject to rigorous scientific examination?

Both ideas appealed to Peabody, said Lamunière. Peabody kept the photographs in strict order by theme. They were documents, after all, intended to help “solve social problems, not to show social problems,” she said. But sentiment appealed to Peabody too, said Lamunière, since it was “critical to engaging students in issues larger than themselves.”

In their lectures, both Gaskell and Lamunière showed that single works of art, examined closely, can become entryways into the past and broader issues of art, politics, history, and culture.

For example, Lamunière used her lecture to survey social photography, starting with the stunning portraits of orphans taken for Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905), an Irish philanthropist who, starting in 1874, opened a series of homes for destitute children.

She acknowledged Jacob Riis (1849-1914), calling him “the father of reform photography,” who preferred sentiment to science. His traveling “magic lantern” shows shocked audiences with images of the poor and helped his reform efforts.

Gaskell showed how modern art slipped away from its old moorings in religious tradition. He identified J.-A.-D. Ingres and Eugène Delacroix as “the last prominent canonical Western artists to have produced devotional works for ecclesiastical use in the normal course of their careers.”

It was with Edouard Manet, a contemporary of Delacroix, that modern art was believed to begin, said Gaskell. At that point, a schism opened in the West between religion and art — or at least art as recognized by museums. Religious art soon met with skepticism or open hostility, attitudes that persist to this day, said Gaskell. (He quoted Picasso on the concept of religious art: “It is an absurdity.”)

But those who are not “art world artists,” said Gaskell, continued to fulfill the needs of religious authorities, creating traditional images readily understood by the faithful, for instance “Divine Mercy.”

The painting is so accessible, Gaskell said, that copies are sold in the gift shop of the U.S. National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass. Copies of derivative paintings also are available there.

Even a version of “Divine Mercy” downloaded from the Web is said to have the ostensible power to “grant graces to souls anywhere in the world,” said Gaskell, displaying the image on his laptop. That power has a modern ring, said Gaskell. It’s an image that does not require a physical manifestation, he explained, but like contemporary art “is properly conceptual.”

The next “In-Sight” lecture will take place on March 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Sackler lecture hall, 485 Broadway. Amy Brauer, the Diane Heath Beever Associate Curator of Ancient Art at the Harvard Art Museum, will discuss “Mosaic of Two Figures Seated on a Couch,” A.D. c. 450-525.

A group of Harvard employees recently united to help colleagues affected by Haiti’s devastating earthquake, using the tool they had at hand, a plastic jar.

Nickels and quarters, checks and dollar bills were all part of the contributions they made to a small impromptu bank fashioned from a Tupperware container and located on a cabinet in the middle of their office.

“Everybody just felt this sense of helplessness,” said Doug Anderson, director of the information technology services and support group for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where there are three workers with direct ties to Haiti. Anderson said members of his team wanted to help their coworkers in a “tangible, personal” way.

After learning of the Harvard Haiti Emergency Relief Fund for Employees, Anderson suggested to his team that they take up their own collection. He offered to match whatever was raised, up to $250, with his own money.

“With 50 people, we could turn pocket change into a lot,” said Anderson, who encouraged his team members to give whatever they could. Over a week and a half, the employees, many of whom are spread across campus, stopped by the central office in the basement of the Science Center to deposit their donations.

The office goal was $250. When it came time to count the money, the total came to $249.76. As promised, Anderson matched the amount, plus enough pocket change to get to $500 even.

“Thank you so much for your generosity and, more importantly, for coming together as a team to show our support for those whose families are affected by the earthquake,” Anderson wrote in an e-mail to his team. “I feel very proud and privileged to work with such a great group of people.”

The Harvard relief fund was initially established with gifts from the University and the Harvard University Employees Credit Union. It is still accepting donations from the Harvard community. The fund will benefit the at least 75 Harvard employees personally touched by the disaster.

Jamesley Dasse, IT support supervisor and part of Anderson’s team, was stunned when he heard about the massive tremor on the island of Hispaniola, where countless uncles, aunts, and cousins reside. He described the terrible days following the quake as “stressful,” as he tried to locate family and friends. Three of his cousins perished, and several others are missing and presumed dead.

But Dasse has been comforted and inspired by his team members and their generous donations. He said he was “blessed” to have a caring boss like Anderson and such giving co-workers.

“I am really proud of everybody. I feel like this is what our group is. We definitely rally together when times are tough, and in situations like this, to help others. I don’t think anyone here would do anything but be selfless.”

When the money was totaled, Dasse and his two co-workers with ties to Haiti deposited the funds at the credit union and returned to their office, where they posted the deposit slip on the wall. The small piece of paper is a great reminder of  “how we came together,” said Anderson.

“Not everybody has a lot to spare these days, and so for everybody to come together … that really meant a lot to those guys.”

Information about how to donate to the Harvard Haiti Emergency Relief Fund for Employees.

Donors who contribute by Feb. 28 to any charities providing Haitian relief will be able to take a charitable deduction on their 2009 or 2010 tax returns.

The chief of the Choctaw Nation took a group of Harvard students into the nitty-gritty daily realities facing a modern American Indian tribe, ranging from making hard business decisions to fighting poverty to playing politics with local governments.

Chief Gregory E. Pyle led what was billed as a “candid conversation” on Tuesday (Feb. 23), as part of a course titled Native American Indians in the 21st Century. The event was co-sponsored by the Office of Student Affairs and the Harvard University Native American Program.

Speaking in a soft Oklahoma drawl, Pyle gave a brief history of the Choctaw Nation, a farming and hunting culture that was forcibly resettled in Oklahoma by the U.S. government beginning in 1832.

He described how his mother as a child was sent to a boarding school, where she was not allowed to speak the Choctaw language. His parents later moved throughout the West seeking work. Pyle’s family resettled in Oklahoma when he was 16.

In 1982, after the U.S. federal government relaxed rules on Indian self-rule, the Choctaws instituted a constitution that created a self-governing, self-sustaining entity, with a legislative and a judicial branch.  In 1982, Pyle was hired as a personnel director. He went on to become assistant chief for 14 years, and was elected chief in 1997.

Pyle is credited with making major improvements in the nation’s business operations, which include casinos, manufacturing, and printing units. Since his election, the nation, which has about 200,000 members, has increased its assets from $4 million to $1 billion and its employees from 100 to more than 8,000, according to Gary Batton, the assistant chief.

As Pyle put it, “We found out how to do business in Indian country.” That has included skillfully negotiating with the federal government on its Indian policies, dealing honestly with a case of tribal embezzlement, and finding common cause with sometimes disliked Oklahoma politicians, all developments that Pyle detailed in plain, homespun language. “We actually got consultants in Washington, D.C., and they can tell us how Washington, D.C., runs. They can tell us, ‘You need to be coming up here and talking more.’ ”

He explained that the Choctaws’ approach to social change skirts cumbersome regulations. He described a tribal effort to help a single mother — who had three children and was making minimum wage — receive much-needed job training. The aid effort included buying gas for her car and paying neighbors to look after her kids. In a few months, the woman was able to double her wages. “If you’re nonfederal and nonstate, you can do stuff like that,” he said.

Health issues — such as high levels of diabetes and obesity among Choctaw children  — led to building seven health clinics. “When you build on your own, you can build much cheaper and much faster than anybody else,” Pyle said. “We don’t cut corners; we just get it done.”

Pyle said the nation was willing to try any number of programs to see what works. “We’re not afraid to fail because every failure brings us closer to success,” he said. “I’ve coined the phrase, ‘Our executives need gray hair.’ ”

Today, about 2,700 people are learning the Choctaw language on the Internet. About 37 Oklahoma schools and four universities also teach Choctaw, partly because the nation took advantage of high school regulations requiring the teaching of a foreign language. “So we went to the state and said, ‘We’d like to have Choctaw as a foreign language,’ and they OK’d it.”

The Harvard class that hosted Pyle is taught by Dennis Norman, associate professor of psychology and faculty chair of the Harvard University Native American Program and Health Initiative. Norman noted that Pyle’s candid comments allowed students to see “governance in action.”

“Here, you have the leader of the nation sharing his views and values about how they enact government to meet the goals of the people, and I think alternative views of government are really, really important,” Norman said. “There are many examples of incredible growth in Indian country that people don’t know of, and the majority of it has been nongaming.”

Indeed, Pyle and the nation’s tribal councils are working on a strategic plan for the next 100 years.

With global population expected to increase by about 2.5 billion by 2050 even while climate change hits farmlands with shifting rainfall and temperatures, it may be time to rethink what we eat and how we produce food, according to a Harvard Medical School instructor and authority on environmental change and human health.

Samuel Myers, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), laid out evidence that the global food supply system is already showing cracks. Add those people and throw in the effects of climate change and — although it’s not time to panic — it may be time to be concerned, Myers said.

Myers, who spoke as part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s “Food for Thought” lecture series Tuesday (Feb. 23), said that the 20th century’s “green revolution” in agriculture made use of new farming techniques, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and new crop strains to increase the global food supply dramatically and make a liar out of Thomas Malthus, who famously predicted that population growth would outstrip the expanding food supply.

Myers pointed out, however, that even one of the fathers of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, said burgeoning agriculture would buy only a few decades of food security against continued population growth.

In recent years, humans have appropriated more land and water to feed themselves, until now between a third and a half of all ecosystem yield is used for human food production. Humans use roughly half of all ice-free, non-desert land and half of accessible fresh water, much of that for agriculture.

Despite that massive use of the Earth’s resources, humanity still fails to feed itself adequately. The inequities in the global food network hit a dubious milestone last year, authorities say, for the first time passing the mark of 1 billion people who go to bed hungry nightly.

Even before population growth and climate change are considered, the current agricultural system is already under siege, Myers said. Much arable land is lost each year to erosion, salinization, and desertification. Fresh water is increasingly drawn from nonrenewable sources, such as melting glaciers and slowly draining subterranean aquifers. Three hundred million Chinese and Indians are living on what Myers termed “fossil water,” deposited underground in the ancient past. One estimate suggests that 3 billion people will live amid water scarcity by 2025.

“We are already coming against very sharp constraints in the use of water,” Myers said.

Other concerns include agricultural pollution, fisheries depletion (fish catches peaked in the 1980s), and biodiversity loss, Myers said.

With a global population surge, the spread of Western-style diets, and the rise of an international middle class demanding higher-quality foods, Myers said that growers may need to double global food production by 2050 to meet demand. That would require a tripling of water for irrigation using current methods, something that Myers said was impossible.

While the effects of climate shifts are uncertain, some — such as changing rainfall patterns, snowpack timing, and glacier melt — could hurt agriculture. In addition, Myers said, recent research has shown that plant production can decline when temperatures increase, leading to less-efficient food production at a time when more is needed. The 2003 European heat wave, for example, did more than kill many people. It cut agricultural yield by 20 to 36 percent.

Despite the gloomy outlook, however, Myers said he is optimistic that such challenges will yet be solved. New technologies, plant breeds, and agricultural techniques can be devised to conserve water and boost productivity. And even as we rethink how our food is produced, we may also need to rethink what it is that we eat. Either way, he said, it’s important to get the conversation started now.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Harvard University researchers who have been studying a North Carolina school system to learn what makes teachers effective are reporting their findings.

The Charlotte Observer reports that the Harvard researchers unveil on Tuesday what they’ve found out about Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teachers…

Read more here

In the age of the bit and the byte and the Web, what happens to the hallowed art of writing history?

A Harvard gathering of five historians took up that question in a discussion called “Writing History Now,” sponsored by the Harvard University Extension School. The session was part of a series celebrating the School’s 100th anniversary, the exact date of which is today (Feb. 23).

For those who write history, the Internet has a bright side, some historians said. It has widened interest in the past, created new audiences, given images fresh historical import, and — through digitizing — improved access to hidden-away archives.

“It’s a new public for history,” said panelist David Hackett Fischer of the Internet’s enhanced content and broad reach into literate audiences.

The Brandeis University historian’s book on the American Revolution, “Washington’s Crossing,” not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, but has been translated widely and soon will be available in Serbo-Croatian. (There’s already a bootleg copy in Chinese.)

Still, the Harvard panel suggested during the Feb. 19 discussion, the Internet age has a dark side for those whose profession traditionally has included painstaking investigations of letters, diaries, public papers, maps, and other documents. For one thing, that paper trail is disappearing under a hail of electrons that may prove elusive to find and save.

Several panelists sang the praises of traditional archival discovery, which, unlike surfing the Net, requires interacting with artifacts that can bloom with surprise.

Megan Marshall ’77, a biographer and former Radcliffe Fellow who specializes in the hidden lives of 19th century American women, extolled “the pleasure of making discoveries in archives, and the crying need to keep these archives going.”

Marshall, an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, read a passage from the Custom House chapter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” when the narrator discovers a bit of old cloth embroidered with a scarlet “A,” an artifact so resonant with meaning that it was as if history itself could “raise up from these dry bones.”

Marshall, whose 2005 volume “The Peabody Sisters” was a Pulitzer finalist, said that writing history sometimes requires a physical immersion that can’t be duplicated using a screen. She said, “It’s up to you, the researcher, to actually find what is actually there.”

Panelist John R. McNeill, an environmental and world historian from Georgetown University, said archival discovery created serendipity, “prized moments for everybody in our business.”

John R. Stilgoe, Harvard’s Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, complained that digitized images are often poor — no match for the ones, for instance, in his collection of 150,000 slides. “I see a lot of flickering lately,” he said, describing himself as “the last man on Earth with a film camera.”

Archives have their place in historiography, but so has the material world around us, said Stilgoe, which sometimes escapes even professional historians. He talked about loading up his old Chevrolet Suburban with “paper goods” during summer road trips, drawing inspiration for a new book by restoring a lifeboat, and finding old slave collars under a neighbor’s woodshed.  Stilgoe suggested to the 400 listeners: “Open yourself to what’s around you.”

Shifting technology does make it easier for historians to utilize visual material — maps, charts, and images — in books and presentations, said Nancy Kollmann, a Russian and legal historian at Stanford University. But the Internet and digitized archives help little in some historical pursuits, she said, such as her current investigation of criminal law practices in 17th century Muscovy.

At that time, the Moscow-centered Russian realm was a nonsecular sphere in which representational art, when there was any, centered on the church. In the absence of images of flogging, executions, and other practices, Kollmann turned to what historians once used almost exclusively: the power of narrative. “You have to make word pictures,” she said.

Kollmann related one story, culled from court records, that allowed her to draw a picture of a hard-to-see Muscovite past. It was the tale of a village woman who (with her son’s help) killed her second husband after he raped her 8-year-old daughter. The story revealed the gender strictures of village life. (Widows often remarried to survive.) But it also opened a window onto a legal system that allowed discretion. The penal code of the time stipulated a death sentence for her crime, but the judge, who interviewed character witnesses, allowed the mother and son to get off with a flogging.

“The past is full of people like us,” said Kollmann, though they lived in times very different from our own. That is where historians are called upon to make sense for the rest of us.

The digital age does offer charms and opportunities to historians, said Marshall. She mentioned one example, www.diarna.org, a Web site that uses Google Earth, maps, video, text, family archives, and oral history to capture the stories of ancient Jewish communities in the Middle East that are fast fading from memory. The Web site shows “what technology can do that traditional history can’t,” she said.

“The Web has widened curiosity,” said Stilgoe, and also has made it possible to connect facts and incidents in the past that — if left unconnected — would remain buried in time.

He told the story of the HMT Rohna, a British ship sunk in 1943 by a German guided missile, the first “smart bomb” used in combat. The attack and its significance, pieced together in part through Internet sources, was a secret until 1997. “The Web is doing something,” said Stilgoe. “Publishers have to wake up.”

Fischer is now writing a book that uses data from 34,000 slave ships, interconnected in “only the way the Web could do.”

Despite the Internet’s potential for improving historical scholarship and presentation, a much older technology got the biggest applause from the audience. One of the best ways to make history come alive, said Fischer, “is to publish beautiful books.”

The panel, at Lowell Lecture Hall, was the second of four this academic year celebrating the Extension School’s centennial. One hundred years ago today, the Harvard Board of Overseers approved a plan to establish the School, which granted its first two degrees in 1913. There are now about 14,000 students registered, 20 percent of whom study online exclusively.

The panel celebrated the Extension’s master of liberal arts program. The A.L.M. degree, offered in 19 fields, is in its 31st year. Two more panels are scheduled, both at 4 p.m. at Lowell Hall. On March 24 comes “Doing Business in the Post-Meltdown Economy: What, if Anything, Will Be Different?” On April 14, look for the panel on “Sustaining our Ecosystems.”

Harvard University today (Feb. 23) announced it will participate in the American Corporate Partners (ACP) mentoring program to help returning veterans transition from the armed services back to the workplace through career counseling and social networking.  The program will provide Harvard Mentors for returning vets, who seek assistance leveraging their past military experience into private sector and public sector jobs.

“This program is a unique way to assist our veterans as they enter or re-enter the workforce. We are grateful for their service to our country and we are pleased to participate in this innovative program,” said Marilyn Hausammann, Vice President of Human Resources.

The University’s program, which will begin March 2010, will be run by Harvard’s Center for Workplace Development. Mentors and veterans will be paired by ACP and will work on a one-to-one basis for one year. Participants in the program will identify and work on career building, work-life balance, personal finance, and networking.

Sid Goodfriend, ACP’s founder is “delighted that Harvard University has decided to join our program.  Harvard has a long history of developing leaders in both public service and in business and is a natural fit to offer career guidance to returning veterans.”

ACP is a New York-based nonprofit organization and launched its nationwide mentoring program in the fall of 2008.  Harvard is joining the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas System as well as numerous corporations as participants in the mentoring program.

ACP’s national mentoring program accepts former enlisted members and officers and current Reservists and National Guard members, who have served on active duty since 2001. They also accept spouses of those service members who have been severely wounded or killed in action.

For more information.

Harvard strives to create learning opportunities to build individual and organizational capability. Harvard’s Center for Workplace Development (CWD) offers a wide range of professional and career development courses designed to help employees grow in their current positions and prepare for the future. CWD also specializes in leadership and management development and provides organizational development consulting and executive coaching services at minimal to no cost.

Gordon Donaldson, an influential Harvard Business School (HBS) professor, mentor, researcher, and administrator from 1955 to 1993, died on Feb. 12 in Parkland, Fla., at the age of 87. An expert in corporate financial management, Donaldson was the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance Emeritus at HBS.

Born on July 1, 1922, in Winnipeg, Manitoba and a graduate of the University of Manitoba at the age of 19, he earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Toronto. In the midst of World War II, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving as an instructor to flight crews from England, Australia, and New Zealand. At the end of the war, he decided to come to the United States to resume his studies.

Donaldson took courses at Harvard Business School in 1950-51 before returning to his native Manitoba to teach and work on his doctoral dissertation. He was invited to join the HBS faculty in 1955, even before completing his doctorate in commercial science in 1956.

Donaldson’s pedagogical reach extended across Harvard Business School’s M.B.A., doctoral, and executive education programs, and his involvement in executive education included two stints in the School’s middle management programs, a year as head of a program for senior managers that then took place in Switzerland, and a six-year assignment in the Owner/President Management Program for entrepreneurs that ended upon his retirement in 1993.

“Gordon Donaldson was a great clinical researcher and a wise mentor to many young faculty members attempting to navigate their way through the promotions process at HBS, a process he led for many years,” said Baker Foundation Professor William E. Fruhan Jr. “He possessed remarkably good judgment and always had a balanced point of view. Over the years, his advice was sought out by successive deans on matters of great importance to the School. He was a pillar of the institution.”

Donaldson is survived by two daughters, Mary Louise Meier of Parkland, Fla., and Patricia Donaldson Smith of Bolton, Mass.; two sons, Richard E. Donaldson of Gorham, Maine, and Robert G. Donaldson of Brunswick, Maine; and six grandchildren. In addition to his wife, a brother, Desmond, also predeceased him.

In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that friends and colleagues consider a donation to organizations that were of special interest to Donaldson, such as the Salvation Army, the Humane Society, or any conservation group. A memorial service celebrating his life may be scheduled in the spring.

To read Donaldson’s full obituary, visit the Harvard Business School Web site.

The electricity generated by fans of the Harvard men’s basketball team at Lavietes Pavilion on Friday (Feb. 19) was enough to power all of Cambridge, but not enough to help the Crimson take the energy out of first-place Cornell, who won, 79-70. Still, the next night Harvard easily imposed its will on Columbia, 77-57, to earn a weekend split.

Gunning for Cornell in a rematch of Harvard’s 86-50 loss on Jan. 30, which was its worst this season, the Crimson stood tall and strong through the game’s first eight minutes against the Big Red, clinging to a slight lead. But after tying the game at 16 apiece, Cornell went on a 10-3 run to go up seven, never to trail again.

Down by as much as 17 in the second half, Harvard went on a spirited 9-0 run to cut the lead to eight. Then, after a Cornell missed shot, Brandyn Curry ’13 drove down the court and found freshman guard Christian Webster in the left corner, who knocked down a three-pointer to bring Harvard within five points and force a Cornell timeout.

Despite chants of “I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win!” from the student section echoing through the stadium, the experienced calm of Cornell showed. Coming out of the timeout, the Big Red drained two consecutive three-pointers to extend the lead to 11, quieting the cheers of the Crimson faithful and halting Harvard’s comeback.

“I was really proud and pleased of an incredible basketball game that we had a chance to be a part of in our arena, with a great environment, with our students being phenomenal for us,” said Harvard coach Tommy Amaker. “It’s nice to have meaningful games for our program and for our kids right now. Being pretty young overall, hopefully this will pay dividends for us down the road … this season.”

“We’re obviously very thankful for the support we’ve had. I’ve never seen anything like this in my four years, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like this before I got here, so we’re very thankful for the student body,” said Jeremy Lin ’10, who led the Crimson in scoring with 24 points. Despite the disappointing outcome, the senior guard acknowledged that the team gave all that it had. “We don’t regret the effort we gave.”

“I told our kids it’s not like everything is over and lost. Obviously, our road is pretty tough, [but] one win wasn’t going to put us where we needed to be, and I don’t think one loss is, in terms of putting us out of it,” said Amaker.

The next night Harvard manhandled the Columbia Lions for its 18th win, behind a career-high 23 points from sophomore guard Oliver McNally, who provided a spark off the bench.

The split keeps Harvard (18-6; 7-3 Ivy League) in third place in the Ivy League. Although the loss to Cornell is deleterious to Harvard’s title hopes, the team still is just two games back.

Even if Harvard can’t win its first Ivy title this year, the season’s success will be well-documented. With two home games, against Brown (Feb. 26) and Yale (Feb. 27), remaining on the schedule, followed by games at Penn (March 5) and Princeton (March 6), Harvard is on pace for its best season in more than a half century and is two wins away from the first 20-win season in program history.

“Washington is Washington, and then there is the rest of the country, and there is a detachment that is hard to explain unless you have spent a fair amount of time in Washington.”

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama (and unofficial “first friend”) knows whereof she speaks.

The assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement shared her insider’s perspective on Washington gridlock with a crowd at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on Feb. 19.

Jarrett cited Republicans who refuse to engage, lobbyists who fight legislation such as financial regulation, and media that have helped to polarize the national dialogue as all playing roles in preventing critical reforms from moving forward.

Describing the everyday legislative process, such as that surrounding the health care debate, as “really, really ugly,” Jarrett compared the machinery of creating law to a sausage-making factory where the best intentions and the facts get “lost in the morass of Washington.”

“It’s been one year, and Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Jarrett, addressing some of the president’s former supporters — and current critics — who expected quick and sweeping change. Obama’s commitment to a variety of reform efforts, she insisted, is as “vibrant today as it was one year ago.”

In the near future, Jarrett said, Obama plans to post online a version of a revised health care bill that would be “good for the American people,” in advance of a health care summit with recalcitrant Republicans later this month. She said he will respond to good counterproposals, and will continue to be “open for change.”

Christened “first friend” by David Gergen, himself a longtime presidential adviser who moderated the session at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, Jarrett said she first met Obama and his future wife, Michelle Robinson, while working in Chicago government.

Jarrett said Michelle was an “extraordinary woman” whom she was eager to hire. Before Robinson said yes, recalled Jarrett, Robinson asked her to dinner to meet her fiancé, Barack, so the three could talk about the position.

That first encounter, said Jarrett, gave her an early look at the character of the future president and some of the qualities that he carried with him into the Oval Office. “He was a very good listener,” said Jarrett, and, despite asking “inquisitive questions,” made her feel instantly at ease.

Jarrett went on to serve as co-chair of the Obama-Biden presidential transition and as senior adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign.

Jarrett lauded Obama’s even temperament as president, as well as his disciplined thought process, his sense of empathy, and his ability to bring together groups of people with various opinions and “make everyone feel very comfortable opening up.”

Asked by Gergen, HKS professor of public service and director of the School’s Center for Public Leadership, how she is most helpful to the president, Jarrett said that comes in her ability to be blunt with the nation’s commander in chief.

“The higher I think you go, the harder it is to find people who will actually tell you the truth, particularly when they disagree with you,” she said, adding, “I feel very free to tell him when I completely disagree with him — respectfully, of course.”

Encouraging members of the next generation to consider pursuing careers in public service, Jarrett urged them to follow their passions.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, “to take a leap of faith and try something that’s a little bit outside of your comfort zone.”

The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership.

STOCKBRIDGE – The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except that everyone is speaking in respectful tones, and rolled yoga mats are everywhere, like baguettes in Doisneau’s Paris. On the walls are limited-edition photographs of lean people doing yoga in front of moss-dappled Indian shrines. At the gift shop on an early February weekend, visitors could have their tarot read, or a photographic portrait taken of their aura. And one of the featured speakers, offering a weekend-long seminar, was a senior professor at Harvard University, Ellen Langer.

Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness – the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot – and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier.

Read more here