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Ask Melissa Schellberg ’10 why she is so passionate about community service, and she won’t give you a calculated plan or vision for change. She’ll keep it simple.

“I’ve always liked helping people, but I never really thought of myself as one of those people who will save the world,” laughed the Harvard softball co-captain. Even so, she has brought about change.

Sensing a need for more service opportunities for Harvard athletes, as service chair of the Student-Athlete Advisory Council (SAAC) last year, Schellberg worked with Nathan Fry, associate director of athletics, to create a community service coordinator position, in order to better match Harvard student-athletes with activities to deepen their community impact.

“It was suggested that teams do community service, but never required [for teams] unless the coach is really on them,” Schellberg said. “But coaches have a lot to do, and I wanted to help out, meet with coaches, and be the facilitator and coordinator of their projects.”

With the support of Fry and Harvard Athletics, she created and served in the role, developing relationships with nonprofit groups in the Boston area to create a more structured program of service opportunities for Harvard’s varsity teams.

Last year, one of Schellberg’s collaborative initiatives with SAAC was “Bench Press for Breast Cancer,” a fundraising event that invited all 41 varsity teams to participate. The event raised more than $6,000 for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to support cancer research.

It wasn’t long before word spread about Schellberg’s service work. Athletes for a Better World took notice, and this past December she was named one of six collegiate finalists nationally for the prestigious Coach Wooden Citizenship Cup, which is given to the student athlete who has “made the greatest positive influence in the lives of others.”

With her success off the field and within the athletic community, it would be easy to gloss over the impact the Las Vegas native has had on Harvard softball as a whole.

Schellberg, who has started nearly every game of her college career, has been one of Harvard’s top offensive and defensive contributors on the diamond. As a freshman in 2006, she finished fourth on the team with a .311 batting average, and helped Harvard to its first Ivy League championship in five years. This season she is third on the team in hits, second in fielding percentage, leads in fielding assists, and is on pace to finish fourth all-time in assists.

“She’s been obviously an incredible member of the team … a very strong defensive third baseman, a clutch hitter for us, a very focused player, works hard, and is very diligent in her skill work,” said Harvard head coach Jenny Allard, who is in her 16th season with the Crimson.

At this point in the season, the Harvard softball team is in the driver’s seat for an Ivy League championship push, and one of the key reasons is the senior slugger, who will trade in her batting helmet and jersey for a cap and gown in less than a month.

“I honestly can’t believe it’s ending. I can’t believe I have, maximum, a month left to play college softball,” said Schellberg, who has been playing the game since she was 9. “It’s been a really good ride. And I know when I look back on it, it’s going to be full of really fond memories, and I’m not going to have any regrets.”

“In my career, Melissa’s been one of the players who has impacted the totality of the program the most,” said Allard. “In all aspects, Melissa ranks high in terms of what she’s been able to do here.

“My comment to all of my players, and specifically to every class, is to always leave the program better than the way you found it. I think Melissa is a reigning example of that. She’s looked for ways to make the team better, have people grow and develop, and I think that’s a characteristic of a great leader.”

And so, although Schellberg may not have changed the world in her four years at Harvard, she can certainly say she’s left her mark.

DroidSense allow you to analyze your Adsense™ performance daily, weekly, monthly and yearly from your Android™ Phone. It helps you graph your AdSense earnings as well. See webpage below for more details. Lite version available (try it before buy the full version).

Price: Free, €0.99

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Features:

DroidSense – AdSense Tool Android App is a great tool for website owners who have incorporated Google’s AdSense into their websites. Check daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly revenue reports while on the go. Even get graphs of earnings reports. DroidSense in combination with DroidAnalytics is a great one-two punch for webmasters with Android phones.

Usefulness:

Not useful to everyone but to those who own websites or blogs and deploy Google’s AdSense services within those websites.

Ease of Use & Frequently Used:

The app is pretty straight-forward, it offers various breakdowns of revenue earned. User dependent however projected from occasional use up to daily use.

Interface:

The user interface is simple aimed at showing various revenue figures, also features simple comparison line graphs if needed.

Hamann, a prominent German tuning company, recently set their sights on tuning the new BMW Z4 sDrive35is. The BMW Z4 received an array of custom modifications from Hamann including a sleek new aerodynamics package, an improved exhaust, and a custom tuning of the car’s ECU. With the tuning changes and the expanded four-pipe exhaust system, BMW’s twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter inline six gained 54 horsepower and 104 ft-lb of torque. This means that Hamann’s tuned Z4 reached 360hp and 398 ft-lb of torque, pushing the top speed to 177mph.

The aerodynamics included a custom front lip spoiler complete with new LED running lights and side skirts with custom air scoops. Hamann tuning also modified the rear fascia to accommodate the new exhaust system and added a new deck lid spoiler. Hamann’s body kit along with the 1.2 inch lowering from the suspension system make the Z4’s stance lower and visually lengthen the body. A set of 20 inch matte black forged aluminum wheels are optional for the customer.

The interior of the BMW Z4 was, for the most part, left untouched. A custom aluminum shift knob and floor mats embroidered with the Hamann logo come standard, and a hand-crafted leather interior is listed as an option. Although Hamann didn’t release the price yet, their custom BMW Z4 isn’t expected to come cheap. The black matte wheels alone cost €7640, or just over $10,000 for a set, so expect this custom tuned Z4 to raise as many eyebrows with its price as its custom tuned sexy layout.

[Source: Hamann]

Source: Fancy Tuning – the latest car tuning news

When David Damrosch was in ninth grade, a teacher gave him a copy of the novel “Tristam Shandy” because she thought it would appeal to his sense of humor. “I was blown away by it,” he said. “Tristam talks at one point about his favorite writers, and if he’d said Defoe and Chaucer, I probably would have become an English professor like my older brother Leo, who’s on the faculty here.”

Instead, Tristam mentioned “my dear Rabelais and my dearer Cervantes.” Damrosch, just 15 at the time, thought, “I don’t know who these guys are, but if Tristam likes them, I’ll like them too.” He went out and bought some Penguin Classics and “fell in love with the broader panorama of literature.”

He especially liked satirical novels, so when he saw “The Divine Comedy” listed in the back of one of those Penguin Classics, he went out and grabbed a copy. “I soon found Dante wasn’t quite the thigh-slapper I was expecting,” he said, “but I was hooked.”

By the time he arrived at Yale as an undergraduate, his interests had expanded beyond European literature to ancient languages and cultures. “I’m a preacher’s kid with Jewish roots in the family,” said the Episcopal priest’s son, “so I was interested in the Bible.” He also had a roommate who signed up for an Egyptian archaeology course, to which Damrosch tagged along. “I was really interested in languages,” he said, “and thought: Here’s a chance to learn a language that doesn’t work like the languages I know.” He eventually dipped his toes into Middle High German, Old Norse, and Aztec poetry, finding that once he fell in love with the literature, he tended to want to learn more about the language. He has studied 12 languages, so far.

“The most interesting case was the Nahuatl language” spoken by the Aztecs. “In graduate school, I found the language was being offered in the anthropology department. The class’s enrollment doubled when I signed up, and my director of graduate studies in comparative literature threatened to throw me out the window when I asked for course credit.”

The adviser, he adds, thought “some hiring committees might feel I was just doing arabesques around the literary tradition.”

At the time, he wasn’t sure whether he’d go into academia or become a writer or Foreign Service officer. The path he ultimately chose has provided the best of all three worlds, allowing travel and immersion in foreign cultures, time to write, and the chance to open the world of comparative literature to young people.

“To me, teaching is like a secular pulpit,” said Damrosch, who is a professor of comparative literature and the department chair of literature and comparative literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “I have a very evangelical sense of literature as a mode of experiencing the world as aesthetic pleasure that I love to communicate to students.”

His most recent title was “The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh,” and he’s at work on another popular nonfiction title about the cultural history of the conquest of Mexico.

After spending almost three decades at Columbia University, in his hometown of Manhattan, Damrosch decided to make the move to Harvard when the department invited him to help with its new, more global focus. “In terms of being at Harvard,” he said, “it’s both a matter of helping build a more global department and also integrating the undergrad literature concentration and the graduate comparative literature program. We’ve now created a truly unified department that I think represents global comparative literature better.”

It didn’t hurt that his older brother, Leo Damrosch, has been at Harvard since 1989, or that his middle brother, Tom, is a parish priest in western Massachusetts, but scholarship was the real draw.

“Every quarter century or so, it’s nice to try something fresh,” he said. “I felt there was a chance to do some innovative work here with some very, very collegial colleagues and excellent students.”

Here’s Skyfire’s promo video for its new Version 2.0 browser, which should be available for Android any time now. (It’s not appearing in the market, and the manual download link’s not working yet either.)

Anyhoo, check out the video above, and we’ll give Skyfire the what-for just as soon as we can. [Skyfire]

Facebook lleva tiempo intentando que sus usuarios compartan con la máxima apertura y ahora lo vuelven a empujar convirtiendo los intereses del perfil en conexiones con sus páginas de comunidad. Como apunta Louis Gray si uno entra a la pestaña “información” del perfil propio en Facebook es “invitado” a que esas preferencias se conviertan en conexiones explícitas y públicas. La alternativa es que desaparezcan del perfil, sin posibilidad de que sigan siendo privadas a los contactos como antes eran.

Empezaron permitiendo que el perfil fuse público, más tarde intentaron mediante cambio en las opciones de privacidad que se compartiese en abierto. Este es el tercer paso de Facebook para intentar que los usuarios no sólo compartan sus intereses sino que lo hagan de forma visible y no sólo con sus contactos. Ganan relevancia y visibilidad, encaja con su visión del fin de la privacidad pero pierden también el alejarse de la razón primera por la que empezó a ser un éxito Facebook: compartir información con la gente que uno considera cercana o relevante.

Relacionado: Open Graph, Facebook a la conquista de la web

Como o lançamento da nova Ford Ranger 2012 ainda está meio distante e a cada dia cresce a curiosidade acerca de seu novo visual já que, apesar de ser várias vezes flagrada em testes externos suas mudanças não puderam ser vistas em decorrência de sua eficiente camuflagem, foram feitas algumas projeções de como será a futura picape da Ford.

Dessa forma, o designer Josh Byrnes em parceria com o site Irmão do Décio projetaram o design da camuflada picape. Sua dianteira aparece com faróis mais estreitos e discretos, perdendo destaque para sua nova grade dianteira que segue o novo DNA da Ford, lembrando bastante a o Fusion.

Além de seu design exterior, Byrnes foi mais longe e também projetou o interior da nova picape Ford 2012 baseada em flagras recentes. Sem maiores novidades, ela aparentemente vem com linhas conservadores adotada de materiais de qualidade superior. No Brasil, o modelo encontrará como principais concorrentes a Toyota Hilux e a Volkswagen Amarok.

Nova Ford Ranger 2012

Fonte: AutoMocion

Engraved on a large slate plaque affixed to Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard is the story of Native Americans’ past and the narrative of our future. That is the site of the original Indian College, Harvard’s first brick building, where more than 350 years ago Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomes of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard lived and studied alongside English students. Caleb was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665.

The Indian College also housed the College’s printing press, on which the first Bible in North America was printed. The Bible was a translation into the Algonquian Indian language.

Behind the plaque’s inscription is a faint, incised representation of a turtle, a powerful symbol in Native American creation stories. The turtle represents many things. One is a creative source, the most powerful force we possess. The turtle also embodies a sense of being well-grounded, self-contained, with a steady approach to life. These qualities resonate with many of the lessons learned at Harvard.

I soon will be an unlikely graduate of the University. My grandfather, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, experienced a precarious childhood. Grinding poverty, disease, and despair had taken root across the reservation in the early 1900s. Often there was not enough food or fuel. His brother, along with thousands of other Indian children, was taken from his family and sent far away to an Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Penn. Boarding schools were part of the federal government’s assimilationist policies aimed at severing Indians’ ties to the land.

Like so many Indian children, my grandfather grew up with his feet in two worlds. One foot was in the Indian world, rich with traditions and ceremonies, a language that nurtured his spirit and heart, and a homeland that gave him a sense of place. His other foot was in the fast-paced white world of trains and cars and different habits. Like so many Indian children of that time, he grew up confused about his identity and indefinite place in American society.

I delved into this history as a law student. It was very disturbing to learn that two generations later things had not greatly improved in Indian country. The wholesale removal of Indian children from their homes and the displacement of their families continued well into the 1970s. This has been the most tragic aspect of Indian life today. Children everywhere deserve to grow up in a safe, stable, and nurturing environment.

I decided then to work for the rights of Native American tribes to be self-determined and self-sufficient, and to help improve conditions on Indian reservations. This work, like development work throughout the world, requires a turtle approach: One must be creative, well-grounded, and have steadfast determination, even in the face of daunting obstacles or discouragement. (After graduation, I plan to return to Vermillion, S.D., where I teach federal Indian law and direct the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota.)

Constancy served Caleb well at Harvard. Despite the hardships of being away from his family and the contradictions of living in the white man’s world, he earned honors in his studies. Sadly, his life, like Joel’s, was cut short by the perils of the time. After Caleb graduated, there was no identifiable Native American presence at Harvard for more than 250 years. Now, about 120 Native American students from 40 tribes study at Harvard every year.

Many Native American students at Harvard still struggle with the contradictions that Caleb and Joel faced. We still have our feet in two worlds. One day we are in our jeans studying economic theory, and the next we are in our jingle dresses dancing at the powwow. Soon we will be in the Yard receiving our degrees, and shortly after we will be fishing or hunting to feed the community. What matters is that we have persisted — that our language, traditions, and culture have endured. While our time at Harvard has given us a sense of place here, what we have learned will extend far beyond these ivy-covered walls. It will reach across all of our borders and become a part of our communities.

Culture mattered then and matters today. The diversity of our cultures is the underpinning of our human bonds, and of our intolerance and prejudice as well. Caleb and Joel lived and studied alongside their ethnic English classmates at a time when the two cultures disputed one another’s right to exist on the continent. Three centuries later, we persist, mostly intact, and determined as ever.

Diversity abounds at Harvard today. Diversity in race and ethnicities, of different religious beliefs and spiritual practices, and in widely varied talents and interests. This diversity, spurred many years ago by Caleb and Joel, not only invigorates the vitality of our learning experience, it cultivates a broader and more insightful view of the world.

The lessons gleaned from the plaque affixed to Matthews Hall continue to inspire us to know the human value of the world and to place ourselves within it. There is certainty in the lessons we have learned from the past, of being creative, well-grounded, and steadfast. Let us not linger, for there is no time to spare. So let us begin.

After a month of bad press and lawsuits, it seems Activision has finally scored a big coup. The developer has announced a ten-year deal with Halo masterminds Bungie, the latter’s first since splitting from Microsoft.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in an occasional series of stories on the measures that individual Schools at Harvard are using to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is a rigorous world of applied mathematics, materials science, bioengineering, and other demanding disciplines.

But it is also a world in which nearly every common space includes green laminate signs or motion-control sensors to turn off lighting. The collective message: Be green.

Turn off the lights, wear a sweater, shut the sash on your fume hood. It’s not rocket science. Or, as they say at SEAS: It’s not quantum physics.

But simple steps like these — along with exacting building standards and other technical measures — have helped SEAS to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 11 percent from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2009. That kind of progress also owes a lot to University-wide measures to save energy, said Edward P. Jackson, SEAS director of physical resources.

That number puts the School on track to meet the University’s ambitious GHG emissions goal of a 30 percent reduction by 2016, inclusive of growth, with 2006 as the baseline year.

SEAS tightened the University-wide standard for temperature set points by adjusting heating and cooling systems to start later and finish earlier. “We did it, and waited for complaints,” said SEAS manager of facilities Donald Claflin. “And there weren’t many.”

Saving energy is everybody’s business, from big energy systems to students who pause to shut off the lights. “It’s a lot of little pieces,” he said. “Everybody’s involved. Everybody’s a player.”

On the technical side, SEAS has installed efficient lighting in its five buildings, and on the two floors it leases at 60 Oxford St. It has also implemented an automated energy management system in the Maxwell Dworkin building, and examined its operating system through the lens of energy savings. By this fall, SEAS will have motion-detection sensors on lights in all of its operation.

“It’s many small steps,” said Fawwaz Habbal, SEAS executive dean. “Little drops of water on a stone will eventually make a mark.”

This kind of effort — assess, innovate, invent — is perfect for engineers, he added. “You give us a problem and we solve it.”

SEAS students, faculty, and staff also are exploring other pathways to sustainability. Some are personal-scale pathways. Custodian Joanne Carson sets aside coffee grounds in a composting bowl in the kitchen at Pierce Hall. People take them home for their gardens, she said.

Other pathways are on a bigger scale. For one, in fiscal 2009, SEAS recovered 60 percent of its recyclable waste, piling up 73 tons for the blue bin.

All SEAS buildings are covered by a green cleaning program that minimizes chemical use. And four LEED projects are under way at SEAS; one more is complete. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a professional U.S. rating system for sustainable building.)

The SEAS Computing and Information Technology office has already been converted from 2,000 square feet of lounge space to three energy-efficient offices in Maxwell Dworkin.

At SEAS Northwest Labs B1, a LEED project now under construction will bring together researchers in medicine, engineering, biology, and applied sciences.

Renovations are ongoing at the SEAS Vlassak Lab and the Weitz Lab, both in the Gordon McKay Laboratory of Applied Science on Oxford Street. LEED-standard renovations are also taking place in two engineering science laboratories at 58 Oxford St.

“Labs are really challenging,” said Habbal. At SEAS, they are energy-intensive hives of complicated gear, from computers, fume hoods, and imaging systems to quantum-cascade lasers.

In addition, SEAS researchers there are looking into new sources of energy, African water resources, efficient computing, carbon sequestration, and the chemistry of climate change.

Sustainability, said SEAS administrative director Jennifer Casasanto, “is part of our dialogue.”

Sustainability is also about encouraging ideas. That means student involvement.

SEAS is part of an arts-science collaboration that helps students and faculty turn their ideas — many of them about green technology — into practical reality. The Laboratory at Harvard, located in the Northwest Science Building, is run by SEAS faculty member David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, along with SEAS staff member Hugo Van Vuuren.

A couple of ideas have already reached reality. One is the sOccket, a portable energy-making device shaped like a soccer ball. Kick, dribble, or throw it around, and the sOccket — rigged with inductive coil technology — stores energy. Prototypes have been tested in South Africa and Kenya.

Also, SEAS student Henry Xie ’11 developed the Harvard Reuse List, an online supply swap for students and staff.

Traditional classroom work touches on sustainability, as well. The oldest such class — and “a capstone experience for students,” said Habbal — is Engineering Science (ES) 96.

Students take on real-world issues at Harvard, then produce book-length recommendations for action. Past examples include energy use at Pierce Hall, the Blackstone complex, and Harvard athletic facilities and Houses.

SEAS classes in applied mathematics, environmental engineering, and climate studies deal with sustainability too.

It’s an issue that requires cooperation, awareness, collective action, and intensive study. “The bottom line,” said Habbal, “is mindset.”

Is Hollywood finally taking a pass on cosmetic surgery? After a rash of recent casting calls recruiting only actress with natural breasts springing up all over Hollywood, some stargazers are suggesting that nipping and tucking may be a dying trend.

Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, celebrity journalist Bradley Jacobs, and Tinseltown casting director John Papsidera sound off on the lack of Hollywood roles for stars whose plastic surgery is over the top…. (We see you, Heidi Montag!)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

El nuevo crossover del Mitsubishi llega pisando fuerte al menos en precios y equipamiento, en el punto de mira tiene un rival de la misma nacionalidad el Nissan Qashqai. Pero el nuevo Mitsubishi ASX parte de un precio bastante bueno y un equipamiento de lo más completo, así como un diseño bastante actractivo y unos acabados que se presume estarán a la altura de la gama y de los que daremos cuenta en cuanto tengamos oportunidad de verlo en vivo.

La única motorización que estará disponible para nuestro pais será el motor diesel 200 DiD, que en realidad es un propulsor 1.8 de 150 CV de potencia. También se espera la llegada de nuevas motorizaciones, como una posible versión de 115 CV o un motor gasolina.

Entrando en el equipamiento, el ASX contará con dos niveles: el Motion y Kaiteki. El primero de ellos contará desde el nivel base con múltiples airbags, ABS más ESP, control de tracción y asistente a la frenada de emergencia, llantas de 17″, faros de xenon, equipo de sonido MP3 con toma USB, climatizador automático o el sistema Star& Stop entre otros elementos.

Mientras que por otro lado, el acabado más completo denominado Kaiteki añade la tapicería de cuero, los asientos con ajuste eléctrico, sonido Rockford Fosgate, entre otros elementos. La lista de precios es la siguiente:

• ASX 200 DiD 150 CV Motion 24.150 euros
• ASX 200 DiD 150 CV Kaiteki 25.750 euros
• ASX 200 DiD 150 CV Motion 4WD 27.450 euros
• ASX 200 DiD 150 CV Kaiteki 4WD 29.500 euros

Vía | Autoblog en español

Sometimes, you have to step back to see the big picture.

That’s the lesson that archaeology students are sharing with the public through a new exhibit at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The exhibit, “Spying on the Past: Declassified Satellite Images and Archaeology,” opens April 29 with a 5 p.m. reception, presenting four case studies of how satellite images can illuminate archaeologically important landscape features that might not be visible from the ground. The examples are from sites in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Peru. They reveal evidence of cities, trackways, irrigation canals, and even traces of nomadic travels.

Ruth Pimentel, a student in the Anthropology Department’s sophomore tutorial in archaeology, said she’s thrilled to be able to share the excitement she felt in learning how to use satellite photos as archaeological tools.

“While I was doing the research this semester, I kept seizing my hapless roommates, showing them pictures on my computer and talking them through the method, just because I couldn’t keep to myself how cool it was,” Pimentel said. “Having gallery space in the Peabody means everyone in the class will get to explain how awesome and exciting this material is, and with much bigger pictures.”

The students’ work stems from more than a decade’s effort by Jason Ur, associate professor of anthropology, who has long used satellite photos to track elusive details of ancient civilizations and interpret them to gain new understanding of old ways of life (detailed in features such as irrigation canals) and connections between communities (elucidated by long-lost roadways).

“The way humans modify their landscapes often has a pattern or regularity, whether intentional or unintentional, that cannot be appreciated from the ground,” Ur said. “I find the emergent order of networks of tracks or patterns of irrigation fields to be almost hypnotic from above.”

Guided by Ur, students in the sophomore tutorial in archaeology first learned the techniques of analyzing satellite photos and then applied them to several archaeologically rich areas. Pimentel worked on the Assyrian Irrigation Project, which focused on northern Iraq near the Turkish border. She examined photographs of the remains of canals built under Assyrian emperors before the empire crumbled in the seventh century B.C.

“We propose that the canals were partly displays of power — the extra water allowing for elaborate royal gardens, for example — and partly large-scale efforts to support agriculture for the increasingly concentrated population,” Pimentel said. “The canals are now mostly obscured by modern farms and towns. But on the satellite images, we’re able to see faint lines on a huge scale across the landscape, evidence of the massive earthworks once there.”

Pimentel said some of the features were so faint that she had to train her eyes to detect them in the photos. There were some photos, however, in which the canals were immediately evident, she said.

“We get excited about those images. They’re our showstoppers,” Pimentel said.

In conducting his own research, satellite photos are just a starting point for Ur. He scours the images for patterns and follows that examination by traveling to a site to inspect the features of interest from the ground. He then goes back to the photos, reinspecting them with a new understanding of the landscape. There are times when, looking at the photos, features are difficult to discern, but there are other times when it’s clear something’s there, making interpretation the challenge.

Ur draws photos from various sources. He even hails Google Earth as an excellent tool for an armchair archaeologist because it can fly you to the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge without leaving the office. Most valuable, though, are older photos, such as those from the CORONA spy satellites, declassified in the 1990s and available from the U.S. Geological Survey. Because CORONA flew in the 1960s and 1970s, the photos are less expensive than images from modern satellites, but Ur said even more important is that they allow him to look back in time. Forty years ago, there was much less development in some key areas, making features visible that might be obscured now.

For visitors to the gallery, Ur said he hopes they understand that archaeology is more than just digging and more than just ancient cities. And Ur and his students said they hope viewers will understand that development is endangering many landscapes.

“I hope visitors come away learning something new about the ancient cultures of Peru, of course, but also that archaeological sites are fragile places in a changing landscape,” said Adam Stack, a graduate student in archaeology who took the course and studied the Chan Chan site on Peru’s north coast. “It will take more than archaeologists to protect the past.”

With the world’s attention focused on global financial reform and responsibility, the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) is establishing a professorship dedicated to addressing the challenges of the international financial system. Launched with gifts totaling $4 million, the professorship is named for international financial consultant and HKS alumnus Minos A. Zombanakis, M.P.A. ’56, A.M. ’57. The Minos A. Zombanakis Professorship of the International Financial System will inaugurate a new area of interdisciplinary study at the Kennedy School.

The Zombanakis Professorship will support a professor and visiting professors of practice whose research and teaching illuminate major policy issues and challenges of the international financial system and serve as a platform for addressing the international monetary system and financial regulation, the role of multilateral institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and vehicles for international cooperation such as the G-20 (Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) forum. The Harvard University Professorship Challenge Fund has provided a $1 million matching contribution.

“Harvard Kennedy School is deeply grateful to Mr. Zombanakis and his many friends for this endeavor,” said David T. Ellwood, Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy and dean of HKS. “Addressing the global financial challenges of today is a top priority for policymakers throughout the world. In establishing this timely professorship, the Kennedy School will better prepare and teach future leaders and professionals as they grapple with the complexities of global markets, regulation, and international finance.”

To read the full story, visit the Harvard Kennedy School Web site.

Uma nova pesquisa feita pela Lotus, com o apoio do governo norte-americano, pretende reduzir a massa da carroceria de seus veículos em até um terço, resultando em uma menor emissão de CO2 e economia de combustível. O uso de materiais leves para a construção das carrocerias e um design eficiente também fazem parte do estudo.

A montadora está fazendo as análises em seu modelo Venza, onde três fatores do veículo estão recebendo maior atenção: O uso de materiais mais resistentes e leves, uma maior integração de peças e sistemas, e implantação de técnicas avançadas de fabricação, como soldagem robotizada na linha de montagem.

Em estimativas futuras, os resultados de redução de peso bruto do Venza podem chegar a 38%, com diversas partes do veículo substituídas por alumínio e magnésio, os novos recursos internos do carro e um novo painel.

Imagens da carroceria do veículo

Via | Inside Line

Harvard University and Harvard University Press (HUP) announced recently that the Murty family of Bangalore, India, has established a new publication series, the Murty Classical Library of India, with a generous gift of $5.2 million. The dual-language series aims both to serve the needs of the general reading public and to enhance scholarship in the field.

Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman noted that the Murty family gift will enable HUP to present the literary cultures of India to a global readership in an unprecedented manner. “The Murty Classical Library of India will make the classical heritage of India accessible worldwide for generations to come,” said Hyman. “We are truly grateful to the Murty family for their vision and leadership in making this historic initiative a reality.”

The Murty family’s endowed series will serve to bring the classical literature of India, much of which remains locked in its original language, to a global audience, making many works available for the first time in English and showcasing the contributions of Indian literature to world civilization. Narayana Murty said of the new series, “I am happy that Harvard University Press is anchoring this publishing project.” His wife, Sudha, agreed: “We are happy to participate in this exciting project of bringing the rich literary heritage of India to far corners of the world.”

Under the direction of General Editor Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, and aided by an international editorial board composed of distinguished scholars, translators will provide contemporary English versions of works originally composed in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages.

Each volume will present the English translation with the original text in the appropriate Indic script on the facing page. The books will be supplemented by scholarly introductions, expert commentary, and textual notes, all with the goal of establishing Murty Classical Library volumes as the most authoritative editions available.

The Murty family’s vision has already begun to impress notable scholars, such as Harvard’s Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy Amartya Sen, who expressed his appreciation for the initiative. “There are few intellectual gaps in the world that are as glaring as the abysmal ignorance of Indian classics in the Western world. It is wonderful that the Murty Classical Library of India is taking up the challenge of filling this gap, through a new commitment of the Harvard University Press, backed by the discerning enthusiasm of the Murty family, and the excellent leadership of Sheldon Pollock — an outstanding Sanskritist and classical scholar. This will be a big contribution to advancing global understanding that is so much needed in the world today.”

HUP plans to make the works available in both print and digital formats. The first volumes are scheduled for publication in fall 2013. An Indian edition is being planned.

Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press is a major publisher of nonfiction, scholarly, and general interest books with offices in Cambridge (Mass.), New York, and London.

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has announced that a team of five Harvard graduate students — Jonathan Bailey, Christopher Cummings, Marvin Figueroa, Kendall Fitch, and Hanseul Kang — were named the 2010 winners of The Urban Education Redesign Challenge, for their public engagement and mobilization strategy for DCPS.

The challenge is a case competition, showcasing a critical and pressing issue and offering graduate students the opportunity to propose innovative solutions and strategies within the context of urban education reform at DCPS.

The Harvard team’s first-place finish comes with a $5,000 prize, a meeting with the DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and an offer to join the Urban Education Leaders Internship Program for the summer, which comes with a stipend.

What do the American Revolution, public education, HIV/AIDS research, the living wage, and rock ’n’ roll have in common? For Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian, the answer is clear: They’re samples of the many achievements by radicals.

Activism has long been a subject of interest for the two Quincy House residents and instructors.

“We have both been profoundly moved by the challenges that historians have posed to the traditional, so-called ‘great man’ version of history, where social change comes from the top down rather than the bottom up,” said McCarthy, lecturer on history and literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and adjunct lecturer on public policy and director of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. “We very much believe that social change comes from the grassroots, from the margins, and from the people.”

McCarthy and McMillian met 15 years ago as graduate students at Columbia University. While separately teaching a popular course there on the American radical tradition headed by Eric Foner, both recognized the need for a single anthology of primary sources tracing the history of radical movements in the United States from the country’s founding to the present. This teaching experience eventually led to their collaboration on “The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition” (The New Press, 2003), now in its second printing.

McCarthy and McMillian, a continuing education and special programs instructor, have since co-edited a second volume, “Protest Nation: Words that Inspired a Century of American Radicalism” (The New Press, 2010). The compendium, which focuses on the 20th century, includes 29 documents, each introduced by the editors, ranging from speeches by Malcolm X and Harvey Milk to manifestos, letters, and essays on gay rights and civil rights, feminism, economic and environmental justice, and animal liberation.

McMillian, who has served as a lecturer in history and literature, hopes that the book will encourage a more charitable understanding of the history of American radicalism.

“It’s astonishing to look back at these movements led by people who were despised and faced incredible criticism from the dominant culture, and yet today we celebrate them as heroes,” he said.

“We set out to restore the integrity of radicalism,” added McCarthy, “to say that these kinds of grassroots mobilizations and critiques from the margin have not only authority, but integrity. It’s important to understand this radical tradition and to convey to students and readers that listening to these voices and taking them seriously is required of us if we’re really going to understand history in its fullest dimensions.”

Since 2002 McCarthy, along with John Stauffer, professor of English and of African and African American Studies, has taught “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac,” a course also offered through the Harvard Extension School that is on track to become a General Education course next year.

McCarthy and McMillian worry about the future of social movements. The campaign to abolish slavery lasted roughly 35 years. Continually inundated with new images and information, the current generation, they said, may not have the attention span or risk-taking spirit to start and sustain such a long movement.

“We have thought that maybe we would see a rekindling of activism of the type we saw in the 1960s,” said McMillian. “There is a grassroots social protest movement happening, but it’s coming from the right. The left has not been mobilized quite as vigorously.”

“Protest Nation” serves as a “field manual” of sorts for progressive activists who seek to place themselves within a history of rebellion.

“There is no shortage of things in the world that are wrong, that need people to act in courageous ways,” said McCarthy. “This generation is searching for its calling, and there is no shortage of things to call them. Whether or not they will take up these issues is another question. I think that’s the question for every generation.”

Spring at Harvard typically signifies Commencement, but before those robed scholars dart off into the wider world, the annual Arts First Festival happens.

For four days, this year from April 29 to May 2, Arts First invades the sidewalks of Harvard Square and 43 venues across campus, with hundreds of student performers and arts opportunities. Sponsored by the Office for the Arts (OfA), the festival boasts everything from the eclectic to the outlandish, with something for kids and adults alike.

Consider the ever-popular Sunken Garden Children’s Theater, which this year takes “The Ugly Ducking” to new heights during an outdoor performance by zany undergraduates. Not your cup of tea? What about “Fat Men in Skirts!!!?!,” which, according to the OFA Web site, is “a dark comedy by Nicky Silver that will make you rethink the nature of monkeys!!!?!” Yes, that’s the play’s actual description. Too avant-something? The Radcliffe Dramatic Club updates and revitalizes “Godspell.”

And then there’s music, sweet music. Goodbye Horses rocks the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub; the Harvard College Madrigal Singers appear at Adolphus Busch Hall; and bluegrass from the Harvard College American Music Association will echo through the Yard. And those are just a few of the offerings.

Kicking off the festival is the presentation of the Harvard Arts Medal to Catherine Lord ’70 by President Drew Faust inside New College Theatre at 5 p.m. today (April 29).

Lord, a visual artist, writer, and curator who addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism, is the 17th distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alum or faculty member to receive this accolade for excellence in the arts and contributions to education and the public good through arts. Past medalists have included poet John Ashbery ’49, composer John Adams ’69, M.A. ’72, cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76, filmmaker Mira Nair ’79, and saxophonist Joshua Redman ’91.

Best of all? It’s mostly free. For a complete schedule and ticketing information, visit the Arts First calendar online.

It is somehow comforting to know that one of the greatest minds of the past 100 years had a hard time making up his own mind.

William James, the oldest child in a celebrated American family and a pioneer in psychology and philosophy, was apparently a famous ditherer. “He’s just like a blob of mercury,” his sister Alice wrote. “You cannot put a mental finger upon him.”

Better than that, perhaps, James was a man of restless intelligence. While teaching at Harvard, he explored medicine, the mind, religion, and all the big questions that still beset people.

One of those questions was: “What makes a life significant?” — the title of a lecture James delivered at Harvard in 1900. (The answer, in sum, was to be awake to the significance of other people, and to escape that “great cloud bank of ancestral blindness” that leads to intolerance and cruelty.)

The same question was also the title of a panel on Monday (April 26), which celebrated James’ life and marked the centennial year of his death.

James Kloppenberg, a 40-year James scholar and Harvard’s Charles Warren Professor of American History, moderated the panel, and began with a question of his own: What relationship does James’ thought have to “our own cultural moment?”

Panelists Louis Menand, Sissela Bok, and Cornel West arrived at variations on the same answer: that James lives on into the 21st century, still a formative, formidable mind.

Menand, Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English, said James was the equivalent of today’s public intellectual. He still offers a lesson to the modern world, said Menand: Beware of training and revering only specialists. James, after all, was not trained in anything he excelled in, and his schooling was as scattershot as it was fervent.

Bok, a philosopher who is Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, said one of James’ ideas, to harness the energy of making war to the pursuit of making peace, would find purchase today. “He would surely be encouraged,” she said, at the vitality of doing public service, both inside and outside the university.

It is worth noting too that James’ “non-militarism” was at odds with the tenor of his own time, said Bok, and James “agonized over the increasingly aggressive role his country was taking” in the world.

And in another modern echo, she said, James worried that peace-loving men carried no weight equivalent to the warriors of the day.

In answer to his own doubts, James wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” a 1906 essay in which he proposed harnessing “manly” virtues to the cause of peace. “The martial type of character,” he wrote, “can be bred without war.”

He had a similar thought in “What Makes a Life Significant?” inspired by a train ride back from the Assembly Grounds in Chautauqua, N.Y. This “Sabbatical city” of sobriety, peace, and order, this “human drama without a villain or a pang,” James wrote, made him suddenly long “for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre.”

But if humans yearn for “everlasting battle” or visions of “human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack,” he mused, why reach for war? Why not satisfy the same urges with hard labor — with pick, ax, scythe, and shovel. Such work, James wrote, reveals “the great fields of heroism lying around me.”

West, a former Harvard scholar who is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, said James had a sense of what the modern world needs now: “non-market values like love, empathy, benevolence, and sacrifice for others.”

He also had a sense that greatness could be something “different than success,” said West. “William James,” he wished out loud, “speak to us in 2010.”

James might bring another lesson forward into the 21st century: Leave your mind free, open, and skeptical.

It stood him in good stead that James lacked a systematic education, said Menand, author of “The Metaphysical Club,” a 2001 primer on pragmatism and other intellectual currents in James’ post-Civil War America.

Menand outlined the hopscotch schooling of James, whose father moved the family from place to place — back and forth to Europe — settling sometimes for only months in one place. By age 13, James had already attended 10 schools.

By 1861, James was enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he quickly jumped from engineering to anatomy to natural history and finally to medicine. A medical degree from Harvard in 1869 was the only credential James ever earned, and it was one he never used. He went on to do pioneering work in psychology and then philosophy. In the end, said Menand, James remained “a restless spirit.”

Through it all, James had a capacious, welcoming intelligence, said Kloppenberg.

The philosopher’s summer home in New Hampshire had nine doors, and “they all opened out,” he said, “consistent with James’ approach to the world.”

Those open doors invited in the big questions.

The meaning of life, said Bok, “is a question people keep asking.”

Celebrating William James

In a continuing James celebration this year, Harvard’s Houghton Library will house “Life is in the Transitions: William James, 1842-1910,” an exhibit of sketches, manuscripts, lecture notes, and letters, from Aug. 16 to Dec. 23. Houghton will host the final day of an Aug. 13-16 conference on James, “In the Footsteps of William James: A Symposium on the Legacy — and the Ongoing Uses — of James’s Work.” It’s co-sponsored by the William James Society and the Chocorua (N.H.) Community Association. (For more information, visit the William James Society Web site.)