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A few minutes in Jameson “Jim” Marvin’s presence, and it’s easy to guess his line of work. The man likes to use his hands.

It’s a useful trait for a music conductor.

But Marvin, who has led Harvard’s choral program for more than 30 years with a passion for making music and friends, will end his time at the University on a high note when he retires at the end of the year.

“The choral program is in great shape, and I am in pretty good shape, so I think it’s time to go.”

To get a true sense of Marvin’s impressive Harvard career, just glance at the ceiling of his lofty Paine Hall office. Plastered high overhead and on every inch of available wall are the colorful posters of the countless concerts he has conducted since taking over as Harvard’s director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music.

The California native was tapped to head the choral program in 1978, beating out 160 applicants after responding to an ad in The New York Times.

“It was so exciting. I loved it,” Marvin said of the intense interview and audition process led by students that included brief turns conducting the all men’s Harvard Glee Club, the women’s Radcliffe Choral Society, and the mixed voice Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, three of the four groups that make up Harvard’s Holden Choirs.

During his tenure, the outgoing Marvin has led all three groups, created another large community and student choir, developed a training course for young singers, added assistant choral director positions for each choir, taught classes in beginning and advanced conducting and masterpieces of choral literature, and performed everything from Bach and Beethoven to Barber and Bernstein.

“This is a really, really wonderful, full program, and I am really proud of it. And I am very, very lucky to have been here to have helped shape it.”

Shaping and perfecting the music requires hard work, said Marvin, who admits to being “strongly tenacious” at times in order to get the best sound possible. But the reward, he said, is always worth the effort.

“Ultimately, through a wonderful rehearsal or performance that brings a piece to an extremely high level, the students may be inspired, and can experience an enriching quality of transcendence … [which] touches them deeply.”

His students laud his commitment to excellence, passion for music, and dedication to his singers.

“He really wanted to help us perform wonderful music, but also really truly enjoy our experience,” said Cara Ferrentino ’08, Harvard Law School’s sustainability coordinator, who sang all four years with the Radcliffe Choral Society.

Marvin grew and developed the triumvirate of choruses for accomplished singers and also founded two programs to help singers with less vocal experience, but an equal love of song.

In 1979 he created the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus, a choir that combines students, faculty, and staff members, as well as community residents. The 180-voice choir helps younger singers to get “a little extra experience and guidance.” He also created the “Choir-in-Progress” course, which helps beginning singers develop voice and music techniques.

Marvin is as gracious as he is gregarious. He is quick to praise former associate director Beverly Taylor with helping to develop Harvard’s choral program. He calls his current associate conductor Kevin Leong his “right-hand man,” and credits the Office for the Arts for its ongoing support.

“So many people helped make the program what it is today.”

His own love of music developed early. As a boy he learned to sing from his grandparents. Later he took piano lessons and recalled sneaking down to the piano in the early morning hours to practice music that left him “in a swoon of a mood.” In high school he sang in a church choir, where he was introduced to the sacred songs that would lead him to his love of Renaissance music.

When he was tapped to lead a group of his fraternity brothers in an annual singing competition while at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his conducting die was cast.

“I realized I liked to stand in front of people and lead. But the fact that I could hear and help them fix and get better and better is what began to convince me that I really could do this.”

Marvin went on to receive his master’s in choral conducting from Stanford University and his doctorate in choral music from the University of Illinois. He was assistant professor of music at Vassar College before arriving at Harvard.

He has toured yearly with the Harvard choirs, enjoying singing trips to countries like New Zealand, Australia, China, and Brazil. He laughed, recalling a ride on the back of an ostrich on a trip to South Africa, and smiled proudly in remembering a performance with the choirs at New York’s famed Lincoln Center. Marvin’s choirs are frequently selected to perform at the regional and national conference of the American Choral Directors Association.

“I can’t imagine the Holden Choirs without him,” said Jack Megan, director of the Office for the Arts,” but I believe they will thrive because of what Jim has accomplished.”

Marvin’s Harvard tenure has been as much about the people as it has been about performance. He is most proud of having created a community of “kindred spirits” who share his love and enthusiasm for music and friendship.

Paying tribute

In tribute to Marvin, more than 400 alumni from the choirs will return to campus this weekend (April 30 to May 2) to celebrate his long career with a series of receptions and group sings, and a special tribute concert at Sanders Theatre.

Descending the cafeteria stairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), Ildiko Voller-Szenci greeted a classmate from Germany. A few steps later, she hailed a friend from Ecuador. Then she encountered one of the School’s executive education groups, composed of students from the far corners of the world. A sprinkling of languages peppered the hallway conversations.

“The languages spoken here and the connections that they represent to the world are just amazing,” said Voller-Szenci, who is Hungarian but also speaks English, French, and Russian.

Such diversity — HKS students come from more than 70 countries — is mirrored across the University, which has 4,131 full-time international students. That eclectic mix makes for a lush linguistic landscape, one that becomes even richer after factoring in the more than 80 ancient and modern languages taught through the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and other Schools.

In an increasingly global economy, mastery of languages is often a critical component to success. Languages have long been a pivotal part of Harvard’s curriculum and a key to learning. Their study, University educators say, develops cognitive skills, fosters connections to foreign markets, preserves ancient traditions and histories, and cultivates a crucial understanding and appreciation of the world.

An FAS course booklet lists the expected German, French, and Spanish. But it also lists Akkadian, Avestan, Kikongo, Old English, Sogdian, Twi, Scottish Gaelic, Urdu, and Uyghur. The myriad choices amount to a crossword puzzle fan’s paradise.

Simply put, said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of arts and humanities, “The University offers the most comprehensive language studies program in the nation.”

In addition to studying many languages, students also are enrolling in a growing array of classes that reflect the widening ripples of a globalized world.

Sorensen, who is also James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of comparative literature, has spearheaded development of the Foreign Language Advisory Group, a collection of language teachers from across the University who meet monthly to explore professional development opportunities and new language initiatives and innovations.

For the past three years, Sorensen and her group have worked to expand the language curriculum to include “bridge” courses involving history, art, and culture, which are taught in a foreign language, and to build connections between the language courses and the content courses taught at upper levels.

Cross-cultural classes

Students now can take courses on China’s Cultural Revolution, taught in Mandarin, or learn about the history and politics of the Islamic world in a class taught in Arabic.

“We were noticing that while students would get to a certain level in their language classes, they needed further encouragement to become more proficient and more deeply immersed in everything that a language can make available to them,” said Sorensen. “These courses help students understand that a language and its culture are profoundly intertwined, and that with sustained study it is possible to reach higher levels of proficiency and immersion in the cultural realm.”

Understanding another part of the world better, said Sorensen, also is an avenue for transcultural understanding.

“When you can understand that culture in its language, and its whole outlook, you are immediately receptive to areas where conflict could be averted,” she said. “I do think if we want to train global citizens and global leaders, having them equipped with this kind of transcultural literacy at a deep level is one of the goals of the university of the 21st century.”

The Foreign Language Advisory Group also has created a course for graduate students who teach languages at Harvard, one that examines the complex nature of language acquisition and specific teaching practices.

Sorensen said the panel gives “language teaching a stronger profile at the University, so it is seen as a crucial aspect of one’s cultural training.”

For Russian native Maria Polinsky, who studies languages’ complex architecture for a living, exploring another language offers students more than just the chance to experience another culture. Such study challenges the brain and helps to develop key cognitive skills. Polinsky, professor of linguistics, said that while languages offer important windows into culture, folklore, film, and literature, their ability to help people build up the executive function of the brain is an equally compelling attraction.

“By teaching students languages, we are helping enhance their cognitive functions, keeping their brains a little more active,” she said.

Polinsky said studies suggest that people raised in bilingual households develop a much stronger executive function, or ability to multitask. Research also indicates that bilingual children are much less likely to succumb to dementia later in life.

According to Polinsky, it’s not too late for college students to reap the mental benefits that come from learning a language.

“We can still catch them early enough and enhance the utility of learning another language, and hopefully we can give them the skills they will take with them when they graduate,” she said. “By keeping language instruction at Harvard at a very high level, we are giving them this idea that this is important.”

Preserver of antiquity

Another important aspect of linguistic study is Harvard’s role as preserver of antiquity.

Tucked behind an innocuous-looking door in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is the office of Marc Zender, who explores and speaks ancient and forgotten languages and teaches them to eager Harvard undergraduates.

Zender’s specialty is Classic Mayan hieroglyphic writing. Though the ancient classical Mayan language is no longer in use, there are 30 related, descendant languages still spoken. Through the study of those “close cousins,” with the help of historical linguistics, Zender said, researchers can reconstruct how the ancient language would have been structured and even how it sounded.

Helping students to appreciate language as a tool for understanding lets them “look over the shoulder of ancient scribes” and read what was important to cultures during their time, Zender said.

“The basic message is that language is our major vehicle for communication even today. Nothing has really replaced being able to either speak to other people or to write, which also so vividly captures a language and a culture.”

Last year, the lecturer on anthropology had more than 300 students in his elective “Digging Glyphs: Adventures in Decipherment.” The class, which attracts undergraduates from a range of concentrations, makes use of the collections in the Peabody and in Harvard’s Semitic Museum. Students attend weekly section meetings in the museums to explore the markings on pottery and tablets of ancient civilizations.

“They can literally touch the past,” said Zender, “and from a language direction, when something has writing on it and you can literally read it aloud, it makes the object come alive.”

Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages and an authority on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Mesopotamia, agrees that a key to understanding ancient societies is the careful study of language.

“Biblical thought and indeed the intellectual cultural traditions of most societies are communicated especially through languages,” said Machinist. “The choice and orchestration of words provide a clue to what the meaning of the world was about.”

But for Machinist, the study of language also offers students a window on today’s world.

“I’d like to think that the work that I and colleagues do, even if it deals with classical or even more remote antiquity, has a bearing on the contemporary scene, because at issue are traditions that are not dead,” he said, noting that the current Iran and Iraq disputes have echoes in those of ancient Persia and Mesopotamia.

“I am not suggesting that reading ancient texts is going to solve our problems in this region tomorrow, but it is going to give us a sense of whom we are talking to there, of what fundamental social, cultural, and ecological realities we are facing, which we ignore at our peril.”

The earlier requirement

Harvard College’s early language requirement was demanding and included three mandatory years of Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac. It was assumed that students entering Harvard had a full knowledge of Latin.

While today’s requirement is much less rigorous, and many undergraduates entering Harvard can test out of required language classes before they arrive on campus, many students choose to continue studying another language, taking advantage of the University’s vast resources to explore written and spoken words and cultures.

Currently, 154 Harvard students are concentrating in one of the University’s language concentration programs, which include East Asian Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Romance Languages and Literatures, Sanskrit and Indian Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures.

To further encourage students to continue their linguistic studies, the University adopted a language citation program in 1998 that recognizes advanced language learning at the College. The achievement is noted in students’ official transcripts, and students receive printed citations that recognize their accomplishments along with their diplomas.

In its first year, the program had 77 participants. Last year, 441 students received language citations. In 2006, FAS also established secondary fields as part of the curriculum. Undergraduates can now declare a secondary field of study in 46 areas, including nine language-based programs.

Languages and related programs also abound in Harvard’s other Schools. Harvard Law School has a class that teaches students Spanish language skills in a legal context. At the Harvard Business School, the student association recently began offering Berlitz Method language classes to first- and second-year students in Mandarin, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Hindi.

In summer, the Harvard Divinity School offers language instruction geared to theological and religious studies, with courses such as elementary biblical Hebrew.

“Dead” language lives

Additionally, students regularly gather to speak at informal “language tables” hosted by the various Houses. For the past several years, a small but dedicated group of graduate and undergraduate students has met in an Italian restaurant to order pizza and chat, not in Italian, but in Latin. The students from Harvard’s Department of the Classics don’t let the fact that Latin is technically a “dead” language deter their enthusiasm.

“It’s hard to stop and think of the Latin for cell phone,” said junior Sara Mills, a classics concentrator and president of the Harvard Classical Club, which organizes the weekly event. The club has developed its own lexicon to translate modern terms such as “resident dean” or “Boylston Hall.”

The most amusing moments from the gatherings, which are sponsored by the department, often come in the form of a bemused waiter who tries to pick up their words, or from neighboring diners who whisper incredulously, “They can’t be speaking Latin.”

“We just smile, sheepishly” said Mills.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and chair/director of the Interfaculty Initiative on Advanced Leadership, has been named one of the “125 women who changed our world” over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping in the May 2010 issue (released April 13) for the magazine’s 125th anniversary.

She was cited for her “ground breaking research on the toll of tokenism, work/family conflicts, fostering diversity, and the creation of successful organizations,” which “has helped women become stronger, more strategic leaders.”

On April 23 she was honored with the 2010 International Leadership Award from the Association of Leadership Professionals at its annual meeting in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Harvard Art Museum announced the appointment of Mary Schneider Enriquez as Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, effective April 5.

Schneider Enriquez has been Latin American art adviser to the Art Museum since 2002, working with the museum’s director and curatorial staff to identify collection and programmatic opportunities in Latin American art. She brings a long history of curatorial, academic, and administrative experience to this position, including undergraduate teaching, independent curatorial and advisory work for institutions across the United States, art criticism, and fundraising.

“I am pleased to welcome Mary to our staff,” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. “With her long and varied background in the art world, especially in Latin America, and as someone who already has an intimate knowledge of the Art Museum and Harvard University, she brings a distinct perspective to this position.”

With her spotlight purring like an old projector, Linda Yao ’10 used a steady hand to follow the cast of famed figure skaters as they shaved graceful ribbons into the ice during “An Evening with Champions.” “La Vie en Rose,” sung by Louis Armstrong, played over the loudspeakers, and a kaleidoscope of light bathed the ice.

Over 40 years, the skating event has raised $2.4 million for the Jimmy Fund of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Brett Michael Giblin ’11, who co-chaired the event, said, “I truly believe that the reason this weekend was such a rousing success, from the incredible skating to the nearly perfect execution, was due to the fact that our volunteers were able to keep the objective that they were working toward — helping children with cancer — in the forefront of their minds.”

The event struck a personal chord with 2006 Olympics skater Emily Hughes ’11, who first visited Harvard to participate in the event in 2006 to pay tribute to her mother, a cancer survivor. Hughes said, “I’m happy and excited that I can do this every year, and that it can go to a worthy cause. Cancer research has a more personal feel for me.”

Topping off at 800 pages, “Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA” is Daniel Carpenter’s opus.

Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and director of the Center for American Political Studies, became fascinated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 20 years ago “because the agency was always in the news and because its decisions were so controversial at the same time that the agency was so highly respected in scientific and popular circles.”

But Carpenter said the research on the FDA then was “incredibly simplistic. In these works, the FDA is either great or it’s horrible; it’s either purely altruistic or it’s power-hungry. A number of well-informed scholars and careful observers of the agency told me the same thing: namely, that previous treatments had oversimplified the agency. I wanted to step outside of those binary narratives.”

One of his approaches was examining the FDA’s reputation. “A big part of the FDA’s power comes from the way it is viewed by different audiences,” said Carpenter. “So I spent a lot of time not only in the records and archives of the FDA, but in the records of medical associations and researchers, drug companies, research hospitals like Mayo Clinic and M.D. Anderson, European and Indian drug regulators and health agencies, politicians, and Supreme Court justices, social movement organizations, and interest groups.”

Behind the scenes, much of what happens at “research universities around the world is dependent upon FDA rules, regulations, and discussions,” said Carpenter.

But what about the American people? Have they become disillusioned by dodgy pharmaceuticals and lawsuits?

“For the audience of the mass public, the FDA’s reputation is compelling because people believe that the agency has kept them safe, and that the FDA generally ‘gets it right,’” he noted.

“The most vivid event in building this reputation was FDA officer Frances Kelsey’s refusal to let thalidomide on the U.S. market,” he said. “When that drug was marketed in Europe and Australia, thousands of children were born with irreversible birth defects, and there were uncounted stillbirths and abortions.” (Kelsey’s photo is on the cover of the book.)

“The general public does, on the whole, trust the FDA, though not as much as it used to,” said Carpenter, who believes the next five to 10 years will be critical for the agency.

“Reputation and Power” also chronicles pivotal FDA decisions, from the 1980s AIDS crisis to oral contraceptives, to chemotherapy, to phased trials and manufacturing.

“This has been 12 years, over 100 archival collections, and three continents of research in the making,” said Carpenter. “I think my proudest moment came when Richard Merrill, a former FDA general counsel and the nation’s top legal scholar on drug regulation — and a tough critic — told me that the book was the best treatment of new drug regulation he had ever seen. From someone who lived it and studied it for decades, that was a nice endorsement.”

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology, was named this year’s winner of the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience, presented by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Winners of the award are honored for a career of “distinguished and sustained scholarship and research at the cutting-edge of cognitive neuroscience,” and for “extraordinary innovation and high impact on international scientific thinking.”

Pinker, who conducts research on language and cognition, delivered the George A. Miller Lecture on April 18 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Might We Suggest…

• High Demand Puts Droid Incredible On Back-Order
  

  Okay, so if you want a Droid Incredible before May 4th, you may want to head down to your local Verizon store.  The official Verizon website has already thrown up a semi-warning that the Droid Inc…

TULLAHOMA — Two students from the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI) have been recognized for their research at one of the nation’s top aeronautic conferences.

The students attending the 2010 Southeastern Regional Student Conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) were awarded second and third place in the Masters Division. The conference, held in Destin, Fla. on April 8-9, included over 300 delegates from 14 universities from the southeastern region.

Nadim Zgheib won second place for his paper, “Asymptotic Solutions for Longitudinal Waves in Solid Rocket Motors” and Michel Akiki won third place for his paper “Compressible Integral Formulation of the Two-Dimensional Porous Channel Flow.” The studies focused on the analytical and numerical modeling of either wave propagation or compressible mean flow description in simulated solid rocket motors.

The two studies were supervised by UTSI Professor Joseph Majdalani who appears as second author on both papers.

Zgheib and Akiki are both from Kesrouan, Lebanon, and both graduated from Notre Dame University shortly before joining UTSI. In 2009, they received their master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Michel is currently working toward his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Zgheib has received a graduate school fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Florida.

AIAA is the world’s largest professional society devoted to the progress of engineering and science in aviation, space and defense.

—

C O N T A C T :

Whitney Holmes (865-974-5469, [email protected])

Madge Gibson (931-393-7213, [email protected])

Everyone’s talking about the phosphorus crisis! (See NY Times, Der Spiegel, Foreign Policy).

It turns out we’re running out of this critical element that’s necessary for fertilizer.

And if we run out, we’ll be set back fifty years in agriculture — and that means billions of people without food.

So we thought we’d break it all down.

Phosphorus makes up around 12% of all commercial fertilizer. It is irreplaceable.

Source: Scientific American

Phosphorus-based fertilizer enabled us to feed a global population that has tripled since WW2… and will increase 33% by 2050

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Use of phosphorous rock has increased 1100% since WW2

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Over half of phosphorus consumption takes place in the developing world and is growing rapidly

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Moderate estimates put global demand at 3% increase per year

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Unfortunately, we’re hitting peak phosphorous in 2035

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Phosphorus is technically a renewable resource… but it takes ten million years to return to the soil

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

90% of global reserves is controlled by five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, USA, and Jordan

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

America’s phosphorus production is declining… and will be exhausted by 2050

Source: Scientific American

After exporting for decades, America now imports 10% of its supply

Source: Foreign Policy

China imposed a 135% phosphorus tariff in 2008 (thankfully we have a trade deal with Morocco)

Oil shortages recently caused an 800% spike in phosphate prices… contributing to high food costs and worldwide riots

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University

Phosphate costs seven times more today than it did in 1960

Source: USDA

The only option is massive industrial treatment of waste water to recover phosphorus.

Source: Dana Cordell at Linköping University and Der Spiegel

And now, a brief history of phosphorus

Phosphorus was the Greek name for the morning star, also known as Lucifer.

The element was discovered in 1669 when a German alchemist boiled down 50 buckets of urine in search of the Philosopher’s Stone.

Phosphorus was used in incendiary bombs in WW2. It also has industrial applications, such as in laundry detergent.

But the most important use (90% of consumption) is in fertilizer.

This is why we have a phosphorus problem…

12 Charts On The Amazing History Of Human Economic Development

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To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):

How Reversible Is The Euro- – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…

…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…

…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.

and to the left of us – China:

Andy Xie – I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst – Credit Writedowns

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.

It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)

We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.

Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)

I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).

The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had  technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.

The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.

Think about that for a minute.

In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.

RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.

We might as well get used to it.

If for some reason you can’t make it to a Verizon store to buy an Incredible in person, you’re going to have to wait a few days. Verizon’s website says new orders won’t ship until May 4 — a testament to the phone’s popularity (or initial low inventory). That’s echoed by reports in our forums discussing limited in-store inventory. Anybody out there have a hard time getting one?

Harvard University has been announced as one of three schools in the Ivy League that were recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as 2009-10 Collective Conference Champions for using green power. The Collective Conference Champions Award recognizes the conference, and its respective participating schools, whose collective green power purchase was the largest among all participating conferences.

Since April 2006, the EPA’s Green Power Partnership has tracked and recognized the collegiate athletic conferences with the highest combined green power purchases in the nation. The EPA recognized Harvard University for its purchase, which contributed to making the Ivy League the challenge’s largest overall purchaser of green power.

Harvard’s voluntary use of nearly 32 million kilowatt-hours (kwh) of green power represents 10 percent of the school’s annual electricity usage. Harvard is purchasing a utility green power product and renewable energy certificates from Essex Hydro Associates and Sterling Planet. In addition, the school generates on-site renewable electricity, which helps to reduce the environmental impacts associated with the campus’s electricity use.

The EPA estimates that Harvard University’s purchase of nearly 32 million kwh of green power is equivalent to the CO² emissions from the electricity use of nearly 3,000 average American homes each year or has the equivalent impact of reducing the CO² emissions of more than 4,000 passenger cars annually. The Ivy League’s collective green power purchase of more than 225 million kwh of green power is equivalent to the CO² emissions from the electricity use of nearly 20,000 average American homes or the annual CO² emissions of nearly 31,000 cars.

Twenty-six collegiate conferences and 54 colleges and universities competed in the 2009-10 challenge, collectively purchasing nearly 1.2 billion kwh of green power. The EPA will extend the College and University Green Power Challenge for a fifth year, to conclude in spring of 2011. The EPA’s Green Power Challenge is open to all U.S. colleges, universities, and conferences. In order to qualify, a collegiate athletic conference must include at least one school that qualifies as a Green Power Partner, and the conference must collectively meet EPA’s minimum conference purchase requirement.

For more information about the EPA’s College and University Green Power Challenge, visit the Challenge Web site.

The ABC reports that Woodside are looking to build a floating LNG production platform for the Sunrise field between Darwin and East Timor (with the East Timorese continuing to lobby vigorously for the plant to be built there) – Floating LNG plant to be built near East Timor

After years of speculation, the Sunrise Joint Venture has finally announced it will build a floating liquefied natural gas processing plant in the Timor Sea. The Greater Sunrise field is in both Australian and Timorese waters, about 700 kilometres north-west of Darwin, and the two countries will have an equal share of royalties.

The floating rig means Darwin will miss out on having a multi-billion dollar plant built there. Operator Woodside Petroleum says after considering on-shore LNG processing in both Darwin and East Timor, the joint venture partners, which include Osaka Gas, Shell and ConocoPhillips, decided a floating plant was the most viable.

Woodside CEO Don Voelte says the decision is a boon for the new but impoverished democracy. “We expect that the selection of a floating LNG processing option will, in addition to generating significant long-term petroleum revenue, provide a broad range of social investment, employment and training opportunities for Timor-Leste.”

Michael Shinagel, Harvard dean of Continuing Education and University Extension, is the recipient of the 2010 Walton S. Bittner Service Citation from the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA). The award recognizes him for his outstanding contributions to continuing education at Harvard, and for service of major significance to UCEA.

Among Shinagel’s achievements cited are his work with Harvard’s human resource department to establish the Tuition Assistance Plan (TAP) in 1976; his expansion of the Harvard Extension School from fewer than 200 courses and 6,000 students in 1975, to more than 600 courses and 14,000 students today; the creation of Harvard Extension School master’s degree programs in the liberal arts that have graduated 2,000 individuals to date; and his service as editor of UCEA’s “Continuing Higher Education Review” for the past 13 years.

Admired by his continuing education decanal counterparts around the world, Shinagel’s contributions to his institution and UCEA are summed up by Mary McIntire, dean of Continuing Studies, Rice University: “Mike generously helps all who seek his advice or opinion. He encourages younger people in the field, not only by example, but by maintaining an active interest in their careers and accomplishments. He has succeeded so admirably at Harvard, in the community, and in the field … we are fortunate to have him among us.”

If Apple’s position on Flash wasn’t perfectly clear, Steve Jobs has taken the time to write a 1500-word open letter regurgitating the party lines at length. In a word (or three), Apple’s position is “Flash sucks unwashed balls.” More »

Ronnie Fieg works with Sebago to put together a collection of 4 exclusive classic Docksides. The idea behind the project was to update a classic silouhette with antique and oiled leathers as well as new colors in soft nubucks. This collection reflects the amazing craftsmanship of the 64 year old company. The midnight navy oily leather, two tone brown/green Spinnaker, brown antique leather and Salmon soft nubuck docksides will all be available at the David Z. flagship store as well as David Z.com on Friday April 30th at 10:00am.

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