Much like Robocop, the Android was a man once. Now, he just spends his days posing for geeks. He looks adorable—that’s his job—but inside there’s pain, loss and regret. Available in t-shirt or poster formats for $19. [ExpodedAndy] More »
Android – Google – Handhelds – Searching – Search Engines
Segundo informações da publicação AutoExpress, a Bugatti vem desenvolvendo um surpreendente superesportivo elétrico com uma potencia de 800 cavalos e torque de 2.200 Nm, disponíveis desde 0 km/h.
De acordo com a publicação, as informações foram repassadas por uma fonte da alta cúpula da companhia. Sua potencia seria disponibilizada através de dois potente motores elétricos, abastecidos por um avançado sistema de baterias de íon de lítio e utilizando como base a carroceria do Bentley Continental GT.
Contudo, nem mesmo a fonte de respeito da Bugatti soube informar o futuro do projeto, isto é, se ele será futuramente apresentado para o publico, ou servira apenas como um exercício internos para que os engenheiros da companhia possam conhecer a tecnologia e a possibilidade de se produzir um veiculo elétrico.
No momento, as informações técnicas do superesportivo da Bugatti é de que seu desempenho seria superior aos de seus concorrentes, com uma aceleração “absolutamente incrível”. No entanto, o principal problema do projeto aparece justamente nesse ponto, já que no momento que se utiliza a total força dos dois motores elétricos, é necessária uma quantidade enorme de energia.
Dessa forma, se o superesportivo elétrico da Bugatti trabalhasse na sua força máxima, a carga de suas baterias se esgotariam em questão de minutos. É ai é que está o desafio não apena da Bugatti, mas de todas as companhias que trabalham com esse tipo de motorização.
Fonte: AutoExpress e AutoMocion
Projeção: JMVDesign
Each Commencement, the Harvard Extension School recognizes the notable accomplishments of its top graduates and outstanding faculty with numerous awards and prizes. Recipients may demonstrate outstanding initiative, character, and academic achievement; show dedication to the arts or public service; or in regard to faculty, be lauded by their students for excellence in teaching.
One honor, the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding Master of Liberal Arts Thesis, is awarded to a student whose graduate thesis embodies the highest level of imaginative scholarship. Through the years, A.L.M. thesis advisers from across the University (all of whom must have Harvard teaching appointments) have been singularly impressed with the work produced by their Extension School advisees: “tremendous body of work — better than many doctoral theses I’ve seen”; and “an important contribution … it should be published”; and on one biotechnology student, “the most impressive master’s student I have encountered … at Harvard.”
In addition to the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding Thesis, there are four major academic prizes — the Phelps, Crite, Langlois, and Small prizes — as well as the Bok, Aurelio, Yang, and Wood prizes. Faculty are awarded the Bonanno, Conway, Fussa, and Shattuck awards.
To see a list of 2009-10 Harvard Extension School prize and award recipients, visit the Extension School Web site.
Jamie Lynn Spears is single again after calling it quits with a Louisiana businessman 10 years her senior.
The 19-year-old single mom began dating businessman James Watson, 29, in December, shortly after her split from Casey Aldridge, the father of her two-year-old daughter Maddie. However, the young mother unceremoniously dumped James a few weeks ago after growing frustrated with his inability to commit.
A tipster blabs to Star Magazine: “The same thing that attracted Jamie Lynn to James at first is what ultimately turned her off. After all the drama she’d been involved in with her ex, Casey Aldridge, she liked the fact that James was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy who didn’t care that she was a celebrity. But, as Jamie Lynn became more attached to him, his lack of seriousness about their relationship began to wear on her.”
Jamie Lynn — best remembered for her starring role on Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 — is reportedly considering enrolling in a few college courses next fall.
David Einhorn, the Greenlight Capital hedge fund manager, has an op-ed in the New York Times today that starts pretty brilliantly
ARE you worried that we are passing our debt on to future generations? Well, you need not worry.
Before this recession it appeared that absent action, the government’s long-term commitments would become a problem in a few decades. I believe the government response to the recession has created budgetary stress sufficient to bring about the crisis much sooner. Our generation — not our grandchildren’s — will have to deal with the consequences.
And this op-ed, titled “Easy Money, Hard Truths” isn’t your typical 5 paragraph op-ed. It’s three pages of debt statistics and inflation warnings that will ruin your day. (We’re thinking this might have been the speech he gave at Ira Sohn yesterday, though we’re not sure).
He slams the US AAA rating. He says inflation would be 9% per annum if they still calculated it they way they did in the 80s.
He says we could solve our problem, but seriously doubts we have the political will.
(Found via Joshua Brown, who wonders if the whole thing is a way for him to promote his gold.)
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Ten professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have been named Walter Channing Cabot Fellows. The annual awards recognize tenured faculty members for distinguished accomplishments in the fields of literature, history, or art, broadly conceived.
The 2010 honorees are Janet Beizer, professor of Romance languages and literatures; Mark Elliott, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History; Francesco Erspamer, professor of Romance languages and literatures; Wilt Idema, professor of Chinese literature; Chris Killip, professor of visual and environmental studies; Alex Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music; Nancy Rosenblum, Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government; Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor; William Julius Wilson, Lewis F. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor; and Richard W. Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology.
Speck just keeps rolling these out more gorgeous ArtsProjekt cases for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. The latest crop include four brand new pieces: Boy vs. Dragon no. 5 by Matthew Curry, Peace Will Come by Spaze Crafte One, Flower Girl by Anneli Olander, and Funky CES by Jim Mahfood. Funky CES was painted live by Jim MahFood at the Speck booth at the CES Tradeshow in Las Vegas earlier this year. However, this time you won’t have to go through Zazzle to purchase them, as they are now available directly from Speck for $39.95.
The Good: Quick access to movies and show times based on GPS or manually input location. Ability to watch movie trailers (in most cases) in advance of purchasing tickets. Ability to purchase tickets from the palm of your hand while on the go. In select areas, the ability to use your phone as a ticket (Mobile Ticket).
The Bad: With ticket prices being what they are now, paying a service fee on top of ticket prices can get to be expensive, though the convenience might be worth it. There were a few times where the screen froze up when trying to play trailers, but overall it performed well. There were a few occasions where the movie lists wouldn’t load for an extended period of time.
The Verdict: There really is no question that everyone should have this app. Even if you don’t think you’ll ever use it, it’s fun to watch the trailers from your phone on a boring day.
Fandango is a service that has been around for several years. If you’ve not heard of it, it provides moviegoers the opportunity to purchase tickets in advance of actually going to the theater. Features of the website include access to information about theaters, show times, synopsis of movies, ability to watch movie trailers, and the ability to purchase tickets online for a surcharge. Now, all the great features of the website are available on four of the main smartphone operating systems: iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Palm – making the movie-going decision-making process much more convenient for today’s active consumer. This review will be specific to the Fandango App for BlackBerry devices. It is currently compatible with the “Bold (9000 and 9700), Curve (8900 and 83xx), Tour 9630, 88xx and Storm 95xx all running OS 4.5 or higher,” according to the Fandango website.
I’ve actually had Fandango loaded on my phone for a while now, so I thought it made sense to review the app. Strangely, it can’t be found on BlackBerry’s App World, so you need to download it directly from Fandango’s website at http://www.fandango.com/blackberryapp. I’ve been using Fandango on my BlackBerry Bold 9700 in the metro Atlanta area on T-Mobile’s 3G network as well as my Wi-Fi network at home.
Using Fandango is relatively straight forward. To start up the app, simply click on the Fandango application icon (little red ‘F’) and it will load and take you to the home screen which consists of two main tabs: “In Theaters,” and “Coming Soon.” Each of the main tabs has their own sub-tabs. The first time you start up Fandango, you will be asked how you want your location information to be identified. You’ll have the option to “Enter Location” or “Find your location.” If you select “Find your location,” the app along with your internal GPS (assuming your device has one) uses GPS coordinates to determine your location, or you can input your zip code if you are in an area where the GPS is unable to connect with satellites.
Once your location is set, the app remembers it and every time you login thereafter (though you can change your location at any time) you’ll start out with the “In Theaters” tab, which as you might expect shows listings for movies that are currently playing in theaters. As I mentioned earlier, each of the main tabs has sub-tabs. The first sub-tab for “In Theaters” is “Opening This Week.” The names of the tabs in this app are clearly marked, so under the “Opening This Week” sub-tab, you’ll find movies that are opening in the coming week. As you scroll through the listings under this tab, you’ll notice the rating of the movies along with their runtime and release dates. There is also a section on fan ratings, if anyone has rated the movie.
When you select the movie you want to see, Fandango opens a new page for you. This page includes some of the things you’ve already seen such as: the title of the movie, rating, runtime, release date, fan rating, and a brief plot. Below that you have a link to play the trailer for the movie (one of my favorite features) along with two additional tabs, “Showtimes” and “Movie Details.” The “Showtimes” tab is the default tab and displays times that your selected movie is playing organized by the varying theaters in your area. You also have the option to change the date for your search (if you’re searching in advance) as well as your location. From here you can go through the motions of buying a ticket at a selected theater and specific time. As you go further in the process you will have the opportunity to enter your credit card information and save it for future use. In select locations you can use Fandango’s Mobile Tickets feature where your ticket gets sent directly to your device and can be scanned by the ticket-taker.
The “Movie Details” tab contains an overview of the movie you are considering. It has information on the cast of characters, director of the movie, genre, and a synopsis of the movie. These features are both important and well executed. Fandango isn’t just about offering you the where and when, it’s also about the why. Much of what we’ve seen so far has been the information you need to get you to a movie at a specific location, with a ticket already in hand, but one of the biggest benefits of the Fandango app is that it gives you the ability to make an informed decision on what movie to see by giving you the details and option to watch a trailer.
As we return to the main screen (the “In Theaters” tab), there are two more sub-tabs to cover. There are only a few differences in the second and third sub-tabs. When you select the “Top Box Office” sub-tab, you see movies that have had the most success in theaters over the past few weeks. The only real difference here is how the movies are categorized (in order of gross revenue generated), and that the amount of money the film has made is added to the brief information you see for each movie. Beyond that, once you select a movie, the process and information mentioned above is the same. The third sub-tab under the “In Theaters” tab is “Near Me.” This sub-tab contains movies that are organized alphabetically and based on your current location.
The next of the two main tabs is the “Coming Soon” tab. Here you’ll find movies that are coming out generally within the next month or so. There are two sub-tabs here, “In the spotlight” and “Near Me.” The “In the spotlight” sub-tab highlights movie titles that will be coming out roughly within the next month based on the anticipated popularity of the movie, whereas the “Near Me” sub-tab display’s movies that are coming soon based on location. For some reason, the “Near Me” sub-tab seemed to have some trouble loading the movie list on occasion.
Lastly, at any time during your use of the Fandango app, you can always press the menu key to access the “Theaters” option which is good for determining what movie you want to see based on what’s playing at any given theater. You also have access to a search function, and the ability to view “My Account” where you can add your fandango account if you have one, add a saved credit card, and view your purchase history.
The Fandango App for BlackBerry has a specific purpose in mind, to assist moviegoers in their decision making process by offering everything you need to know to make an informed decision. The app is easy to navigate because everything is clearly defined, and aside from a few minor glitches from time to time, it operates very smoothly. My favorite feature of this app is the ability to watch trailers for most of the films listed. The quality of the trailers seems to be pretty high and I had no problems streaming the video provided the connection was good. I did not have an opportunity to purchase tickets through the app, but on two separate occasions, aside from the testing I did specifically for this review, I found myself using the app to look up movies and times on the fly. Overall it seems well thought out and put together, and I would highly recommend this app to anyone with a BlackBerry that meets the minimum requirements.
For more information on Fandango for BlackBerry, go here.
Over at LevelUp Studio they have been hard at work in their continued development and support of a highly popular application we have all grown to know and love, Beautiful Widgets. Lately there have been a slew of updates, which we have not covered, and for those that may have missed them, some of them include:
- Ability to customize color of widget text
- Show four day weather forecast
- Hide background / adjust transparency
- Download various weather skins
- Custom live wallpaper
This custom live wallpaper takes your standard grass live wallpaper and adds a very nice touch, showing current weather conditions as long as you have Beautiful Widgets installed on your device. If you don’t have it installed, the wallpaper will still work, except you will only have the sun and moon animations, and it will not adjust to your current weather conditions. If you have the Beautiful Widgets, be sure to check out this latest update, and if you are interested in purchasing, be sure to check it out in the Market.
This is a post by Android Central. It is sponsored by the Android Central Accessories Store
2011 Audi A8 Interior
Though this blogger is particularly fond of Audi, any person with even the slightest fascination in cars would agree that Audi reigns supreme when it comes to interior design and quality, and GM’s VP of Global Engineering, Karl Stracke, agrees. Though Stracke feels confident in the progress that GM has made with regard to interiors, he still would like to see the Motown automaker go further; something like Audi.
“We’re not yet at Audi quality,” he said. “I want to be at Audi quality. Audi is the benchmark for interiors.”
Stracke has been with GM for 30 years, all of which has been on the European side. He is responsible for many Opel models, and is the mind behind the last generation Saab 9-3. Staracke and his team are much more focused on interiors than past GM execs, and devote every Friday to driving cars on the proving grounds and checking out competitors models.
– By: Stephen Calogera
Source: Edmunds
Kate Wareing, Oxfam’s Director of UK poverty said.
“Iain Duncan Smith has today outlined plans to help move people off welfare and into work and we broadly welcome this new approach to make the system fairer.
“Work should never be seen as a punishment and those on benefits should not be forced to work for less than the minimum wage. The assumption that people don’t want to work is simply not true. Our experience is that people on benefits do want to work, and a big part of what holds them back is the benefit system.
“It is vital that people are always better off in work. Currently, many of those people who are in the transition between benefits and employment can end up keeping less than 10p for every pound they earn.
“Those actively seeking employment, whether that be temporary or part-time, should never be penalised; if someone on benefits earns a pound then we should reward that initiative, rather than taking away what they have earned as if it was the wrong thing to do.
“People should be allowed to do small amounts of community work, without losing their benefits. If the government implemented a Community Allowance it would allow community organisations to pay local unemployed people to do the bits and pieces of work that desperately need doing within their communities. For every £1 invested in the Community Allowance, £10.20 worth of social value is created – that’s because the work has immense community and social value, improving facilities and the local environment, which aren’t usually measured in conventional economic terms.”
/Ends
For more information or to interview Kate Wareing please contact Sarah Dransfield, Oxfam Press Officer on 01865 472269 or [email protected]
Yesterday a host of boldfaced investor names talked up their latest ideas at the Ira Sohn conference.
It doesn’t sound as though there were any huge bombshells, though David Einhorn’s announcement that he is short Moody’s (MCO) and McGraw-Hill (MHP) has generated some headlines (though to be honest, we hadn’t realized that was actually news).
Presenting a bullish case was Jeremy Grantham of GMO, who loves blue-chip stocks right now.
Here are the notes of Mike O’Rourke of BTIG:
IN GMO’s 7 year forecast U.S. High quality names are aberrantly cheap and should provide 7.6% real return per year. In constructing a portfolio Grantham said it should be 40% U.S. Blue Chips, 20% Emerging Markets and 30% EAFE Blue chips. Grantham notes that bonds are “grotesquely” overpriced predicted to post a real return 1.7% per year. Grantham’s 3 choices or recommendations are Timber which has 7.5% forecasted real annual return. Then Grantham likes Emerging Markets which he believes will go to a premium P/E to the rest of the world. Finally he likes high quality U.S. blue chaps. They are trading at a 17% discount to fair value and 55% of earnings come from around the world.
The bedrock of Grantham’s thinking is that “Things regress to the mean.” Of the 34 bubbles GMO has identified it takes about 3.5 years for the bubble to run up and it comes back down to the trendline nearly as quickly. All bubbles reverse. Grantham believes both the U.K. and Australia are in housing bubbles. The risks to betting against bubbles are career risk and business risk. Grantham believes debt has nothing to do with growth, and debt has less influence than most think. Grantham concluded by noting the importance of the upward bias in the third year of the presidential cycle.
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Alexander Ahmed was 5 years old when he started playing a board game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball. Armed with stats cards from seasons going back to 1911, players roll dice to pitch, swing, and make defensive plays. “It simulates real-life baseball pretty well,” said the senior from suburban Springfield, Mass.
For Ahmed, Strat-O-Matic combined two early passions: sports play and statistics. Growing up, he studied box scores, and kept stats on every game he played. In high school, Ahmed was a three-sport varsity athlete who excelled in science and math too. At Harvard, there was ample opportunity to put the two worlds together.
On the sports side, Ahmed, an applied mathematics concentrator at Winthrop House, played junior varsity baseball for his first two years. He then masterminded the transformation of the struggling team from junior varsity status to the Harvard Baseball Club, where his batting average (.490) was second on the team this year.
Then there are all those intramural sports. “I try to do as many as I can,” said Ahmed. “It’s what I do for exercise.” Those included soccer, flag football, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, basketball, softball, crew, swimming, and ice hockey. Of the last, he said, “I learned to skate last year so I could play.”
Ahmed also has explored the mathematical and scientific dimensions that sport offers. His senior thesis — 63 pages of narrative, equations, and appendices — uses a statistical modeling tool called the Markov Chain to estimate “run expectancy” in baseball.
He also belongs to the 20-member Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, where weekly meetings draw in concentrators from fields such as math, statistics, economics, and psychology. “We try to ask interesting questions that any sports fan would ask,” said Ahmed, “then try to answer them with the tools that we have from our studies.”
In his sophomore year, he was one of seven students in the club who wrote a paper for the online Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports on “park factors,” the ways to adjust statistics based on the qualities of baseball venues. One example is the “Green Monster,” the famously high wall in Fenway Park’s left field. Ahmed also did a second-year independent study project for the Arizona Diamondbacks on pitching rotations.
Then there are the courses that Ahmed has taken that cross science with sports, such as this semester’s comparative biomechanics. (He wrote his final paper on the biomechanics of throwing.) “They’re difficult classes,” said Ahmed, but they left him with a solid life skill in problem solving.
In April, he was turned down for stats jobs with the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians. But teaching math is an option too, something Ahmed tried out last year in a summer school program for rising eighth-graders who were struggling in math and science.
Ahmed and undergraduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were paid to bring baseball into lessons in the mornings and coach baseball in the afternoons. One class on projectile motion used hardball throws to calculate velocity. Another, on probability, used major league statistics.
On field trips, the youngsters visited work settings that combined sport and science, including bat-testing engineers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Baseball Research Center. “It was cool for the kids to see that,” said Ahmed. “It showed that if you want to go into engineering, you can partner it with something that you love, like baseball.”
Then there is the Harvard University Band, a social constant for four years. It taught him leadership skills (he managed the band last year), let him play trombone (an instrument he took up in fifth grade), and allowed for a lot of sports viewing (football, hockey, basketball, and more).
“The older alums love the band the most,” said Ahmed. “They sing along with the fight songs.”
by Tom Laskawy.
Michelle
Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, Let’s Move, has kicked into high gear. The Presidential
Task Force on Childhood Obesity released
a landmark report documenting the scale of the problem, complete with a list
of 70 recommendations and a set of benchmarks, including the goal of returning
the childhood obesity rate to its 1972 level of 5% by 2030. And
this week came the announcement that a new industry partnership called the
Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which includes most of the major food
companies, agreed to reduce the number of calories in its members’ products by 1.5 trillion calories by 2015.
It
would be churlish of me to downplay the significance of either the report or
the industry announcement. As nutritionist Marion Nestle observed,
whatever skepticism one may rightly have regarding industry self-regulation,
the fact that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—whose public health
credentials in general and anti-obesity efforts in particular are beyond
reproach—will be auditing the calorie-cutting plan should keep industry shenanigans
to a minimum.
But
what will a 1.5-trillion calorie cut look like? In an article that
helpfully explains how companies might go about reaching their goal—lower-calorie Lunchables! Smaller Kraft Cheese slices!—former food industry
executive Hank Cardello puts
the cuts into context:
…[T]his
is a drop in the bucket and represents only a 0.5 percent reduction in the 300
trillion calories available for Americans to consume each year. That translates
to less than 1.5 pounds of added weight per person. Hardly enough to resolve an
obesity crisis.
That context
was left of out of the comments by David Mackay, chair of the Healthy Weight Commitment
Foundation, at the White House announcement. But he
did express his deep pleasure that the concept of “calories in/calories
out” is a foundational concept of the White House childhood obesity initiative.
“Calories in/calories out” refers to the idea that balancing consumption with exercise
is the key to maintaining a healthy weight. It also happens to be the industry
mantra, since it mostly leaves industry off the hook. It becomes an individual’s
responsibility to count calories and get enough exercise. Industry can offer a
helping hand with programs like this one, but on the whole can be left to its
own devices.
And
certainly, industry desperate wants to be left along. As Kelly Brownell, head
of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity said
to the Washington Post‘s Jane Black: “My
guess is that they were going to do this anyway… The hidden motive here is to
convince government to back off and not regulate the industry.”
The
question then becomes if these impressive-sounding but small-bore industry
initiatives will make up for an apparent lack of political will from the Obama
administration to force government to do its part. The Task Force report is
full of things the government should do, but has only a handful of things it will do.
Meanwhile,
one of the core commitments the Obama administration has made to address obesity—through the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, aka the National School Lunch Program—is stuck in congressional limbo. The bill, already disappointing
in its minimal increases in funding, appears stalled at least until after
the 2010 midterm elections.
Indeed,
I’d feel better about the administration’s supposed laser-like focus on the
National School Lunch Program—already overdue for reauthorization and operating under
an extension of the current version, with all its flaws—if it showed a
little more engagement with the current congressional bottleneck. I suspect,
however, that with the coming of the political season surrounding the midterm
elections, even a public health crisis on the scale of the obesity epidemic
must take a back seat to more pressing concerns.
In
essence, the task force’s report—with its laundry list of recommendations and benchmarks,
most of which don’t start until 2015 and don’t end until 2030—feels less like
the roadmap its reputed to be and more like a poorly written recipe. The
ingredients are excellent, and there’s a beautiful picture of what the final
dish will look like, but the step-by-step instructions are missing. We don’t
know the order or even the precise amounts of each ingredient. We do know
there’s a great dish in there somewhere, but we don’t know how to make it.
Now,
it’s clearly unreasonable to expect the task force to have created a precise recipe to fix a social problem on this scale. But of the dozen or so recommendations that were identified as
the government’s responsibilities, which will the Obama administration enact? Where
was the call from the President for all federal agencies mentioned in the
report to draw up a specific action plan in response to the recommendations?
We’re
just not going to meet these benchmarks without government policy playing a
significant role. Industry needs to be a partner, of course. But we are after all talking about the
industry that gave us the
now infamous Smart Choices label,
with guidelines so slack that even Froot Loops could qualify. The same industry that tried to pass
off sugar-sweetened
Cocoa Krispies as immune boosting. The same industry that had the CEO of
one of its most powerful companies refer
to soda as a “staple food.” And the same industry that targets
children with billions of dollars in advertising so that it can take advantage
of the “nag factor” at the supermarket. It is, in short, not to be
trusted.
Along
those lines, I was not encouraged by a recent interview
in Politico with Melody Barnes, the administration’s director of the Domestic Policy
Council, and chief architect of Let’s Move. When Mike Allen asked
what the government itself was going to do to address obesity in the wake of
the task force’s report, Barnes gave a lengthy description of the
administration’s efforts on the school lunch program and its Healthy Food Financing
Initiative, which would fund grocery stores in so-called “food deserts.” Both predate the task force report. When Allen pressed on the
subject, Barnes offered no other initiatives.
We
have learned over the last decade and to our great chagrin that a change in
administration can undo decades of good government. The more that Let’s Move relies on industry good
behavior and bully pulpit exhortations from the White House as it tries to
avoid writing policies into law that might change the underlying structural
foundation of the obesity epidemic, the more likely we are to risk falling back
to old patterns once our enthusiasm flags or—dare I say it—a Republican
returns to the White House, which could happen well before the final obesity
benchmark in 2030.
Drops
in the bucket, even dozens of them, just won’t get the job done.
Cross-posted from markbittman.com.
Related Links:
DC rejects soda tax but funds better school food
Endocrine disruptors really do suck
Lessons from Berkeley schools: The truth about kids and vegetables
For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students applied to the College; 2,110 were accepted into the Class of 2014. More than 60 percent of the admitted students, benefiting from a record $158 million in financial aid, will receive need-based scholarships — a demonstration of Harvard’s commitment to providing access to a Harvard education to promising students from across the globe.
“When alumni and friends give immediate-use funds in support of financial aid at Harvard, they are providing what are, in many ways, the most valuable gifts that we receive,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College. “This same generosity made it possible for me to attend Harvard, and I see the gratitude that I felt in the extraordinary students whom we admit each year and support through financial aid.”
While large current-use gifts intended specifically for financial aid were previously relatively rare, alumni now recognize and focus on aid as a primary goal and priority. Longtime financial aid benefactors Beatrice Liu ’81, M.B.A. ’87, and Philip Lovett ’83, M.B.A. ’87, led the way, providing early support for this vital student resource, and more donors are following suit.
Despite increasing costs and growing student need in the current economic climate, Harvard is determined to continue providing access for talented students. Offering this level of support would not be possible without the many contributions from alumni, including significant immediate-use gifts toward financial aid from Michael Kerr ’81, M.B.A. ’85, Sumner Redstone ’44, LL.B. ’47, and Joseph O’Donnell ’67, M.B.A. ’71. All of these gifts help increase access to Harvard for students across the income spectrum.
“Such gifts,” said Fitzsimmons, “demonstrate the unwavering and generous dedication of alumni in sharing Harvard with future generations of students. It’s inspiring to see, and we are enormously grateful for their continued support.”
In addition to providing direct support to students, current-use gifts are also used to enrich the student experience, channeling funding to unique courses, new faculty initiatives, and undergraduate research opportunities.
The immediate-use funds contributed to Harvard’s financial aid program help individual students through the Harvard College Fund Scholars Program. As part of this program, donors can connect directly to the students who benefit immediately from their generosity.
“Giving exceptional students the opportunity to access all that Harvard has to offer is one of my primary responsibilities as an alumnus,” said O’Donnell. “By making a current-use contribution in support of the financial aid program, I know that I can start helping students right away.”
Last December, One Laptop per Child‘s XO-3 tablet was an impossible dream: semi-flexible plastic, multitouch, sci-fi thinness, all for $75. And while a partnership with Marvell helps breathe life into XO-3, it won’t resemble winter’s fantasy device. More »
One Laptop per Child – Hardware – Notebooks and Laptops – iPhone – One Laptop
For more than two decades, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has awarded its Centennial Medal to a select group of graduates who have made significant contributions to society and scholarship. This year’s recipients: one of the world’s foremost scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama; the founder, publisher, and principal editor of a scholarly journal; an economist and a 2007 Nobel laureate; and one of the most eminent of American philosophers.
Receiving the medal today (May 27) are David Bevington, Stephen Fischer-Galati, Eric Maskin, and Martha Nussbaum.
David Bevington ’52, Ph.D. ’59, English
David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. One of the world’s foremost scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, Bevington has written or edited more than 30 volumes on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His authored books include “From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England” (1962), “Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture” (1985), and “Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth” (2008). His new book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is “Murder Most Foul: The History of Hamlet.” Bevington has edited the Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 volumes (1988, now being re-edited), and Longman’s “Complete Works of Shakespeare,” sixth edition (2009). He is the former president of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (1981-86), the Shakespeare Association of America (1976-77 and 1995-96), and the Renaissance English Text Society (1977-80). He is senior editor of the Revels Plays (Manchester University Press), which publishes critical editions of plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and the Revels Student Editions. He was senior editor of the “Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama” (2002) and is one of three senior editors of a forthcoming Cambridge edition of “The Works of Ben Jonson.”
Stephen Fischer-Galati ’46, Ph.D. ’49, history
Stephen Fischer-Galati is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Colorado. He is the founder, publisher, and principal editor of the scholarly journal East European Quarterly and the scholarly series East European Monographs, which has put out more than 700 scholarly books on East-Central Europe in collaboration with Columbia University Press. Fischer-Galati is one of the world’s foremost specialists on East European history and civilization, exploring the evolution of East-West relations and the intersection of Western and Eastern political and cultural developments. He has also published extensively on Balkan issues and guerilla warfare in the region. Born in Romania, Fischer-Galati escaped the country as a teenager during the early stages of World War II, finishing his high school studies in Massachusetts before going on to Harvard. His books include “Romania: A Historic Perspective,” “Eastern Europe and the Cold War: Perceptions and Perspectives,” and “Man, State, and Society in East European History,” and he has authored more than 250 articles. He holds several honorary degrees and major grants and fellowships from American and international scholarly foundations. He is also the president of the International Commission of East European and Slavic Studies of the International Congress of Historical Studies.
Eric Maskin ’72, Ph.D. ’76, applied mathematics
Eric Stark Maskin is an economist and a 2007 Nobel laureate recognized (along with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger B. Myerson) “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Among other critical applications, that theory has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures. Maskin is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University. After earning his doctorate at Harvard, Maskin went to the University of Cambridge in 1976, where he was a research fellow at Jesus College, and then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977-84) and at Harvard (1985-2000), where he was the Louis Berkman Professor of Economics. His work in economic theory, including game theory, the economics of incentives, and contract theory, has deeply influenced diverse areas of economics, politics, and law. He is particularly well-known for his papers on mechanism design/implementation theory and dynamic games. His current research projects include comparing different electoral rules, examining the causes of inequality, and studying coalition formation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the European Economic Association, and he is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He was president of the Econometric Society in 2003.
Martha Nussbaum, Ph.D. ’75, classical philology
Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, with appointments in the Law School, the Philosophy Department, and the Divinity School. Among the most eminent of American philosophers, her wide-ranging interests include ancient notions of ethics, feminism, religious equality, gender and sexuality law, global justice, and notions of disgust, shame, and other emotions and their various effects on the law. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford universities. Among her many books the most recent are “The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future” (2007), “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (2008), and “From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law” (2010). From 1986 to 1993, Nussbaum was a research adviser at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She is former president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and she has chaired the Association’s Committee on International Cooperation, its Committee on the Status of Women, and its Committee on Public Philosophy. Nussbaum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, which in 2009 awarded her its Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence.
Harvard will confer 10 honorary degrees today (May 27) during the Morning Exercises.
David H. Souter
Doctor of Laws
David H. Souter was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 19 years before retiring in June 2009. Souter, who graduated from Harvard College in 1961 and Harvard Law School in 1966, will be the principal speaker at the Afternoon Exercises at this year’s Commencement.
Harvard President Drew Faust hailed Souter’s “deep sense of independence and fairness” and “clear concern for the effects of the court’s decisions on the lives of real people” in making the Commencement speaker announcement. She said his “dedication, humility, and commitment to learning” should be an inspiration to anyone contemplating a career in public service.
Souter was also a Rhodes Scholar, earning an M.A. from Magdalen College in Oxford in 1963.
Nominated by President George H.W. Bush, Souter came to the court after spending many years at posts in the New Hampshire legal system. Born in Massachusetts, he moved to New Hampshire as a boy. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he began his legal career in private practice. In 1968, he was named assistant attorney general of New Hampshire. In 1971, he became deputy attorney general, and, in 1976, attorney general. He became a state Superior Court associate justice two years later and was appointed to the state Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1983. He became a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1990, shortly before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thomas R. Cech
Doctor of Science
Thomas R. Cech, director of the Colorado Institute for Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Colorado, has made important contributions to understanding RNA, findings that won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989.
Cech was awarded the Nobel for revelations that RNA, ribonucleic acid, has functions beyond its role as a carrier of genetic information. In a single-celled organism, Tetrahymena thermophila, Cech discovered that RNA can also function as an enzyme, a function that had previously been thought to be the exclusive domain of proteins. These RNA enzymes are called ribozymes.
Cech grew up in Iowa and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Grinnell College in 1970. He received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the University of Colorado faculty in 1978 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1988 and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry in 1990.
In 2000, Cech became the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and led that organization until 2009, when he returned to the University of Colorado as director of the Colorado Institute for Molecular Biotechnology.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Cech has won numerous awards and honors, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1995, and the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1988. In 1987, Cech was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and was awarded a lifetime professorship by the American Cancer Society.
Renée C. Fox
Doctor of Laws
Renée C. Fox’s studies in the sociology of medicine, medical ethics, medical research, and medical education have led her to Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China, and the United States, and have resulted in nine books and numerous articles.
Fox earned a doctorate in sociology from Harvard in 1954. She received a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Smith College. She joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, where she is Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences.
Before joining the University of Pennsylvania’s faculty, Fox was a member of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. She taught for 12 years at Barnard College and then was a visiting lecturer for two years at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. At Pennsylvania, she was a professor in the Sociology Department with joint secondary appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, and in the School of Nursing. She also held an interdisciplinary chair as the Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences.
Her best-known books are “Experiment Perilous: Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown,” “The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis,” “Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society,” “The Sociology of Medicine: A Participant Observer’s View,” and “In the Belgian Chateau: The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change.” She is working on a book about her life as a sociologist.
Fox is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received a Radcliffe Graduate School Medal and a Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has won several teaching awards, holds nine honorary degrees, and in 2007 received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Freeman A. Hrabowski III
Doctor of Laws
Freeman A. Hrabowski III is committed to rigorous academic standards and challenging students to excel. The president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), who chose to fund a championship chess team at the school instead of a football program, has built a career devoted to education and to helping minorities succeed in science, technology, engineering, and math.
In 1988 he co-founded the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program at UMBC with the goal of increasing the diversity of future leaders in science, technology, engineering, and related fields. Originally geared toward African-American males, the program has expanded to students of all races and both genders, and has been recognized by the National Science Foundation as a national model.
Called a “tireless academic cheerleader,” he was associate dean of graduate studies and associate professor of statistics and research at Alabama A&M University from 1976 to 1977. He was a professor of mathematics at Coppin State College in Baltimore for 10 years, and served as dean of arts and sciences from 1977 to 1981. He was the school’s vice president for academic affairs from 1981 to 1987. He went to the UMBC as vice provost in 1987, and was appointed president in 1993.
The son of teachers, Hrabowski was jailed for a week at age 12 after marching against school segregation in his home city of Birmingham, Ala. “The experience taught me that the more we expect of children, the more they can do,” he said in a 2008 interview with U.S. News & World Report, which named him one of America’s best leaders.
An early academic standout, he skipped two grades and graduated from high school at age 15. Four years later he graduated from Hampton Institute with the highest honors in mathematics. He received his master’s in mathematics in 1971 and his Ph.D. in higher education administration and educational statistics in 1975 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
He is a member of several boards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is the co-author of “Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males.” In 2009, Time magazine named Hrabowski one of America’s 10 best college presidents.
Susan Lindquist
Doctor of Science
Understanding how malformed proteins affect the human body, and how they are involved in evolution, is the realm of biologist Susan Lindquist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lindquist, an authority on the complex molecular phenomenon called protein folding, explores how misfolded proteins play a role in diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. She uses yeast-based models of such protein-folded diseases to develop new approaches to therapy.
One area of Lindquist’s research examines the “chaperone” heat shock proteins that assist in protein folding and help to buffer genetic mutations. When such chaperone systems are overwhelmed, misfolding and disease states can result. The former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research also has explored how such misfolded proteins affect some evolutionary changes.
“One implication of our work is that the protein-folding problem isn’t always a problem,” notes Lindquist’s lab home page. “The very same types of misfoldings that cause dreadful diseases in some circumstances can have beneficial effects in others. The protein-folding problem is as ancient as life itself; it makes sense that evolution would occasionally, perhaps even often, use it to advantage.”
As a Radcliffe Fellow in 2007-08, Lindquist continued her investigations into the connections between genomics and medicine.
Lindquist received her undergraduate degree in microbiology from the University of Illinois in 1971. She received her Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1976. In 1999 she was named the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences at the University of Chicago.
Her awards include the Dickson Prize in Medicine, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Otto-Warburg Prize, and the Genetics Society of America Medal. She is an associate member of the Broad Institute, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She is the co-founder of the Cambridge-based FoldRx Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Thomas Nagel
Doctor of Laws
American philosopher of the mind Thomas Nagel is known for “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” This rumination on the idea of consciousness — and the limits of science for explaining it — was published in the October 1974 issue of The Philosophical Review.
The article articulates a central concern of Nagel, who said that humans instinctually want to make sense of the world, but adopting a unified, purely objective worldview can lead to error. In fact, relying on scientific objectivity alone leaves out some essential component of understanding ourselves.
Since 1980, Nagel has taught at New York University, where he is University Professor of Philosophy and Law. His other interests include political philosophy and ethics. He published his first philosophy paper in 1959 and his first book, “The Possibility of Altruism,” in 1970. Subsequent books include “Moral Questions” (1979), “What Does It All Mean?” (1987), “The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice” (2002, with Liam Murphy), and the recent “Secular Philosophy and Religious Temperament” (2009), a book of essays.
Nagel was born in 1937 in Belgrade, in present-day Serbia, and as a young child moved to the United States. He earned a B.A. in 1958 from Cornell University, a B.Phil. from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1960, and a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he was a student of philosopher John Rawls, in 1963.
He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, (1963-66) and at Princeton University (1966-80) and has lectured at Stanford, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Yale universities. In 2008, Nagel received both the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy and the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.
Nagel is a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2008, he received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford.
David G. Nathan
Doctor of Science
David G. Nathan, the Robert A. Stranahan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, former physician-in-chief at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital, and former president of the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has had a career of discovery, teaching, and leadership that has not only pushed back the frontiers of knowledge of blood-based disorders but also fostered a generation of leaders who are guiding the field into the future.
Nathan, who graduated from Harvard College in 1951 and from Harvard Medical School in 1955, is an authority on blood disorders. His discoveries have shed light on anemia and the hemoglobin disorder thalassemia. He won the National Medal of Science in 1990 “for his contributions to the understanding of the pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of thalassemia; for his contributions to the understanding of disorders of red cell permeability; for his contributions to the understanding of the regulation of erythropoiesis; and for his contributions to the training of a generation of hematologists and oncologists.”
Nathan has won many awards and honors over his career, including the John Howland Medal of the American Pediatric Society and the Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians. He is one of three physicians to win both.
Nathan’s medical career began as an intern and senior resident at what was then the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He spent two years as a clinical associate at the National Cancer Institute. From 1959 to 1966, he was a hematologist at Brigham Hospital, and then became chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 1985, he was physician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital, a position he held until 1995, when he was named president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He served as Dana-Farber’s president until 2000.
He is the author of “Hematology of Infancy and Childhood,” which is the leading text in the field.
The Baroness Onora O’Neill of Bengarve
Doctor of Laws
Scholar and politician Onora O’Neill, Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, studied philosophy, psychology, and physiology at Oxford University before earning her philosophy doctorate at Harvard in 1969.
Her mentor and dissertation adviser was American philosopher John Rawls, the one-time James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard whose signature work, “A Theory of Justice” is still a primary text in political philosophy.
A native of Northern Ireland, O’Neill has written widely and influentially on political philosophy and ethics, as well as on international justice, bioethics, media ethics, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant. Her work concerns issues of trust, consent, and respect for autonomy, in particular in the context of complex medical decision-making.
A veteran instructor at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, she teaches philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she was principal at Newnham College from 1992 to 2006.
O’Neill is the author of seven books and co-author of an eighth. Her works include “Acting on Principle” (1975), “Towards Justice and Virtue” (1996), “Bounds of Justice” (2000), and “Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics” (2001), the last being her Gifford Lectures in book form. (The prestigious Gifford Lectures, a tradition at Scottish universities, are designed to explore the idea of “natural theology,” that is, theology supported by science.)
O’Neill, a life peer, is a “crossbench” (nonparty) member of the British House of Lords. She has served on committees concerning stem cell research, genomic medicine, and nanotechnology and food.
O’Neill’s advisory work reflects her academic interests. In the United Kingdom, she has been a member of the Animal Procedures Committee, the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which she chairs.
Richard Serra
Doctor of Arts
Minimalist sculptor and experimental video artist Richard Serra is famous for his monumental works in steel — a favorite medium — and for his experimental films, beginning with “Hand Catching Lead” in 1968. He is associated with the process art movement of the mid-1960s. It celebrates the serendipity of art (the drip painting of Jackson Pollock, for instance) as well as the process of making art (rather than the art itself).
His first sculptures in the 1960s were made out of nontraditional materials such as fiberglass, neon, and rubber. But he soon graduated to his lifelong fascination with metals.
Born in 1939, Serra worked at steel mills to support himself while studying English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received a bachelor’s degree. From 1961 to 1964, Serra studied painting at Yale University, earning both a B.F.A. and an M.F.A.
From 1968 to 1970, he executed a series of “splash pieces” in which molten lead was splashed against walls. Serra moved to “prop pieces,” metal sculptures held together solely by balance and the force of gravity. In 1970, Serra began experimenting with large-scale sculptures that played off urban landscapes. Many were made of spirals and curving lines — counterpoints to the right angles that dominate city skylines.
He is best known for his looming minimalist constructions made from rolls of Cor-Ten steel. They were once dismissed as artifacts from an arrogant art world. Serra’s 120-foot-long Tilted Arc, installed in Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1981, was dismantled eight years later. But in 2007, The New York Times called Serra “a titan of sculpture, one of the last great modernists.” That year, four massive sculptures with the same whimsical curves were the centerpieces of a Serra retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Meryl Streep
Doctor of Arts
Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep has won fans around the world and the acting industry’s highest awards for her versatility, her ability to master accents and personas, and her ease with both dramatic and comedic roles.
Considered one of the country’s greatest living actresses, Streep has been nominated 16 times for an Oscar, winning two, and 25 times for a Golden Globe, winning seven. She is the most nominated performer for either award.
Born in New Jersey in 1949, Streep’s initial artistic interest was opera, but she eventually gravitated toward theater, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in drama from Vassar College in 1971. She earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama in 1975.
Her early career involved the New York stage and included work with the New York Shakespeare Festival, as well as on Broadway. In 1978 she won an Emmy Award for her role in the television miniseries “Holocaust.”
Streep’s movie career blossomed with her role in the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter.” She received her first Academy Award nomination and has worked steadily in films since.
Two years later she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role as a struggling mother in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and won for best actress in 1983 for her portrayal of a tormented Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice.”
Streep’s other films include “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Out of Africa,” “Silkwood,” “The River Wild,” “Adaptation,” “The Hours,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” and “Julie and Julia.”
Streep also is an environmental health activist. In 1989 she helped to found Mothers and Others, a consumer group advocating sustainable agriculture and increased pesticide regulations.
Among her many honors are a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute.
— Compiled by Corydon Ireland, Alvin Powell, and Colleen Walsh
“Language is identity, language is history, language is culture, language is education, and language is a bridge between the past, present, and future,” said Marcus Briggs-Cloud, a graduating master’s student at Harvard Divinity School, addressing a recent meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Whenever he introduces himself, Briggs-Cloud does so in Maskoke, a melodic language now spoken by only a few thousand people.
Language has been a key to the Florida native’s understanding of his cultural identity and of his ancestors’ fractured history. Using his master of theological studies degree, Briggs-Cloud hopes to preserve his native language, and build a bridge of knowledge and support for the Maskoke Nation.
For his undergraduate education, the son of the Wind Clan people and grandson of the Bird Clan people chose the University of Oklahoma, partly because of its indigenous studies program, but also to explore the genealogical and cultural connections to the descendants of his ancestors who had been displaced by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
“I wanted to see if the language and the ceremonial continuity was there from what was familiar to me, what we had maintained in Florida, even though we had been separated for 170 years.”
Briggs-Cloud described a moving meeting with relatives of his great-great-grandfather, George Cloud.
“It was an evocative encounter for me,” he recalled, “especially since my great-aunt, who just died at the age of 96, always wondered, with immense emotional pain, if her people ever made it westward on that long road of suffering.”
In Oklahoma, Briggs-Cloud also found something else, a young urban Indian population sadly out of touch with its heritage. “They don’t know where they come from,” he said. “None of them are speakers of their language, and they are mostly disconnected from their communities.”
According to Briggs-Cloud, the disconnect is largely a product of the federal government’s effort during the 19th and 20th centuries to remove Native American Indian children from their homes and educate them in Christian boarding schools.
By the time the practice finally ended in the 1970s, he said, generations of indigenous peoples had been affected, with many suffering from “post-traumatic stress.” Parents no longer wanted to speak their native language or teach it to their children for fear of social repercussions. The critical sense of community that a language helps to foster, said Briggs-Cloud, frequently dissolved in a haze of alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, and even suicide.
He stayed at the University of Oklahoma after graduation, teaching Maskoke language and philosophy in the university’s anthropology department, counseling high school Indian youth, and working with organizations that support indigenous communities. His hope was to mobilize grassroots projects around community engagement — but there were obstacles.
“The irony is that my own people would listen to an anthropologist from Harvard before they would listen to our own elders,” said Briggs-Cloud, a slender young man who wears his dark hair in a long braid and a turquoise earring in each ear to represent balance. “The only thing for me to do was to get that credential. So I applied to only one school.”
Harvard Divinity School allowed him to “really do what I wanted to do,” he said: “liberation theology, decolonization, gender theory — those kinds of areas that I am interested in.”
Building on his Harvard work, Briggs-Cloud developed a curriculum for the course he plans to teach back in Oklahoma at the College of the Muscogee Nation. It involves a critical analysis of theories on decolonization, gender, politics, and epistemology, as well as the theology and philosophy of the Maskoke people. Instrumental to the course will be studying language.
“The decolonization of the mind for indigenous peoples begins with language acquisition,” said Briggs-Cloud. “All of our worldviews are encompassed in our respective languages.”
While at Harvard, he took part in forums in the Harvard University Native American Program, and helped to organize its annual powwow. He was also closely involved with the Harvard Indian Intertribal Dance Troupe.
A self-taught musician, Briggs-Cloud plays the piano, violin, and hand drum, and is an accomplished singer with an album “Pum Vculvke Vrakkuecetv” (“To Honor Our Elders”) to his credit. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a Ph.D. closer to home in Oklahoma, where he now resides. Life on the East Coast has taken him too far away from his community and his tribal duties, he said, which include leading ceremonial dances and songs.
“My ceremonial ground is there,” said Briggs-Cloud. “That’s where my priorities are.”
When Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) President Teresita Alvarez-Bjelland ’76, M.B.A. ’79, took office last year, she had a specific goal in mind: bring together the network of Harvard alumni worldwide to highlight the important role that public service plays in the Harvard community. Over the past year, the HAA joined with thousands of alumni, students, and faculty to celebrate Harvard’s long-standing commitment to public service.
“Service is a unifying cause for alumni,” said Alvarez-Bjelland. “As the umbrella organization for all Harvard alumni, the HAA focuses on public service that enables us to participate in worthy projects while also showcasing University-wide initiatives.” Alvarez-Bjelland, who is the HAA’s first Hispanic president and only the second international leader in the role, emphasized the need for Harvard’s continued commitment to service, not just in Cambridge, but nationally and abroad. During her tenure, she met with alumni around the world and spoke with students on campus, spreading the message about public service opportunities available through the HAA.
Under the banner “Harvard Serves,” the HAA worked through the year on public service initiatives, including a “Global Month of Service” in April. The HAA travel office integrated this theme into its activities, collaborating with the Phillips Brooks House Association-Alumni (PBHA-A) on a service trip to New Orleans. In addition, the HAA Alumni Education office partnered with the PBHA-A to develop a series of Cambridge-based panel discussions that featured Harvard alumni working toward positive social change.
To spotlight Harvard’s commitment to public service while making use of new technologies, the HAA partnered with the Harvard Office of Public Affairs and Communications to create “Public Service on the Map” an interactive Web site where members of the Harvard community list their public service activities and connect with others engaged in public service. Launched as a beta test in April, the map already lists hundreds of public service activities, from all Schools, and on six continents.
“For me,” said Alvarez-Bjelland, “it has truly been an inspiring year. Alumni around the world embraced the theme of public service, from recent graduates to alumni who have never been actively engaged with the HAA before.”
Incoming HAA President Robert R. Bowie Jr. ’73 plans to continue strengthening the alumni community by exploring some untapped power in the Harvard network. He believes that members of Harvard’s alumni community “are instantly part of a worldwide network of shared experiences and a common history. The HAA is a platform for leveraging the power of that network to help one another, to support lifelong learning, and to engage with the University.”
Bowie, a founding member of the law firm Bowie & Jensen LLC and an active participant in the HAA, has served as vice president of both the University-wide and College clusters, as a member-at-large of the executive committee, and as co-chair of the schools and scholarship committee. He is the current first vice president of the HAA. He is also a playwright and poet.
Alvarez-Bjelland highlighted key attributes that Bowie will bring to the HAA. “Bob is a loyal alum with years of involvement,” she said. “His dedication and his drive will strengthen the HAA and bring the alumni closer together.”
Bowie looks forward to continuing his collaboration with Alvarez-Bjelland in the coming year, as well as with the other past HAA presidents on the executive committee, the HAA board, committees, and staff. “Teresita has included me in a very generous way throughout the past year,” said Bowie, “and I am grateful to be able to draw on the wealth of resources that she and all of the past HAA presidents bring to the HAA.”
Bowie plans to combine his commitment to Harvard with his passion for storytelling in the coming year, collecting and sharing alumni experiences through engagement activities across the HAA. These stories will highlight the unique, yet inextricably linked, threads that alumni contribute to Harvard’s social fabric and emphasize the untapped resources that each alumnus/alumna’s experience can provide. The HAA will serve as a conduit through which the diverse members of the alumni community can enrich their own connections with the University and with one another.
