“Sometimes there’s a myth that you can’t compete in Division 1 football and aspire to things like medical school,’’ Crimson coach Tim Murphy said as he prepared for the 126th Harvard-Yale spectacle. “We’re very fortunate to have a bunch of kids doing it. It’s a great tradition…’’

Read more here (The Boston Globe)

Climate change from the burning of fossil fuels will add to risks to public health, said Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment in Boston. The center and groups led by the American Medical Association are presenting data at a briefing today in Washington as a call for action to curb emissions…

Read more here (Bloomberg)

After last week’s contest, where a Harvard win would have clinched at least a share of the Ivy League Championship, the Crimson now stand in second place. They need to defeat Yale and hope that Cornell (2-7; 1-5 Ivy League) upsets Penn (7-2; 6-0 Ivy League) to clinch a share of their third-straight conference title and 14th overall.

Harvard has won seven of the past eight games against the Bulldogs, and holds a 52-65-8 record in the historic series. In Harvard’s back-to-back championship years, both titles were clinched with victories over the Bulldogs.

Saturday’s contest at the Yale Bowl begins at noon and will be nationally televised on Versus TV, with radio broadcasts on 1120 AM (Boston), 1390 AM (Plymouth), 970 AM (Sturbridge), the Harvard student radio station, WHRB-FM 95.3, and Sirius Satellite Radio.

For 500 years, books have been inviting readers into contained worlds that imply the possibility of mastery. But the Internet invites them into a world of hyperlinks. They explode the notion of containment and make mastery of all but the narrowest inquiries impossible.

This expansive, open age of digital information challenges the traditions of scholarship, learning, and even the act of reading. So what will be the fate of higher education in the digital age?

That was the subject of a Harvard panel on Wednesday (Nov. 18), “No More Teachers? No More Books?” It is the first of four such sponsored panels this academic year by the Harvard Extension School, which celebrates its 100th year in February.

The panel included Harry Lewis, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science; David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor; Craig Silverstein ’94, the director of technology at Google; and Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

The Extension School itself is a case study in how the Internet is transforming higher education. This year one-third of Extension enrollees, in more than 120 countries, are taking online courses.

The intent of Extension was “to share Harvard’s learning with the surrounding community,” said Lewis, the panel’s moderator. Now that surrounding community “is the entire world.”

Lewis is co-author of “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (2008). Shaken by the digital age, people have reached “some kind of cusped time,” he said, in which they are coping with ubiquitous information and new social forces that have grown up around the Internet.

People are not at the cusp yet because “we’re still using books,” said Weinberger, a media philosopher. He described books as a “disconnected medium,” the kind of containment no longer honored in an age of hyperlinks. Authors no longer decide where a topic stops. Readers do, as they click freely through layers of links.

Books also imply a world of knowledge in which experts filter and choose, said Weinberger, author of “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder” (2007). But the Internet means embracing a “new strategy” for learning, he said, with a philosophy of “Include everything; filter on the way out.”

Books also imply that knowledge is mastered, said Weinberger, but the Internet is a loose-edged world.

Weinberger showed his training as a philosopher in discussing a revolutionary truth about learning on the Internet. Its layers and links show us “there’s always been an argument about what’s been said.” That is, the Internet is a continual challenge to authority.

As for higher education, universities will remain places — physical entities — in the digital age, said Weinberger. Their material reality will not be “leached away” by the Internet. The learning process will benefit from the knowledge-sharing ethos of the Internet and by its tendency to “fill every interstice” of inquiry, he said, which is “pretty good news for higher education.”

But wait a minute, countered Darnton, a historian as well as library leader. The book is not dead.

“The old-fashioned print codex is doing very well, thank you,” turning out something like a million new titles a year worldwide, he said. Darnton is the author of “The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future” (2009) and is a cautionary critic on leaping too fast into the digital age.

Not all knowledge can be captured in bytes, just as not all knowledge was ever captured in books, he believes, and the best future will be one in which the digital and the traditional coexist.

The digital age brings with it “a period of enormous confusion … a new world in which we need guidance,” said Darnton. That’s good news for the idea of “teachers and books,” he said, the “two implements” of traditional learning that must be embraced with new attention.

Meanwhile, there is reason to worry about print-digitization projects such as Google Books. Technicians scanning texts may use wrong editions, miss pages or volumes, or employ arbitrary categories for the finished, digitized books. Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Darnton said, “comes up under gardening.”

A bigger worry, he said, is that so much information winds up in the hands of a “corporate monopoly.” Despite glitches, the Google project is “so good” that it should not be in private hands, said Darnton. “It should be harnessed for the public good.”

Sitting next to Darnton was Silverstein, who was Google’s first employee, and who right away said he was “trained by lawyers” not to say anything about Google Books.

But he offered insights into the role of universities in the digital age. Higher education does a good job of imparting technical knowledge, but only in a work environment do people pick up “ancillary skills related to a group environment,” said Silverstein. “You can do well (in school) without learning these other skills.”

Software engineering, for instance, is more than computer science, he said. It involves “testing and programming in a group environment,” and using the social skills that make the transfer of knowledge easier.

Silverstein used the example of a graduate student who wrote software code that worked well but was written in such a way that no one else could understand it. Survival in the workplace requires not just technical skills, but “awareness of the environment you are in.”

Google is aware that the world of the classroom should be supplemented by the workplace, he said, citing the company’s “Summer of Code.” Since 2005, Google has sponsored about 1,500 student software developers. They are given three-month stipends to write code for open-source projects, under the guidance of mentors.

“I’m excited to see where that takes us,” said Silverstein.

In the classroom, the digital age is changing the way that people think, read, and learn in a university environment, said panelist Turkle.

Meanwhile, the digital boom has also created its own myths, she said, including the “myth of multitasking.” Despite our embrace of “volume and velocity,” said Turkle, “when you multitask, you do everything worse.” Ironically, the digital age has brought with it a new imperative to slow down and take some time.

Another myth is that simulation is the best way to learn, Turkle said, but “simulation reality will always leave something out,” including a sense of scale and the necessity to doubt (and not just love) technology.

Sitting in front of computers, wowed by what they see, people “learn to take things at interface value,” often at the expense of focusing on the real. Turkle said that what gets lost is a skill long associated with higher education: critical thinking.

In the world of digital information, she said, “We must approach our tools with the appropriate doubt.”

“If you want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the church pulpit,” said Moreton, quoting the executive director of the Christian Coalition from 1995. “But if you want to reach them on Saturday, you do it at Walmart.”

Moreton, author of “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard University Press, 2009), was on campus Tuesday (Nov. 17) to explore the ideological foundation behind the company’s corporate ethos, one that she said has successfully fueled the megacorporation’s bottom line.

She appeared at Harvard Divinity School as part of its Business Across Religious Traditions colloquium series.

The connection, she said, is largely the product of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who started the discount retail chain in Arkansas in 1962, and gradually tapped into the strong fundamentalist Christian culture across the Sun Belt.

Moreton, assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Georgia, said Walton worked into the company’s corporate structure the notion of “service leadership” that ties worker roles into the concept that “Christ was a servant leader,” and emphasizes the importance in Christian tradition of serving others.

With this vision, said Moreton, men at the company “earned their power through their superior ability to serve,” while women had “an enthusiastic audience for labor that was formally considered unskilled.”

Even an ongoing sex-discrimination case against Walmart illustrated the strong religious connection many of its employees associate with the company. Many of the plaintiffs in Dukes v. Walmart Stores Inc., a class-action discrimination suit filed in 2000 that alleged that the firm offered women fewer promotions and lower pay than men, admitted to an initial strong attraction to Walmart’s “values.”

According to Moreton, citing a story on the suit that appeared in The Nation, the plaintiffs’ “original enthusiasm for their jobs had much to do with Walmart’s reputation as a pro-family, Christian company.”

Another critical element of Walmart’s success, she said, was Walmart’s savvy ability to connect into the underlying social structure of Christian families.

In the 1980s, during regular business meetings with Walmart managers and their spouses, Walmart’s director of family living spoke on the changed relationships between husbands and wives, which were, Moreton noted, “fundamental to the company’s business model.”

Meeting attendees were told, “Men should start expressing their appreciation to their overburdened wives. After all, hadn’t they been motivated this very weekend by Sam Walton’s thanks for their own hard work at Walmart? Did they in turn show that appreciation to their wives? Did they show it to the women working in the stores?”

The message, Moreton said, picked up on the notion of the Christian model of “headship” and submission in Christian marriage with a similar one developing in secular management texts. It then married them “within a service workplace.”

Akpan joins the ranks of past recipients Charles Altchek ’07 (2005, 2006), Thomas McLaughlin ’98 (1997), and William Kohler ’97 (1996). The Grand Prairie, TX. native, who was named Ivy Rookie of the Year in 2006, also becomes the first Harvard player to win both Ivy Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year honors, and the fourth overall.

Akpan, who was also named to the Top Drawer Soccer National Team of the Year (Nov. 19), finished the regular season first in the league in nearly every statistical category, holds the Harvard career points (33) and assists (123) records, and is two goals behind Chris Ohiri’s ’64 goals-scored record (47) going into the NCAA tournament.

Freshman forward Brian Rogers received the Ivy Rookie of the Year and second-team All-Ivy honors. Rogers is the sixth Harvard freshman to win the award. Rogers, who was named Ivy Rookie of the Week twice this season, assisted on three game-winning goals this season in addition to tallying three game winners.

Rounding out league honors were Crimson defenders Kwaku Nyamekye ’10 (first team) and Richard Smith ’13 (second team), and midfielders Brian Grimm ’10 (second team) and Alex Chi ’11 (honorable mention).

On Sunday (Nov. 22), Harvard will host the second round of the NCAA tournament, playing the winner of Friday’s (Nov. 20) match between Monmouth and the University of Connecticut. Game time is 1 p.m.

Read more here (USA Today)

That “simple truth,” as he called it, has strong political implications. Power in the future — “a lasting majority,” said Coleman — will go to whichever party stakes “a legitimate claim to independents [and] welcomes its center-right people along with its most hard-core members.”

Republicans and Democrats alike have hard-core elements in the far left and right, Coleman told the crowd at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. But it is important to be welcoming to moderates, to the practical, reformist core that has guided American politics since Abraham Lincoln.

Coleman, who served in the U.S. Senate from 2003-09, acknowledged that Republicans have sometimes failed to welcome youth, women, Hispanics, and gays. “We have to do a better job of reaching out … if we expect to be a majority party,” he said. Failing that, added Coleman, Republicans could one day find themselves “a regional party” sequestered in limited geographic strongholds.

In particular, the Republican Party should be attractive to college-age voters, who seem so “in control of their lives” and attracted to individual initiative, he said. “The philosophy of conservatives really is more in line with the reality of your generation. I just don’t think we’ve done a good job of articulating it.”

One year into the Obama era, political shifts may be under way. Coleman parsed the recent Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, both close contests that went to the Republican candidates who attracted independent swing votes. He added that recent national polls show for the first time in 12 years that people believe government is “doing too much.”

The former senator and onetime mayor of St. Paul, Minn., is a fellow this week (Nov. 16-20) at the Institute of Politics (IOP), which sponsored the event. IOP Director Bill Purcell — himself a former mayor of Nashville —described his colleague as “a voice of moderation with a pragmatic approach to problem-solving.”

In running a city, “you learn to be responsive,” said Coleman, right down to taking calls about snow plowing. He described his city hall experience as gritty and valuable, even though it occupies “the bottom of the political food chain.”

Coleman’s St. Paul tenure demonstrates his political journey. He was first elected mayor as a Democrat in 1994, and the second time as a Republican in 1998.

Coleman, a onetime anti-war activist at Hofstra University on Long Island, earlier attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Some of its famous graduates are on the political left, including U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Coleman joked that he “never met a Republican until I went to college. There weren’t any.”

But in the 1990s, as a former state prosecutor struggling to revive St. Paul as mayor, Coleman discovered that his business-oriented, reformist urges were better expressed in the Republican Party. He went from being Democrat Bill Clinton’s state campaign representative in 1996 to Republican George W. Bush’s in 2000.

After what Coleman described as “six turbulent years” in the Senate, his thesis — that the United States is at its core a center-right nation — came into greater focus. He enumerated the main points of that thesis to an audience that interrupted him with occasional bursts of applause.

The center-right doesn’t mind government action as long as “effectiveness and results” are the endpoints, said Coleman. “They want government action that has good bang for the buck.”

Health care reform is a good example, he said. There is broad national consensus to bring costs into line and to maintain quality, but reform has to have practical meaning, said Coleman. “Folks in center-right America want reform, but they want it to work.” Meanwhile, he said, the same people, who he said tend to be modest and frugal, want to see their tax dollars spent with care.

The center-right core also has a vision of economic prosperity driven by innovation and individual effort, not by government intervention, said Coleman. “They embrace an entrepreneurial spirit rather than a collectivist vision.”

For dramatic effect, he recited a list of addresses: all garages where big companies started small, including Disney, Ford, and Hewlett Packard.

That same center-right core “trusts markets that usually work, over government regulation that occasionally does,” Coleman said, and it measures progress in job creation.

Beyond economics, the core center-right believes that the American judiciary is meant to interpret laws, said Coleman, “not use its power to make social changes that legislatures are unwilling to do.”

Yes, social issues generate the most heated public debates, he said, including cultural turbulence over gay marriage, abortion, and the right to bear arms.

But even within this national clash over values, consensus is possible and necessary, if the United States is to maintain its national security. Coleman quoted onetime Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who described politics as “the art of the possible.” And he praised the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose senatorial skills involved friendship and “finding common ground.”

On foreign policy, center-right beliefs maintain that “we are exceptional in the world” and that Americans “use strength as the path to peace,” said Coleman, though they harbor no illusions of perfection.

That sense of being exceptional includes a sense of American national pride and dignity, one that is offended to see a president bow to “the emperor of Japan or the king of Saudi Arabia,” said Coleman. “Courtesy is one thing, but we don’t willingly surrender, even symbolically, [to the idea] that they are better than us.”

Coleman’s sense of the nation’s place in the world was unapologetic. “We still believe Lincoln’s words,” said Coleman of the center-right, “that America is ‘the last best hope of Earth,’ and I think our leaders should behave accordingly.”

The Senate is a place where friendship is possible, he said, but where consensus and action are often difficult.

Coleman gave an example, citing a bipartisan attempt he was part of to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and to give nations like Iran and Venezuela “less bark and less bite.” What has to be done is clear, he said. America needs more conservation, more renewable energy, more environmentally safe energy exploration, and more nuclear power.

It’s also a time for new Lincolns, he said. Coleman called the 16th president “the hero of the center-right” for refusing to embrace political expediency in favor of “enduring values.”

Lincoln had one other quality shared by the enduring core of the center-right, said Coleman. “He dreamed great dreams.”

Maxine Savitz, vice president of the National Academy of Engineering, former deputy assistant secretary for conservation in the U.S. Department of Energy, and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said the energy efficiency gained through new technologies in buildings, cars, and industry could reduce energy use as much as 30 percent by 2030.

Savitz, who spoke at the Science Center as part of the Harvard University Center for the Environment’s (HUCE) Future of Energy lecture series on Nov. 17, presented the results of reports by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering that assessed technology’s potential to transform the nation’s energy production, distribution, and use.

The reports conclude, Savitz said, that the United States needs a concerted and sustained energy approach, but that potential efficiencies from technology in buildings, transportation, and industry could cut energy consumption 15 percent by 2020 and 30 percent by 2030. The savings from heating, cooling, lighting, and other building systems alone could counterbalance the projected growth in energy consumption through 2030, meaning that no new power plants would be needed. In addition, Savitz said, those estimates were calculated assuming that people continue their everyday behavior. Savings from conservation-related behavior change — such as walking to work instead of driving, turning the thermostat down, and wearing heavier clothes at home — were not included in those calculations and could potentially add significantly to energy savings.

“Deploying existing energy-efficient technology is the nearest term and lowest-cost option,” Savitz said.

Savitz, a retired general manager of technology partnerships for Honeywell Inc., also lamented the country’s shift away from energy efficiency during the 1980s. In response to a question by HUCE Director Daniel Schrag, Savitz said that if the nation had maintained the savings momentum gained in the late 1970s, it would be far ahead on conserving energy now.

Savitz said the last couple of years have been exciting for those involved in energy conservation and efficiency, with public interest at levels not seen since the 1970s. The question, she said, is how long such interest will continue. Savitz said that any U.S. energy solutions will require a portfolio of changes across many fields, not just energy efficiency.

Savitz was part of the team that drafted the report on the potential for energy efficiency through technology, released earlier this year. Other subcommittees looked at power generation from renewable energy sources and at the potential for using coal and biomass to create liquid transportation fuels.

There are several promising options for new electricity supplies, Savitz said, including nuclear power plants that utilize novel technology, coal plants with carbon capture and sequestration technology, and increased use of wind power. Renewables provide just 8 or 9 percent of the nation’s energy, with most of that from hydropower. The United States could draw 20 percent of its power from wind, she said, but that would require a major investment, including building 100,000 turbines at a cost of $100 billion for capital improvements.

There are few immediate alternatives to using gasoline for liquid transportation, Savitz said. Fuel use is projected to reach about 15 million barrels a day by 2035, and just 2.5 million barrels can reasonably be expected to come from clean biofuels or liquid-coal technology.

“We’re going to be using petroleum fuels for a long time in the transportation sector,” Savitz said.

The United States has proven in the past that it can increase energy efficiency, Savitz said. Consumption rose continuously until the 1970s, when it leveled off, before beginning to grow again, increasing 40 percent in the decades since. Now, 40 percent of the nation’s energy goes to light, heat, cool, and otherwise run buildings. Transportation uses another 28 percent, while industry uses 33 percent.

Though the U.S. economy has become more energy-efficient in recent years, it still uses about twice as much energy per dollar of gross domestic product as European economies, Savitz said. Greater energy efficiency is possible for a host of building systems and appliances, in both residential and industrial settings. Savitz cited possible improvements in everything from television sets to heating and cooling systems to windows to clothes washers to lighting, for which new light-emitting diode bulbs are poised to reduce energy consumption even from that of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Savitz used the example of the refrigerator to illustrate the potential for savings from energy efficiency. Refrigerators in 1947 averaged eight cubic feet and used 400 kilowatt hours of electricity. Refrigerators grew in both size and energy consumption through the 1970s, when their energy use began to decline. That dip continues, and now, although they’re much larger at roughly 22 cubic feet, they use only slightly more energy than they did more than half a century ago.

Though there is great promise of savings from energy efficiency, there are barriers to adopting these technologies too, Savitz said, including lack of information, problems with capital availability, regulatory policies, ownership status, and the uncertain psychological factors involved in making people embrace change.

That last issue has gotten the least attention, Savitz said, but is a significant variable. You only have to consider why consumers suddenly changed driving and car-buying habits when gas prices topped $4 a gallon to understand how significant and difficult to predict it can be.

“How do people make decisions? Why at $4 do people drive less, but at $3 they don’t?” Savitz asked.

Cochran (1909-80), a Glasgow native, was one of the founding members of Harvard’s Statistics Department in 1957. To this day, he is one of the best-known names in the science of planning, collecting, and analyzing numerical data.

His modern colleagues at Harvard — some of them former students and collaborators — sponsored a symposium Nov. 14 in honor of Cochran’s scholarship and centenary year.

His book “Experimental Design,” co-authored in 1950 with Gertrude Cox, shook the world of the still-young science. So did his next volume, “Sampling Techniques,” in 1953.

Cochran and Cox “were like gods,” said Tirthankar Dasgupta, an assistant professor of statistics at Harvard, one of nearly 100 attendees at the symposium, held at Tsai Auditorium. In the audience too was presenter Robert Groves, director of the U.S. Census Bureau and an admirer of Cochran’s work in statistics, which he called both rich and humanizing.

Celebrating alongside the scholars were the fabled researcher’s younger daughter, Teresa “Tessa” Cochran, a Virginia psychologist, and his only son, Alexander “Sandy” Cochran, a retired executive living in Florida.

They brought along a family album, which at the end of the session flashed on a big screen like a slide show. Included were photos of Cochran as a young man in plus fours, another of him and Cox improbably in chef’s aprons, and group shots of the great minds of statistics from decades ago. Said Harvard department chair Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, “That’s like a Who’s Who to us.”

Tessa remembered growing up in a strict household, but one where a good joke had its place. The signature sound of her childhood, she said, was the chunk-chunk of the heavy carriage on a Monroe calculator, a hand-cranked paperless precursor to the computer.

Her mother Betty had a doctorate in biology, so the parents were intimidating intellectually. When she faltered during a homework assignment, Tessa remembered her father’s statistical reminder of “regression towards the mean.”

The greats of modern statistics were visitors to the Cochran household, and all possessed “a foreign language,” remembered Sandy, a one-time mathematics major who confessed to flunking statistics. When the family was in Princeton during World War II, they lived next door to Albert Einstein, who on leaving for work would often pat 3-year-old Sandy on the head. His mother teased him for years after that “none of it rubbed off.”

Witty in person and concise on paper, Cochran is best known for his contributions to all three common forms of collecting statistical data, according to Meng: experiments, sample surveys, and observational studies.

The three forms differ in degree of control. The more control in the data-collection stage means an easier analysis stage. That means more control over what experts like Meng call “valid statistical inference.” Statistics, after all, is largely the search for causality, as it can be inferred from large universes of data.

With experiments, researchers have the most control, as in clinical drug trials, where researchers decide which patients get a drug and which get a placebo. With sample surveys they have less control, said Meng, but at least a researcher can decide where the data comes from. Researchers can take a random sampling of hospitals, for instance, and then in turn a random sampling of patients in each hospital.

With observational studies, the researcher typically has no control. Data is simply collected as it comes in, from patients at a particular hospital, for instance. Without care, the “confounding factors” in observational studies can suggest misleading results. Yes, cigarette smokers get lung cancer more often than nonsmokers — but other factors may obscure causality: age, occupation, environment, and so on.

Among other things, Cochran was an expert in taking observational data and filtering it mathematically in order to make statistical inferences more powerful. He was the only statistician on the 10-member scientific advisory committee for a 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s report concluding that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer.

There were five nonsmokers on the panel and five smokers, by design. Cochran was the only one of the smokers who did not quit after the report’s appearance. At age 55, Cochran calculated that his chances of getting lung cancer were 40 percent, compared with 24 percent for a former smoker. “The comfort of my cigarettes,” he concluded, outweighs the 16 percent increase in risk.

But despite his personal decision, Cochran’s work went on to save millions of lives in the decades since, said Allan M. Brandt, author of “The Cigarette Century” (2007), a study of the rise and fall of U.S. cigarette consumption. (Brandt, a science historian, delivered the symposium’s opening remarks. He is dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.)

At the time of the 1964 report, 50 percent of all American adults smoked, said Brandt. Today that figure is closer to 20 percent.

He called the range of Cochran’s interests and contributions within statistics “astonishing.” During World War II, Cochran investigated the probability of hits in naval warfare and bombing raid strategies. He later employed statistical methods to assess the effects of radiation at Hiroshima and the efficacy of the Salk polio vaccine.

Famously, starting in 1950, Cochran and other statistics experts pored over the data for the Kinsey Report on sexual behavior in the human male. (Their conclusions, summarized in 1953 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, were largely supportive — though they cautioned readers they had no opinion on “orgasm as a measure of sexual behavior.”)

The Kinsey work wasn’t all work. Cochran and statistics legend Frederick Mosteller liked to sing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on their way back from lunch, and were once shushed by the famous Alfred C. Kinsey for being too loud. Mosteller, the first chair of Harvard’s Department of Statistics, died in 2006. But his posthumous memoir, “The Pleasures of Statistics,” will soon appear in print.

Cochran’s landmark contributions started in the 1930s at an agricultural experiment station in the English countryside. Eager for a job during the Great Depression and anxious to make a difference, he had given up Ph.D. studies in mathematics at Cambridge University to assess the effect of weather patterns on crop yields and other practical matters.

Investigations at the Rothamsted Experimental Station involved a world of sugar beets, barley, potatoes, eelworms, plowing depths, and soil amendments like chalk. To Cochran, it was a practical universe that inspired his early scholarship in statistics.

He published 18 papers in his five years there. The very first one established what is now known as “Cochran’s theorem,” which is just one of the reasons for his enduring fame. The theorem allows checking to see whether two statistical quantities are independent of each other — meaning that knowing one provides no information on the other. That simplifies the path to statistical inference by creating a “simpler condition” mathematically, said Meng.

When researchers study the contributing factors in a disease, for instance, a common question is often: Are genes a significant factor, or environment — or both? Cochran’s theorem helps to test if a particular factor is statistically significant.

There was a “Rothamsted influence” on Cochran’s work in experimental design, said University of Glasgow statistics professor Michael Titterington, who gave a presentation that included the right pronunciation for “Willy” Cochran’s childhood nickname: “Wully.”

Sequential and long-term field trials required complex methods for organization and tracking, which led to methods — like “lattice designs” — which later proved more broadly useful in statistics. Practical farming issues, which Cochran began studying in times of economic hardship, also reminded him that researchers have to guard against the risk of failure, said Titterington — that statistics experts have a responsibility not only to science but to the real world.

“He was intensely practical,” said Harvard’s John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics Donald Rubin of his former graduate adviser. During a colloquium presentation on observational studies, he recalled Cochran’s interruption during a conversation in the late 1960s: “Unless you give me an example of why it’s important, stop talking about it.”

The research team from Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston used information from 1,154 U.S. hospitals that contribute to the National Trauma Data Bank…

Read more here (Los Angeles Times)

“A new Fred Ho had to be born,” said the saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, and political activist of his “rebirth” after a successful three-year battle with colon cancer.

Ho addressed the audience as recipient of the fall 2009 Harvard Arts Medal, an honor “bestowed upon a distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alumnus or alumna, or faculty member who has achieved excellence in the arts and has made a contribution through the arts to education or the public good.”

A prolific author and composer, Ho is known for a unique musical style that fuses elements of traditional Chinese and African-American music with jazz to create a rich, multicultural, multidimensional sound. He has published several books and recorded more than 15 albums.

At the award ceremony, the artist and onetime Harvard Jazz Band member discussed his life and work with journalist and media commentator Callie Crossley of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Topics ranged from Ho’s approach to incorporating traditional forms of Eastern music — part of his Chinese-American heritage — into his compositions to his radical politics and his cancer diagnosis.

In response to a question about the place of politics in his music, Ho said, “I don’t see it as mechanical, as injecting politics into music. I see music and politics as inseparable. I see the best politics as a creative act, and the best music as art that shakes the world.”

In her remarks before presenting the medal, Dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds summed up Ho’s commitment to his art, saying, “Fred Ho has expanded musical definitions and experiences through the integration of Asian-American sensibilities and historical experiences. His music and aesthetic — his voice — are uniquely his, and there is no mistaking the fullness of that voice with any other.”

The Harvard Jazz Bands delivered a roiling performance the following evening (Nov. 14) in Lowell Lecture Hall, in a tribute to the honoree that included jazz works by composers such as Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Benny Carter.

But the night belonged to Ho and what he calls his “revolutionary earth music.” The concert featured the premiere of his piece, “Take the Zen Train,” which he performed with the Harvard Jazz Bands, as well as with three undergraduate dancers.

With his baritone saxophone sounding at times like a thumping base beat, at times like a screeching animal call from the wild, Ho led the student group through his 1975 piece “Liberation Genesis” and into “Take the Zen Train,” what he referred to in the program notes as his “journey to the future without any baggage, without any past or present predeterminations or preconditions.”

The performance was the culmination of a three-month residency sponsored by the Office for the Arts’ Learning From Performers program, during which Ho regularly traveled to campus from his home in New York City to work with students on his new piece. The work, commissioned by the Harvard Jazz Bands and the Office for the Arts, is a composition in six movements, and details Ho’s battle with colon cancer.

The dancers, covered in green body paint and sporting brightly colored tights and silk pants, performed in front of the musicians, incorporating three forms of movement: ballet, hip-hop, and the Chinese martial art Wushu.

Daniel Jáquez, who attended the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, staged the dance element of the composition and encouraged the students to improvise and copy each other’s styles and steps.

For the young musicians and dancers, the work was as rewarding as it was challenging.

“I am always interested in looking into the possibilities with movement and how that can be incorporated into my own means of expression,” said Shayna Skal ’13, one of the dancers. A classically trained ballerina, Skal said she loved how the piece challenged her to work “on things that are totally outside my comfort level.”

Alto saxophonist Maxwell Nwaru ’10, who performed two solos during Ho’s “Take the Zen Train,” admitted the piece took some getting used to.

“It definitely took us by surprise when we first looked at it,” said Nwaru of Ho’s unusual melodic and harmonic structures, rapidly changing tempos, and frequent use of “altered” and “diminished scales,” all departures from more conventional forms of jazz.

But over time and after playing with Ho, Nwaru called the final product “amazing” and said the music made him realize “you should never really take anything for granted; it’s a life lesson in many senses … you never know what’s out there.”

After the performance, Ho welcomed admirers and autograph seekers, thanked the young artists for their time and effort, and said the end result was more than he could have hoped.

“The magic of performance always should be beyond your wildest expectations, and that is what it was.”

Tom Lee of the Office for the Arts also contributed to this story.

Going into that game, both teams shared 6-2 records and were undefeated in conference play at 5-0.

Penn proved to be a tough challenge for the Crimson, and it didn’t take long for the Quakers to get on the scoreboard. On their opening drive, Penn scored the game’s first points on a 51-yard touchdown pass, taking a 7-0 lead.

Then, just as they did in the first quarter, the Quakers found the end zone to open the second, going up 14-0. Before the half ended, Penn added a field goal to make the score 17-0.

Harvard, who had difficulty moving the ball against the league’s top defense through most of the game, finally found the end zone late in the third quarter on a 45-yard touchdown pass to Chris Lorditch ’11. But those were the only points they could get, as the Crimson were shut out in the final quarter.

Harvard quarterback Collier Winters ’11, who went 10-23 for 135 yards passing and a touchdown, led the Crimson in rushing, with 57 yards on a career-high 18 carries.

On defense, junior defensive back Collin Zych led the Crimson defense with 10 tackles and two passes broken up.

The loss dropped Harvard to second in the league, one game behind Penn. For the Crimson to claim their third consecutive Ivy championship, they will need to win at Yale (4-5; 2-4 Ivy League) on Saturday (Nov. 21), and Penn will have to lose at home to last-place Cornell (2-7; 1-5 Ivy League).

Harvard and B.C. finished the first half scoreless, but 33 seconds into the second, B.C. broke the tie with a goal.

In such a low-scoring battle, the story of the game was defense. The Eagles only allowed one Crimson shot the entire game, whereas Harvard, which surrendered 20 shots, was led by goalkeeper Lauren Mann ’10, a Second Team Ivy League selection, who recorded 10 saves on the day.

The region’s second seed, B.C. (15-3-2) finished the regular season ranked No. 7 in the country. B.C. also defeated the Crimson earlier this season, 4-1, on Sept. 18, and has not lost to Harvard since 2002.

Although the loss ends the Crimson’s season (9-7-1; 6-1 Ivy League), the year still had its triumphs since Harvard won its second-consecutive Ivy League Championship (ninth overall) and saw six members of the team receive All-Ivy League honors: (first team) Katherine Sheeleigh ’11; (second team) Melanie Baskind ’12, Mann, Lindsey Kowal ’12, Lizzy Nichols ’10; and (honorable mention) Gina Wideroff ’11.

The findings surprised doctors and health experts, who have believed emergency room care was equitable.

“This is another drop in a sea of evidence that the uninsured fare much worse in their health in the United States,” said senior author Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and medical journalist…

Read more here (Associated Press)

From there, tight defensive play for Harvard was enough to hold off the Quakers, as the Crimson clinched their first Ivy League championship since 2006 (13th overall) and finished the regular season with the team’s best record in more than a decade.

Flight 006 clearing for takeoff

Baba Omosegbon '12 leaps over a fallen Penn player in pursuit of the ball.

Making necessary headway

Crimson midfielder Adam Rousmaniere '10 tries to put a head on the ball while fending off a defender.

Running toward the rock

In a mad dash for the ball, Harvard midfielder Desmond Mitchell '10 is too fast for his Penn counterpart.

Quality control

Crimson midfielder Robert Millock '11 controls the ball in front of a Penn player.

Passing through

Andre Akpan '10 moves swiftly down the field toward a Penn defender.

Put it on the board

Two-time Ivy Rookie of the Week Brian Rogers '13 celebrates after teammate Richard Smith '13 scores the game's only goal.

The impenetrable wall

A diving Austin Harms '12 makes one of two key saves on the day, earning his sixth shutout of the year in Harvard's 1-0 victory over Penn.

The victors

Erupting in cheers, the Harvard men's soccer team celebrates a hard-earned Ivy League Championship.

Bringing 'Ivy' back to Cambridge

Baba Omosegbon '12 (left) and Andre Akpan '10 share a joyful moment at game's end.

Photo slideshow: Harvard vs. Penn

Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Sophomore goalkeeper Austin Harms made two saves in posting his sixth shutout of the season. Smith’s game-winning tally was his first career goal, and earned him Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors.

The Crimson finished the regular season ranked 11th nationally with a record of 13-3-1 (5-1-1 Ivy League). Harvard, who has a first round bye in the NCAA tournament, will host the winner of Friday’s (Nov. 20) Monmouth or Connecticut match. Game time is set for Sunday (Nov. 22, 1 p.m.) at Ohiri Field.

In an interview, HGSE Lecturer Joe Blatt, Ed.M. ’77, director of the Technology, Innovation, and Education program, shares his thoughts on the amazing success of “Sesame Street” and its impact on education — and on the Ed School.

To read the full interview.

“Oh, what a night,” Nancy Pelosi told David Gergen, HKS professor of public service and director of the School’s Center For Public Leadership, recalling her recent victory in the House, which passed the health care bill by a narrow 220-215 margin.

“It’s very humbling,” said Pelosi of the bill’s passage, saying she was standing on the shoulders of predecessors such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who supported national health insurance, and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who made health care reform the hallmark of his career.

“I tell my members, ‘You were born for this moment; this is our responsibility,’” she said.

The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate for debate.

Pelosi joined Gergen at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Nov. 13 for an hour-long conversation titled “Leadership in an Era of Reform.” During the discussion, she offered her perspective on various topics, including the health care bill, leadership issues, negotiating tactics, the importance of women in elected positions, and the war in Afghanistan.

The abortion issue was a focal point of the evening’s discussion.

Before the House approved the health care bill, the legislation hit a late roadblock for many of its pro-choice supporters in the form of an amendment sponsored by Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan. The amendment restricts the use of government-backed health insurance coverage for abortions and places restrictions on abortions offered through private insurance plans that are subsidized with government funds.

While Pelosi said she too was concerned about the restrictions included in the Stupak amendment, the tactic she used that allowed House members to vote against the amendment, but ultimately for the bill, meant they were able “to advance the ball down the field.”

“It’s got to be about reforming the health insurance industry,” not about abortion, said Pelosi.

But despite the challenge of the health care bill, Pelosi called the passage this year of supplemental funding for the war in Afghanistan the “hardest sell.”

She referred to recent comments from Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who cautioned President Obama about sending more soldiers to the conflict, and the lack of a strong political partner in the country. She said it would be “very hard to get many Democrats to support a big increase in troops to Afghanistan.”

Asked by a Harvard College student for her tips on negotiating, Pelosi said the art was above all a fine balancing act.

“You have to be passionate about what you believe in, but dispassionate at the table and how you negotiate,” she said. “It’s not about an ideological debate … but a negotiation that builds consensus, that has legitimacy because people agree to it.”

Acknowledging that the presence of more women in the House likely contributed to passage of the health care bill, she encouraged those in attendance to consider getting involved in government.

“Know your power,” Pelosi told the women in the audience, a reference in part to her own rise in government from “the kitchen to the Congress,” and to her recent book, “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters.”

“Young women,” she said, “give me so much hope.”

But those who were anticipating a dramatic encounter involving Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York who resigned last year in connection with a prostitution case, came away instead with a highly nuanced argument about the need for broader financial regulations.

Spitzer, J.D. ’84, appeared at Emerson Hall Thursday (Nov. 12) at the invitation of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics to take part in the center’s Lab Lectures on the Question of Institutional Corruption. The lectures are designed to launch a five-year research project on the topic.

Spitzer made a name for himself as the tough-minded attorney general of New York state, in large part for his aggressive prosecution of white-collar crime, including insurance companies and Wall Street securities firms. During his remarks, he took the audience through a lengthy and detailed discussion on the importance of government involvement in establishing transparency in the financial sector.

Government has a significant role to play, argued the Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate, in establishing a critical sense of economic transparency.

“Only government can enforce rules relating to integrity and transparency in the marketplace,” he said, and “only government can get these companies to tell the truth.”

Spitzer outlined what he considered a host of problems with the government’s response to the nation’s economic crisis, including his concern with the notion that a company can be “too big to fail,” an argument made during the early days to help justify an expensive corporate bailout.

“Too big to fail is too big not to fail. When [companies] get that big, they are inevitably going to fail, because you can’t manage them.”

Corporate governance is at “the heart and soul of what has failed” the nation’s economic system over the last quarter century, said Spitzer, adding that one of the clear ways forward is to allow shareholders to elect a company’s board of directors.

The subject of Spitzer’s resignation from the governorship came up only briefly, at the beginning and end of the discussion.

“We hold these lectures to address serious and difficult matters,” said Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at HLS and the center’s director, who introduced Spitzer. But, he added, the attention generated by the talk meant it required additional “framing.”

“No one doubts that what Gov. Spitzer did was wrong … likewise no one doubts that until the moment he was charged, at least, Gov. Spitzer inspired the very best in our profession. Whether popular or not, he worked aggressively to serve ideals bigger than himself … he was enormously successful in holding accountable those who used power to do enormous harm.”

“I have invited Eliot Spitzer to contribute to these talks because of the breadth of his experience,” Lessig said, “and, no doubt, the depth of his reflection upon where and how the problems which we study… might be addressed.”

Following his talk, Spitzer gave a simple reply to a question involving his decision to leave office: “I resigned because I thought it was the right thing to do, and the actions that led to it were wrong.”

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government last night honored the creators of an innovative bus system that has dramatically reduced traffic congestion and pollution in the city – and that could be a model for similar innovation elsewhere in the world…

Read more here (The Boston Globe)

The report detailed how the University’s system, which now includes 73 libraries, has grown organically over three centuries. It found that while distributed decision-making contributed to the development of Harvard’s collections, it also created myriad technological and operational obstacles that are straining library resources.

“The Harvard library structure is unique among great universities for its degree of decentralization and its often internally incompatible modes of operation,’’ the Task Force reported. “Perpetuation of the current administrative structure promises to hold the University captive to frozen accidents of history, rather than facilitating the development of new strengths and fostering an agile organization for the 21st century.’’

In releasing the report, Provost Steven Hyman underscored the importance of realigning the libraries’ resources toward a model that emphasizes access to scholarly materials over the aggressive acquisition of widely available resources.

“The digital revolution has fundamentally changed the way human beings collect and disseminate information, and scholarship is increasingly crossing academic boundaries, opening new areas of research that require new resources,’’ Hyman said. “As we build upon Harvard’s outstanding collection, we must envision what the library of the 21st century should be and how it can best serve the University.”

To carry out the Task Force’s recommendations, Hyman named an eight-member Implementation Work Group that will develop new funding and operating models for the library system. The panel will work with University and School leadership, Hyman said, “but members of the panel are duty-bound to leave their individual School or library affiliations at the door.” The panel will consult closely with library staff and existing library committees.

“As a faculty member who relies on the resources and skilled staff of the libraries, I am gratified to be able to play a part in this effort to position Harvard’s library system for the future,’’ said David Lamberth, professor of theology and philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, who will chair the implementation. “Harvard’s collection is one of the world’s treasures, and our overarching goal must be to ensure that it continues to thrive for generations of scholars to come.”

The other members of the group are:

Nancy Cline, Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, FAS

Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor; Director of the Harvard University Library (HUL)

John Haigh, Executive Dean, Harvard Kennedy School

Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director, Knowledge and Library Services, HBS

Leslie Kirwan, Dean of Administration and Finance, FAS

Richard Mills, Dean for Operations and Business Affairs, HMS

John Palfrey, Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources and Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, HLS

The Task Force identified five areas of reform for the implementation panel to address. Its specific recommendations were:

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure

The current decentralized system “impedes nimble, effective, and fiscally responsible responses to 21st century challenges,’’ the report said as it recommended unifying information technology functions, preservation activities, and some acquisition and cataloging services.

2. Rationalize and enhance information and technology systems

The Task Force said that core systems must be standardized across the campus to enable Harvard libraries to better collaborate internally and externally. “This focus on systems improvement will not succeed, however, unless paired with changes in the model for decision-making and funding,’’ according to the report.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries

The Task Force urged the University to re-evaluate the way it funds library materials, spaces and services, beginning with the financing of the Harvard Depository, which it said “combines disincentives to storing materials with procedures that punish the most generous providers of materials.’’

4. Rationalize the system for acquiring, accessing and developing a “single university” collection.

Currently, the library system places emphasis on building comprehensive collections by acquisition, but thanks to technological advances it matters less where materials are housed than it once did and researchers in many fields are increasingly opting for access to resources over ownership. Also, a centralized purchasing and licensing office would maximize the University’s negotiating position.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer institutions

Harvard’s information technology systems must be improved in order to operate more efficiently with other systems, with the goal of maximizing access to scholarly materials for faculty and students.

To download a pdf of the Task Force Statement. To download a pdf of the Task Force Report.

Harvard claims 16 recipients of the medal, the highest U.S. military decoration for bravery. The plaque was a gift from the Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization. According to the group, more than 1,200 Harvard graduates have lost their lives during wartime military service.

In the audience with other honored guests was Susan Roosevelt Weld, the great-granddaughter and granddaughter of Medal of Honor recipients President Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) and his son, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt II (Class of 1909).

Nov. 11 marked 91 years to the day since the close of World War I, the “war to end all wars,” even though many more conflicts have roiled the world since then.

Introducing the guests was Paul E. Mawn ’63, a retired Navy captain and chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, who researched Harvard’s medal recipients. They “bore the price of freedom,” he said, “which is not free.”

The guest of honor was Gen. George W. Casey Jr., chief of staff of the U.S. Army. His father’s name, Gen. George William Casey ’45, appears on a bronze plaque on the north wall of the Memorial Church, honoring Harvard graduates who died in Vietnam.

He read a list of the University’s Medal of Honor winners — including six from the Civil War, two from World War I, and one each from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. “What they have in common is selflessness,” said Casey, “selflessness to others, selflessness to country.”

He praised a “new generation of heroes,” represented by Sgt. 1st Class Jared C. Monti, a Massachusetts-born infantryman killed in 2006 in Afghanistan while trying to save a wounded friend. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Harvard President Drew Faust joined Casey in unveiling the Medal of Honor plaque, mounted on the wall just to the left of the church pulpit.

Faust is the daughter of McGhee Tyson Gilpin, who as a World War II U.S. Army intelligence officer was wounded in 1944 and awarded the Silver Star for valor.

She called the Harvard men being honored “the finest exemplars” of graduates through the years, who from the Revolution on have served their country. Their brave deeds “remind us of the meaning of character, of devotion, of moral as well as military achievement,” said Faust. “We at Harvard are proud to have been a part of the lives of these remarkable Americans.”

As current and future students pass through Harvard’s gates in search of wisdom, she said, “Let us work to ensure that we impart not just the wisdom of the mind but also the wisdom of the heart — the courage, character, and that profound sense of obligation to service and citizenship so powerfully represented by the men we honor today.”

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, called for “a moment of silence, deep silence,” while the church bell tolled sonorously.

The bell was the gift of A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard when the church was dedicated on Armistice Day in 1932. The bell’s inscription reads that it “should forever ring in memory of voices that are hushed.”

“Harvard lifts aspirations. It makes people want to do more, to reach and stretch,” Faust said.

She made her comments in response to a question from former New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, now a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, who moderated a talk with Faust before an audience of Harvard alumni Nov. 9 at Paine Hall

Faust and Greenhouse appeared with Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig at a two-part President’s Forum, sponsored by the Harvard Alumni Association and the Harvard Club of Boston. Lessig, who is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard, opened the event, delivering a dynamic talk about institutional ethics and how legal lobbying is exerting a corrupting influence on the nation’s decision makers.

Lessig spoke broadly about institutional ethics, citing the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the influence of congressional lobbying as examples of how important acting ethically is in society. On the congressional issue, Lessig said that even when conducted legally, lobbying creates a mini-economy that buys powerful interests access to members of the House and Senate that is denied to ordinary citizens. Further, he said, the high cost of running political campaigns makes senators and representatives dependent on special-interest money, creating an unhealthy triangle where lobbyists finance politicians’ campaigns, politicians give access to special interests, and special interests, in turn, hire lobbyists.

On the Exxon Valdez case, Lessig said the ethical question is whether the ship’s captain should have been allowed to steer a supertanker when his automobile driver’s license had been suspended for drunk driving, and whether the people around him should have taken action once they knew he might have been impaired. In discussing who is responsible in such cases, Lessig pointed a finger back at the audience — and beyond.

“It’s not the evil people we need to focus on, it’s the good people, the decent people,” Lessig said. “Corruptions are primed by the most privileged and permitted by the passivity of the most privileged. … I think the branch of government we need [to act] is the people.”

In her part of the program, Faust fielded a range of questions, both from Greenhouse and the audience, touching on building community, the financial crisis, and on Harvard’s effect on its students. Responding to questions about Harvard’s financial situation, Faust said that, though the endowment’s losses set its balance sheets back to where they were in 2005, “we were a pretty good university in 2005.” But Harvard has taken on commitments since then that are not easily shed, Faust said, leading to necessary moves in the last year, such as layoffs, wage freezes, and cuts to expense and travel spending, among others.

Faust said she did not believe there would be a rapid bounce-back of the endowment with a return to business as it was. Rather, she said, Harvard is at a “new normal,” complete not only with financial constraints but with opportunities to rethink how the University does business.

Faust defended both the endowment’s investment strategy and the manner in which it compensates Harvard Management Company (HMC) money managers. She said the endowment’s investment strategy has led to an average 8.9 percent annual return over the last decade, even with last year’s crash, far ahead of the 1.4 percent annual return that a more conservative 60/40 split between stocks and bonds would have delivered. As for the managers, Faust said the compensation plan was designed to both attract the necessary talent to HMC and link compensation to performance, giving bonuses and other features that reward performance above benchmarks and taking back bonuses when managers underperform.

The rapid decline in the endowment has highlighted how dependent the University has become on that income, Faust said. One necessary change in how Harvard conducts its financial affairs will be to recognize that endowment dependence and to plan for future volatility. That means that buffers against future declines, in the form of reserves, need to be built up and maintained by the Schools most dependent on endowment income, she said.

Despite Harvard’s financial challenges, Faust added, the University’s commitment remains strong to student financial aid, which has been spared the cuts suffered by other programs. That is because the University intends to remain true to its commitment to attracting the best and the brightest, regardless of economic background, she explained.

“We think this is our responsibility as an institution,” Faust said.

In last month’s session, McFague was quoting New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, while offering her own analysis of the current dual crises rocking the globe, one financial and the other environmental. Both, said the theologian in residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, are the product of greed.

“The same insatiable desire for more, more money, more energy … underlies both of these planetary disasters.”
But while the world’s economy appears to be crawling back to life through substantial governmental interventions, the outlook for the environment, she said, is bleak.

An author and a scholar, McFague is a leader in the fields of ecofeminism and Christian theology. Her most recent book is “A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming.” She gave the 2009 Dudleian Lecture as part of a yearlong series sponsored by the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS titled “Ecologies of Human Flourishing.”

Her presentation, “Cities, Climate Change, and Christianity: Religion and Sustainable Urbanism,” underscored the dire state of the global environment and the need, she said, for a paradigm shift, one that presents an organic model for urban living and a method for “thinking differently about nature and our place in it.”

Religion can play a role in numerous ways, McFague suggested. It can help people, particularly city dwellers, connect with the concept of space and place, an understanding that their environment is derived directly from the Earth. What lies behind all construction, the foundation of every city, she said, is nature, “that encompassing and mysterious term for everything that is.”

By replacing the traditional Christian concern with time and history with a notion of space and place, she said, there can be a new focus on Earth rather than heaven, on bodies and their basic needs, rather than on “interpretation, meaning, and eternal salvation.”

In addition, she suggested that the concept of self-emptying, which is found in many religions and involves a type of detachment from worldly desires and an opening up to God, could be a template for how people may “live differently.” It could help to provide insight into needs and wants, acting as “an invitation to imitate the way God loved the world.”

“Copenhagen does not look like it’s going to work, folks,” she said of next month’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Denmark. But that’s no reason to give up.

“We carry on,” she said, “with what hope we have.”

“Constellation (Stranger Fruit)” is what Biggers dubs “a surreal tableau.” The work summons heavenly constellations and patterned 19th century quilts embedded with secret codes, both of which helped to steer escaped slaves north along the Underground Railroad.

“This whole notion of navigating the Eastern Seaboard via the stars, as Harriet Tubman did, has been on my mind a lot,” said Biggers of his “tree growing in the cosmos.”

“I think of the installation as abstracting history and creating an infinite reflection between stellar constellations and the points on the Underground Railroad.”

Boston, a central stop on the network of escape routes and safe houses from the South before the Civil War, suitably fits Biggers’ scheme. Approached last year by the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies to teach a class, Biggers coincidentally was contacted shortly afterward by the Office for the Arts (OfA), which hoped to commission a piece.

“So I merged the two,” said Biggers, who became the 2009 Marshall S. Cogan Visiting Artist through the Public Art Program of OfA. Based out of New York, Biggers will join Columbia University’s arts faculty in 2010.

“‘Strange Fruit’ is the mantra present in my work because of its historical value in Americana,” he explained. “The tree is a mixed metaphor. It’s not just a tree of death but a tree of life, an axis mundi between heaven and earth.”

The exhibit runs until Dec. 2. A conversation with Biggers will take place on Nov. 16 at 6 p.m. at the Sackler Museum, and vocalist Imani Uzuri will perform at the installation site at 4 p.m. on Nov. 18, followed by an informal exchange with the artists.

Uzuri will debut two compositions, continuing a collaboration with Biggers that started years ago with a theatrical interpretation of the Abel Meeropol poem “Strange Fruit,” famously sung by Holiday. “She’s the cosmic oracle, a wise chanteuse singing under the tree,” said Biggers.

Koto player Sumie Kaneko and Harvard’s own KeyChange will contribute to Biggers’ artistic journey between earthly and heavenly realms.

For more information visit the Office for the Arts at Harvard.

Yasuko Nagasaka sees a future where ambulances are equipped with tanks of a gas that, when inhaled during heart attacks, will dramatically cut the nearly 50 percent death rate.

In that future, the tanks would contain nitric oxide, found widely today everywhere from automobile exhaust pipes to the human body. Not to be confused with nitrous oxide — the familiar laughing gas of dental-surgery lore — nitric oxide is chemically simpler, with just one nitrogen atom, and very reactive. It lasts under a second in the body before it combines with other atoms, including the potentially harmful oxygen compounds that arise during a heart attack.

Nagasaka’s vision will take enormous amounts of hard work: She will need to conduct research as a principal investigator even as she takes on teaching duties and juggles responsibilities at home, where she is a single mother to two children, ages 11 and 7.

“It has been challenging for me to work as a researcher on a full-time basis, in a foreign country where there is no family or friends to help,” said Nagasaka, who came to Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) from Japan in 2005 and who is now an instructor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and in MGH’s Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care. “My work requires a considerable amount of time being physically present in the laboratory.”

The crushing squeeze of work and family is a familiar one in the medical research field. Young faculty members not only have to prove themselves in the laboratory during these years, but also have to juggle teaching, patient care, grant-writing, publication, and family duties. In 1995, Harvard Medical School began a special fellowship program aimed at easing these difficult years, especially for women, who often bear a greater share of responsibilities at home.

The Eleanor and Miles Shore 50th Anniversary Fellowship Program for Scholars in Medicine awarded 81 fellowships of $25,000 to $50,000 this year to lend a hand to Nagasaka and to others like her.

The fellowships don’t convey the ability to be in two places at once, but they can be used to hire help — in the lab or at home — to ease the need to be so. They also can be used to opt out of clinical responsibilities to gain time for research or grant-writing, to help a new lab get its footing, or for other purposes.

Nagasaka, who received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Tokyo Women’s Medical College, will use the fellowship for her science, where the grant will help her begin to gain independence as a researcher at MGH.

If Nagasaka can fully unearth nitric oxide’s heart-helping effects, in coming years emergency workers might administer the gas to heart-attack sufferers, letting the compound traverse the lungs and travel to the heart. Once there, it would reduce the damage. However, the precise downstream effects of inhaled nitric oxide on the injured heart remain to be elucidated. Nagasaka will tackle this question with her laboratory team and the aid of a Shore fellowship.

There’s real reason to think this future could become a reality. Nagasaka is researching nitric oxide’s effects in a pioneering MGH lab that has made other strides with this gas. Headed by Warren Zapol, the Reginald Jenney Professor of Anaesthesia, and Kenneth Bloch, William Thomas Green Morton Professor of Anaesthesia, the lab has already documented the gas’ beneficial effect by selectively dilating the lung’s blood vessels and has developed life-saving treatments for hypoxic term infants, treatments that the Food and Drug Administration approved in 1999.

Though the gas is already used widely to help improve lung function, Nagasaka said that its short lifespan made people think it didn’t last long enough to penetrate into other organs. More recent research, however, showed that its benefits can extend to preserving the heart, intestines, and liver from injury.

Nagasaka’s work has begun to pay off. In 2008, she was the lead author on a paper that appeared as a featured article in the journal Anesthesiology showing that brief periods of nitric oxide inhalation by mice can protect against heart damage from the restriction of coronary artery blood flow and its subsequent resumption. The next step would be clinical trials.

“I believe the excitement of this scientific development will be fully justified if it produces a dramatic impact on clinical medicine,” Nagasaka said.

The Nov. 18 presentation and reception will be held at the Tosteson Medical Education Center Atrium, 260 Longwood Ave., Boston, from 4 to 6 p.m. The awards presentation (4:30 p.m.) will be held in the Carl E. Walter Amphitheater.

To download a pdf of the recipients. 

Its title? “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.” Christakis finds it appropriate that a social network was essentially responsible for a book on — ta da! — social networking. And now Christakis and Fowler are presenting their findings to the greatest social network of all — the world.

In “Connected” they explore the myriad ways we influence those around us: family, friends, co-workers, friends of friends, friends of their friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. In short, they say, our lives are chain reactions with potentially enormous effects.

Christakis’ interest in these effects emerged during his work as a hospice physician (he is also a social scientist at Harvard Medical School) in the mid-1990s. “I was taking care of seriously ill people,” he recalled, “and I began thinking about the widower effect: If one spouse dies, the probability of the other dying is significantly increased.”

Christakis began investigating “the spread of health phenomena in bigger health networks,” and the ways we’re influenced by people up to three degrees removed from us, including those we may not know. The book covers vast turf, from how our friends’ friends can help to make us gain or lose weight — or quit smoking — to the prominence of online social networking and how its presence informs our lives.

“All kinds of bad things spread through social networks: suicide, germs, drug abuse, unhappiness,” he said. But good things come too.

“Happiness, information, love, kindness. We even find our spouses via networks,” he said, noting that 70 percent of people marry a friend of a friend. “All these people looking for their soul mate … when really only one out of the 10,000 people — within three degrees removed from us — will be our spouse.”

Named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2009, Christakis said his desired influence hits closer to home. He joked: “I just wish I was influential with my kids.”

There is a sense of peaceful strength and comfort with life that surrounds Ho, the result, in part, of his recent battle with an often-lethal enemy.

In August 2006, Ho, who is also a political activist, author, and playwright, was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and given almost impossible odds of survival. But after three years, seven surgeries, and chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Ho was declared free of the disease.

“I feel much better,” said the 1979 Harvard graduate in the lobby of Harvard’s New College Theatre on Holyoke Street, “considering I was supposed to be dead last year.”

On Nov. 13, the outspoken Ho will receive this year’s Harvard Arts Medal, an honor given to a Harvard or Radcliffe graduate or faculty member in recognition of contributing to the arts, and in particular contributing to education or the public good. Past winners include cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76, film director Mira Nair ’79, author John Updike ’54, and actor Jack Lemmon ’47.

Ho has been on campus for several weeks, participating in a residency sponsored by the Office for the Arts’ Learning From Performers program. He has worked closely with student performers on his new piece “Take the Zen Train.” The work, commissioned by the Harvard Jazz Bands and the Office for the Arts, will premiere at Lowell Lecture Hall on Nov. 14.

The 20-minute composition in six movements incorporates music for the Jazz Bands with choreography for three student dancers who have backgrounds in hip-hop, ballet, and the Chinese martial art of Wushu. Ho enlisted the help of New York stage director Daniel Jáquez, a product of the American Repertory Theater /Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, to stage the dance element of the piece, which chronicles Ho’s battle with cancer.

“It’s my philosophical journey,” Ho said, “a series of epiphanies, what the war against cancer taught me.”

Jáquez, who has made frequent visits to Harvard to work with students on the production, said he tried to find dancers during auditions who “had the passion and the understanding of what this struggle was for Fred.”

For Ho, battling the disease deepened his understanding of the importance of health, wisdom, and love, and gave him a profound understanding of “how creativity can really make us better.”

“We are not the sum of our blood vessels, our DNA, our tissue, and our bones,” said Ho. “What makes the human species and each of us individually unique is our consciousness, our ability to create.”

Conformity was never part of Ho’s larger picture. At Harvard in the 1970s, the sociology concentrator challenged what he deemed the “hard core [Max] Weberians” with his thoughts on communism and Karl Marx. He also delved into political and social activism, and founded the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association.

The trend extended to his socially charged music, which refused to fit a particular genre. Though often labeled jazz, Ho’s work frequently incorporates elements of traditional African and Asian music, resulting in a complex and multilayered product.

Ho’s pieces have been called “fiercely imaginative” and include interactive video opera, as well as musical theater. The composer said he was thrilled to create a work for Harvard using his “revolutionary earth music,” a style that “challenges conventional harmony.”

My chords “don’t follow any of the formulas or tropes [of jazz]. For a student group to take on that challenge is remarkable,” he said, adding that the Harvard students share his willingness to “try new things.”

Thomas G. Everett, director of the Harvard University Bands, was a bit concerned when he first saw the music created by Ho, who as an undergraduate was a member of the Harvard Jazz Band and wrote compositions for the ensemble. Everett wondered if “Take the Zen Train’s” rapid changes of style, key, tempo, and dynamics, which are “crucial to the success of the piece,” might overwhelm the group.

“The students on first playing were a little baffled,’’ Everett said. But at subsequent rehearsals — with Ho in attendance, playing along, and helping guide the students through the work — the players began to blend into the piece.

“That is when the magic happened,” said Everett.

In the end, Ho hopes he can inspire students and listeners alike with the music and the message in “Take the Zen Train.”

“I hope,” he said, “that people come away with a spirit of elation about the impossible.”

The world of Fred Ho

Fred Ho will receive the Harvard Arts Medal Nov. 13 at 5 p.m. in the New College Theatre, 12 Holyoke St. Free and open to the public but tickets required; available through the Harvard Box Office (617.496.2222) limit two per person.

“The World of Fred Ho” is a tribute concert with Ho and the Harvard Jazz Bands Nov. 14 at 8 p.m. in Lowell Lecture Hall, 17 Kirkland St. Tickets are $10 general admission; $8 students and senior citizens and are available through the Harvard Box Office.

Last week, I walked into class 13 minutes after the hour. I had left Mather House, shockingly far from the behemoth that is Northwest Laboratories, 25 minutes before. Two things are true about the walk. First, there is a hill hiding between the river and the rest of Cambridge, a hump that has inexplicably remained through 400 years of development and which undoubtedly held the trappings of the city’s farm days, back when the area was grassy and idyllic. Now it just slows me down. If I walk briskly I can make it to Northwest Laboratories and back in 40 minutes, too long to be convenient.

The second, and more important, thing about walking in and around Harvard Square is the traffic light question. I have driven in Cambridge. I have biked and walked and rollerbladed and even, once, Segwayed. There is nothing more maddening and dangerous to a commuter than a distracted co-ed texting while jaywalking across Mass. Ave. The first time I drove through the square, I almost had a heart attack while trying not to plow head-on into students oblivious and, somehow, camouflaged in the winding streets.

Dangers aside, my walking commute was getting too tedious. Perhaps a city bicycle was in order, something that could get me around Cambridge faster than my walking shoes. I picked up a secondhand city bike, a single-speed monstrosity that rode like a folding table on wheels. I bought a cable lock as heavy as the bike itself to protect my investment. Finally, I would waste less time in transit.

Alas, it was not to be. Every street is two-way to a pedestrian. In keeping with my desire to survive into adulthood, I intended not to ride the wrong way down one-way streets. This, I came to realize, was both revolutionary and nearly impossible. Biking in and around the square, like driving in Maine, is full of moments of disbelief. You can’t get there from here.

To get from Mather House to Harvard Yard, for example, requires first biking away from both locations for a solid two minutes. Getting to the Quad is arguably faster on foot, and heaven forbid a cyclist should attempt to get from the Science Center to the river without either sidewalks or some gutsy wrong-way riding. Worse for me, Northwest Laboratories can only be reached by a circuitous route that includes a foray into what I can only assume is residential Somerville.

All this is how I ended up six minutes late, according to Harvard time, to my class. I had realized in a fit of ingenuity that if all the roads were the wrong way on the way up to the laboratories, then they were all in my favor on the way back. I had decided to walk my bike to class and enjoy the ride back later. But seven bad cross-walk signals and the extra weight slowed me down, and I sheepishly snuck into lecture 25 minutes after leaving my room, and weathered the disapproving looks of the teaching fellows in the front row.

If only I were content to take the shuttle.

The Gazette welcomes suggestions and submissions for the Student Voice column. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student with a 500-word story to tell about life and learning at Harvard, send your suggestion to News Editor Jim Concannon.

Twenty-eight staffers climbed onto a bus and traveled to Boston’s South End on Nov. 6 to spend the morning sorting more than 9,000 pounds of food, such as cans of tuna, jars of peanut butter, and other nonperishable items for distribution to the 600 food pantries that the food bank supports. Harvard’s first group of volunteers also donated 166 pounds of nonperishable goods, raised through an in-house food drive.

This year the food bank has seen a sharp rise in demand as more families are struggling to cope with the ongoing recession.

The visit kicked off Harvard’s yearlong volunteer effort, which involves groups of students, faculty, and staff assisting at the food bank on Friday mornings through the end of the academic year.

President Drew Faust announced the ongoing commitment to the food bank, the first of its kind for the University, last month during a University-wide celebration of public service. University groups that would like to join the volunteer effort can e-mail community@harvard.edu to sign up.

The Community Gifts Through Harvard campaign, which launches this month, is another way for the University to make a difference in its host communities. Each year, for more than half a century, the Harvard community has rallied to help. Last year’s contributions aided more than 400 human service agencies and charities in Greater Boston.

The campaign helps to fund food distribution programs for the hungry and the homeless; home health care for the elderly; programs to prevent drug and alcohol abuse; programs to fight racism and discrimination; cancer research, education, and patient services; and programs to break the cycle of substance abuse and crime.

Manela actually began by studying foreign languages as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not far from his hometown of Haifa, Israel. He soon discovered that courses in East Asian and Middle Eastern history complemented his interests in Chinese, Arabic, and Persian. Though he saw a future in academia, history was not a field he had expected to pursue.

“I didn’t yet conceive of it as something you could do as a profession, but rather something you might study to know more about the world,” he said.

Previously the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, Manela now specializes in modern international history and the history of the United States in the world. His first book, “The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism” (Oxford, 2007), explored the impact of President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric on nationalist movements in Asia and the Middle East in the wake of World War I. Manela’s current research revolves around the global campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Manela considers his undergraduate experience the source of some of his main intellectual questions.
In college, “I realized that in the modern period — during the 19th and early 20th centuries — there were really fascinating parallels between the history of the Ottoman Empire and the history of East Asia, particularly China,” Manela said. “That really intrigued me. … I kept wondering how I could study these parallels in a way that wasn’t simply comparative. I wanted to put everything into one big framework and tell the story as connected.”

Manela decided to concentrate on international history as a graduate student at Yale, partly because he was reluctant to give up studying any of the countries or languages he had embraced in college.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of focusing on just one of them,” he said. “I wanted to put it all to good use.”

Studying international history has allowed Manela to break free of the nation as an analytical framework and devote new attention to transnational actors, organizations, and themes. When Manela arrived at Harvard in 2003, history professors Akira Iriye (now emeritus) and the late Ernest May served as inspirational figures for him, as they too were concerned with these pioneering directions in international history. (May even taught Manela the basics of PowerPoint by jotting a few commands on an index card during his first semester at Harvard.)

“Teaching with them … was a tremendously formative experience for me,” Manela said. “Together, they established an amazing tradition of international history in this department.”

A member of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Manela considers the interdisciplinary community of scholars and students his “second home” within the University. He served as the Weatherhead’s director of undergraduate student programs for four years, and is now director of graduate student programs.

Manela spends most of his free time with his three daughters, but sometimes revisits an old interest: chess. Occasionally he challenges the regulars in Harvard Square.

“Once upon a time I used to play chess fairly well,” he said, “but that’s history.”

Manela is grateful to have the chance to study a subject that many people can pursue only as a hobby, even though he never did live up to expectations of becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

“I think this is a decent alternative,” he said with a grin.

Rivlin, who served in several presidential administrations and as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, was presented the Richard E. Neustadt Award, bestowed annually to an individual who has created powerful solutions to public problems, drawing on research and intellectual ideas as appropriate.

Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, received the Thomas C. Schelling Award, bestowed annually to an individual whose remarkable intellectual work has had a transformative impact on public policy.

Both winners also receive a $25,000 prize.

“These awards are given in the names of two people who were central to the creation of the modern Kennedy School,” said Ellwood. “It is in their spirit that we recognize this year’s remarkable recipients, both of whom are highly accomplished in their fields, and who have furthered scientific knowledge and understanding while serving the public good. We are proud to honor their extraordinary contributions.”

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

Overall, the papers document the business transactions and family history of the Dunster and Glover families during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, while others offer insight into the legal system in Colonial America.

Key documents, including memoranda and Harvard’s first annual report, provide details about Dunster’s tenure as president of Harvard, early Colonial education in New England, local missionary efforts to educate Native Americans, and the operations of the first printing press in North America.

Dunster (1609–c. 1659) studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received bachelor of arts (1630) and master of arts (1634) degrees. Subsequently, he returned to Bury, where he served as headmaster of the Bury Grammar School and minister of Saint Mary’s Church.

Following the outbreak in 1640 of civil war in England, Dunster emigrated to the English colonies. On Aug. 27 of the same year, he was appointed the first president of Harvard College.

With the College in dire financial straits, Dunster reformed the academic program, established a four-year residency requirement, and introduced a student code of conduct. With funding from the Massachusetts General Court and — significantly — from individual donors, Dunster oversaw construction of the first College building. Dunster secured the College’s papers of incorporation, approved by the General Court of Massachusetts, as the Charter of 1650, and established its governance by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (commonly called the “Harvard Corporation”).

“Four hundred years after his birth, Henry Dunster continues to hold a place at the heart of Harvard history and culture,” notes Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library. “Appointed Harvard’s first president, he had chosen the title himself based upon a related position at his Cambridge alma mater. He is understood to be the author of the Charter of 1650, under which the University is governed to this very day. His newly digitized papers offer brief but tantalizing glimpses of the man, his family, and his aspirations for Harvard.”

“Coaching is a remarkable change process that has often been thought of as a self-help method without established best practices,” said Carol Kauffman, institute director and assistant clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at McLean Hospital. “The goal of the institute is to provide a solid scientific foundation of coaching based on good science, good research, and good practice. Evidence-based coaching will transform the field by giving coaches and clients more and better choices of best practices.”

The institute will seek to advance the field of coaching through five centers of excellence including research, education, applied positive psychology, health coaching, and executive and leadership coaching. The Harnisch Fund for Coaching, established with the $2 million gift, will fuel coaching-related research by awarding grants for high-quality scientific coaching studies. The institute’s research center will also disseminate empirically supported best practices, which include peer-reviewed studies.

Ruth Ann Harnisch, a philanthropist and certified professional coach, chose to fund coaching research at McLean after listening to the stories of researchers at the first-ever International Coaching Research Forum, organized by Kauffman in 2008.

“They talked about the challenges they faced as serious academics attempting to do peer-reviewed, respected coaching research. It became clear to me that a respectable academic home for coaching would be a game-changer for the field,” Harnisch said.

Known for its cutting-edge research and world-class professionals, McLean Hospital has studied and practiced coaching-related disciplines for years.

“There is a growing interest in positive psychology, of which coaching is an integral part,” said Philip Levendusky, director of psychology at McLean and associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Increasing evidence shows that coaching can have a positive impact on health care delivery in terms of lifestyle changes, medication compliance, and a host of other changes that reap big rewards for patients and the health care system.

“In her gift to establish the Institute of Coaching, Ruth Ann Harnisch has made a significant commitment to the coaching profession and to improving the lives of individuals,” Levendusky said.

In announcing the initiative, FAS Dean Michael D. Smith said, “This effort goes to the heart of our long-term viability and strength as a faculty.”

Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and African and African American Studies and FAS senior adviser on faculty development and diversity, will manage the initiative, which will ask each department “to devise a plan to help their assistant and associate professors develop as teachers, scholars, and members of the academic community.”

Lamont has developed guidelines that include departmental and individual mentoring plans; a $1,000 grant for each tenure-track faculty member to support their scholarship; practical support from FAS administrative departments; and guidance for department chairs and tenured faculty on how to aid the departmental plan and provide leadership for junior faculty.

Bob was an outstanding medical student. Graduating Alpha Omega Alpha, he received his house staff training and became a Chief Resident in Medicine at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. He served a fellowship with William Daughaday, a world-class researcher on growth hormone, and from 1961 to 1963, worked at the Endocrinology Branch, National Cancer Institute, with Drs. William D. Odell and Peter G. Condliffe on immunologic studies of purified human and bovine thyrotropin (TSH). This work led to Bob’s single-authored landmark publication “Radioimmunoassay of Human Plasma Thyrotropin,” published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 1965. The TSH assay is still one of the most commonly ordered tests in all of medicine because of its utility in identifying patients who have thyroid dysfunction. This was the first of many papers dealing with the hypothalamic-pituitary regulation of the thyroid gland, a topic Bob returned to repeatedly during his career. His first academic position was in the Department of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, where he was selected a Markle Scholar, a highly prestigious award given to select faculty at US and Canadian medical schools.

In 1969, he was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania by Dr. Arnold Relman, eventually becoming a Professor of Medicine and the Chief of Endocrinology. During his time at Penn, Bob developed one of the first radioimmunoassays for the active thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine (T3), and used it in a remarkably productive period of clinical research with his fellows, who included Drs. Peter Snyder and Charles Emerson, both of whom have become prominent endocrinologists, in their own right. These studies dealt with the physiology and pathophysiology of the thyroid hormone feedback regulation of TSH using thyrotropin-releasing hormone as a tool in both humans and animals. Later, he turned to the study of thyroxine (T4) to T3 conversion, working with Michael Kaplan, David Gardner, Tony Jennings, and Mansour Saberi, investigating the biochemistry of Type 1 deiodinase, the effect of fasting and illness on the pituitary-thyroid axis and on the inhibition of T4 to T3 conversion in response to that stress. One of these papers, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, is still cited as the definitive demonstration that the endogenous reduction of T4 to T3 conversion in fasting humans ameliorates the negative protein balance of that condition. As Chief of the Endocrinology section at Penn, Bob was a respected and important member of the faculty, where he excelled as a teacher and clinical consultant.

In 1979, Bob moved to the University of North Carolina to be a Professor of Medicine and the Director of General Clinical Research Center (GCRC). As GCRC Director, he was literally the embodiment of the Center. He immersed himself in the research programs of all the lead investigators who used the facility. To the members of the GCRC Committee, it always seemed that he knew more, or at least as much, about every study as did the Principal Investigator. With his typical generosity, he devoted countless hours to reviewing protocols, solving technical problems, and facilitating everyone’s work. He was extremely helpful to Fellows and junior faculty in designing clinical research projects and helped young faculty members establish careers in clinical investigation. It was not unusual for him to devote extensive time and effort to heavily edit someone else’s R01 grant and he comprehensively read and edited almost every grant that was submitted by the physicians who used the Center. He also continued his own work on thyroid physiology, which had a very strong human investigation focus.

Bob was also a superb physician-teacher as well as physician-scientist and was greatly admired by the students, house staff, and clinical Fellows, as well as faculty colleagues. All of these groups sought his opinion on difficult clinical cases as well as challenging research projects. When he announced that he was leaving to come to Boston, the Associate Chief of the Medical Service was distraught because he did not know “to whom he could go to for endocrine consultations.” During his time at the University of North Carolina, he also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM), the premier journal in its field. He also began his collaboration with Dr. Lewis Braverman as co-editor of The Thyroid: A Fundamental and Clinical Text, the classic in its field, an effort which spanned 18 years and four editions.

In 1990, Bob returned to Boston as Deputy Editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At the Journal, he served first under Dr. Arnold Relman (with whom he had worked at the University of Pennsylvania) and later with Dr. Jerome Kassirer focusing on endocrine studies. It is in these two editorial capacities, with the JCEM and the NEJM, that many of the world’s endocrinologists were exposed to the depth of Bob’s knowledge and his high standards for succinct communication. The final hurdle for publication in these journals was responding to an all too often sentence-by-sentence, unbiased but vigorous critique of what was often thought by the authors to be the “final” version of the paper. Typically, the manuscript pages were virtually covered by a sea of red ink. While disconcerting, Bob’s comments invariably educated the authors in the art of scientific communication and often included substantive contributions to the research, even to topics in which the authors were the acknowledged world authorities. During the ten years that he served as a Deputy Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, he played an important role in its success. His good judgment, intelligence, and his unfailing instinct for ethical behavior in research and medical journalism were of inestimable assistance to the Editors, who came to rely very heavily on his advice.

With his retirement from The New England Journal in 2000, Bob became a full-time member of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s (BWH) Thyroid Division, which later was merged into the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension. He assumed a new responsibility, editing Clinical Thyroidology, a quarterly review journal of the recent thyroid-related literature sponsored by the American Thyroid Association, and focused the rest of his efforts on teaching, mentoring and patient care. He also was an important member of the BWH Institutional Review Board. In his leadership role on the Institute of Medicine-sponsored Committee on the Health and Environmental Effects of Perchlorate, he summarized their deliberations in both written and oral testimony for Congress. It was in this period also that we at the Brigham were treated first-hand to his skills as a teacher, a consummate clinician, as well as his truly encyclopedic knowledge of endocrinology. As far as we could tell, he had never forgotten any article he had read, and it seemed he had read virtually everything. During our weekly clinical Grand Rounds, he would typically support his comments with the most relevant literature, mention the lead author, journal, and year of publication, and summarize and critique the conclusions. As one might imagine, he was in great demand by the fellows as a clinical attending and gave of his time unstintingly to them as well as to students, residents, attendings, and, of course, to his patients.

Bob received numerous honors, including the Van Meter Prize and the Distinguished Service Award of The American Thyroid Association, as well as the Sidney H. Ingbar Distinguished Service Award of The Endocrine Society. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to teaching and clinical care, the Endocrinology Division at the Brigham has named our main conference room in his honor. It was in this room that he shared so much of his knowledge and superb clinical judgment with all of us.

This summary of Bob’s many accomplishments unfortunately cannot capture his wry sense of humor and his everyday thoughtfulness for his colleagues, his students and his patients. He was the epitome of the Academic Physician, a scholar, physician, teacher, and friend and a role model for each of us to emulate. We have attempted in this short space to do justice to this uniquely generous individual. We hope we have succeeded.

Respectfully submitted,

P. Reed Larsen, M.D.
Arnold S. Relman, M.D.
David R. Clemmons, M.D.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) relies on private donations through its Anatomical Gift Program. Any person of sound mind who is over 18 years of age can register to donate his or her body for education, research, and the advancement of medical and dental science or therapy. Under the Massachusetts Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, an individual can arrange for donation of her or his remains by executing the Instrument of Anatomical Gift.

To be valid, the instrument must be signed by two witnesses. The original document is sent to the Medical School, after which the individual is registered in the program, and receives a letter of acknowledgment and a donor card.

For more information, call 617-432-1735, e-mail agp@hms.harvard.edu, or visit the Harvard Medical School Web site.

 These are just a few of the internships in a variety of fields that 48 Harvard College Weissman interns explored in a variety of fields this summer, supported by the Weissman International Internship Program. Administered by the Office of Career Services, the program was established in 1994 by Paul ’52 and Harriet Weissman to help foster the development of Harvard College students’ understanding of the global community in which they live and work. Since its inception, the Weissman Program has enabled more than 350 students to work in fields ranging from public service to business, from science to arts administration.

In their final reports, the 2009 Weissman interns related the joys and challenges of living and working in another culture, negotiating new environments, working with a supervisor, and using foreign language skills in daily life. 

Aditya Balasubramanian ’12, who analyzed financial statements, drafted funding proposals, and helped redesign a grassroots microcredit institution’s Web site in Resistencia, Argentina, detailed a process of self-discovery and unpredictability that has given him a new approach to life. After spending the summer at a nonprofit educational development agency in Dublin, Katherine Gunn ’11 related a fresh career direction and a sense of personal growth, thanks to the welcoming atmosphere in Ireland. Eric Dong ’11 expressed a greater interest in macroeconomics and an appreciation for the survival skills he learned in contrasting cities after spending the summer working with UBS-SDIC and Blackrock-Bank of China Funds in Shenzhen and Shanghai, China. Tannis Thorlakson ’11, who worked with Grassroot Soccer in Cape Town, South Africa, planned events that combined youth soccer tournaments or camps with HIV testing, counseling, and education. She is now considering a future in the environment, health, and international development areas.

The Weissman Program was designed for returning undergraduates to ensure that students enrich the Harvard community and, in turn, have their remaining undergraduate time enhanced by their global experiences. Each fall, the recent Weissman interns are welcomed back at an annual luncheon held at the Harvard Faculty Club. On Oct. 22, interns spoke with Paul and Harriet Weissman, Associate Dean Jay Ellison, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Bill Fitzsimmons, and others of insights gained, perspectives shifted, and worldviews broadened.

For more information about the Weissman International Internship Program, please visit the Office of Career Services Web site.

Grant proposals may be in any field, but preference will be given to projects for which funding might not be otherwise available from traditional sources. During this phase of the program, the Harvard China Fund expects to fund several proposals at the $100,000 to $200,000 range, and encourages applicants to seek matching funds.

For more information, visit the Harvard China Fund Web site.

A Harvard theoretical physicist has discussed with scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland the possibility that they may discover a theorized “stau” particle, with a lifetime of a minute or so, that could provide the first experimental confirmation of string theory.

A Harvard theoretical physicist has discussed with scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland the possibility that they may discover a theorized “stau” particle, with a lifetime of a minute or so, that could provide the first experimental confirmation of string theory.

String theory, developed in the late 1960s and early ’70s, is a theoretical physicists’ multitool, explaining in one model all four of the universe’s main forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the two that operate inside atomic nuclei, the strong force and the weak force.

Without string theory, physicists need two theories to explain how the universe works. General relativity explains gravity, while the other three basic forces are explained by the “standard model.” Moreover, gravity has been very difficult to reconcile with quantum theory, a problem for which string theory offers a solution.

A major problem with string theory, however, is that it has never been confirmed experimentally, which is where Donner Professor of Science Cumrun Vafa and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) come in.

Several years of work with graduate student Jonathan Heckman, who graduated in June, and other colleagues, has led Vafa to suggest that a particle whose properties are predicted by string theory may be detectable at the energy levels produced by the LHC.

The LHC is the world’s largest particle collider, located in a 16.8-mile-long underground ring that runs from Switzerland under the border into France and back. Once it is fully operational, it should be able to smash beams of protons into each other with an energy of 14 trillion electron volts, seven times more powerful than the current highest-power collider, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

After glitches and equipment failures marred the LHC’s start last year, operators are trying again this month. In late October, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, were celebrating the first particles to enter sectors of the accelerator since it was shut down.

Operators expect a gradual ramp-up of activity, first circling beams, then creating low-power collisions, and slowly increasing the collisions’ energy. Vafa isn’t the only Harvard faculty member eagerly anticipating the LHC start-up. Harvard experimental physicists have lent a hand to build ATLAS, one of the two main detectors there. Other theoretical physicists, including Lisa Randall, the Frank Baird Jr. Professor of Science, and Howard Georgi, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, also await the light that the LHC will shed on their work.

Most physicists expect the LHC will discover the elusive particle known as “Higgs,” which is the origin of mass for all known particles. One major remaining question is what else the LHC might discover.

Vafa traveled to CERN in late October to discuss with teams of scientists at the two main detectors on what else they might see. If the assumptions that he and Heckman make in the context of string theory are valid, Vafa said, the two lightest of the new particles are the gravitino and the stau. The gravitino, however, is so weakly interactive that it is hard to produce directly, Vafa said. A stau particle, however, is easier to produce and should be semi-stable, lasting as long as a minute. And it should leave a signature track — unexplainable by any of the already-observed particles — as it streaks across the LHC’s detectors.

“It would be the smoking gun for our stringy models,” Vafa said.

While Vafa and Heckman’s work predicts there is a good likelihood of generating a stau particle, there is also a less likely possibility that a semi-stable neutral particle will be generated. If the particle proves neutral, it won’t manifest itself in a way that the LHC’s detectors would see. It could still be found, but indirectly. If the particle is created and escapes the accelerator, it would manifest as missing energy and could be located as scientists tally their experimental results.

Vafa and Heckman came up with their stau conclusion by winnowing the many possibilities in string theory. One difficulty of the theory, Vafa said, is its flexibility. String theory has hundreds of variables, which he described as “dials” that physicists can turn up and down to generate innumerable possible universes.

While that is interesting to theoreticians, Vafa said, it can also muddy the theoretical search for one universe: ours.

Vafa and Heckman devised two constraints that greatly narrowed the possible string universes. First, they assumed that gravity does not have to play a role in the unification of the other three forces. And second, they assumed that one property of string theory, called supersymmetry, is present at the energy levels generated by the LHC.

If string theory is correct, our universe is made up not of particles, as has been generally taught, but of tiny vibrating strings. The different vibrations manifest themselves as the familiar particles and forces that students learn about in physics class.

In addition to string theory’s ability to encompass gravity and the other forces in one framework, it can also fill a second important theoretical gap in understanding the universe, by explaining all the missing matter.

The known constellation of particles under conventional theories — electrons, quarks, neutrinos, and the like — can only account for about a sixth of the matter in the universe. The rest of it is made up of theorized “dark matter,” whose form remains unknown.

Dark matter is explained in string theory by the concept of supersymmetry. Supersymmetry, which was first discovered in the context of string theory, holds that for each known particle there is a corresponding particle of different spin. At the time of the big bang, the theory says, the paired particles had similar properties such as mass and charge, but as the universe cooled off, the symmetry got broken. Now, according to the theory, in our broken-symmetry universe, the supersymmetric particles have much higher masses than their known partners. This higher mass also would explain why scientists haven’t seen them yet, since particle colliders must generate more energy than they have been able to do to create them. In the stringy models of Vafa and Heckman, the gravitino, which is predicted to be about 100 times more massive than the electron, comprises the bulk of the dark matter.

With the start-up of the LHC, Vafa said, science may be on the threshold of energies needed to create new supersymmetric particles, and of gaining a new understanding of the universe.

“I think it’s probably the most exciting experiment we’ll see in our lifetimes,” Vafa said of the LHC. “We’ll be excited by whatever they find — whether or not they confirm our predictions — because it’s the truth of nature, and it will teach us about the fundamental ways nature works.”

To understand his many contributions as a mentor, author, expert witness, designer and implementer of programs and policies, and concerned citizen, one must first understand the man. Julius Richmond — known to all as “Julie” or as “JBR” — was a son of Chicago, the Chicago of Carl Sandburg, Studs Terkel, ­­­­­­­­­­­­­Daniel Burnham, and Jane Addams. The first wrote the epic poem “The People Yes,” the second had a love affair with the “common” folk whose lives he chronicled, the third reminded us to “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood,” and the last translated her ideas into social activism. Julie was about people, all people, about great ideas and plans, and about seeking social justice. Julius Richmond spent most of his life in the East. Nevertheless, though he left Chicago, Chicago never left him.

His early years were difficult, but he found the groundwork for his life’s concerns on a farm midst goats and lambs. He observed and studied the relationship of lambs to their mothers and to goat foster mothers, the capacity of sheep and goats to adopt strange kids and lambs, and the impact of the infant on the mother and of the mother on the infant. These experiences fueled his deep interest in and commitment to issues in child development, a field which he pioneered after graduating the University of Illinois Medical School in 1939, doing his internship at Cook County Hospital, serving as a flight surgeon in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, and — after discharge — completing his residency in pediatrics at Cook County and Chicago’s municipal contagious disease hospitals.

In 1953, he moved to the State University of New York at Syracuse College of Medicine (now known as the Upstate Medical Center). There he and his colleague, Bettye Caldwell, established a pioneering daycare center for infants as young as six months of age and focused their research efforts on cognitive abilities developed during a child’s first years. They devoted particular attention to children who faced special risks due to their family’s social and disadvantaged economic status.

This pioneering work demonstrated that cognitive and emotional stimulation made a substantial difference in the development of children. It helped focus attention on psychological, social, and behavioral dimensions of health in addition to the more traditional narrower focus on physical well being. It was this work that led Sargent Shriver, the “general” in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, to recruit Julie to serve as the first National Director of Project Head Start. The call came in January of 1965 and by that summer half a million children from poor families were enrolled in Head Start programs. The programs went beyond learning letters, numbers, and colors and involved the acquisition of concepts and social skills. Parents were intimately involved in the effort and in a broad conceptual scheme health and nutritional needs were addressed as well. What Julie helped put into place, survives. Head Start recently enrolled its 25 millionth child, is deeply embedded in our national strategy on behalf of children, and provides a daily reminder of how much can be accomplished through vision, conviction, commitment, dedication, and hard work.

Had Julie only launched Head Start on its high-impact trajectory, it would have been enough. But he did much more and did it at the very same time. While at the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) he worked informally with the health staff of the OEO community action program to develop the neighborhood health centers program that brought needed health and other services to deprived neighborhoods and populations. It is worth remembering that it was Senator Edward Kennedy who steered the first $50 million Neighborhood Health Center amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act to passage. That was not the only time that Dr. Richmond “recruited” Senator Kennedy in support of forward looking legislation. Many of the services offered in these centers were provided by newly-trained members of the affected communities. In time, those neighborhood health centers evolved into the community health centers that now are an important part of the infrastructure undergirding America’s health care delivery system. Today there are over 1,100 such centers servicing more than 17 million individuals. If Julie was the father of Head Start, it can be said that he was the midwife at the birth of Neighborhood Health Centers.

And, of course, there is much more. In 1966, Julie was honored by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) with the C. Anderson Aldrich award in Child Development, the Academy’s highest honor in the field. In accepting the award Julie challenged the profession to view child development as a basic science of pediatrics in which theory and methodology would guide rigorous investigation. Further, he argued that psychosocial aspects of child development needed to be incorporated into pediatric training. He understood that this view would face opposition from those who considered biologic research as “hard” science and were loath to incorporate what they viewed as “softer” social science data. He, therefore, influenced the Executive Committee of the AAP to establish a Section on Child Development to provide a forum for communication, stimulate interest in research, and foster educational activities for pediatricians and others. For Julie it was not enough to “have an idea.” It was necessary to translate the idea into action, to institutionalize child development as a basic science for pediatrics. A younger generation may not grasp how “radical” his views were. Today, forty years after his Aldrich address, developmental and behavioral pediatrics is recognized as an academic discipline with subspecialty board status. As with Head Start and Neighborhood Community Health Centers which remain integral to the American scene, so with Julie Richmond’s vision for pediatrics.

Julius Benjamin Richmond was not yet done. He came to Harvard University with appointments in the Medical School, the School of Public Health, and the Kennedy School of Government, serving at the same time at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and as Director of the Judge Baker Guidance Center and for a time as Chair of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. But Washington and public service called once again. In 1977 he took leave from his Boston activities and accepted appointment as both Assistant Secretary for Health and Surgeon General in the Carter administration.

He accomplished much even in a period of fiscal retrenchment. During his tenure he issued two highly influential reports: a 1,200 page Report published on the 15th anniversary of Surgeon General Luther Terry’s original report linking smoking to lung cancer and other serious diseases and a second report Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. The smoking report was praised for its comprehensiveness and rigor, the scrupulous review process of research studies on smoking and its health effects, and its medical precision. It is fair to say that the report ended the so called “debate” about tobacco and its effects. Julie had declared “case-closed.” It took years for the full impact of the report to be felt and for the “cover-up” to be fully exposed and recognized, but the trend was inexorable. Not surprisingly, this work equipped him to be an expert witness in various class action suits brought against the tobacco industry. His credibility and knowledge were important in the suit brought by non-smoking flight attendants who had suffered harm from passengers who smoked. The industry settled this suit for $300 million which was used to create the Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute (FAMRI), a foundation which sponsors scientific investigation of the harms of second-hand smoke. Dr. Richmond served as FAMRI’s first medical director. Once again his efforts were institutionalized.

The second report on health promotion and disease prevention redirected attention from the traditional emphasis on resource inputs and access to assessments of outcomes, including assessments of health functioning, reductions in morbidity and increases in life-expectancy, and changes in health status. Importantly, the Report set specific and measurable goals for health promotion for various population groups. The shift in emphasis was yet another “big idea” and once again Julie created something which endures: the assessment and setting of goals has been followed at ten year intervals and is now part of the American health scene. We measure where we are and agree upon attainable goals that require sustained action. We return to see whether we have achieved those goals, assess why we have failed on those that proved beyond our reach, and set out anew to seek improvement.

Dr. Richmond returned to Harvard and to his work in Boston. He did not come back to “rest on his laurels,” though there were many lectures, commemorations, commendations, and honorary degrees in the offing. Rather, he returned to resume his activities in planning research activities across the university, meeting with colleagues, writing numerous articles, editorials, op-ed pieces, and a book on health care. He raised his voice and pen against complacency, on behalf of major reform of the health delivery and financing system, and on behalf of social justice. He believed that success is based on three interacting ingredients: a requisite scientific knowledge base, a social strategy that would utilize that knowledge base, and a political strategy that would gain support for the strategy. That is how he fought for a better world.

Even so, he found the time to meet with all who wanted to come through his open door. Those who did benefitted from his remarkable capacity for meeting with, listening to, inspiring us all and somehow getting us – perhaps especially younger colleagues – to offer comments and ideas we had never believed we had in us. Like the greatest ball players he made those on his team (and all were on his team) perform better. He worked to build bridges between disciplines and as well between individuals who might learn from one another’s ideas and activities. In his writing and lectures, and perhaps above all in his conversation in which he wanted to talk about you and your ideas, he inspired a long list of persons who would wish to carry on his work.

Julie Richmond lived a full life. He was blessed with his first wife Rhee, who died in 1985, and as well with his surviving wife Jean. He was proud of his three sons, Barry, Charles, and Dale, and grieved deeply at Dale’s untimely death. He accomplished much and much of what he accomplished was due to his love of people. Harvard put it well when, in awarding him an honorary degree, it stated: “Farsighted architect of initiatives in health, master builder of bridges linking academy and community, for whom nothing is more precious than the life of a child.”

Respectfully submitted,

Rashi Fein, Chairperson
Allan Brandt
Leon Eisenberg
Nancy Oriol
Judith Palfrey
Lisbeth Schorr
Jack Shonkoff

Baim, who came to Harvard Medical School in 1981, established the interventional cardiology program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The program specializes in training surgeons to use new medical devices, including stents. In 2000, Baim moved on to Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Memorial services are set for Monday (Nov. 16) in Canton, Mass.

The campus tool was developed by Harvard undergraduates Alex Bick ’10 (engineering sciences), Joy Ding ’10 (computer science), Drew Robb ’10 (physics and mathematics), Cameron Spickert ’10 (computer science), and Winston Yan ’10 (physics). The team members are splitting a $10,000 scholarship, and each of them was awarded a trip to the EduCause Annual Conference in Denver.

The core of Rover is a guidebook, enhanced by location-awareness and social-networking features to tell students what is happening around campus, spotlighting store deals, events, news, and transportation options. Rover is unique in having a live feed of deals to connect local businesses with students, creating interactions that allow for greater integration.

The application previously won top honors in the 2008 I3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge.

The Big Mobile on Campus Challenge for full-time college students and staff was established in 2008 to recognize innovative and creative mobile applications that enhance academic performance, build campus community, and improve school operations.

A member of the HBS faculty for more than 40 years, Lorsch has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including “Pawns or Potentates: The Reality of America’s Corporate Boards” and “Back to the Drawing Board: Designing Boards for a Complex World.”

The magazine also named William W. George and Raymond V. Gilmartin, both Professors of Management Practice at HBS, and James I. Cash Jr., the School’s James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration Emeritus, to its Directorship 100 list, comprising “those 100 individuals who exert the most influence on the boardroom agenda.”

There are plenty of guides that offer tips on negotiation strategies. As useful as these are for a grounding in the fundamentals, they don’t always fit the complex, ever-changing deal situations that occur in today’s business environment. Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Guhan Subramanian is working to fill that gap by examining complex deals where negotiators are fighting on multiple fronts — across the table for sure, but also on the same side of the table with known, unknown, and potential competitors.

This winter, Subramanian will publish “Negotiauctions: New Dealmaking Strategies for a Competitive Marketplace” (W.W. Norton), a book that draws on his experience studying and advising on complex corporate transactions and high-stakes personal ones, such as buying a home or car. The first Harvard faculty member to hold tenured appointments at both Harvard Business School, where he is H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, and Harvard Law School, where he is Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business, Subramanian is the faculty chair for the new HBS Executive Education course “Managing Negotiators and the Deal Process,” taking place this week (Nov. 8-13).

September now looks like an aberration that’s only visible in Harvard’s rear-view mirror. The team that month won just once in its first seven games and finished September at 3-5-1.

Responding as champions are expected to do, however, the Crimson won six of their final seven games, and the program’s ninth Ancient Eight title.

The hero against Columbia was Melanie Baskind ’12, the 2008 Ivy League Player of the Year, who scored both of the Crimson’s goals, including the game winner at the 95:08 mark of overtime.

Baskind, who finished the regular season second on the team in scoring (4) and first in assists (6), was named to the Top Drawer Soccer National Team of the Week and received Ivy Player of the Week honors on Nov. 9.

Nov. 13 (4 p.m.) the Crimson will travel to Chestnut Hill, Mass. to face Boston College in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament. Earlier this season Harvard fell to the Eagles, 4-1.

“Many had copies,” said the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), “and I noticed that several had earmarked pages with … yellow sticky notes.”

The book was “Architectures for Agreement: Addressing Global Climate Change in the Post-Kyoto World.” Edited by Stavins and Joseph Aldy, then a fellow at a Washington think tank, Resources for the Future, and now special assistant to the president for energy and the environment, the book described the research results from a Harvard-led initiative on climate change.

When the U.N. Climate Change Conference convenes in Copenhagen next month, the same Harvard collaborators will play a similar key role in briefing participants, using research summarized in a new book by Stavins and Aldy, “Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy: Summary for Policymakers,” just published by Cambridge University Press.

Stavins directs the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, an interfaculty, multinational, multidisciplinary initiative that works to educate and inform officials who develop climate policy. The project includes 35 research efforts in Europe, the United States, China, India, Australia, and Japan, and has an outreach component that works directly with many governments, including the nations accounting for about 90 percent of global emissions.

The initiative is broad in scope. It includes a range of Harvard faculty members, as well as international authorities in international relations,economics, political science, and the law.

“No university, no sector, no country has cornered the market on wisdom, so it’s necessary to have a broad set of perspectives bearing upon the question,” said Stavins.

Through intensive research, the initiative helps countries to identify the key design elements of “scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic” international climate policies.

Stavins and his team have met frequently in recent months with key Washington players concerning the upcoming negotiations. They were also contacted last year by Denmark’s prime minister to help him prepare for the Copenhagen summit.

While Stavins and members of his project won’t have official seats at the negotiating table next month, they will work behind the scenes, holding meetings to explain their findings to nongovernmental organizations, attending delegates, and the press. In addition, Stavins hopes that some meetings will bring together members of negotiating groups who may not “normally be in agreement.”

Stavins believes there is little chance for a breakthrough agreement at the summit, and he adds that is not entirely a bad thing. He explained his position by providing a historical perspective, and a little baseball parlance.

Next month’s meeting is a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 multinational agreement aimed at curbing global greenhouse gas emissions through 2012. The Kyoto summit set binding targets for 37 of the world’s industrialized nations, but was considered a failure by many because it did not restrict emissions from some of the most rapidly growing economies, such as China and India. In addition, the United States, a major emitter, would not ratify the agreement.

In Copenhagen, a similar, target-based agreement, said Stavins, “would be a Kyoto Protocol on steroids. It would mean more stringent targets for the industrialized world and no targets whatsoever for the developing world. It wouldn’t be ratified by the United States Senate, there would be no involvement from India or China, and it would do virtually nothing about the problem.”

The Harvard professor said the problem of climate change cannot be solved in a single stroke.

“The cliché that one often hears about the American baseball season is even more true about climate policy: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Stavins said that positive results from Copenhagen, ones that could serve as a foundation for climate policy going forward, would include a joint communiqué on climate change principles, or what his initiative calls a “portfolio of domestic commitments,” in which each nation promises to abide by its domestic climate change policies.

“A date like December 18th in Copenhagen is arbitrary in terms of the nature of the problem,” said Stavins. “The important thing is what happens in the long term. So that’s why I would say that the goal for Copenhagen should be meaningful global action over the long term, not some notion of success in Copenhagen itself.”

“It’s a matter of building institutions, and that takes time,” he added, noting that he believes that the Obama administration understands the need for a highly nuanced approach to a solution.

“This administration has excellent people. They take climate policy very seriously and intelligently, and when I say intelligently, I mean they are very aware of the science, as well as the economic and political realities of the challenge.”