Rochester Review

September–October 2012, Volume 75, No. 1

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Emily Boynton, Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Mark Michaud, Tom Rickey, Brandon Vick, and Michael Wentzel

Editorial Office

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Published six times a year for alumni, students, their parents, and friends of the University, Rochester Review is produced by University Communications.

Opinions expressed are those of the authors, the editors, or their subjects and do not necessarily represent official positions of the University of Rochester.

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2012 University of Rochester

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Alumni photographs, courtesy of the subjects. Unless otherwise credited, all others are Rochester Review photos.

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Contents

New Majors for a New Age

Letters

Betting on a Boson

Life Savers

Light House

A Class Record for Diversity

At the ‘Intersection of Science, Engineering, and Music’

Introducing Rettner Hall

A New Route for Tackling Prostate Cancer

Seeing the Future

Who Was Debussy?

Scientists Rate University a ‘Best Place to Work’

‘Proving What We Knew about Ourselves’

What’s Big Data Got to Do with It?

A Super  Supercomputer

‘A Great Gift to the City’

At Issue: Election 2012

The Student Voter’s Dilemma

A New Kind of Rescue Hero

In the News

Some History—and Tips—on ‘Taps’

‘The Pilgrim’

By George, It’s a Birthday Party!

Connecting in the Facebook Age

Joseph Platt ’37: ‘Soul of Harvey Mudd College’

Books & Recordings

Getting from Here to There

Rocket Science

New Majors for a New Age

By Joel Seligman

The Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation will open in the fall of 2013 and house new undergraduate programs designed for students educated in the Internet age.

Rettner Hall will build on our momentum in digital media. Our new digital media studies major, which we will begin offering this fall, will require students to take half of their courses in the arts and humanities and the other half in the sciences and engineering. Students in this major will choose courses from a dozen different departments as they synthesize analytic, algorithmic, aesthetic, and technological thinking in the study of both traditional and new forms of media.

Understanding and producing digital media represents a new standard of literacy for the 21st century. Students in digital media will address various media forms as they collaborate on a capstone project during their senior year to construct a digital media object.

A proposed audio and music engineering program also will be housed in Rettner Hall. A joint effort among the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the College’s Department of Music, and the Eastman School of Music, audio and music engineering will offer design-based engineering instruction in combination with the humanistic study of music. Students will perform hands-on work in acoustics, signal processing, audio software, and the recording arts, and will study music theory and musicianship.

The ground floor of Rettner Hall will be dedicated to an engineering fabrication center or Fab Lab. In this collaborative space, students will design a tool (for example, render it electronically), and then, using the tools available in the Fab Lab, create a working prototype of that object. While the Fab Lab will provide invaluable hands-on skills to students in engineering, it also will be a sophisticated learning environment for students across the disciplines in Arts, Sciences & Engineering as they share instruments such as the 3-D printers used in additive manufacturing.

Many students already have signed up for the new digital media studies major, and others are looking forward to taking courses and working on cocurricular projects. Freshman philosophy student Juan Bernardo Tobar, for example, imagines he’ll be spending all of his time in Rettner Hall. Having taken a course on The Art and Science of Time offered last spring as part of the Ferrari Humanities Symposium, he discovered an abiding interest in courses offered by multiple faculty members from a variety of perspectives. He’s eager to begin work in the digital media studies major, and he’s already thinking about the senior capstone project he’d like to work on, one that would no doubt involve the music industry.

Sophomore Kedar Shashidhar, also interested in music, is looking forward to working in the audio and music engineering program. An entrepreneur at heart, he wanted to be engaged in something productive over the summer, so he began to form networks with various companies when he went to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last winter. He landed a position as an intern in a recording studio in Rochester, and after learning the ropes he was given increased responsibilities, including creating and managing a large-scale promotional event.

The additions of the digital media studies major and the proposed audio and music engineering major are the latest new programs in Arts, Sciences & Engineering. When state approval of the audio and music engineering major is complete, the College will have added 14 new majors since 2006, including financial economics; bioethics; economics and business strategies; epidemiology; health, behavior, and society; health policy; international relations; archaeology, technology, and historical structures; computer science (as a BA option); optical engineering; American studies; the Barry Florescue Undergraduate Business Degree Program; digital media studies; and audio and music engineering.

To put this in different terms, the late Steve Jobs memorably remarked, “the intersection of humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.”

Our challenge is to be in the vanguard of the new multidisciplinary world.

Letters

IMPACT: Services like the EquiCenter in Mendon, N.Y., are important community resources, say members of Rochester-area families affected by autism. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Understanding Autism

Excellent and fascinating piece about autism (“The ‘Spaces Between,’” July-August). Readers should realize that earlier work at the U of R is relevant, too. Stanley Sapon in psycholinguistics was doing behavioral work in the 1960s, teaching autistic children speech. The late E. Roy John [founder of the Center for Brain Research] carried his research from the U of R to NYU, where his brain research lab has pioneered standards in quantitative electroencepholographic studies that are allowing us to use computer-enhanced brain biofeedback to stabilize and normalize the brain waves of autistic patients.

Before Sapon and John at the U of R, Drs. [John] Romano and [George] Engel in the Department of Psychiatry had done seminal work on brain waves in delirium. The brain wave lab was located in the psychiatry department, where many of us who worked with them became familiar with the EEG and continue to utilize it in our ongoing work.

The modern neurofeedback work with patients with autism is very hopeful.

David Tinling ’63M (Res)

Rochester, Vt.

The writer was a member of the psychiatry faculty from 1965 to 1979.

The recent article “The ‘Spaces Between’” did an excellent job showcasing the tremendous autism research being conducted by the U of R medical team. This research is extremely important in identifying the causes of autism and how treatment can be improved.

Yet it is the collaboration between the U of R and local agencies that will help to translate these research findings into programs and services that will support those impacted by autism in our community today.

Upstate New York Families for Effective Autism Treatment Inc. (UNYFEAT), a grassroots organization started by parents with children who have autism, is a good example of how successful these types of collaborative partnerships can be in expanding the services and support that thousands of people in our community rely upon to better meet the needs of individuals with autism.

The EquiCenter in Mendon, N.Y., is another organization that is making a real difference to those individuals with autism. This premier Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship (PATH) equine center provides therapeutic horseback riding to my son, Peyton, shown in the photo on page 43 of the story. The EquiCenter collaborates with parents and U of R medical professionals to create a program that meets the individual physical and emotional needs of the child. The benefits of therapeutic horseback riding can be dramatic in children with self-regulation, sensory, and motor planning needs. The rider and the horse develop a partnership that is truly remarkable, especially for a child with autism who may have difficulty forming relationships.

The EquiCenter’s staff encourages riders to groom the horse, lead it through specific tasks, and then to care for it after the riding is done as a way to improve the rider’s self-esteem and adaptive living skills while having fun.

Overall, this experience has improved my child’s ability with social interactions and coordination of physical movements.

Thank you for highlighting the importance of research and collaboration and how specifically the U of R medical team is working with organizations in our community to improve the lives of individuals impacted by autism.

Christina Walker Hilton ’93S (MBA)

Fairport, N.Y.

The writer is the finance director of Upstate New York Families for Effective Autism Treatment Inc. (UNYFEAT).

Bell Ringer of an Issue

I want to compliment you on the best issue ever. I am a Class of 1979 MBA living in St. Louis. I receive Review, but many times it is really geared to those graduates who live close enough to take advantage of all that U of R can offer.

One of the articles I found fabulous this time was “Sound Advice” (Alumni Gazette, July-August), which had actually useful information–clearly written and nicely designed with an interesting look. I had wondered about these topics, so was happy to have them explained in the context of an alumnus [Grammy Award–winning mastering engineer Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM)].

The other article I loved was “Ring Tones.” What a well-written article, along with outstanding graphics of the Hopeman Memorial Carillon. I have always enjoyed picnics at the carillon concerts here at Concordia Seminary. This article will be enjoyed by all my friends who come to the picnics.

Great job! Thanks so much for your work. Much appreciated!

Joanne Miller Griffin ’79S (MBA)

St. Louis

I am glad to hear there is a current revival of playing the carillon. As one of the students (and a past president of the Bellman Society) who was there when the chimes were replaced by the carillon, I can tell you that we had an active group of students playing the carillon back then.

Arie Abbenes, who came from the Netherlands to play the dedication recital (which was recorded by the University– he now is a faculty member at the Netherlands Carillon School), also gave lessons to those of us who had been playing the chimes. I subsequently took lessons from him in the Netherlands.

Back then the carillon was played almost daily. We played concerts, occasionally were asked to play when there were funerals or weddings in the chapel and, of course, played at other times (typically lunch time and before dinner). We became good at fixing broken transmission wires (wires connecting the keys and the bell clapper) and repairing the practice instrument.

Several of the group became carillonneur members of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America. We recruited and taught other students, arranged music, and occasionally had student club funds to buy music. Both David Caldwell ’75 and I tried to get the University to hire a carillonneur, or at least create an Eastman School graduate assistantship, to keep going what we had both worked so hard to develop amongst our fellow students. I hope the University considers expanding support of the use of the instrument.

Carolyn Birmingham ’75

Ridgeland, Miss.

I was sorry to learn of [Eastman School professor and performer] David Craighead’s passing (In Memoriam, July- August). I was very fortunate to have him as my organ teacher for the four years I attended the U of R and the Eastman School.

He gave me numerous insights on registration and this became more obvious to me after I initially served as a substitute church organist for several years. At almost every church I played I would receive compliments, not so much for my playing but rather comments like “We’ve never heard the organ sound like that.” My response was to attribute this to Mr. Craighead’s wonderful teaching.

I asked him why he did not just perform as he was obviously as qualified and talented as the big name pipe organ performers of the time. But he said he felt his main calling was to teach, and what a blessing this was to the multitude of students he taught.

The Hopeman Memorial Carillon article was quite informative and brought back a fond memory. We had not seen the sun for several days (a week or more of drizzle?) and early one such morning someone played “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” You could hear the entire campus laughing.

Robert (Rollo) Anderson ’59

Palmyra, Va.

Review welcomes letters and will print them as space permits. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity. Unsigned letters cannot be used. Send letters to Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P.O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; rochrev@rochester.edu.

HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS

Betting on a Boson

(Photo: Rex Features/AP Images)

COLLISION COURSE: Several Rochester scientists were part of an international team whose work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and France produced evidence this summer of a particle believed to be the long-sought Higgs boson. The work by Rochester’s Arie Bodek, Regina Demina, Paul Slattery, Aran Garcia-Bellido, Pawel deBarbaro, and Sergei Korjenevski helped support a nearly 50-year-old theory by Carl Hagen, professor of physics at Rochester. Hagen was one of six researchers who published similar papers in 1964 that predicted the existence of the subatomic particle.

MEDICAL STUDENTS

Life Savers

(Photo: Brandon Vick)

RESCUE TEAM: First-year medical students Sarah Nevarez, Bridget Hughes, and Lindsay Wahl earned praise from City of Rochester rescue personnel and School of Medicine and Dentistry officials for their help in an effort to rescue two children and their father from the Erie Canal in August. The students, only in their third official day at the medical school—along with David Lambert, senior associate dean for medical student education, and Adrienne Morgan, senior director of the Center for Advocacy, Community Health, Education, and Diversity—rushed to the canal after the man lost control of the children’s stroller and it rolled down an embankment and dropped into the water

ATHLETICS

Light House

(Photo: Composite by Adam Fenster)

FIELD WORK: The Yellowjacket men’s soccer team practices under new lights at Fauver Stadium in late August as Rochester’s athletics teams gear up for the season with some revamped facilities. In addition to the lights at Fauver, lights have been installed at Towers Field—along with an artificial turf surface for baseball—and the Palestra’s basketball court has been refinished. Under way are renovations to the Speegle-Wilbraham Aquatic Center.

A Class Record for Diversity

By Kathleen McGarvey

(Graphic: Steve Boerner)

The Class of 2016 is the most diverse class Rochester has ever welcomed, in terms of background and other measures, says Jonathan Burdick, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid for Arts, Sciences & Engineering.

While definitive numbers won’t be known until after the data is collected from first registration, the class is also on track to be the biggest, with an estimated class membership of at least 1,230 students, a slight majority of whom are male.

A growing share of the class—and the largest ever total number of students—are from traditionally underrepresented ethnic and racial groups. “We will have achieved enrollment shares of more than 5 percent each for Latino and African-American students,” Burdick says, calling that attainment “at the least a higher platform from which to continue expanding Rochester’s reach into all communities and Rochester’s relevance to rising aspirations and expectations among historically underrepresented groups.”

Students are also coming from farther away: 90 percent of the growth of this year’s class, compared to those of a year or two ago, is from students coming from the western and southern United States, as well as students who are U.S. citizens enrolling straight from living abroad.

AUDIO & MUSIC ENGINEERING

At the ‘Intersection of Science, Engineering, and Music’

New major in audio and music engineering aims to make its grads the ‘gold standard’ in evolving fields.

By Bob Marcotte

STUDIO SOUND: Professors Mark Bocko (bass), Dave Headlam (piano), and Jack Mottley (booth), and PhD student Stephen Roessner (drums) test a new recording studio in the Computer Studies Building, a space that provides opportunities to work with technologies involving sound. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Imagine walking into a booth, having your picture taken, and walking out not only with a photo but also with a computer-generated, algorithmic melody uniquely yours—based on the features of your face.

That’s one of the projects Kedar Shashidhar ’15 of Corning, N.Y., has been working on.

It’s an example of the “intersection of science, engineering, and music” that Mark Bocko, professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering in the Hajim School, and Dave Headlam, professor of music theory at the Eastman School, had in mind when they first began talking about a new major in audio and music engineering.

Designed to leverage Rochester’s hallmark strengths in engineering and music—both at the Eastman School and in the College’s Department of Music—the major was approved by the faculty last spring and is being offered for the first time this fall.

Along with a new major in digital media studies, the audio and music engineering major offers students an opportunity to explore the evolving fields of digital technology through multidisciplinary research and learning. Both majors will move into the new Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation, now under construction between Wilson Commons and Morey Hall, in fall of 2013.

The chance to combine his passion for music with technology caught Shashidar’s attention. “I’ve always had that more technical mindset,” Shashidhar says. The degree “complements who I am as a person and where I want to go in life.”

Bocko, who is an affiliate faculty member at the Eastman School, says the demand for traditional audio recording engineers employed by professional recording studios has declined, largely because advances in audio technology have made it possible for people to invest a few thousand dollars and put together an excellent home recording studio of their own. Headlam says even when live music is recorded in a superior acoustical setting like Eastman’s Hatch Recital Hall, much of the processing can now be done on a laptop.

At the same time there’s a burgeoning need for sonic media engineers in areas such as the video game industry, which is now larger than the music industry, according to Bocko and Headlam.

“You have hours and hours of screens and material in a major video game,” Bocko says. “Scoring all of that with music in a way that’s interesting and not repetitive is quite a challenge.”

Students trained in audio and music hardware and software design could very well end up finding efficient ways to use computers to generate more satisfying soundtracks, he says.

But they’ll likely be working in teams with marketing and design people who’ll have to ensure that the music being produced appeals to people, Headlam adds.

That’s why there will be two versions of the major.

One version, leading to a bachelor of science degree, carries a heavier load of engineering and technology classes, and will be the preferred preparation for students who wish to pursue “hard-core” engineering careers in hardware and software design and development. The other version, leading to a bachelor of arts degree, will be less technically comprehensive, emphasizing creation of audio content and leaving room for students to complete a dual major in, for example, music or brain and cognitive sciences or in engineering disciplines.

John Covach, professor and chair of the College music department and professor of theory at the Eastman School, says that the new major and facilities will help meet the increasing demand for music courses and performance. “The interest in music among Rochester students is really remarkable,” he says.

Shashidhar once dreamed of playing saxophone for a living, then gravitated toward the more secure job prospects of chemical engineering—until he heard Bocko describe the new major at an orientation session. Now he’s looking forward to helping break new ground by obtaining a degree many people have never heard of.

“It is really what you make of it,” Shashidhar says. “That’s one of the things I really like about this major.”

Bob Marcotte writes about the Hajim School for University Communications.

CAMPUS LIFE

Introducing Rettner Hall

DIGITAL HOME: Scheduled to be open in fall 2013, the Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation will be home to students studying digital media as well as engineering. (Illustration: Steve Boerner)

The new home for media arts and innovation will be named for Ronald Rettner, a University trustee who provided the lead gift for construction of the building.

Approved for construction this summer, Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation will feature an engineering fabrication lab where students can build project prototypes, a multipurpose learning studio, group study areas, and exhibit space. The building will also contain sound and video recording studios, high-end computers, and 3-D printers, the latest manufacturing technique to convert digital design software into actual models.

The building—to be located between Wilson Commons and Morey Hall—is scheduled to be ready for classes by fall 2013. That’s when students pursuing newly designed majors in digital media studies and in audio and music engineering will be able to tinker at will in the three-story structure. Designed by the Boston-based architectural firm of Goody Clancy, the 18,900-square-foot building will be open 24 hours a day to accommodate students’ creativity and innovation—at whatever hour inspiration strikes.

—Valerie Alhart

DISCOVERY

A New Route for Tackling Prostate Cancer

PATENTLY SPICY: Rochester scientists have received a patent to use compounds derived from curcumin to fight cancer, acne, baldness, and other conditions. (Photo: iStockphoto)

It may be the Peyton Manning of prostate cancer: a protein called paxillin that’s essential for the disease to grow and spread throughout the body.

Like any good quarterback, paxillin commands the entire field, controlling cell growth in tumors sensitive to hormone therapy and in tumors that grow resistant to such treatment.

Though in the very early stages, the discovery that paxillin is a major player in prostate cancer is an important first step toward developing a treatment for men whose cancer persists even after the most aggressive treatment. The research was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“The holy grail in prostate cancer is to figure out why cells stop responding to hormone therapy,” says senior study author Stephen Hammes, the Louis S. Wolk Distinguished Professor in Medicine and chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism in the Department of Medicine.

Hammes and first author Aritro Sen, research assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism, found that paxillin can go into the nucleus of a cell, regulating signals that lead to the creation of cancer cells. Taking paxillin out of the nucleus brought growth to a halt in both hormone-therapy-dependent and resistant prostate cancer cells.

What Does It Mean to Be Cool?

Research led by a Medical Center psychologist and published by the Journal of Individual Differences has found the characteristics associated with coolness today are markedly different from those of the past.

“I was not prepared to find that coolness has lost so much of its historical origins and meaning—the very heavy countercultural, somewhat individualistic, pose,” says Ilan Dar-Nimrod, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry, who led the study.

Coolness now is not so broody, he says. “The much darker version of what coolness is, is still there, but it is not the main focus. The main thing is: Do I like this person? Is this person nice to people, attractive, confident, and successful?”

Dar-Nimrod and his colleagues recruited almost 1,000 people who completed a questionnaire on the attributes, behaviors, and individuals they associated with the word “cool.” A significant number of participants used adjectives that focused on positive traits, such as “friendly,” “competent,” “trendy,” and “attractive.”

The findings could point to possible health implications, says Dar-Nimrod, whose main research interests are the effects of genetics and social environment on decision making and health behaviors. “Smoking or drug use, for example, could be connected with a view of coolness that includes rebelliousness or a countercultural stance. This can inform future health research on behaviors.”

Mathematicians Hide Waves Inside an Invisible ‘Hat’

Is invisibility, once the stuff of stories, slowly becoming reality? Over the past five years, mathematicians and other scientists have been working on devices that shield small objects from detection by microwaves or sound waves.

Allan Greenleaf, professor of mathematics, and an international team of researchers have come up with a process that would allow practical applications to be performed in a cloaked—or invisible—environment. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Such a

cloak could hide a probe needed to take precise sound measurements while letting in just enough sound waves that could be amplified for taking measurements. They’ve dubbed the system “Schrödinger’s hat,” in reference to the famed Schrödinger’s cat of quantum mechanics.

Patenting Curry’s Power Against Disease

The University and two other entities have received a U.S. patent for the use of compounds related to curcumin, the main ingredient of curry, in the fight against cancer, acne, baldness, and other medical conditions.

The patent—also awarded to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to AndroScience Corp. of San Diego—is for research led by Chawnshang Chang, director of the George Whipple Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Medical Center and a cofounder of AndroScience, in which the University owns a stake.

Chang, a faculty member in the Departments of Urology and Pathology and the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center, is one of many researchers worldwide investigating the potential biomedical benefits of curcumin, the spice that gives mustard and curry their bright yellow colors. Two dozen patents, dating back to 2004, have been issued to the University for Chang’s work.

“It’s exciting and gratifying to be part of the broad effort to learn about how compounds like ginger and curcumin exert potential health effects, which are well recognized in China and other cultures, and try to harness them to treat people with diseases like prostate cancer,” says Chang.

New Huntington Treatment Shows Promise

A new Rochester study indicates that the compound coenzyme Q10 (CoQ) reduces oxidative damage, a finding that hints at its potential to slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. The discovery, which appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Huntington’s Disease, also points to a new biomarker that could be used to screen experimental treatments for the debilitating disease and other neurological disorders.

“This study supports the hypothesis that CoQ exerts antioxidant effects in patients with Huntington’s disease and therefore is a treatment that warrants further study,” says Kevin Biglan, associate professor of neurology and lead author of the study. “As importantly, it has provided us with a new method to evaluate the efficacy of potential new treatments.”

Huntington’s disease is a genetic, progressive neuro-degenerative disorder that affects movement, behavior, and cognition and generally results in death within 20 years of the disease’s onset. Scientists believe that one of the important triggers is a genetic “stutter” that produces abnormal protein deposits in brain cells—deposits believed to inhibit the ability of cells to meet their energy demands. The result is oxidative stress— and, ultimately, cellular death. —Mark Michaud

INSTITUTE OF OPTICS

Seeing the Future

Noted optical scientist Xi-Cheng Zhang takes the helm at the Institute of Optics.

By Kathleen McGarvey

VISION: Zhang, who took over as director of the Institute of Optics this year, says he wants to make decisions from a strategic, visionary perspective, devoting resources, such as the hiring of new faculty, to areas in which Rochester can lead. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

As an expert in terahertz waves whose insights are in demand around the world, Xi-Cheng Zhang knows a thing or two about studying waves.

Now he’s looking forward to making them, on behalf of the Institute of Optics, as he works with colleagues to reinforce Rochester’s reputation as a driving academic force in optics nationally.

In January, Zhang succeeded previous director Wayne Knox, professor of optics and vision science, who was promoted after 10 years to become associate dean of education and new initiatives at the Hajim School.

“The Institute of Optics has a great reputation, a rich history, and a unique culture,” says Zhang, who spent the previous two decades at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was founding director of its Center for Terahertz Research and acting head of the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy. “It’s the first optics institute in the United States, and one of the top in the world.”

The admiration is mutual. “Xi-Cheng Zhang is an internationally recognized scientist in the field of optics who appreciates the great tradition of our institute, and we very much look forward to the scientific and administrative leadership he will bring to the institute,” Rob Clark, dean of the Hajim School, said upon Zhang’s appointment.

But while there’s much talk of tradition, Zhang’s directorship also marks a new era for the august institute that has granted approximately half of the optics degrees earned in the United States.

“The world is changing, and we have to change as well,” Zhang says. “We have many great achievements—but we need more.”

As director, he aims to increase undergraduate enrollment and to increase the number of master’s degree students. He’s also working to increase funding, patents, entrepreneurship, and publications in top journals. Key to all of that is identifying core strengths that make the Rochester program distinctive.

“I’m looking for the unique features of our institute,” Zhang says. To do that, he has been working closely with faculty members and alumni, reaching out to the institute’s many graduates through receptions, phone calls, and email exchanges.

“Because we’re small, we can’t do everything,” Zhang says. But he wants to make decisions from a strategic, visionary perspective, devoting resources, such as the hiring of new faculty, to areas in which Rochester can lead. And some fields of inquiry are simply essential.

“There are some areas which we shouldn’t miss, that as an institute of optics, we cannot afford to miss,” he says.

One of those areas is research into terahertz electromagnetic frequencies. Strengthening such research at the University is “one of my major tasks,” he says. “Like many of our faculty who maintain rigorous research programs, I plan to keep a top research profile here. My leadership focus will encompass active research, supervising students, and continuing to achieve significant funding.”

Curiosity first drew him to terahertz waves—he was intrigued because so little was known about the frequency, which lies on the electromagnetic spectrum between mid-infrared and microwave bands. But when NASA contacted him after the crash of the space shuttle Columbia to find out if terahertz technology could be used to identify defects in the shuttle’s thermal insulation, Zhang’s interest expanded to a drive for applications.

These are early days for research on the terahertz spectrum, but because the waves can go through many common, non- metallic materials, the work shows promise for applications in a wide variety of areas, from security and defense—identifying explosives and other dangerous chemicals from a distance of up to 30 meters away—to pharmaceuticals and art restoration and conservation.

For example, terahertz technology “has potential for homeland security applications,” he says, allowing airports to move away from backscatter x-rays, a method that has raised public concerns about privacy and safety.

The likely usefulness of terahertz waves for defense and homeland security has brought Zhang international attention. He recently retired as chair of a pair of NATO organizations, and this summer he received an honorary professorship from Moscow State University, recognition that has been awarded sparingly to scientists.

Participation in research of such immediate global interest has kept Zhang on the move. “I traveled 290,000 miles one year,” he says. “It’s 230,000 miles to the moon. There are a lot of meetings and organizations interested in terahertz technology.”

While at Rensselaer, Zhang established a company, Zomega Terahertz Corporation, dedicated to developing and establishing terahertz-technology applications. He hopes to help encourage entrepreneurship at the institute, where, he notes, there is already a long history of establishing companies by faculty, alumni, and students and a tradition of strong relationships with industry.

“I feel this is good for society, and good for our institute as well,” he says.

And despite the demanding pace of his research, his eyes are firmly on the plans he’s developing for the institute.

“I have a chance to work with a large group of the best faculty in the world, to achieve our goal together.”

LEARN

Who Was Debussy?

GENIUS: Marie Rolf says Debussy established a “new compositional paradigm” in works such as his 1905 La Mer, a rare autograph manuscript of which is held by Sibley Music Library. (Photo: Eastman School/Sibley Library)

This October, the Eastman School will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of composer Claude Debussy with a three-week festival, the Prismatic Debussy. Featuring concerts, lectures, and master classes, the festival will explore beloved masterpieces, such as his orchestral Nocturnes, compositions rarely performed, early songs, and new pieces inspired by the French composer. Marie Rolf ’76E (PhD), associate dean of graduate studies and professor of music theory at Eastman, is the festival’s artistic director.

What’s most important for people to know about Debussy?

Debussy was one of the greatest pathbreaking composers who ever lived. Unlike Bach or Mozart, who had the fortune to be born at the end of the Baroque and Classical eras, respectively, and who built on a pre-existing style, Debussy had to establish a whole new compositional paradigm, one that would honor French tradition but that left the more ponderous aspects of the past and set the stage for composers of the 20th century. Claude Debussy was a genius who changed the musical world forever.

In what ways was he a product of his era?

Debussy was also a man of his time and influenced by a great variety of contemporary ideas and sources: the literary symbolists Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé; the arts of other cultures, including Japan and Indonesia, Spain, and Russia; the café concerts of Paris; ragtime, minstrel songs, shadow plays, the circus. His primary motivation centered on his veneration for nature and his desire to create music that was free, “en plein air,” subject to no rules but the laws of pleasure and beauty.

What inspired you to create the festival?

We want to celebrate the composer’s eclecticism and originality, but we also want to celebrate the rich talent and resources of the Eastman School. We’re fortunate to have gifted students and faculty who interpret Debussy’s music as performers and as scholars, and to have access to several Debussy manuscripts and other rare materials in the Sibley Music Library. During the Prismatic Debussy festival, we aim to present his works in fresh and imaginative ways, showcasing our different ensembles, combining performance with cutting-edge research, and even featuring new compositions inspired by Debussy. So in a sense our festival is a celebration of the creative artistry of Debussy but also of the combined creative resources of our school.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Ice Man Arriveth

Vasilii Petrenko, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, is Rochester’s first climate scientist—though he says “paleoclimatologist” is a more accurate description. Petrenko works with ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica to learn about the climate and environment thousands of years ago. Along with observations of contemporary conditions and computer modeling to predict future patterns, study of climatic history is essential to understand what is happening today, he says.

How far back does the ice record go?

In Greenland, we can go back a little over 100,000 years. In Antarctica, the oldest ice core has been dated to about 800,000 years. And we can probably go further back.

What can you learn from the ice samples?

One of the things I’m interested in is how the natural methane budget works. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it has two types of sources today: one is natural, and one is anthropogenic—from humans. That source is now considerably larger than the natural sources, around a factor of 2 to 1. But there’s a lot of concern that with global warming, the natural methane budget might ramp up dramatically.

Does the melting ice in Greenland affect your research?

Some of the really large-volume samples that I need to get—some of my samples are a thousand kilograms, or about a ton—I can only get from the edges of the ice sheets because it’s impractical to get that much by drilling deep vertical cores.

But the edges are melting very fast, so the ice that’s available there is changing. In the Greenland Summit region, which is above 3,000 meters, it’s very cold year round—but in the last few years the instances where temperatures have gotten above freezing are increasing, and that creates melt layers in the snow and alters the way that gases are trapped.

We’re definitely feeling the influence. In my lifetime we’re not concerned about being able to retrieve the deep ice cores because the ice sheets do have a lot of inertia and it takes a long time to melt an ice sheet.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Do the Shoes Fit?

Judith Baumhauer ’09M (MPH), professor of orthopaedics, is president of the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society—the first woman to lead the organization. She was also the first female faculty member appointed to Rochester’s Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation. A medical doctor specializing in orthopaedic foot and ankle surgery, she’s one of the nation’s few female professors in the field.

What don’t we know about our feet?

People assume they’re going to wear the same size shoe they wore in college, but actually they’re probably wearing a shoe that’s too small. Your foot continues to grow throughout your life—it’s called periosteal bone growth. More than 80 percent of women are wearing shoes too small for their feet.

Are foot problems seasonal?

In the winter, to get in shape people walk on the treadmill or use other machines. But those machines are a repetitive stress. Sometimes your body can take the repetitive stress and do OK. And sometimes just the action of taking the same step over and over and over again, hundreds of times, gives you an overuse injury. So you can get Achilles tendonitis, or posterior tibial tendonitis—the tendon that supports your arch. That tendon can be painful around the inside of your ankle.

Once it gets to be nice weather, people want to go outside to exercise. This avoids the treadmill but has other injury risks. Walking on uneven ground can make the ankle vulnerable to rolling, resulting in an ankle sprain. I still tell people I like them to walk or run outside because I like them to change up their terrain—it’s better for their balance and causes fewer overuse problems.

What do you say to people about high heels?

You want a shoe that’s supportive and fits well. Support is a function of shock absorption and arch support.

I wear high heels to functions, just like everybody else—but when I get to my table, I kick them off. They’re for show, not for use. High heels give you a look—your calf is a little tighter, your back is more arched, your shoulders are back a little bit, your posture is better. There are qualities about high heels that make people feel they look better. And there’s value in that—your self-esteem is important. But you have to recognize that it is a look—and they’re not the most functional thing.

—Kathleen McGarvey

IN BRIEF

Scientists Rate University a ‘Best Place to Work’

The Scientist magazine has named Rochester one of the best places in the world for scientists to work.

The University is rated 22nd in the magazine’s worldwide survey of scientists in the life sciences.

At Rochester, that work is done primarily at the Medical Center, as well as in the Departments of Biology and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

The results are based on questionnaires completed by more than 1,000 full-time life scientists working in academic or non-commercial institutions.

This is the third consecutive year that the University has appeared on the list.

College Prep Center Expands

In its first year, the University’s College Prep Center at East High School in Rochester worked with nearly 700 students, providing advice and assistance and holding workshops about the college admissions process.

This year more students will receive the same support and outreach through a second center at the city’s Benjamin Franklin High School, thanks to a grant from the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation.

The new center will be a partnership between the school and the University’s David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity in Arts, Sciences & Engineering. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation funds the East High center, which opened last August.

“Our goal is to increase the high school graduation and college-going rates of students across the Rochester City School District,” says Beth Olivares, director of the Kearns Center.

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Building Bridges

A newly renovated railroad bridge connecting the River Campus to southwest Rochester neighborhoods opened to walkers, joggers, hikers, and bicyclists this summer. The Erie Lackawanna Pedestrian Bridge, built atop the deck of a railroad bridge constructed in the 1850s, spans the Genesee River approximately 1.5 miles south of downtown Rochester, linking the east and west banks of the river.

Eastman School Joins Partnership for City Music Instruction

Children in Rochester can learn about music in a new program, RocMusic, created this fall by a partnership between the Eastman School, the Eastman Community Music School, the Hochstein School of Music & Dance, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Rochester City School District, and the City of Rochester.

Inspired by Venezuela’s “El Sistema” program, RocMusic is a community-based, tuition-free music instruction program for economically disadvantaged youth. The pilot program will teach general music literacy and appreciation to children ages five through eight, and string instruction for children ages 9 to 18, three days a week.

“All children deserve the opportunity to experience the joy of making music,” says Jamal Rossi, RocMusic founder and executive associate dean of the Eastman School. The goal of the program, he says, “is to bring these opportunities directly to children by providing access to musical instruments, high quality instruction, and a safe place to learn and practice music after school and during the summer months.”

The program is being funded by a $100,000 seed grant from the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation. The grant will be used to hire a part-time music director and music instructors, as well as to furnish materials and to fund activities.

LANDMARK SEASON

‘Proving What We Knew about Ourselves’

The Yellowjackets celebrate the 1987 football season and the lessons of perseverance.

By Dana Hilfinger ’10

SEASON’S CHEER: Stepping in to his first head coaching job at Rochester in 1984, Ray Tellier (above) led the Yellowjackets to the NCAA playoffs in 1987, a 25th anniversary milestone that will be celebrated this fall. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Ray Tellier and his Rochester coaching staff set the stage for the 1987 football season three years earlier.

A first-time head coach, Tellier in 1984 had accepted the challenge of rebuilding a program that hadn’t posted a winning season in five years. The former offensive coordinator at Brown University focused first on the recruiting trail, bringing in talent from the Northeast.

“We just had to go out and find enough good players, and they would take it from there,” Tellier says.

Wins, however, were hard to come by, and the young recruits—as well as the upperclassmen—learned that turning things around would not be easy. Between 1984, when Tellier became head coach, and 1986, the team won just four games.

“A freshman starting two ways says a lot about the nature of the program,” says fullback and four-year starter Dan Gioia ’88, who recalls starting as fullback and linebacker in at least one game as a freshman.

“We suffered through, and we took our lumps,” says Dominic Strada ’89, a free safety from Jessup, Pa. “But we worked hard in the offseason. Everybody kept coming back with the attitude that we were going to get better each season. All we needed was for something to happen on the field that proved what we knew about ourselves.”

By 1987, that attitude was on full display as the Yellowjackets posted a 9–2 record, setting a record for single-season victories and becoming the only Rochester football team to earn an NCAA playoff berth. The 25th anniversary of the historic season will be celebrated this fall during Meliora Weekend, Oct. 11–14.

The milestone season opened Sept. 12, 1987, with a win over Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Fauver Stadium. Ahead on the schedule was a game against Union College, a perennial Goliath in the region.

Gioia, whose high school was near Union, remembers the moment well. “It’s the difference between programs with winning records and losing records—winning programs, like Union, would turn a game that they shouldn't win into a win; losing programs would turn those games into a loss.”

“I don’t think we had scored a point against them in three years,” Tellier says. But on Sept. 19, 1987, the Yellowjackets scored 24, enough to eke out a difficult victory in Schenectady.

“It went from a ‘here we go again,’ getting behind early, to striking right back and thinking we have a shot,” says wide receiver and kick returner Tommy Sheehan ’90. “When we beat them, we knew we were for real.”

With a balanced, high-powered offense and a tight defense, the Yellowjackets won their first six games for the first time since 1959.

The Yellowjackets credit each player’s willingness to work as a member of a team.

“There were five or six of us who would pick up the ball and lead either by example or verbally at any given point in a game,” Strada says.

At middle linebacker, there was future hall-of-famer Gary Ciarleglio ’89. Greg Sutton ’89, known as “Mr. Intensity.” There was the always reliable kicker Andy Milne ’89, who won a number of close games for the team. Sheehan, a sophomore wide receiver, would go on to win conference and All-America honors. And there were senior captains Pete Elliot ’89, another linebacker, and Gioia, a fullback.

“I remember after being named captain I had a sit-down chat with Coach Tellier,” Gioia says. “He said just lead by example. Work hard and lead by example. And that’s what we tried to do.”

While the Yellowjackets sustained late-season injuries that proved too difficult to overcome in their NCAA playoff game—a frigid, late November matchup with eventual national champion Wagner—the team’s turnaround was undeniable.

“I wished it had happened other times,” Tellier says of making it to the post- season. “It was a great accomplishment, for players to grow up and start to believe in themselves.”

Twenty-five years later, there’s still a sense of accomplishment, one that’s tempered by time.

“You really need to understand where we came from,” says Strada. “Most of the starters were all juniors and seniors at the time, but we all started from day one as freshmen and sophomores in there playing.”

“I look back at being in a team environment and competing—and how that applies to what I do today more than looking back on being on a team that won. That was a snapshot in time and a great thing to be a part of, but it’s really about the lessons.”

A former editor of the Campus Times, Dana Hilfinger ’10 is a freelance writer.

What’s Big Data Got to Do with It?

Advances in computing power and a wealth of digital information are changing scientific research.

By Kathleen McGarvey

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS: Henry Kautz, professor and chair of computer science, says “big data” often requires a new approach to problem-solving in science. “What I think we need are more people thinking of extremely creative ways to use these machines,” he says. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In June — and in digital culture, that’s already a good while ago—the CEO of the social networking service Twitter, Dick Costolo, announced that users were posting 400 million tweets a day. And that was up 60 million tweets per day from the figure just three months before. It all adds up to a billion tweets every two and a half days.

As a microblogging service that allows people to post messages of no more than 140 characters, Twitter is an immense but transitory compendium of observations, insights, outbursts, and mundanities. What value could it have for scientific researchers?

A lot, as it happens. Henry Kautz, chair of the computer science department, and colleagues Adam Sadilek and Vincent Silenzio have shown that Twitter messages can be harnessed to predict the spread of infectious diseases, such as influenza.

This year, they have published two papers explaining how, by using the geo-tags embedded in tweets, scientists can use social networking data to model the transmission of disease—and even to forecast when and if a specific individual will fall ill.

Kautz, Sadilek, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science, and Silenzio, associate professor of psychiatry and a member of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, have programmed computers to identify tweets in which people talk about feeling sick—disregarding messages where people use the term figuratively.

“Once you have that, you can start to map where people are sick,” Kautz says, because GPS in cell phones indicate where a tweet was made. “And you can actually start to create a visualization of the spread of disease through cities and across time.”

“These results provide a foundation for research on fundamental questions of public health,” the team writes, “including the identification of non-cooperative disease carriers (‘Typhoid Marys’), adaptive vaccine policies, and our understanding of the emergence of global epidemics from day-to-day interpersonal interactions.”

And they note that the approach has applicability far beyond infectious diseases, for modeling and predicting political ideas, purchasing preferences, or nearly anything else rooted in behavior.

“It’s actually pretty neat,” Kautz says—so neat that they’ve formed a venture capital–funded start-up business, Corpora, that makes use of the technology for applications in areas such as health care, insurance, pharmaceuticals, government agencies, and public opinion tracking.

Such ingenuity, combined with vast quantities of information and high-performance computing, is changing the parameters of knowledge.

We call ours the “information age”—an era marked by an endless digital trail revealing what we do and where we do it, and much that’s happening within us and without us.

Anyone who has used the Internet is already familiar with the ways businesses have seized on that trove of information to predict and guide the choices we make as we purchase books and shoes, vacations and music.

But the possibilities of “big data”—the fast-emerging shorthand term for the efficient analysis and problem-solving application of vast quantities of data—are profound for science, medicine, and other areas of research. Through high-performance computing, creative computer science, and new bonds of collaboration, researchers find themselves at the brink of what many predict to be a new age of investigation and advances in knowledge—comparable, the New York Times has suggested, to the introduction of the microscope and the telescope.

Rochester is at the forefront, pairing teams of researchers and computational scientists with supercomputing technology to transform data into knowledge.

Applications range widely. Why do countries go to war? Curt Signorino, associate professor of political science, is using data mining tools drawn from genetics and finance to compare data on every combination of countries from the years 1900 to 2000, creating an explanatory model that fits the data more than three times better than standard techniques.

How can energy flow through the power grid to make sure that electricity is reliably delivered to people where they need it, when they need it? Mark Bocko, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences, is studying the dynamic behavior of the power grid and how to control it with the tactical use of data—what has become known as the “smart grid.” He and his team are developing imaging, sound, and vibration sensors that will sort through information at the source, curbing the amount of transmitted data so only the most useful is passed along.

How can we better fight the flu, which claims the lives of 30,000 to 40,000 people each year in the United States? David Topham, vice provost and professor of microbiology and immunology, and colleagues are working to build a computer model of the immune system that will allow for simulations of infections and possible vaccines before the flu strikes—thereby speeding production of effective vaccines, and saving lives.

Pedro Domingos, associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, who will be a featured speaker at a conference on big data to be held at Rochester in October, says there are few if any fields that will be untouched. “Science, in just about every area, without big data will grind to a halt. It will be a field of diminishing returns.”

Kautz, who is director of an initiative for big data in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, says complex problems in science, mathematics, engineering, and the social sciences have traditionally been approached by breaking them into smaller pieces, understanding how each works, and then deducing solutions to the larger problems.

But systems science—a broad and interdisciplinary field underpinning big data that studies the behavior of complex physical, biological, artificial, and social systems—has upturned that approach, focusing on the whole instead of the parts and ushering in a new scale for problem solving. It provides a fresh capacity to see how things interrelate and influence each other, from the molecular level to entire populations.

“I’m an immunologist,” says Topham. “I was trained in cell biology, so I like to study individual cells.”

Formerly, he would collect a blood or tissue sample, isolate the cells, and from experiments on them, garner a few elements of data. Now, when he and his colleagues carry out clinical studies, they pursue many more dimensions of cellular investigation.

Computational approaches are going to “allow us to identify biological relationships between cells and proteins, microorganisms and the host, that we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to detect, and then understand how these affect our ability to respond to vaccines or disease,” he says. A computational take on science has inverted the relationship between experimentation and analysis. Carrying out experiments used to consume about 75 percent of researchers’ time, and analysis the remaining 25 percent, but “I would say that’s reversed now,” he says. “You can do one experiment, and it will take weeks to analyze the data.”

While computers, computational methods, and data collection are advancing rapidly, these are still early days for big data. When researchers talk about the data now available, they seem to reach almost instinctively for metaphors of water: a deluge, a flood, a relentless torrent of information to be channeled and controlled.

“It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones,” says the Times about what it terms a “data flood.” An influential report on big data issued last year by McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, invoked the idea of “large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed” today.

“We don’t know how to manage this information. It’s like drinking from a fire hose—how do you control it so that you don’t become overwhelmed?” says David Williams, dean for research for Arts, Sciences & Engineering and the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics.

As critical as the availability of data is the capacity to select from and organize it—to sort out the most useful elements, the most meaningful patterns, the formerly unrecognized connections—and transform the flood of data into something of practical value.

“It’s a bit like prospecting in the old days of mining, because you’re looking for nuggets of gold,” says Rob Clark, dean of the Hajim School and interim senior vice president for research.

But it’s not a passive search. “I think ‘big data’ is a term, like ‘cloud,’ that’s getting thrown around so much that it’s getting distorted,” says David Lewis, vice president for information technology and CIO. “To us, ‘big data’ is doing something with the data—you’re doing the analytics.”

Such analysis has emerged as a national priority. In March, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” aimed at bringing together research universities, industry, and nonprofit organizations with the federal government to take advantage of the opportunities big data offers for science and innovation.

“The technology for generating new data is always far ahead of our ability to analyze it. It has become a major, global problem,” says Topham. “The real data comes when you can relate different kinds of data, find the connections—and that’s very difficult to do. It almost requires intuition.”

Intuition is a tough thing to teach, but through courses in data mining, biostatistics, and algorithms, students are acquiring the skills needed to swim proficiently in a sea of data. Clark says the secret lies in teaching students the basics of how to manage information, big or small, “to extract kernels of useful information from data sets.”

Such extraction is changing scientific research across the disciplines. In Arts, Sciences & Engineering, earth and environmental sciences and chemical engineering have to take a big data approach.

“We really view it as refining the tools for supporting the mechanics of research,” says Carmala Garzione, associate professor and chair of the earth and environmental sciences department. “We’re basically moving from a very discipline-oriented science, where you would have a group of researchers who’d look at some very specific aspect of the earth, to a much more interdisciplinary science, where groups of researchers are working across disciplinary boundaries to understand how the earth behaves as a complex system.”

SCIENTIFIC VIEW: As part of work that explores the planet as a complex system, researchers are using large data sets to bring an interdisciplinary approach to earth science, says Carmala Garzione, associate professor and chair of earth and environmental sciences. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The kind of transition she describes is one taking place across disciplines, says Washington’s Domingos. “I think a mental shift has to happen in how scientists think about doing science.” Graduate students and researchers early in their careers have been professionally formed in an environment of computational approaches, but for more established scientists, he notes, big data requires an adjustment to a new way of pursuing research questions.

At the Medical Center, it’s an approach that is swiftly becoming central. The University, New York State, and IBM have partnered to establish the Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation. It’s home to the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, making Rochester one of the five most powerful university-based supercomputing sites in the country.

“It’s one of the most powerful supercomputers dedicated to health research in the world,” says Topham, director of the HSCCI. “The Blue Gene/Q lets you run experiments that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.”

For example, Jean-Philippe Couderc, associate professor of cardiology and assistant director of the Heart Research Follow-up Program Laboratory, and colleague Coeli Lopes, assistant professor at the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute—along with Jeremy Rice of IBM’s Watson Research Center—plan to use Blue Gene/Q in modeling the heart to test drugs’ effects on the organ.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration launched an initiative designed to bring medical breakthroughs to patients more quickly while ensuring safety and reducing the costs of drug development. Key to that effort has been developing better ways to test the cardiac toxicity of drugs—a leading cause of drugs being removed from the market.

Together with the FDA, the University in 2008 established an electronic repository of electrocardiography data—the Telemetric and Holter ECG Warehouse, or THEW—to help foster research in the field. The database is part of the Center for Quantitative Electrocardiology and Cardiac Safety, funded by a $2.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and a part of the University’s Heart Research Follow-up Program. It brings together an international network of academic researchers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and government regulators. Data from the center is provided to academic and private research organizations to help them design and validate new tools and methods to detect abnormal cardiac activity.

The repository makes Rochester the hub of a heart research wheel that spans the globe, from academic institutions and industry in Europe to Asia to South America.

“We are the only academic group in the world that provides an open resource of ECG data for drug safety evaluation,” says Couderc. Last year alone, 25 publications were produced from repository data. Together with Lopes and Rice, Couderc is using data from THEW to model effects of drugs on cardiac cells, using a computerized model of the heart system produced by the National Library of Medicine in cooperation with IBM.

From an anatomical point of view, the model’s an excellent representation of the heart, he says. He and his team are being trained in using the Blue Gene/Q computer to evaluate the effects of drugs on a wedge of the heart—its inner and outer layers—and the millions of different cells that form them. They check the results of the model against the documented results shown in THEW’s records.

“IBM brings a unique tool; the University brings unique data sets, enabling such tools to have a significant impact on drug-safety evaluation and medicine,” he says.

But one of the most important ingredients in that equation is the imagination and inventiveness of people engaged in research.

“We lead with people, not with computing,” says Lewis. It’s an emphasis that others echo.

“This is all about the people. In fact, the people are the far more valuable and important component of this partnership,” says Topham. “Yes, you need hardware—but you can’t use the hardware if you don’t have the right people, and IBM has a very strong interest in disseminating the knowledge of how to use these tools to deal with important questions. “Our health sciences researchers have the questions. We have the patient population. We have the ability to generate the data. We just need the tools to analyze it. And together, the University and IBM can do much more than either one of us can do on our own.”

The collaboration doesn’t extend only to IBM researchers; big data is strengthening ties between researchers all over campus. Big data allows “the creation of teams of investigators,” says Williams. “I think we’re going to see a lot more collaboration between investigators at different institutions” because of improved communications and the ability to transmit data.

The studies being carried out through HSCCI require many people, and a wide variety of expertise, says Topham. “I have pediatricians, infectious disease specialists, immunologists, neonatologists, researchers in genomics and microbiomics, computational people, data management—we have a huge data management core to deal with all that data.”

Kautz’s vision for big data at Rochester focuses not on supercomputing hardware—“we have that well in hand,” he says—but on the people who use them. “What I think we need are more people thinking of extremely creative ways to use these machines, as well as other resources.”

With the rise of big data, computer scientists take on a pivotal role in the research of many fields. “One aspect of providing computational support to a physical scientist is saying, we’re programmers. You tell us what to do and we’ll run that package. But there’s this other role in terms of helping think more deeply about the problem, because that’s the new way of solving the problem. And you need to do both.”

Bringing big data to bear on the field of environmental sciences, for example, will “require a strong collaboration between computer scientists and earth scientists,” say Garzione. “Ultimately, the department plans to hire “earth scientists with a strong computational bent”—Vasilii Petrenko, an atmospheric chemist, joined the faculty last year, and John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer, came on board for this academic year—“or computer scientists who are capable of tackling problems in other disciplines with a healthy dialogue that enables them to find a solution to computational problems.”

And solutions found in one area can, at the computational level, provide keys to other areas, far afield.

Algorithms that Kautz’s students are developing for mining social network data from Twitter, for example, might turn out to be relevant for doing computational biology. “That kind of thing happens all the time,” says Kautz. “You look at a problem with the right level of abstraction and you realize, ‘Gee, we can think of both of these things as a network, and we’re trying to find certain patterns.’ ”

In his lab, Topham says, researchers are studying vaccines and immune responses, but the methodological advances they make “could apply to cancer, to development, to cognition. They could apply it to environmental questions.”

The possibilities excite him.

“I’m hoping we get to do some really important research, that we solve some long-standing questions,” he says. “Developing new vaccines. Imaging the brain better so that you can tailor treatment more effectively. Understanding individual cells’ behavior, in the brain or in the immune system—these are the key questions that have just been lingering out there in the field. “And we now have the technologies to study these things in ways we didn’t before.”

The University will host a conference, The Rochester Big Data Forum 2012, October 4–6. To learn more, visit www.rochester.edu/rocdata.

A Super  Supercomputer

Rochester is one of the first academic homes in the nation for IBM’s next-generation supercomputer, designed to ‘make knowledge out of data.’

POWERHOUSE: At peak performance, IBM’s Blue Gene/Q supercomputer can make 209 trillion calculations a second. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A pivotal piece of big data research at Rochester is the Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation (HSCCI), which in August became home to the next-generation supercomputer built by IBM—the Blue Gene/Q. It makes Rochester one of the five most powerful university-based supercomputing sites in the nation.

“It will be one of the most, if not the most, powerful supercomputers dedicated to health science research in the world,” says David Topham, director of HSCCI. The University created the center in 2008, in partnership with IBM, and began work with what is now the previous generation of supercomputer, the Blue Gene/P. In collaboration, the University, New York State, and IBM have upgraded the center with the Blue Gene/Q. The Center for Governmental Research estimates that the project could create 900 jobs in the community and generate $205 million in new research funding over the next 10 years.

At peak performance, the BlueGene/Q can make 209 trillion calculations per second. It’s 15 times more powerful than the previous generation supercomputer—and has the computing power of about 20,000 laptops.

The supercomputer, which will enable scientists to sift through mountains of data and create complex models, has vast potential for applications in medicine, and Rochester scientists are applying high-performance computing to research programs in vaccine development, brain injury, and cardiac disease.

Topham calls it “truly a new domain” for research, as supercomputing technology allows researchers to ask fundamentally different questions about health, creating “knowledge out of data.”

At universities around the country, just a decade ago, when researchers needed to summon more computing power than could be found in a conventional machine, they created what were known as “Beowulf clusters”—100 or 200 desktop computers linked together. It took a lot of space, produced a lot of heat, and consumed a lot of energy—and it was only sustainable for a day or two. Other researchers would cluster their own servers, requiring special air conditioning and running up electricity bills.

Faced with that insupportable situation, faculty at Rochester came together to find a solution.

“They had different research domains, but they had the same core issue: they needed a facility that could help them accelerate their research results,” recalls David Lewis, vice president for information technology and CIO.

The solution they hit upon was a shared center—what is today the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC), which advances research through high-performance computing. It supports 150 research groups across the University.

“We started with 16 pilot users. Now we have more than 500 researchers” from 35 University departments and centers, says Brendan Mort, director of CIRC.

“The results have been exponential,” says Lewis. “We’ve built this as a community, and people have contributed hardware and people. They feel they can get bigger outcomes by being part of a shared resource rather than trying to build their own thing.”

‘A Great Gift to the City’

Dedicated in memory of a beloved son, the Memorial Art Gallery looks forward to its centennial celebration in October 2013 as a community landmark and resource for the arts.

By Marjorie Searl

MEMORIAL GIFT: Work began on the Memorial Art Gallery in 1912 after Emily Sibley Watson established the museum as a memorial to her son, J. G. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

As crews broke ground for what would be Rochester’s new art museum in May 1912 on the University Avenue Campus, it’s not difficult to imagine the profound mix of feelings—grief, civic charity, and simple personal gratification—that may have settled on Emily Sibley Averell Watson. With the construction site just around the corner from her mansion on nearby Prince Street, she could not have helped but reflect on the events that had led to the momentous project.

Her first marriage to Isaac Averell, the son of a prosperous Ogdensburg, N.Y., banker, had ended in divorce in less than a decade. Her two children from that marriage were gone. Her nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Louise, died in 1886; her 26-year-old son, James, known as J. G., in 1904. Both succumbed to infectious diseases that periodically ravaged pre-antibiotic America.

Her beloved mother, Elizabeth Maria Tinker Sibley, the wife of Western Union cofounder, Hiram Sibley, had died in 1903. Noted philanthropists, the elder Sibleys had bequeathed the mantle of civic leadership to their daughter, as well as the greatest wealth in Rochester.

In 1891, she had married James Sibley Watson, the son of her father’s longtime business partner and himself an heir to the Western Union fortune. Together, they had a son, also named James.

And there was the art museum. For more than three decades, Rochester’s civic and cultural leaders had discussed the need for a museum worthy of a bustling, growing, and industrious city like Rochester. Buffalo had opened a museum in 1905, as had Indianapolis in 1906. Toledo was preparing to open one in 1912. Art museums, like most other institutions of the period, were founded and managed by men of means and influence. Rochester’s would not follow suit.

A woman of means in her own right, Watson was one of the few women of her time to establish, singlehandedly, a major cultural institution. She not only fulfilled the hope of then University President Rush Rhees to include an art building on the University's campus, but in so doing she enshrined the memory of J. G., the son she had lost at such an early age. She had one important stipulation: that the museum be administered as a community treasure, open and available to all citizens of Rochester.

In 2012, that museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, has firmly established itself as one of the country’s leading community art museums owned by a national research university. The museum’s grounds even look a little similar to the construction site of 100 years ago as work continues on a new sculpture park that will be opened in time for the Memorial Art Gallery’s centennial celebration in October 2013. As with the gallery itself, the Centennial Sculpture Park has been designed as a resource for the community to enjoy as well as a cultural expression of Rochester’s leadership in the arts.

PRINCELY PLACE: A 1905 plan for the Prince Street campus included a site for an art museum (above), but it remained on the drawing board until Emily Sibley Watson's efforts to build a museum in memory of her son, J. G., were realized. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

The first major expansion in 25 years, the park represents the latest chapter in the gallery’s 100-year history of serving the community, a commitment that began with the expression of a mother’s grief.

Emily Sibley Averell had grown up in a family that prized art and collecting. By the time construction began on the new gallery, she and her husband, James, were said to have one of the finest private collections of art in the country. In her 90 years of life, she traveled the world but remained loyal to her home of Rochester.

For more than three decades, the professional and cultural lives of the Watsons and the Sibleys had intertwined with that of the City of Rochester. In 1877, Hiram Sibley built Sibley Library on the Prince Street campus, a year that also marked the birth of both of Watson’s children—Elizabeth Louise in January and J. G. in December.

That year also marked the birth of the Rochester Art Club, an organization that gave structure and voice to a diverse but energetic group of painters, sculptors, and Rochesterians sympathetic to their cause. The club furthered its mission of “the cultivation and advancement of fine and industrial arts and promotion of social involvement of members” by offering studio classes. Its honorary membership included the upper crust of Rochester society, which was nearly identical with those who would, it might be hoped, support the organization financially. Among them was Emily Sibley Averell, who was elected to honorary membership in 1891 along with her future husband, James Sibley Watson.

Since founding the club, its members had searched for a permanent meeting and exhibition space, but efforts had proved futile. In other parts of the country, Greco-American edifices housing public art collections fast were becoming fixtures in cities that wanted to demonstrate the importance of culture and civic standing. Why not Rochester? Rochester’s civic leaders were conversant with the City Beautiful movement, a philosophy that emphasized grandeur in urban planning. Industries and businesses with an international reach were humming: Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and, of course, Western Union. At the same time, two institutes of higher education were growing within the city limits—the University of Rochester and Mechanics Institute, today known as the Rochester Institute of Technology. Typically, the civic art museums of the day were founded and funded by wealthy citizens who were also collectors and connoisseurs. In Rochester, in the first decade of the 20th century, only two people could legitimately fill that role: Emily Sibley Watson and Eastman Kodak Co. founder George Eastman.

While both steadily built important art collections (the Watsons had art delivered to them on their yacht at least once), Emily Sibley Watson was also considering how best to commemorate J. G. As someone who regularly stepped in to fill needs of all kinds, whether giving food to the poor or providing tuition for an impoverished student, the need for an art building at the University must have been compelling to her, as not only did she prize art, but her son had also been a lover of the arts. Watson had inculcated that lifelong interest. J. G. Averell lived a life that was in marked contrast to that of his grandfather, Hiram Sibley, who came to Livingston County at the age of 16, and soon after opened a machine shop and a wool-carding business. At 16, J. G. was at boarding school preparing for a Harvard education and the life of an upper-class gentleman. Yachting and equestrian sports were shared family interests. At Harvard, he was on the golf team, and he was renowned as a polo player. In spring 1904, after enjoying a European tour, he joined the architectural firm of Herbert D. Hale in Boston. By November, he had died of typhoid at his mother’s Prince Street home. He was buried next to his sister, Louise, in Mt. Hope Cemetery. His grave was marked by a headstone designed by his mother’s friend, the architect and designer Claude Bragdon. Like his grandfather and mother, J. G. had been a collector; on his final trip to Europe, he purchased a group of fine prints, which became the nucleus of the Memorial Art Gallery’s collection of works on paper.

As mourning was a largely private experience in those times, little remains to indicate how Watson coped, except to assume that her attention would have been directed even more fully toward her surviving child. But she was not inactive. Following her mother’s death in 1903, she commissioned a memorial painting by family friend George Haushalter to be installed at St. Andrew’s Church. The subject: the biblical story of the gifts of the magi. She joined the Wednesday Club in 1908. She continued her philanthropic activities, contributing to the needs of St. Andrew’s Church as well as helping young violinist David Hochstein advance in his musical studies. Meanwhile, as Rhees steadily advanced his plans for expanding the University’s campus on Prince Street, he followed in the footsteps of college presidents by trying to match up a willing donor with a campus need. Whether strategically or not, the positioning of the need alongside the common good may have made the case more attractive to Watson. From the very beginning, the Memorial Art Gallery was aligned with the community. In an undated article pasted on a page in the March 21, 1912, minutes of the University’s Board of Trustees, the case was made clear:

“An abiding faith, held by all local lovers of the fine arts, that in due time some generous citizen would bestow upon us a permanent and beautiful home for paintings and sculpture, has been justified by the munificent gift of Mrs. James S. Watson to the University of Rochester, and through the university to the people of Rochester, in memory of her son, James G. Averell. . . . “An art gallery has been badly needed in Rochester and will be the more appreciated because the lack of it has been felt for so long a time. In every work that has been attempted within recent years for the advancement of arts in Rochester, Mrs. Watson has upheld and assisted those who assumed active management, and her latest act of generosity lays the people of Rochester under another debt of gratitude to her for her practical methods of expressing civic patriotism. The plans for the gallery, which have already been made public, give assurance that the building will be a dignified, artistic, and enduring memorial.”

On May 18, 1912, George Herdle, the president of the Rochester Art Club who would become the first director of the Memorial Art Gallery, extended the personal thanks of the club in a series of resolutions that underscored how widely Watson’s gift to the community would be appreciated: “Whereas, through the munificence and progressive spirit of Mrs. Jas. S. Watson, provision has been made for the erection of a museum and art gallery for Rochester be it resolved: That the Roch. Art Club realizes that the gift to the people is of the highest importance to the moral and aesthetic uplift of our citizens, gives dignity and high opportunity for the conservation of the Fine Arts, and places Rochester on a par with the leading art centers of the nation. “Resolved: That the building shall be dedicated to the memory of a gifted and lamented lover of the Fine Arts and its kindred creative activities is felt by the club to be a most appropriate provision, which will act as an incentive to the youth of our city, to emulate the example of our departed co-laborer, who worked in the interest of all that was beautiful and progressive.”

The New York firm of Foster and Gade, whose principal was architect John Gade, was hired to design the building. Gade’s wife, Ruth Sibley, was Watson’s niece and a favorite cousin of J. G. With the local assistance of Bragdon, Gade supervised the construction. The gallery’s first board, as noted in the agreement between the University and Watson, included Watson, her husband, her brother, her niece, Marie Atkinson Perkins Willard, sister-in-law and philanthropist Mrs. Granger A. Hollister, Rhees, and Eastman. Filling out the board was a group marked by overlapping interests in art, social welfare, and business. At the formal dedication on October 8, Rhees prefaced his introduction of the speaker, Metropolitan Museum of Art president Robert DeForest, by tracing the history of art instruction at the University. That history included lectures for students and the public by art professor Elizabeth Denio, the first woman to teach at Rochester, whose salary originally had been funded by Watson. Overlooking the dedication ceremonies was a plaster version of a life-sized sculpture commissioned by Watson from the prominent sculptor William Ordway Partridge, an artist known for his equestrian sculpture of General U. S. Grant (1896) in Brooklyn’s Grant Square and the heroic Pieta (1906) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Partridge had hoped to have the hooded figure of Memory finished in time for the dedication, but work on the marble sculpture had been delayed. In the following spring, the original was installed as a formal tribute to J. G. Averell, complete with a pedestal inscription: “He Loved Life and Beauty and Honour.” In the June 1914 issue of The Common-Good, arts advocate, artist, and Mechanics Institute instructor Anna Page Scott described the impact that the Memorial Art Gallery was already having on the community:

Marjorie Searl is chief curator at the Memorial Art Gallery and the editor of Seeing America: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester.

(Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

Celebrating 100 Years

The dedication of a new, multi-acre sculpture park in October 2013 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Memorial Art Gallery’s founding. Under way since 2010, the Centennial Sculpture Park, near the intersection of University Avenue and Goodman Street on the gallery’s grounds, will feature work by sculptors Tom Otterness, Wendell Castle, Albert Paley, and Jackie Ferrara.

Representing the largest site-specific installation in the Memorial Art Gallery’s history, the park is designed to carry on the gallery’s tradition of serving as a public resource for the community while also emphasizing Rochester’s contributions to the nation’s cultural history.

For more information, visit http://mag.rochester.edu.

At Issue: Election 2012

As the 2012 election season hits full stride, we turn to Rochester experts for insight on some of the key issues.

Interviews by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Illustration: John W. Tomac for Rochester Review)

From the national to the municipal level, several issues are bound to grasp the attention of candidates and voters in November 2012.

Health care policy, the size and scope of the federal budget, and campaign finance are among the issues that continue to generate debate. Two more long-standing topics in American politics are likely to draw attention. One is negative advertising, which tends to arise from the mix of a divided electorate, a close contest, and well-known candidates. The second is the religious faith of the presidential candidates. President Obama’s faith was a topic of discussion when he was a candidate in 2008, and this year, Mitt Romney became the first member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—or, less formally, Mormon—to win a major party presidential nomination. For faculty who follow such topics closely, this will be a busy season. Here’s a sample of their perspectives going into the election.

Health Care

Ted Brown, Professor of History, Community and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Humanities

Brown is the editor or coauthor of several books, including a forthcoming history of health care reform in the United States as told through political cartoons. He teaches students in the College and the School of Medicine and Dentistry in courses including Introduction to the U.S. Health System; Health, Medicine, and Social Reform; American Health Policy and Politics; Changing Concepts of Health and Illness; and History of International and Global Health.

The health care overhaul, in the form of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is widely considered President Obama’s signature achievement. How big a political victory is it? Will it solve the problem of access? Bring down costs?

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or more commonly “Obamacare”) in March 2010 was a considerable political achievement, in light of our history. Theodore Roosevelt supported the first national campaign for universal health coverage in the 1910s when, post-presidency, he ran again for president in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket. President Franklin Roosevelt flirted with universal national health reform, coming out in support of a “right to adequate medical care” in his 1944 State of the Union address, and when Harry Truman was elected in 1948, he became the first sitting president to champion universal health reform, and pushed hard for it for several years. But Truman failed miserably, and under the pall of McCarthyism this country moved away from anything that could be politically labeled as “socialized medicine” and into the internationally unique and structurally bizarre system of employment-related health insurance we have today. Medicare and Medicaid, supported by President John F. Kennedy and passed under President Lyndon Johnson, were intended to cover those outside the employment-based system.

President Bill Clinton returned to the quest for universal health insurance, but he too failed—rather spectacularly. Universal health insurance emerged as a key priority of President Barack Obama’s, and after a long and complicated political battle he succeeded, the first American president to do so after a century of struggle.

Nonetheless, the Affordable Care Act is highly flawed, and its structure and implementation clearly reflect the extraordinarily difficult and complex political process that produced it. Instead of creating one uniform, administratively efficient national system, the ACA primarily creates additional patches in an inefficient patchwork system. Even if the reforms survive this fall’s elections and are fully implemented by 2014, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that some 25 to 30 million people will remain uninsured either because of numerous exceptions written into the law or because individuals will fail to obtain or employers will drop coverage, calculating that they would rather pay the penalty than pay for the insurance. Finally, those who will be covered will be covered to very different and unequal degrees.

From an ethical and social justice point of view we will fall far short of having a truly universal national system. In addition, there will be few effective cost control measures built in and the likelihood of continued, rapid, and unsustainable cost escalation is very high, which not long down the road will result in even more severe problems than we have now and which will keep the United States as the distant outlier in health care costs compared to all other countries.

In short, President Obama has handed us, at best, a half-full glass that’s already leaking. Could any other president have done better? Perhaps not, but that assessment is more an indictment of our social values, political system, and national culture than an occasion for celebrating President Obama’s triumph.

Campaign Advertising

Mitchell Lovett, Assistant Professor of Marketing

Lovett has coauthored numerous scholarly articles, including “The Seeds of Negativity: Knowledge and Money” in the journal Marketing Science (2011). He teaches Marketing Research, Advertising and Sales Promotion, and Consumer Behavior at the Simon School.

When and why do campaigns “go negative”?

Tightly contested elections generally attract negative television advertising. People always say they don’t like negative advertising, but it’s effective at influencing some of the key voters.

The voters who know the most about the candidates are usually partisan, and their choice of candidates isn’t influenced much by advertising. Really the campaigns are going after the swing voters or the so-called “undecideds” that have been suggested to be a relatively small group in this presidential election.

Within this subset of voters, the effect of negative advertising depends on how much knowledge they have. If a voter has some knowledge of the candidates—and we’re talking about pretty superficial knowledge—the effect is greater than if, for example, he or she looked upon the candidates as complete blank slates. If people know something about the candidates, negative advertising actually has something to build on. There’s something already in their minds that the ads can trigger to generate a stronger response.

One reason negative advertising might build upon itself is that fear really has no end in the way people can imagine electoral outcomes. Bad candidates can do really bad things. Good candidate can only do so much good—their hands are tied by Congress and other forces beyond any individual’s control.

It’s also the case that the candidate who’s ahead gets a lot more negative attention, whereas the positive attention stays relatively stable for candidates. You saw this in the Republican primary earlier this year. As Herman Cain went up in the polls, as Rick Perry went up in the polls, you saw them getting more negative attention.

Money in Politics

Lynda Powell, Professor of Political Science

Powell is the coauthor of four books, including this year’s The Influence of Campaign Contributions in State Legislatures (University of Michigan Press, 2012). She teaches undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as American Elections, Money in Politics, American Legislative Institutions, and Voting and Elections, and supervises undergraduates in a variety of political science internships.

What do we know about the relationship between big money and public policy?

Political scientists have had difficulty establishing a causal connection between campaign contributions and public policy, and some scholars have concluded that they have at best a marginal impact on legislative behavior.

In my study of more than 3,000 state legislators in all 99 state legislative chambers, however, I found that contributions do indeed influence public policy, though more in some states than in others.

Previous studies that have looked for the influence of money have almost all studied the U.S. Congress, and have examined the linkage between the contributions to a member and the floor votes cast by that member on legislation of interest to donors. The problem with this approach is that looking at the votes that determine the final passage or failure of a bill ignores all the decisions that determine the details of its substantive content, as well as those that determine whether or not a bill is ever written or comes to a vote.

And it is in these less observable areas of legislative activity that legislators may most easily accommodate the interests of donors. Further, because this literature studies just the two Congressional chambers, little to no attention has been given to asking how variation in institutional design and electoral context might affect the degree to which campaign contributions influence the legislative process.

In surveying state legislators, I asked them how much time they devoted to fundraising for their own campaigns and for their caucuses. I also asked how much influence contributions had on the content and passage of legislation in the chamber. Asking about content, as well as influence, captures the range of legislative activities most likely to be affected by donations. I found fundraising was strongly related to influence—the more time members spent fundraising, the greater the influence of contributions. Features of institutional design and electoral context explained much of the quite substantial chamber differences in fundraising time and influence.

Members in the professionalized legislatures found in big states spend substantial time fundraising, and it is in these states with highly compensated members and leaders that donations are particularly influential. Legislators with ambitions for higher office also spend considerable time fundraising. Chambers vary greatly in the fraction of these ambitious members; the more ambitious members, the greater the influence of donors. Chamber size also matters—the more members there are to fundraise, the greater the influence of contributions.

Term limits reduce the value of holding office, and should reduce the influence of contributions. However, members in these chambers are no less eager than other legislators to sustain political careers and a large fraction of them are ambitious for higher office. Ambition negates much, although not all, of the beneficial effect of term limits. The influence of contributions is also less in states with better educated constituents, who may be more able to monitor and sanction legislative shirking.

Federal Budget

David Primo, Associate Professor of Political Science and Business Administration

Primo is the author or coauthor of three books, including Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions (University of Chicago Press, 2007). He teaches undergraduates and graduate students in courses such as Business and Politics, The Nature of Entrepreneurship, and Models in American Politics: Theory and Data.

Will the outcome of the presidential and congressional elections have any impact on our ability to reduce the long-term structural deficit? Given that Congress

does not have a strong track record in reducing the main drivers of the deficit—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—the best hope for major reforms to the federal budget is presidential leadership.

Reelection-driven politicians fear that major changes to entitlement programs—especially Medicare and Social Security—will doom them to defeat. It certainly will make them targets. Politically, at least, charts and graphs cannot compete with ads like the one depicting House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pushing an elderly woman off a cliff after Rep. Ryan proposed Medicare reform.

This political calculus might change if public opinion radically shifts or if financial markets send signals that changes are needed. Neither seems likely. In public opinion polls, respondents view the deficit as a serious problem but oppose changes in programs such as Medicare that are critical to bringing spending under control. For instance, in a 2010 Bloomberg News poll, nearly half of respondents believed that the budget deficit is “dangerously out of control and threatens our economic future,” yet 82 percent were opposed to reductions in Medicare to deal with the problem.

Meanwhile, investors continue to buy up U.S. bonds, keeping our nation’s borrowing costs low. It also doesn’t help that when Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt last year, the markets barely flinched. Paradoxically, the good times for U.S. bonds make reform less likely since it allows a run up of debt at virtually no interest cost (right now) and provides a justification for inaction—the markets aren’t worried, so why should we be? Strong presidential leadership might change political dynamics long enough to cement a fiscal reform agreement. The addition of Paul Ryan to Mitt Romney’s presidential ticket is a welcome development, because Ryan is one of the few members of Congress who speaks out on long-term fiscal issues. At a minimum, then, we will hear more discussion of our perilous financial situation in the coming months. But even if a President Romney or a reelected President Obama is willing to use precious political capital to push for fiscal reform, he will still need to find members of Congress, generally not known for displaying political courage, who are willing to risk their seats for the sake of the country’s fiscal future.

Religion & Politics

Nora Rubel, Assistant Professor of Religion

Rubel is the author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2009) and teaches undergraduates in courses such as History of Judaism; Religion and American Foodways; and Religion and the American Presidency.

Why are Americans so interested in the religious faith of their presidential candidates?

Concern over our presidential candidates’ religious affiliation is nothing new, but the nature of the concern has changed, reflecting at each point the anxieties of the time. The 2008 presidential election highlighted contemporary concerns about religious identity that continue to reverberate in the ongoing 2012 campaign. Who can forget the uproar over then candidate Barack Obama’s supposedly hidden Muslim identity? The underlying message was that being a Muslim is a negative, and thus worthy of a smear campaign. The “secret Muslim” ruckus was immediately followed by a critique of his Christian pastor and the form of his Christian affiliation. Perhaps Obama wasn’t a Muslim, but he wasn’t exactly the right sort of Christian either.

Mitt Romney continues to be plagued by questions about his Mormon faith. A prominent pastor’s statement last year that Mormonism is a “cult” only underscores the fact that many evangelicals don’t consider it to be a true Christian religion. Among his critics, there doesn’t seem to be a very specific interrogation of Mormon beliefs, just a dismissal of Mormon commitment to Christian principles (as the evangelicals see them).

Religion was an issue during presidential campaigns as early as the election of 1800, during Thomas Jefferson’s bid for office. A widely distributed pamphlet by Dutch Reformed Minister William Linn declared opposition to Jefferson’s candidacy on the basis of Jefferson’s Deist affiliation and lack of appropriate Christian credentials. Linn believed that the law of the land, as well as its chief executive, should reflect the character of the nation—in his mind, a Christian one. Similar to the alarmist anti-Muslim rumors spread over the Internet about Obama, other opponents in 1800 spread rumors that Jefferson would force citizens to burn their Bibles.

And, of course, many Americans are aware of the hay that was made over John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism during his 1960 presidential campaign. The biggest religious question of the mid–20th century, which lacked the religious diversity that new immigration would bring in the late 1960s, was whether a Catholic or a Jew could be fully integrated. Kennedy chose to address the Protestant Greater Houston Ministerial Association in a speech that is now frequently cited as a watershed moment in American religious history. Rather than attempt to defend the tenets of his faith to an audience that was never going to embrace Catholicism as equivalent to their Protestant denominations, he instead challenged them to uphold the ecumenical spirit of America.

Almost 50 years later, Mitt Romney delivered his “Faith in America” speech, an address meant to allay fears about the foreignness of Mormonism (a concern that is ironic, given Mormonism’s indigenous origins). Like Kennedy, Romney stated that “A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.” However, unlike Kennedy, he stressed that while church authorities would never interfere with presidential decisions, his Christian faith would nevertheless inform his presidency.

The Student Voter’s Dilemma

You’re an undergraduate at school in Rochester. You’re from California. You’re not registered to vote. What are you to do?

You might try calling your parents and asking. You might punch a few terms into Google and see where it leads you. Or you might be lucky enough to run into Andrew Cutillo ’13, the senior coordinator for the student-led initiative in Arts, Sciences & Engineering that’s come to be known as R’ World, R’ Vote.

This year the initiative gets a new name—the Committee for Political Engagement, or CPE—but the main mission is the same, says Cutillo, who’s been involved in it since he was a freshman.

“The main thing we do is make sure everyone’s registered, help people with absentee ballots, and for people registered on campus, make sure they can get to the polls.”

A political science major from Clark’s Summit, Pa., Cutillo says a student’s rights are clear, even if the process of registering and voting doesn’t initially seem to be.

“A student has a right to register to vote either in their hometown or wherever they’re living to go to school, the idea being that they’re in a transitional period in which they’re part of two communities,” he says. “So a student can register in Rochester and vote in person, or they can register to vote in their home state or district and vote absentee.”

This fall, Cutillo and other members of the committee will be visible on the River Campus and each will carry a handbook of updated regulations for all 50 states—the regulations that spell out who can register absentee, when the deadlines are, and how to send in an absentee ballot.

“When we go up to a student and we say, ‘Do you want to register to vote?,’ and they say, ‘Sure, but I’m from California, can I register there?’ We’ll say, ‘Absolutely,’ ” Cutillo says. “We’ll look it up, we’ll work with them, we’ll go online.”

Cutillo says a resource students might find helpful is www.longdistancevoter.org. He adds that the committee will be launching an improved website of its own this month.

As it turns out, most states permit absentee residents to request a ballot on relatively short notice—a week or less. But that’s not universal, and the laws are getting more complicated.

“A wave of new voting laws in several states adds to our workload and requires additional effort from student voters,” says Cutillo. “Many of these are first-time voters, and are particularly affected.”

—Karen McCally

A New Kind of Rescue Hero

It’s not a toy fireman—or even a real one. It’s a death’s head cockroach, and Ben Epstein ’78 is outfitting it to save lives.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

LOW-TECH HIGH-TECH: Cockroaches outfitted with tiny electronic equipment form wireless communications networks in a Defense Department–funded project led by Epstein. (Photo: John Minchillo/AP Images for Rochester Review)

It’s a Wednesday morning in May in a lab at Texas A&M University, and Ben Epstein ’78 is filming as a technician removes a two-inch long cockroach from a plastic box, rubs it with a cotton cloth, and dabs a splotch of adhesive on its back.

Next, the technician presses a small circuit board to the adhesive, connecting a tiny radio, microphone, and battery. The whole package fits on the roach like a backpack, and in a few minutes, the roach and several others like it will be released onto the cement floor of a large shed, where they will scurry away like grade schoolers dashing to the bus stop.

It’s all part of the field test for the OrthopterNets program, a project of OpCoast, a two-person New Jersey tech company specializing in networking and wireless systems. Epstein and the company’s other half, David Rhodes, are both electrical engineers with doctorates, a long line of published articles, and about three decades of experience in the field.

“If you have enough insects with these radios, they can form what’s called an ad-hoc radio communications network,” Epstein says, explaining the OrthopterNets project. The release of hundreds of outfitted cockroaches could form a network allowing search officers, stationed at receivers, to communicate with people trapped in mines, buildings, or caves. The project could make this particular species of cockroach—the supersized death’s head cockroach, which likes nothing more than to wander in dark spaces—an unwitting search and rescue hero.

OrthopterNets is funded by the Defense Department’s Army Research Office. The Defense Department has funded research that’s had significant commercial applications, and Epstein hopes that OrthopterNets is no exception. He predicts, however, that it will draw interest mostly from public and private entities that carry out search and rescue missions.

“I don’t see people buying these things on Amazon,” he jokes.

That said, the death’s head cockroach is, in fact, a bargain. The low-tech facilitator of high-tech operations comes at a pittance. “It barely even appears in our budget,” says Epstein of the cost of the roaches, which he obtains from a local supplier. Not even the circuitry itself is expensive, he adds. For commercial users, “most of the cost would be in mounting the circuits—the manual labor involved.”

The project is in the prototype phase and Epstein estimates that it will take another year to make OrthopterNets operational. Part of the challenge is making the equipment as small, light, and powerful as possible. On the one hand, the death’s head cockroach is a hearty creature. During the May field experiment, roaches were carrying two grams of equipment—about half their total weight. And, Epstein noted,

“They don’t seem to mind.”

Nonetheless, about four minutes into the field experiment, at least one of the roaches slowed considerably, as first the battery, and then the circuit board, slipped from its back. “Batteries are the biggest limitation,” says Epstein, who says that’s why the team is focused on developing the circuit board to consume less power.

The OrthopterNets project is one of many that the Defense Department has sponsored that harness “cyborgs”—short for cybernetic organisms—for military purposes. Several years ago, the department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, funded a program called HI-MEMS, or Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems, to develop technology to control insect locomotion. Epstein attended a HI-MEMS briefing.

“I was very impressed with the work that I saw,” he recalls. Noting that HI-MEMS focused on insect movement, “I thought why not do something involving communication with insects?’”

He constructed a team of experts on everything from insects to integrated circuits. His partners—Hong Liang of Texas A&M’s mechanical engineering department along with Byunghoo Jung and Harry Diamond of Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering—describe Epstein as “highly creative.” “I’ve always enjoyed our collaborations with Ben,” adds Diamond, who worked with Epstein on the development of a digital array radar for the U.S. Army.

A tinkerer by nature, Epstein says his childhood bedroom in Cherry Hill, N.J., was littered with deconstructed gadgets. At Rochester, he had less time for informal experimentation. “To be quite honest,” he confesses, “I was just studying so much.”

There were exceptions. Just for fun, he helped a professor test the theory that flatworms, or plenarians, emitted electrical fields. If the fields could be manipulated, Epstein says, “you could make plenarians grow two heads.”

Alas. “We never got that far,” he concedes.

In the News

GAME CHANGER: Ayub founded the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange. (Photo: Scott Duncan/Other Films Inc.)

Alumna one of 33 Women Featured in ESPN Magazine’s ‘Beyond IX’

ESPN Magazine named Awista Ayub ’01 one of “33 women who will change the way sports are played” in an article, “Beyond IX,” in its June 11, 2012, issue commemorating the 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX. A section of a larger education bill, Title IX prohibited discrimination in any federally subsidized educational program on the basis of sex, and led to major improvements in athletic programs for women and girls. In 2003, Ayub founded the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange to use athletic competition to teach leadership and conflict resolution. The exchange brought Afghan girls to the United States to play soccer and to return to Afghanistan as ambassadors for the sport. The program eventually resulted in a league of 15 girls soccer teams in Afghanistan (See “Supporting a ‘Home’ Team,” Rochester Review, November–December 2009). Ayub is now helping to bring basketball and tennis, as well as soccer, to war-torn regions as director of South Asia programs for the nonprofit Seeds of Peace.

Vittorio Grilli ’86 (PhD) named Italy’s Minister of Finance

In July, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti appointed Vittorio Grilli ’86 (PhD) as minister of finance. A native of Milan, Grilli had previously served as deputy minister of Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, and before that, in Italy’s treasury. Grilli also worked in the private sector as managing director of the London office of Credit Suisse First Boston. After earning his doctorate in economics at Rochester, Grilli taught economics at Yale and at the University of London.

Grads Nominated by President Obama to Key Posts

President Barack Obama has nominated Allison Macfarlane ’87 and Emil Kang ’90 to key administration posts. Macfarlane, a geologist, was tapped to chair the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, she served previously on Obama’s White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which studied nuclear waste disposal. Kang, a musician and the director for the arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was nominated to be a member of the National Council on the Arts. The council advises the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts on issues concerning grants, funding guidelines, and new initiatives.

Some History—and Tips—on ‘Taps’

A retired Army bandmaster marks the 150th anniversary of the nation’s most famous bugle call.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

ORIGINS: A painting by Sidney E. King depicts the birth of “Taps” 150 years ago, a story told by Orosz in a new booklet and online. (Photo: Berkeley Plantation)

Every evening, Josef Orosz ’55E turns on a CD recording of “Taps,” and broadcasts it, via loudspeakers outside his home, to the small, southeastern Pennsylvania town of Bedford.

“It is in honor of all the fallen heroes of the day,” says the retired Army bandmaster.

This summer marked the 150th anniversary of the first time the famous bugle call was played. And to mark the occasion, Orosz published a booklet, “The History of ‘Taps,’ ” summing up the origins of the piece, and including some instructions on playing it.

“‘Taps’ is a military bugle call, not a symphonic trumpet solo,” says Orosz. Decrying common variations of the piece in both dynamics and phrasing—the “Hollywood version,” he calls it—he says, “If someone is going to play ‘Taps’ at a funeral, it must be exactly as it was intended: a prayer for the fallen hero. No changes, no variations.”

Orosz enlisted in the Army following his graduation from the Eastman School, joining the U.S. Army Field Band on the bass fiddle and tuba and 10 years later had advanced to Army bandmaster. In the 1960s, one of his roles was to train band members to play “Taps” at the funerals of soldiers who lost their lives in the Vietnam War.

He hopes that an understanding of the historical context of the piece will impress upon performers the importance of playing the piece not as they might intend, but as Union Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield intended, on the bitter evening of July 2, 1852, on a plantation near Charles City, Va.

As Orosz explains, the Confederacy had mounted a steep challenge to Butterfield’s Third Brigade during the one-day Battle of Gaines’s Mill, in which 600 Third Brigade soldiers perished. Butterfield, who couldn’t read music, had nonetheless composed a bugle call specifically for his regiment. Played immediately before any additional calls (bugle calls, along with drum rolls, were the means of communication on the battlefield), the call indicated that the following instructions would be for his regiment only. But on that devastating evening, the general recalled years later, the call “did not seem to be as smooth, melodious, and musical as it should be.” He summoned his bugler, Private Oliver Norton, to rework the call. Norton “practiced a change in the call of ‘Taps’ until I had it to suit my ear,” Butterfield told Century Magazine in 1898.

Norton, in turn, told the magazine, “The music was beautiful on that still summer night, and was heard far beyond the limits of the Brigade. The next day, I was visited by several buglers from neighboring brigades, asking for copies of the music, which I gladly furnished.”

Orosz’s history of “Taps” may be read in its entirety at http://joseforosz.com/taps2012. htm.

ROCHESTER LIVES

‘The Pilgrim’

Arriving from Burma in 1868, Theodore Thanbyah, Class of 1871, would become Rochester’s first graduate from Asia.

By Nancy Ehrich Martin ’65, ’94 (MA)

MISSION OF BURMA: Thanbyah, the University’s first graduate from Asia, was recruited by Baptist missionaries. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

On June 28, 1871, Theodore Thanbyah—believed to be the first student from Asia to receive a Rochester degree—stood at the podium and delivered his senior oration at University commencement. The title of his oration was “The Contest for Commercial Supremacy in Asia.”

Thanbyah was born in Bassein, Burma, located west of Rangoon on the delta of the great Irrawaddy River, in September 1843. At that time, there was an active Baptist mission in Bassein working among the Karen people, an ethnic minority group from the higher elevations, in eastern Burma, toward Laos. The Burmese looked down upon the Karens and they suffered some persecution.

Among the more prominent of the first missionaries to work with the Karens was E. L. Abbott, the father of Willard Abbott, Class of 1858. We know from this relationship that there was a link between the Bassein mission and the University.

It is likely that the Baptists recognized Thanbyah’s great potential as a scholar and possible clergyman, as he was sent to the United States for further education. He prepared for college in a special department in connection with Shurtleff College, a Baptist institution in Upper Alton, Ill.

Thanbyah entered the University in September 1868, at the age of 26, along with 14-year-old Henry Hooker Van Meter, Class of 1872, a son of Baptist missionaries in Bassein. Thanbyah and Van Meter may have been sent out from Bassein together and prepared together. We know they entered the University together.

Thanbyah entered the University as a sophomore and followed the classical course of Greek and Latin. After graduating in the Class of 1871, Thanbyah attended the Rochester Theological Seminary, graduating in 1874, at which time he also received an AM degree (a rough equivalent to today’s master of arts degree) from the University. In August of that year, he departed for Burma.

Thanbyah had a long and vigorous career back in his home country. From 1874 until his death in 1920, his address remained Karen Quarter, Kemendine, Rangoon. Among the posts he held were pastor, Rangoon (1875–81); municipal commissioner (1885); teacher, American Baptist Mission (1875–96); Rangoon Karen Home Mission Society (1891–1920); and president, National Karen Association (1881–1903).

He was also the author of several books including Sermons in Karen; A Karen Arithmetic; A Karen Mensuration of Plane Surfaces with Land Surveying; Karen Customs, Ceremonies and Poetry; The Karens: Their Persecutions and Hardships, 1824-1854; The Karens and Their Progress 1854-1914; and Karen Folk-lore Tales. He even produced an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe in the Karen language.

Thanbyah’s own life story, The Pilgrim, published posthumously in 1925, perhaps would prove the most interesting. Unfortunately, however, it has never been translated into English. In 1926, Thanbyah’s nephew, P. Tamlatoo, presented a copy of the memoir to President Rush Rhees. In acknowledging this gift, Rhees lamented, “I profoundly regret that I am unable to read this biography. Your uncle was held in high regard here, and we shall cherish this memorial.” This copy of The Pilgrim remains on the shelves of the Rush Rhees Library in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

The University honored Thanbyah in 1918 by bestowing upon him an honorary doctor of divinity degree “in recognition of your long and faithful service as a minister of the Gospel and as a leader of the intellectual life of your people.” The degree was given in absentia, as it was impossible for Thanbyah to be present. In fact, it is unlikely that he ever returned to the United States after completing his education in 1874.

Thanbyah lived a long and productive life. In a letter to the University from his son, A. M. Thanbyah, dated Nov. 12, 1920, we learn: “It is with deep regret that I have to inform you of the death of my father on the 29th of October 1920, after a short illness. He conducted his last Pastor’s Bible class on the 22nd of October and that same evening influenza set in from which he never recovered. . . . Three out of eight children survive him.”

Today, Thanbyah’s senior oration remains his written work that a modern reader finds most accessible. It begins:

“It has been a prominent desire of the European nations ever since the light of civilization shed its rays upon them to grasp the wealth of Asia. “History shows that the commercial control of the East has rendered the nation possessing it the master of the world.”

Thanbyah’s senior oration has been preserved in the University Archives. You may read it in its entirety at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4849. Martin is the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist.

ALUMNI RELATIONS

By George, It’s a Birthday Party!

Alumni across the country celebrate the 158th anniversary of George Eastman’s birth.

DC: Jeremy Friedman ’08, ’11W (MS) demonstrates that Yellowjacket spirit can travel far and wide. (Photo: Courtesy of the subjects)

More than 300 alumni in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Rochester, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., helped welcome the Class of 2012 into the University’s alumni family with celebrations in July to mark the anniversary of the birth of University benefactor George Eastman.

Hosted by the Office of Alumni Relations and the Young Alumni Council, the regional happy hours took place on or near July 12, the Rochester entrepreneur’s birthday. The guest of honor—in the form of a life-sized stand-up photo of the Eastman Quadrangle statue—made an appearance at all the events.

The Young Alumni Council includes College alumni who graduated within the previous 10 years. The council members collaborate with the Office of Alumni Relations on programming, events, and outreach initiatives for young alumni.

To learn more, visit www.rochester.edu/college/alumni/youngalumni/yac.

LIFELONG LEARNING

Connecting in the Facebook Age

Looking to learn more about social media? Alumni Relations explores a program to get the pre-Internet generation of alumni online.

AMONG FRIENDS: Mary Komornik Massad ’56 and other members of the Lifelong Learning Advisory Council attend an Alumni Relations session about Facebook. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Mary Komornik Massad ’56 wanted to stay on top of the news in her family, particularly among her grandchildren, so she volunteered for a recent training session on Facebook with other members of the University’s Lifelong Learning Advisory Council.

“I’m trying to get myself into the 21st century to keep up with this gang of mine, frankly,” said Massad ’56, who lives in Manlius, N.Y., and cochairs the council. Most of her 10 grandchildren use Facebook. “They live in different states and communicate this way, and occasionally I hear about what they’ve heard from each other that I knew nothing about.”

After learning that senior citizens are the fastest-growing segment of Facebook users in the United States (a number that could reach 55 million by 2020, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project), the Office of Alumni Relations decided to lead a pilot training session to gauge interest in further training on a larger scale.

Led by Christyn Sanagursky, program manager of alumni marketing and communications, and Oliver Cashman-Brown, a program assistant for alumni education, the orientation focused on the basics of setting up a Facebook account, as well as the reasons for doing so, such as staying in touch with relatives, reuniting with former classmates, and taking advantage of promotions from local businesses.

“Sometimes you’ll learn more about your family than you wanted to know,” cautioned Cashman-Brown, whose comment drew laughter from the nine participants. (The group found the site’s “poke” option even funnier.) “But you can be connected in a different way to the world around you.”

He also pointed out that people use Facebook in different ways. His mother, for instance, typically only posts pictures of her cats, while his niece “updates every 20 seconds.”

The group’s homework assignment? Set up an account, send out friend requests, and “like” the Alumni Relations Facebook page.

Dick Schwartz ’63, ’66 (MS) and Vicki Proschel Schwartz ’62 left the session intrigued, but still unsure whether they wanted to put in the commitment to create and maintain a Facebook account. They weren’t convinced that the social media site can offer much more than they’re currently getting through phone calls, email, and Google searches.

“But I certainly know more now than I did before,” said Vicki Schwartz, of Perinton, N.Y. “I’m interested in learning more.”

While Massad plans to start a Facebook account, she will be “very selective” with it, mostly because she doesn’t think she could ever put in the amount of time online that the younger generation does. She prefers reading newspapers, magazines, and books to spending time on the Internet.

But she realizes that nothing beats the immediacy of social media.

“I really want to find out what’s happening in my family as soon as the rest of my family knows,” she said.

Alumni can visit the Facebook page of the Office of Alumni Relations at www.facebook.com/URAlumniRelations.

—Robin L. Flanigan

Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

TRIBUTE

Joseph Platt ’37: ‘Soul of Harvey Mudd College’

LEADER: Platt combined fun and drive as founding president of Harvey Mudd College. (Photo: Courtesy of Harvey Mudd College)

I first met Joseph Platt in 1957, when I was a college senior and he was in his first year as founding president of Harvey Mudd College. Joe had grown up in Rochester, and had arrived in Claremont, Calif., after a stint teaching in Rochester’s physics department, from which he’d graduated with honors in 1937, and where, as a faculty member, he’d helped design and build a 240-million-volt synchrocyclotron.

In 1961, as I was finishing my doctorate, he recruited me to join the new college’s physics department. Joe was a charming and compelling recruiter; we met outdoors, me in a chair and he sitting on a wall, curling his legs up under him, stoking his pipe and talking about his dreams for a great college. How could I not want to join?

Joe would spend more than half his life actively involved in the life of “HMC.” President for 20 years, he became a senior professor in the physics department in 1981, and continued to teach until just a few years before his death in July at age 96.

It always seemed to me that Joe and his wife, Jean, provided half the vision of the college. The other half was provided by the Mudds and their friends. Both halves were essential to HMC.

Four aspects of Joe’s personality stand out especially vividly to me, all of them contributing to the legacy of the college.

The first was integrity. You knew where Joe stood, and he never disappointed. An example: In the early days the faculty debated what qualities we were looking for in our students. One faculty member suggested that to learn something about them, we tell potential students one thing but actually do something else. Another faculty member said he didn’t think that was smart. Joe said that it wasn’t only not smart, but it wasn’t right. That settled that.

The second was teamwork. Everyone—faculty, students, alumni, staff, trustees—was part of the team. An example: In the 1960s, while other campuses were storming administration buildings to protest the Vietnam War, some students organized their own protest. And who was the first person they asked to speak to them? Joe, of course.

The third was quality. An example: Joe traveled the country recruiting the best founding faculty he could. When Joe began his role as president, there were seven faculty members. By the time he stepped down as president in 1976, the college had become among the best undergraduate engineering programs in the country.

The fourth was fun. Joe had a sense of play. An example was his guitar playing and singing Art Roberts songs, at places like the East Dorm Christmas Party: “When Rabi was a young man . . .”; “Round and round and round go the deuterons . . .” Nobody was left out; we all came in on the choruses.

Joe was, and is, the soul of Harvey Mudd College.

—Thomas Helliwell

Helliwell is a professor emeritus of physics at Harvey Mudd College. This essay is adapted from his remembrances at Harvey Mudd College’s “Remembering Joe Platt,” http://newwww.hmc.edu/rememberingjoeplatt.

Books & Recordings

Books

The Caldwell Collection of Viols: A Life Together in the Pursuit of Beauty

By Catharina Meints Caldwell ’66E

Music Word Media, 2012

Meints Caldwell, associate professor of viola da gamba at Oberlin, presents a comprehensive look at the viol collection that she and her late husband, James Caldwell, built over the course of their careers.

The Good Life: The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World

By Cheryl Mendelson ’73 (PhD)

Bloomsbury, 2012

Mendelson, who teaches philosophy at Barnard College, argues against the politicization of morality and antimoral strains she finds rampant in contemporary American culture.

Smith’s Patient-Centered Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Method (Third Edition)

By Robert Smith ’80M (Flw), et al

McGraw-Hill, 2012

Smith, professor of medicine at Michigan State, and a team of experts offer a third edition of the classic on patient interviewing. The edition includes a foreword by Timothy Quill ’76M (MD), ’79M (Res), director of the Center for Ethics, Humanities, and Palliative Care at the Medical Center.

Twice Shy

By Patrick Freivald ’98

JournalStone, 2012

Freivald presents a science fiction adventure in which 16-year-old heroine Ani Romero secretly battles a zombie virus along with the stresses of adolescence.

Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum

By Bridget Cooks ’02 (PhD)

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

Cooks, associate professor of art history, African- American studies, and visual studies at the University of California at Irvine, explores the curation and critical reception of major museum exhibitions of African- American art.

Assistive Technologies and Other Supports for People with Brain Impairment

By Marcia Scherer ’86M (MS), ’97W (PhD)

Springer, 2012

Scherer, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Medical Center, examines how assistive and cognitive support technologies are helping people with learning disabilities, autism, traumatic brain injuries, and dementias to think, remember, and learn. Scherer is also the author of Assistive Technology Assessment Handbook (CRC Press, 2012).

Asymmetric Economic Integration

By Snorri Thomas Snorrason ’88S (MBA)

Springer, 2012

Snorrason explores the relationship between the size of a country and the effects of economic integration.

Quantum Mechanics: Theory and Experiment

By Mark Beck ’85, ’92 (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2012

Beck, the Benjamin Brown Professor of Physics and chair of the Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Whitman College, offers a quantum mechanics textbook for upper-level undergraduate physics students.

Start Your Own Home Business After 50

By Robert Bly ’79

Linden Publishing, 2012

The copywriter Bly offers tips to adults over age 50 on how to leverage their skills and experience to establish profitable home businesses.

Introducción a la historia de la lengua española (Second Edition)

By Melvyn Resnick ’68 (PhD) and Robert Hammond

Georgetown University Press, 2011

In an expanded second edition, linguists Resnick and Hammond survey the history of the Spanish language from its Indo-European ancestry to the present day language of more than 400 million people.

The Regal Rules for Girls: How to Find Love, a Life— and Maybe Even a Lord—in London

By Jerramy Fine ’99

Berkley Books, 2012

Fine offers a guide that “tells you exactly where Prince Harry drinks and where Kate Middleton shops,” and is “filled with essential English etiquette.”

Sock Yarn Studio: Hats, Garments, and Other Projects Designed for Sock Yarn

By Carol Sulcoski ’87

Lark Crafts, 2012

In her third book on knitting design, Sulcoski features patterns and demonstrates techniques for using sock yarn to hand knit items other than socks.

The Pond: A History of Big Pea Porridge Pond in Madison, New Hampshire, Ice Age to 1951

By Connie Brown ’60, Brian Fowler, and Lee Pollock

White Birch Books, 2012

Brown, a longtime resident of Pea Porridge Pond, joins geologist Fowler and ecologist Pollock to tell the 14,000-year natural and human history of the New Hampshire lake.

The Complete Soccer Coaching Guide—76 Training Sessions That Develop the Advanced Player

By Chris Apple ’92

World Class Coaching, 2012

Yellowjacket men’s soccer coach Apple provides a calendar of soccer drills that helped the 2010 Yellowjackets prepare for the NCAA Elite 8 and reach a No. 6 national ranking by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

A Persistent Reformer: Jonathan Kozol’s Work to Promote Equality in America

Edited by Richard Ognibene ’66 (MA), ’73W (EdD)

Peter Lang Publishing, 2012

Ognibene, professor emeritus of education at Siena College, edits a series of essays analyzing 12 books by the activist and educational critic. The book includes an essay by Ognibene, “Kozol on Teaching.”

Del Mar at 75: Where the Turf Meets the Surf

By Barry Myers ’77W (Mas)

Active Light Press, 2012

Photographer Myers showcases a day in the life of Southern California’s storied Del Mar racetrack through nearly 200 pages of color photographs.

Citizen Soldier: A Life of Harry S. Truman

By Aida Donald ’61 (PhD)

Basic Books, 2012 H

istorian Donald reevaluates the decisions of Harry Truman in the critical years following World War II, arguing that the 33rd president “deserves recognition as the principal architect of the American postwar world.”

First Place for Jazz

By Dean Sorenson ’92E (MM)

Neil A. Kjos, 2011

Sorenson, director of jazz studies at the University of Minnesota, presents a methods book for beginning jazz players, featuring 12 original compositions, accompanying practice exercises, and online resources.

West Coast: Bering to Baja

By David Freese ’68

George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012

Freese offers “a photographic journey along the 5,000-mile West Coast of North America from Alaska across to British Columbia, then south to Washington, Oregon, California, and Baja, Mexico.”

The Eighth Wonder

By Kimberly Young ’04M (Pdc)

AuthorHouse, 2012

Psychologist Young presents her debut novel, a bittersweet romance set in Bradford, Pa., near the Kinzua Bridge, once dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world.”

The Fluff Cycle (And How to End It by Solving Real Sales and Marketing Problems)

By Brent Wahba ’88, ’01S (MBA)

CreateSpace, 2012

Wahba, president of Strategy Science, offers a guide on how to break the cycle of “ineffective, outsider-defined business ‘solutions’ by creating a learning, problem-solving culture.”

Directional Sense: How to Find Your Way Around

By Janet Chapman ’73 and Myron Grant

Institute for Human Centered Design, 2012

Carpman and Grant present “a guide for the directionally challenged.” The book includes tips on map reading, following signs, recognizing landmarks, and using wayfinding technologies such as GPS.

Under the Darkening

By Michael DeMasi ’97

Damnation Books, 2012

In a novel of crime and fantasy, DeMasi tells a tale of drugs, murder, and redemption.

Ignite the Genius Within: Discover Your Full Potential

By Christine Ranck ’73E and Christopher Lee Nutter

Penguin Books, 2011

Ranck, a trauma therapist, adapts eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, or EMDR, for those seeking to enhance creativity and consciousness.

Darwin’s Disciple: George John Romanes, A Life in Letters

By Joel Schwartz ’62

American Philosophical Society, 2010

Schwartz, professor of biology emeritus at City University of New York, examines the life and letters of George John Romanes, the English biologist who played a central role in defending Darwinian evolution and who enjoyed a close relationship with Darwin during the last decade of Darwin’s life.

Books & Recordings is a compilation of recent work by University alumni, faculty, and staff. For inclusion in an upcoming issue, send the work’s title, publisher information, author, and author’s class year, along with a brief description, to Books & Recordings, Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P. O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; or by email to rochrev@rochester.edu.

Getting from Here to There

Don’t have a good sense of direction? It’s a learnable skill, says Janet Reizenstein Carpman ’73.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

I first began thinking about spatial orientation and disorientation when I was studying for my master’s degree in city planning at Harvard. I was intrigued with the idea that human behavior could be affected by designed environments, and vice versa. During my second grad school adventure, in the PhD program in architecture and sociology at the University of Michigan, I directed an applied research project on wayfinding.

We studied the design-related needs of patients and visitors in preparation for the design of a $285 million hospital at the University of Michigan Medical Center. In the process of interviewing thousands of patients and visitors, we learned that disorientation was a major source of stress. Perhaps this shouldn’t have been surprising in an old hospital where the emergency room was located on an upper floor and colored floor lines snaked throughout, but our team was still struck by the significance of this issue. When my partner, Myron Grant, and I founded our consulting firm, we decided to focus on wayfinding.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

Planners and architects can do many things to make places navigable. They should make entrances obvious; keep circulation simple; maintain unobstructed views to entrances and decision points; design areas to look appropriate for their function; and in larger facilities, create some spaces that look distinct or unique.

Inspired by friends who admit not being able to find their way out of a paper bag, we delved into the world of the “directionally challenged.” We explored the sparse research on a “sense of direction.” We found that wayfinding is a learnable skill, not a mysterious instinct you’re doomed to live without. Directional Sense is designed to help people develop that skill.

There are several basic skills to wayfinding. One is understanding wayfinding words and numbers, because there’s a lot of language that’s used on signs and maps and in directions that may not have an obvious meaning. When somebody says, “Oh, it’s just down the road apiece”—what does that mean? There are also single roads whose name changes three or four times, addresses that follow a pattern of even numbers on one side and odd on the other, and then the pattern changes. There are shortcomings with every directional cue.

You need to have what we call a “big picture” of where you are in relation to your destination. That involves understanding spatial layouts. But, of course, layouts can be confusing in many ways too. Part of helping people understand how to navigate is to get the message across that no cue is perfect, no map is perfect, as no human being is perfect. We have to use the best information we have, and use a number of different kinds of cues in order to help us get from one place to the other.

GPS is another important tool we have to navigate. But it doesn’t always work. It’s not always correct. Using GPS involves using all of the basic wayfinding skills in one way or another.

Janet Reizenstein Carpman ’73

Architectural sociologist; copresident of Carpman Grant Associates, Wayfinding Consultants; and coauthor of Directional Sense: How to Find Your Way Around (Institute for Human Centered Design)

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Mich.

On navigating the River Campus: “I have vivid memories of being lost in the Rush Rhees stacks, wandering the extensive, mural-covered tunnels connecting campus buildings, and trudging through the snow on crutches—definitely an incentive to find the shortest route between two points!”

SUMMER PROGRAMS

Rocket Science

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

BLAST OFF! High schoolers Benjamin Mika, Kalem Rutledge, and Daniella Vazquez put their classroom understanding of rocket design and the concept of thrust to the test by experimenting with water rockets during an introductory course on engineering offered this summer by the University’s Upward Bound program, an initiative designed to help prepare area students for college.