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(04/11/11 11:30pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Informatics professor Johan Bollen and colleague Huina Mao began with the premise that people feel happier when the market is up and that stock prices are predictive of the national mood. Ten million tweets and some calculus later, they found the opposite: The collective Twitter mood actually predicts up-and-down movements in the Dow Jones by four days. Their published results made national headlines last October — Bollen even had a go on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” In March, a London hedge fund announced its $40 million investment in the model, and the fund opens for trade in April with Bollen and Mao as private consultants.Inside: Can I give you a scenario to see how this works? Say people are very anxious on Monday. What will the Dow Jones do in four days, most of the time? GO. Bollen: It depends on the dimension of mood. When people get nervous, we’ve observed that the market responds three or four days later — which is quite a shock because you’d think this would happen immediately, but it’s like the Titanic. It’s difficult to turn the boat. It may take a couple days for the public and traders to process their moods and then start making decisions. Inside: So you have all these Twitter users who are predominantly under 30, and then you have all these investors who are above 30 predominantly. How do you justify or defend that young people’s moods are affecting how older people are buying stock? Well, we’re actually not defending that at all. We have no idea of why this works, we really don’t. But it works.Inside: Science teachers everywhere are screaming correlation doesn’t equal causation. Is that what you’re saying about this study?Yeah. There may very well be some mechanism through which these are related. The correlation is very high: mood from three or four days past is correlating with present Dow Jones evaluations. Inside: So what do you think is happening?What I think may be happening is that somehow these 30-year-olds — Twitter is heavily news-driven — are like a canary in a coal mine. It’s an early indicator of what happens and how we all feel. When the market finally adjusts, it’s very difficult for people to get an edge on the market because by then we all share the same information. So it is possible that we’ve tapped into an alternate early source of information. The other hypothesis is that traders’ moods are affected by the public’s mood. One of our recent papers investigates how mood can be contagious online. Inside: Have you met with any of the Twitter co-founders?Not with the co-founders, but we talk with representatives for Twitter. Right now they’re changing their data access policies, and at least for commercial applications you will no longer be allowed to access their data feeds. You have to purchase a license to the data. They have an exclusive partner, Gnip, and they license out the data – it’s not cheap. Inside: I didn’t know Twitter could do that. Does Facebook have an arrangement like that?No, not for the raw data, which is too bad because that would be highly valuable data. Although I think Facebook fulfi lls a different function: People post updates, but it’s not so news-oriented. It’s more a sort of communal sharing. Twitter is much more fastpaced – people sharing news and very ephemeral status reports.Inside: What are you working on now?Right now we’re trying to model how emotions spread through these networks. With Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, where Twitter and Facebook played an important role, it’s not inconceivable that emotions played a tremendous role in how people got organized and how they felt about the regime. If there’s contagion of emotion, it means people can get infected with anger and all kinds of other emotions and that may play a role in organizing these kinds of protests. Inside: Will you be able to get access to tweets from those specific geographic areas? Only the Egypt tweets or only the Libya tweets? Yeah, it’s possible, because some of the tweets are geolocated. You can also use indicators like, “I’m at so-and-so Square right now.” Inside: Several years ago, when the Internet was just beginning to develop, you compared communication networks to the role of a brain in an organism. Do you still think this? I still stand by that. I wouldn’t have called it “the brain,” but at least “the central nervous system.” If you look at the globalization of our economy that has taken place, you look at information technology like Facebook and Twitter, it allows us to be part of phenomena — social, cultural, economic — that occur in different parts of the world. And to be so aware of these, that sometimes it’s difficult to determine whether it’s happening to someone else or to us.If you look at the disaster in Japan, you can see the pain and the suffering. We’re so close to it that it affects how we feel about ourselves. I think it’s tying us all very closely together, and I think it’ll have a beneficial effect on the “world organism,” if you can look at it that way.
(10/04/10 2:36am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>CAPE TOWN, South Africa – If cans of Coca-Cola reach the most marginalized communities in the world, why can’t vaccines do the same?An Australian surgeon asked this question at a United Nations convention about global health in late August in Melbourne, Australia.The discussion that followed was refreshingly honest and, to my relief, inspirational.Big changes are happening in the way a few global leaders think about reaching the poor. Amid the stale, stuffy debates in the UN, the World Bank and non-governmental organizations that spend more on pamphlets than on people, fresh air is leaking in, especially from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.The Coke-vaccine comparison is a sort of evergreen question in global health circles. It’s been used for years, and it will likely be around for many more years or even decades. Melinda Gates used the Coke-vaccine juxtaposition in a speech during the recent UN summit about the Millennium Development Goals, which took place in New York in late September. Her answer to the Coke-vaccine question focused on demand.“Ultimately, Coke’s success depends on one crucial fact,” Gates said. “And that is that people want a Coca-Cola.”It’s Coke’s “aspirational marketing” that is the key to its wide reach, she said. Consider Coke’s current slogan: “Open Happiness.” The campaign equates drinking a Coke to achieving a lifestyle, and it tailors this message to different cultural ideals.In America, Coke ads often appeal to beauty and feeling good. In many Latin American countries, the ads appeal to family life. In South Africa, Coke ads appeal to community and togetherness. How does this aspirational, localized marketing approach apply to global health? It’s a paradigm shift. Public health campaigns in developing countries reek of top-down, outsider paternalism and appeal to avoidance. “Wear a condom.” “Get tested.” “Wash and rinse.” “Use a bed net.” Somehow, health campaigns need to appeal to lifestyle aspirations rather than disease avoidance and capitalize on people’s real wants and desires. But the answer to the Coke-vaccine question is two-pronged. The first part is about demand and marketing. The second part is about supply.Why don’t pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines for the developing world’s “Big Three” communicable diseases: malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS? Treatments exist for these diseases, but there are no vaccines to prevent the diseases in the first place. Simply put, a malaria vaccine will never be a blockbuster the way Viagra, Lipitor or Zoloft are. But what if pharmaceutical companies could somehow have a guarantee that their malaria or TB vaccine will earn a large enough return to cover all research and development costs and earn a sizable profit, while at the same time keeping the cost of those vaccines low for poor, developing-world consumers?The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying an innovative approach called “Advanced Market Commitments.”An AMC works like this: Donors, such as governments and foundations, make binding commitments to pay for a desired vaccine if and when it is developed.If the new vaccine costs $15 per dose, the pooled donor commitments will cover $14 of that expense, and low-income countries could purchase the vaccine at a price of $1 per dose.After a predetermined number of vaccines have been sold in this way, enough to cover the supplier’s R&D expenses, the supplier would then agree to sell additional doses at only $1 — enough to cover continuing production costs and earn a profit.The first AMC trial was launched in June 2009, made possible by a $1.5 billion commitment from the Gates Foundation and five donor countries. To anyone familiar with the social, political and economic complexities of delivering basic medicines and vaccines to marginalized communities around the world, such outside-the-box thinking is exciting and absolutely necessary.It makes the Coke-vaccine question a little less maddening and a little more inspirational.E-mail: brzehr@indiana.edu
(09/17/10 5:12pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As an undergraduate in the 1950s, Elinor “Lin” Ostrom was told she had two career choices.“There was no encouragement to think about anything other than teaching in high school or being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen,” said Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at IU. “I don’t know how many times I was told about being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen.”Now, more than half a century later, Ostrom spent a Monday sitting in a TV studio and posing for an Associated Press photo shoot after completing interviews with the Wall Street Journal, BBC and The New York Times.On Oct. 12, 2009, Ostrom became the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, a career many advised her not to pursue.“So that’s a lesson,” she said.HER STORYAt 6:30 a.m. Oct. 12, 2009, Ostrom received a phone call.At first she thought it was a telemarketer, but once she heard the voice she knew it was from the Nobel committee.Nine hours and countless interviews later, Ostrom was still processing the instant international fame.“When it’s been this hectic, you don’t have much time to think about it,” she said. “It’s been a very exciting day, and I’m very appreciative of being able to talk to people, and I hope I survive it.”In a white house on the west edge of campus, congratulatory flowers stream in. The house is the building for the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which Ostrom and her husband, Vincent, helped found in 1973.The Ostroms founded the workshop in an effort to approach political-economic scholarship in a new, interdisciplinary way.Covering its walls are artifacts and art pieces gathered from around the world.“Look at it around here — this is not the normal academic office,” said the workshop’s co-director Michael McGinnis. “Look at the stuff on the walls — it looks like you’re in an area-studies institute.”The collection extends throughout the building and into Ostrom’s second-floor office, which isn’t the expansive corner office one might expect of a Nobel laureate.Squeezed narrowly into a single-window room are an aged wooden desk and beige metal filing cabinets. Four fluorescent light bulbs cast a dusty yellow glow on the crumbling ceiling.One wall is plastered with a faded National Geographic map and a whale calendar still showing May.The only indications of Ostrom’s award are a single bouquet of flowers sitting on the desk and an envelope addressed to her as the “2009 Nobel winner.”And the two papers in her opened briefcase?The official Nobel certificates.HER CONTRIBUTIONDownstairs at the center, three international students discussed Ostrom’s significance in the economic community.“She’s a political scientist, definitely, but she’s so big that she spills over into being an economist as well,” said Pontus Strimling, a mathematics post-doctoral student from Sweden. Strimling explained Ostrom’s major area of research, common pool resources, as land or property that is not controlled by government nor by private entities, but rather is shared among individuals.“Think of a fish in a lake or an apple tree — it’s hard to keep other people from going there and picking the apples, and the apple that someone picked, no one else can have it,” he said. “Her theory is about what kind of agreements make sure fishing is sustainable, or that the apples are distributed equally.”Biologist Somabha Mohanty, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs described how Ostrom transformed traditional thinking about groups dividing resources.“She tried to look at communities that for many years had actually been sustainably managing these common pool resources,” Mohanty said. “These were not privatized resources nor were they owned by the state, but communities and groups had created their own systems and rules for managing these resources.”McGinnis said Ostrom and her team of researchers found many different common property systems around the world.“She has really revolutionized the way in which people understand the commons,” he said. “There are some things you can’t divide up into private property — you can’t put fences in the sea and carve up different fishing areas.”In her ground-breaking 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” Ostrom argued there are other ways to control resources besides complete government regulation, and one solution won’t apply to all problems.“What I’ve learned is the dichotomy of ‘the market’ and ‘the state’ is not a useful dichotomy,” she said in an interview with the BBC on Oct. 12. “There are many more institutional arrangements out there in the world. ... When we try to develop a top-down formula, the same formula for every place in the country, that’s where we seem to run into serious trouble.”IN THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHTOstrom is a Nobel celebrity now, but those who have known her for decades or even a couple months said they believed the award wouldn’t change her.“She’s probably the most brilliant and energetic person I’ve ever met,” Mohanty said. “She likes to hear what everyone says. It is very important to her that she works with everyone as a team and as colleagues, not as this high professor talking to students.”McGinnis echoed these sentiments, having worked with Ostrom for more than 20 years.“Her and Vincent have a house out in the country. They’re very rustic, very down-home people,” he said, “and yet the smartest people I’ve ever met. The hardest working, and yet just normal folks.”Even after reaching the pinnacle of academia, Ostrom remains grounded, McGinnis said.“A lot of people at her level — and there aren’t many — but a lot of them are kind of full of themselves, and she’s not,” he said.In the middle of the biggest day of her life, Ostrom took a break from the national spotlight to spend 10 minutes with two student reporters.“I’m still interested (in teaching),” she said. “I like your questions. I learn from my students — they give me new ideas and new direction and all the rest. This is a passion for me. I don’t have to do it.”— Originally published in the Indiana Daily Student, Oct. 13, 2009.
(09/15/10 1:54am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Australia didn’t have a government for 17 days.At least, that’s what the headlines read and newscasters said, and it’s what everyone on the streets was talking about the past three weeks.But the situation wasn’t as perilous as it sounds, at least by American standards.Imagine an American scenario: It’s mid-November, 98 percent of the votes are counted and neither Republicans nor Democrats won the House.No majority, no magic 218 seats.Instead, the balance of power rests fully with three independent congressmen who could side with either party and have two weeks to choose which party will govern.The three independents are political no-names — as unknown as Sarah Palin before she was John McCain’s running mate — representing rural constituencies in New Mexico, North Dakota and Montana.Their platforms are agriculture-based, and their grievances are about the misfortune of farmers and the rural poor during the past decade. They’ve never had a political loudspeaker until the 2010 electoral tie, and they love it.This is what happened in Australia. The country’s late August election produced no majority, no prime minister and the country’s first hung Parliament in 70 years.Tony, Rob and Bob — some call them the “three amigos,” others the “three wise men” — took 17 days to decide which party and prime minister would control the Aussie government for the next three years.The two major parties — incumbent center-left Labour party and conservative Liberal party — were in full tug-of-war mode over this trio of instant political celebrities, a la Kevin Costner’s 2008 dramedy “Swing Vote.”It was a tug-of-war, for sure, but with less messiness than might be expected from such melodramatic headlines.In a hypothetical American version of this political stalemate, all hell breaks loose.Tea Party protesters canvas the sleepy districts of the three independents. Cable news shows become full-time poll aggregators and pundits wax ridiculous. John King feverishly pokes at his map. Senior citizens propagate e-mail chains claiming the end of times has commenced.The Dow plunges to its lowest value in a year. Obama addresses the nation to calmly assert the government is still functioning and the election wasn’t rigged. Homeland Security ups the terror bar to orange for good measure.But in Australia, the quagmire didn’t cause panic, fear or irrationality.Instead, it produced the most constructive political round table I’ve ever seen on television.On the eve of the 17th day, when the three independents would announce their decision, Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired a special, prime-time edition of “Q & A,” a weekly political show with a panel and audience questions.The panel included one of the three independents: Bob Katter, “the man in the 10- gallon hat.” Also on the panel were leaders of both major parties and an Australian sociologist.Imagine the composure and nuance of the “Charlie Rose Show” combined with the passion and toughness of “Hardball with Chris Matthews” combined with the honesty and humor of “The Daily Show.”Add to that an educated, respectful, not pre-selected studio audience and an Anderson Cooper-esque moderator.I hadn’t seen anything like it in the U.S. — I had stumbled upon bipartisanship, or democracy in action, or something like that.Australians seem to take their politics less seriously than Americans do, and it was refreshing.They seem to take government for what it is: an imperfect tool whose components are imperfect institutions and imperfect people and whose imperfections will always exist regardless of which party is in power.Rather than exhausting themselves with blanket proclamations about big government or big business or socialism, they focused on practical governance. They laughed about their political differences rather than yelling about them.On Day 17, the three independents split, and the incumbent center-left party won power by one vote.The three Aussie amigos had spoken, and the Aussie electorate moved on.
(08/27/10 3:10am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – The Athlone Towers came tumbling down at 11:56 a.m. Sunday. They vanished in eight seconds.The iconic pair of 283-foot-tall power plant cooling towers, located centrally amid Cape Town’s sprawling southern suburbs, twisted like concrete Slinkies as choreographed blasts raced around their midsection.Families flocked by the thousands to high points in the city, jostling for positions to witness and record the bittersweet demolition. The implosion was as visible a sign of progress and government action as the 2010 World Cup, but it was also a solemn, nostalgic occasion, not unlike saying goodbye to old friends.The hollow, flask-shaped towers had literally been crumbling for years and were eyesores in a skyline dominated by crisp mountain peaks. The coal power plant they serviced was decommissioned in 2006 after almost 50 years of operation.The site remained lifeless until Sunday’s blast, but the towers weren’t totally abandoned. A pair of falcons lived on the upper rim of one of the stacks since 1989.As part of the contract to demolish the towers, the city went to great lengths — and heights — to accommodate the avian couple. Peregrine falcons breed for life. They choose a partner and a breeding site and stick with them for their full 15 to 20 year lifespan.The descriptor “peregrine” means “having a tendency to wander.” While the birds do fly thousands of miles every year, diving at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour to snatch a meaty meal along the coast, their strong homing instinct unfailingly leads them back home.They don’t build nests. Instead, they lay eggs in sand on cliff ledges or in the city, the next best alternative to a cliff ledge. When the birds first began frequenting the Athlone cooling towers in the 1980s, ornithologists from the University of Cape Town placed three large boxes — each filled with a base layer of sand to mimic the falcons’ requisite breeding habitat — atop one of the towers.Year after year, for two decades, this pair of Peregrine falcons returned to the top of the towers — the tallest man-made structures outside the downtown area — to breed and raise chicks. To ensure the falcons could continue to breed at the site post-demolition, the city allowed researchers to move the breeding boxes to a nearby brick chimney of the power station. The relocation was a gradual process.Time will tell whether the aging falcons of Athlone fully adapt to their new perch. So far, researchers say, the outlook is positive, and the birds will soon breed again. The city committed an entire website and a portion of its demolition contract to the story of the birds.It’s a fascinating sub-story in the broader context of South Africa’s post-Apartheid poverty trap. Birds are getting home relocation and a mention in city contracts. Meanwhile, the miles of slums around the base of the Athlone towers get covered in blast dust.In many ways the towers were like the slums: too big to miss, so familiar they blended into the morning commute, ugly scars of the past and in desperate need of visible, decisive government action.The towers got theirs, and the city got its message out: The falcons of Athlone are safe and right at home.Editor’s Note: At least 2,000 IU-Bloomington students study abroad in 50 countries every year. The Writers Abroad program, now in its fourth semester at the Indiana Daily Student, brings some of those students’ stories back to Bloomington. We will not have a nation & world page this semester, but we’re keeping Writers Abroad. You can find the columns on the campus page. They might not be there every day, but check online for columns you might miss. We have 15 students from around the world who will take you into their lives and give you a glimpse into their world.
(05/03/10 4:52pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In a word, spring semester at the IDS has been “experimental.”We introduced “Quickies” to the front page to set a more conversational tone for the paper. We designed dynamic, dramatic pages to communicate more effectively with readers. We worked with our Web coders to introduce more than a dozen incremental improvements to idsnews.com, including a database of 60 years of Little 500 race stats. We broke down the IUSA budget dollar by dollar, followed an IU party master during his craziest Little 500 rave yet, and printed a giant “4/20” above a discussion on marijuana legislation. We covered three student deaths and professor Don Belton’s murder. We reported an on-campus rape and tried to bring sexual assault into the campus conversation. We saw IU men’s basketball’s worst conference losing streak in school history and Butler’s run to the championship. Thanks for reading and thanks for responding. After all, the only difference between a newspaper and your newspaper is participation.Brad Zehr, editor in chiefLarry Buchanan, art directorBen Phelps, managing editorPeter Stevenson, managing editor
(04/20/10 7:38pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Training for 12 months takes dedication. Keeping race records for 50 years takes love.Dr. John Greenman, a family practice physician in Bluffton, Ind., has meticulously tracked the Little 500 race data since he was an IU freshman in 1958.He devised a points system for race results: the champion team gets 33 points, 2nd place gets 32 points — all the way down to 33rd place, which earns 1 point.According to his system, the all-time top men’s team is Phi Gamma Delta (1588 points) and top women’s team is Kappa Alpha Theta (710). The tally reveals which teams have been consistently strong during the men’s 60 years and women's 22 years, rather than highlighting the teams with the most championships. The all-time winningest team, the Cutters, rank down at 16 in Greenman’s system because the team didn’t start racing until 1984.During his time at IU, Greenman lived in Dodds House, a residence hall in Teter quad. Although he never rode in the Little 500, he was friends with many riders, including several race legends.His roommate at one point was Bob Stoller, team manager for the 1962 Phi Psi squad on which the film “Breaking Away” is based. He also knew Dave Blase, the inspiration for the film’s main character, Dave Stoller.“Dave did like the Italians and did shave his legs,” Greenman said. “He had bicycles everywhere.”Greenman said he still occasionally runs into Blase at Italian operas performed by Jacobs School of Music students.When Greenman was on campus in the late ’50s and early ’60s, the race took place at Tenth Street Stadium, where the Arboretum is today. He also said one problem for riders was missing dinner to practice. In that era, residence halls served meals only at set times, and riders often had to sacrifice supper for track time.But Greenman said the biggest difference he sees between today’s race and the ’60s races is the prevalence of independent teams — those that are not affiliated with a specific residential hall or greek house.“My two gripes about the independent teams are that they can get riders from anywhere and that they don’t have any backing,” Greenman said. “The idea is for students to support a single team, so if there are independent teams, they should have some connection to a single dorm or house.”Greenman still travels to Bloomington for most of the Spring Series events, of which Miss ’N Out is his favorite “because participants are riding for the team but really riding for their own survival.”Expect to see him in the stands this weekend, sitting below the shade of the press box with pencil in hand.“Look for the man with the Dodds House hat,” he said.
(04/08/10 4:05am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Ask any IU student if he or she wants a fall break, and nine out of 10 respond with an emphatic yes, said IU Student Association President Peter SerVaas at Tuesday’s Bloomington Faculty Council meeting.After all, Purdue University has a fall break, as does IU-Purdue University Indianapolis. The long haul from the end of August to Thanksgiving break is a grinding marathon for all involved.But adding two days of vacation in mid-October will take more than an IUSA task force and invocations of Purdue luxury.It will take the “political will of the BFC” to craft a calendar that would “set in motion hundreds, if not thousands of changes in the routine procedures and practices throughout the campus,” said Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs and chairman of BFC’s the Calendar Committee.“Do we want to really get started on that process?” Gieryn asked the council. “Is it worth the candle?”It must be. Provost Karen Hanson convened the calendar committee last November and asked it to examine making Labor Day a Bloomington campus holiday and instituting a fall break.The calendar committee released its proposal to revise the campus calendar and opened the council floor for discussion on the proposal’s four recommendations, one of which was a two-day, mid-October fall break.Proposal to revise IUB campus calendarThe new calendar would take effect in fall 2011 if approved by the Bloomington Faculty Council and campus administrators this spring. -Labor Day becomes a University holiday-Two-day fall break instituted for the Monday and Tuesday of the seventh academic week (mid-October)-Fall classes start three weekdays earlier, on the Wednesday of Welcome Week-Summer Sessions shortened from 14 total weeks to 12 total weeks, with individual departments deciding the duration of courses.Calendar committee chairman Tom Gieryn listed major concerns and questions about the proposal at Tuesday’s BFC meeting.SUPPORT FOR PROPOSALLabor Day a mustNo one on the council objected to making Labor Day a University holiday.“It is incongruous for a federal holiday not to be celebrated,” Gieryn said. “It’s a family gathering; it punctuates the end of the summer; most of our peer institutions observe Labor Day — we seem to be out-of-synch with them.”Presently, IU support staff do not work on Labor Day, but faculty must work and classes meet.Students, faculty need a breatherThe council recognized the psychological value in a mid-term break.Whereas spring semester has a full-week break after nine weeks, the fall semester currently has no break until more than 12 weeks in.“For me, it’s really about the rhythm of the year,” Dean of Students Pete Goldsmith said. “It’s a very, very long run to go from August to November. We think that for everybody’s mental health, it might be useful to have those couple of days off.”Boosting enthusiasm for summer sessionsThe proposal would allow departments to determine the length of summer courses — two, four, six, eight, 10 or 12 weeks — rather than the current summer sessions schedule that dictates a six-week Session I and eight-week Session II.“Because the summer sessions are so long ... they bleed too much into summer research time, and most faculty refuse to teach them,” said Diane Reilly, a College of Arts and Sciences representative on the BFC Calendar Committee.She said by giving departments more freedom to design summer sessions and even limit summer courses to four or eight weeks, top research faculty would be more inclined to teach the summer courses because they could still meet their research goals.Syncing with IUPUIOne major argument in favor of adding a fall break to IU-Bloomington’s academic calendar is that IUPUI has already accomplished the feat.The IUPUI faculty council approved an October fall break for its campus, beginning in fall 2010. A priority for the calendar committee is to better align the academic schedules of IUPUI and IU-Bloomington.CRITIQUES OF PROPOSALStudent “mischief” during breaksA critique of the proposal is that a Labor Day break (a three-day weekend) and fall break (a four-day weekend) would create more opportunities for “mischief” — namely, alcohol-based partying. One respondent said, “the new fall break could become the second world’s greatest college weekend.”Cutting classroom timeAlthough the proposal does not decrease the number of instructional days — the three break days are balanced by starting fall classes three days earlier — there is the perception by faculty that adding vacation days will lower student and professor interaction.One council member shared his experience at a different university that tried a two-day, Monday and Tuesday October break.“Attendance plummeted that week — the Wednesday, the Thursday and the Friday,” he said. “It essentially became a full-week break.”Less time between move-in and classesStudents would move in the weekend before classes start on Wednesday, allowing only two or three days for traditional Welcome Week activities and orientation programs. The shortened transition time would be especially problematic for international students and graduate students who have more pre-semester meetings than undergraduates.“Broken Weeks”These are school weeks that are not five days. The new calendar would create three additional broken weeks in the fall semester in addition to Thanksgiving week.Broken weeks are most problematic for lab courses in chemistry, physics and biology because the labs are set up to facilitate the same experiment all five days of the week.“It’s really difficult for us to teach the labs any other way than to teach the same lab Monday through Friday,” said Randy Arnold, a member of the chemistry department and the non-tenure track researchers representative on the council.“Bureaucratic inertia”The new calendar would implicate hundreds of department deadlines that would need to be tweaked. Gieryn cited a few: Drop/Add, Waitlist, Financial Aid forms, fee refunds and the plethora of IU Bursar and IU Registrar scheduled items. Intensive Freshman Seminars would be affected, as would global language training institutes, New Student Orientation, GROUPS programs and summer music clinics at Jacobs School of Music.
(03/30/10 11:45pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As an undergraduate in the 1950s, Elinor “Lin” Ostrom was told she had two career choices.“There was no encouragement to think about anything other than teaching in high school or being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen,” said Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at IU. “I don’t know how many times I was told about being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen.”Now, more than half a century later, Ostrom spent a Monday sitting in a TV studio and posing for an Associated Press photo shoot after completing interviews with the Wall Street Journal, BBC and The New York Times.On Oct. 12, 2009, Ostrom became the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, a career many advised her not to pursue.“So that’s a lesson,” she said.Her storyAt 6:30 a.m. Oct. 12, 2009, Ostrom received a phone call.At first she thought it was a telemarketer, but once she heard the voice she knew it was from the Nobel committee.Nine hours and countless interviews later, Ostrom was still processing the instant international fame.“When it’s been this hectic, you don’t have much time to think about it,” she said. “It’s been a very exciting day, and I’m very appreciative of being able to talk to people, and I hope I survive it.”In a white house on the west edge of campus, congratulatory flowers stream in. The house is the building for the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which Ostrom and her husband, Vincent, helped found in 1973.The Ostroms founded the workshop in an effort to approach political-economic scholarship in a new, interdisciplinary way.Covering its walls are artifacts and art pieces gathered from around the world.“Look at it around here — this is not the normal academic office,” said the workshop’s co-director Michael McGinnis. “Look at the stuff on the walls — it looks like you’re in an area-studies institute.”The collection extends throughout the building and into Ostrom’s second-floor office, which isn’t the expansive corner office one might expect of a Nobel laureate.Squeezed narrowly into a single-window room are an aged wooden desk and beige metal filing cabinets. Four fluorescent light bulbs cast a dusty yellow glow on the crumbling ceiling.One wall is plastered with a faded National Geographic map and a whale calendar still showing May.The only indications of Ostrom’s award are a single bouquet of flowers sitting on the desk and an envelope addressed to her as the “2009 Nobel winner.”And the two papers in her opened briefcase?The official Nobel certificates.Her contributionDownstairs at the center, three international students discussed Ostrom’s significance in the economic community.“She’s a political scientist, definitely, but she’s so big that she spills over into being an economist as well,” said Pontus Strimling, a mathematics post-doctoral student from Sweden. Strimling explained Ostrom’s major area of research, common pool resources, as land or property that is not controlled by government nor by private entities, but rather is shared among individuals.“Think of a fish in a lake or an apple tree — it’s hard to keep other people from going there and picking the apples, and the apple that someone picked, no one else can have it,” he said. “Her theory is about what kind of agreements make sure fishing is sustainable, or that the apples are distributed equally.”Biologist Somabha Mohanty, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs described how Ostrom transformed traditional thinking about groups dividing resources.“She tried to look at communities that for many years had actually been sustainably managing these common pool resources,” Mohanty said. “These were not privatized resources nor were they owned by the state, but communities and groups had created their own systems and rules for managing these resources.”McGinnis said Ostrom and her team of researchers found many different common property systems around the world.“She has really revolutionized the way in which people understand the commons,” he said. “There are some things you can’t divide up into private property — you can’t put fences in the sea and carve up different fishing areas.”In her ground-breaking 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” Ostrom argued there are other ways to control resources besides complete government regulation, and one solution won’t apply to all problems.“What I’ve learned is the dichotomy of ‘the market’ and ‘the state’ is not a useful dichotomy,” she said in an interview with the BBC on Oct. 12. “There are many more institutional arrangements out there in the world. ... When we try to develop a top-down formula, the same formula for every place in the country, that’s where we seem to run into serious trouble.”In the national spotlightOstrom is a Nobel celebrity now, but those who have known her for decades or even a couple months said they believed the award wouldn’t change her.“She likes to hear what everyone says. It is very important to her that she works with everyone as a team and as colleagues, not as this high professor talking to students.” Mohanty said. McGinnis echoed these sentiments, having worked with Ostrom for more than 20 years.“Her and Vincent have a house out in the country. They’re very rustic, very down-home people,” he said, “and yet the smartest people I’ve ever met. The hardest working, and yet just normal folks.”Even after reaching the pinnacle of academia, Ostrom remains grounded, McGinnis said.“A lot of people at her level — and there aren’t many — but a lot of them are kind of full of themselves, and she’s not,” he said.In the middle of the biggest day of her life, Ostrom took a break from the national spotlight to spend 10 minutes with two student reporters.“I’m still interested (in teaching),” she said. “I like your questions. I learn from my students. They give me new ideas and new direction and all the rest. This is a passion for me.”Originally published in the Indiana Daily Student: Oct. 13, 2009
(01/11/10 5:51am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Welcome back to campus, and thanks for picking us up. The 40 student editors at the IDS strive daily to produce the most accurate, up-to-date and relevant stories for the IU and Bloomington communities.But we can’t do it alone. We want to hear your ideas, news tips and opinions on the issues we cover – we want you to comment on idsnews.com, post on our Facebook wall, watch our YouTube channel and e-mail us your ideas or concerns. We want to inform, inspire and start the conversation.Here are five IDS features to follow this semester:Writers Abroad. We have a team of 20 IDS staff writers and IU students reporting while studying abroad, from Washington, D.C., to Ghana to Hong Kong.IU Basketball Web site. Look for the site to launch this week, complete with reporting, commentary, video and posts from our Hoosier Hype sports blog.Investigative Reporting. A small team of experienced IDS reporters will dig into campus issues like student safety, drug use, the Life Sciences Initiative and poverty in Monroe County.IDS on Facebook. Become a fan of our page, where we will continue to post links for breaking news, multimedia and IDS blogs.Special Publications. Look for our spring guides to housing and living, men and women, and of course, the Little 500.Brad Zehr, Editor-in-chiefLarry Buchanan, Art directorBen Phelps, Managing editorPeter Stevenson, Managing editor
(12/09/09 6:34am)
Elinor Ostrom condensed four decades of tireless economic legwork to 30 minutes in her Nobel Lecture.
(12/03/09 5:37am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In 24 hours, Elinor “Lin” Ostrom has gone from shaking the hands of President Barack Obama to those of IU President Michael McRobbie. Sitting on the stage at the IU Auditorium on Wednesday, Ostrom held hands with her husband, Vincent, as she listened to fellow faculty and colleagues celebrate her achievements.Ostrom, Nobel Prize Laureate and IU Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, is IU’s eighth Nobel Prize winner and the world’s first woman to win it in economics. Friends and colleagues gathered in the auditorium Wednesday for a brief reception followed by remarks from Mayor Mark Kruzan, Provost Karen Hanson, and co-directors of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis Michael McGinnis and James Walker, among others.After meeting fellow 2009 Nobel Laureates on Tuesday in Washington and attending the reception at IU on Wednesday, Ostrom will leave for Stockholm on Friday to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics, formally titled the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.“This is Lin’s day, Tuesday was Lin’s day, next week is Lin’s week, too, in Stockholm,” said McRobbie during his speech Wednesday at the reception. McRobbie highlighted the many contributions Ostrom has made both to economic scholarship and to the University.The Nobel Committee, in their announcement of her award on Oct. 12, cited Ostrom’s large body of research on the economic governance of common resources, like fish in the ocean and trees in the forest, where no one entity has authoritative control.“Her book ‘Governing the Commons’ dispelled the conventional wisdom that the best arrangement for managing common property was either privatization or government control,” Hanson said in the ceremony’s opening remarks.Beyond her contributions to analysis of the commons, Ostrom and husband Vincent have contributed fiscally to the institution where they have both worked for more than four and half decades.“Lin and Vincent have given personally to the Foundation – to an endowment to support the Workshop – over $2 million over their careers at IU,” McRobbie said. “They’ve made a further estate gift of $1.5 million, and Lin has said her half of the Nobel Prize, $700,000, will also be a part of that endowment.”Furthermore, Ostrom and husband Vincent founded the Workshop in 1973 to foster an interdisciplinary approach to political-economic scholarship.“Vincent and Lin together have been the driving force, jointly, behind the Workshop ... which I think has been one of the most vigorous, most dynamic, most highly regarded academic centers in the University,” McRobbie said.Even with all of Ostrom’s travel obligations, the Workshop still remains one of her top priorities.“I’m at the Workshop all the time ... we had a colloquium today,” Ostrom said. “The Workshop doesn’t change.”Following her lecture Dec. 8 at Stockholm University and award ceremony Dec. 10 at Stockholm Concert Hall, Ostrom will attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on Dec. 13. She plans to help with international negotiations on climate change by representing the Workshop and its hundreds of contributing scholars. “Lin is nothing if not gracious to her colleagues,” McRobbie said. “She has said over and over again that her achievement reflects all the wonderful students the Workshop has had, the wonderful faculty who have been part of the Workshop and the extraordinary staff. ... The glory that is now Lin’s also reflects on all of them.”
(10/13/09 4:48am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As an undergraduate in the 1950s, Elinor “Lin” Ostrom was told she had two career choices.“There was no encouragement to think about anything other than teaching in high school or being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen,” said Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at IU. “I don’t know how many times I was told about being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen.”Now, more than half a century later, Ostrom spent her Monday sitting in a TV studio and posing for an Associated Press photo shoot after completing interviews with the Wall Street Journal, BBC and the New York Times.On Monday, Ostrom became the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, a career many advised her not to pursue.“So that’s a lesson,” she said.HER STORYAt 6:30 a.m. Monday, Ostrom received a phone call. At first she thought it was a telemarketer, but once she heard the voice she knew it was from the Nobel committee.Nine hours and countless interviews later, Ostrom was still processing the instant international fame.“When it’s been this hectic, you don’t have much time to think about it,” she said. “It’s been a very exciting day, and I’m very appreciative of being able to talk to people, and I hope I survive it.”Meanwhile, in a white house on Park Avenue behind Collins, congratulatory flowers begin streaming in steadily. The house is the building for the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which Ostrom and her husband, Vincent, helped found in 1973.Patty Lezotte, administrative assistant and publications director for the workshop, is printing out screenshots of national news Web sites featuring the Nobel announcement.David Price, the workshop’s receptionist and front office coordinator, answers relentless telephone calls from reporters across the globe – China, Italy, Peru, Canada and Sweden, to name a few.The Ostroms founded the workshop in an effort to approach political-economic scholarship in a new, interdisciplinary way.Covering its walls are artifacts and art pieces gathered from around the world.“Look at it around here – this is not the normal academic office,” the workshop’s co-director Michael McGinnis says. “Look at the stuff on the walls – it looks like you’re in an area-studies institute.”The collection extends throughout the building and into Ostrom’s second-floor office, which isn’t the expansive corner office one might expect of a Nobel laureate.Squeezed narrowly into a single-window room are an aged wooden desk and beige metal filing cabinets. Four fluorescent lightbulbs cast a dusty yellow glow on the crumbling ceiling.One wall is plastered with a faded National Geographic map and a whale calendar still showing May.The only indications of Ostrom’s award is a single bouquet of flowers sitting on the desk and an envelope addressed to her as the “2009 Nobel winner.”And the two papers in her opened briefcase?The official Nobel certificates.HER CONTRIBUTIONDownstairs at the center, three international students discussed Ostrom’s significance in the economic community.“She’s a political scientist, definitely, but she’s so big that she spills over into being an economist as well,” said Pontus Strimling, a mathematics post-doctoral student from Sweden. “She’s everywhere. She’s written so much good stuff ... such excellent quality compared to anyone else.”Strimling explained Ostrom’s major area of research, common pool resources, as land or property that is not controlled by government nor by private entities, but rather is shared among individuals.“Think of a fish in a lake or an apple tree – it’s hard to keep other people from going there and picking the apples, and the apple that someone picked, no one else can have it,” he said. “Her theory is about what kind of agreements make sure fishing is sustainable, or that the apples are distributed equally.”Biologist Somabha Mohanty, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and native of India, described how Ostrom transformed traditional thinking about groups dividing resources.“She tried to look at communities that for many years had actually been sustainably managing these common pool resources,” Mohanty said. “These were not privatized resources nor were they owned by the state, but communities and groups had created their own systems and rules for managing these resources.”McGinnis said Ostrom and her team of researchers found many different common property systems around the world, including irrigation systems and forests.“She has really revolutionized the way in which people understand the commons,” he said. “There are some things you can’t divide up into private property – you can’t put fences in the sea and carve up different fishing areas. ... Communities have come up with all kinds of ways to figure these things out.”Ostrom’s ground-breaking 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” explored the different ways to divide common resources other than the market or the state.Ostrom argued that there are other ways to control resources besides complete government regulation, and one solution won’t apply to all problems.“What I’ve learned is the dichotomy of ‘the market’ and ‘the state’ is not a useful dichotomy,” she said in an interview Monday with the BBC. “There are many more institutional arrangements out there in the world. ... When we try to develop a top-down formula, the same formula for every place in the country, that’s where we seem to run into serious trouble.”IN THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHTOn their way to her photo shoot, Ostrom’s colleagues joked that she won’t go anywhere anymore without being recognized.She’s a Nobel celebrity now, but those who have known her for decades or even a couple months said they believed the award wouldn’t change her.“She’s probably the most brilliant and energetic person I’ve ever met,” Mohanty said. “She likes to hear what everyone says. It is very important to her that she works with everyone as a team and as colleagues, not as this high professor talking to students.”McGinnis echoed these sentiments, having worked with Ostrom for more than 20 years.“Her and Vincent have a house out in the country. They’re very rustic, very down-home people,” he said, “and yet the smartest people I’ve ever met. The hardest working, and yet just normal folks.”Even after reaching the pinnacle of academia, Ostrom remains grounded, McGinnis said.“A lot of people at her level – and there aren’t many – but a lot of them are kind of full of themselves, and she’s not,” he said.In the middle of the biggest day of her life, Ostrom took a break from the national spotlight to spend 10 minutes with two student reporters.“I’m still interested (in teaching),” she said. “I like your questions. I learn from my students – they give me new ideas and new direction and all the rest. This is a passion for me. I don’t have to do it.”
(09/02/09 4:46am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Each student at Kabwende Primary School in rural Rwanda has a new book this semester. The books are filled with stories written by peers an ocean away.In June, two IU students documented the scene as the Kabwende children, accustomed to sharing one textbook among four students, received their own personal books.“Even before we gave them the books, the excitement was apparent from 100 yards away,” said junior Chris Purvis, a photographer and videographer for the Books and Beyond documentation team. “It was apparent in their faces that to have something of their own, a real possession, was something new.”The international story-exchange project was a yearlong endeavor started by IU’s Global Village Living-Learning Center to bring books to Rwanda schools with limited resources.But Books and Beyond, as its name indicates, is about more than book donation.“It’s not just going to Africa and helping people and leaving,” said junior Caitlin Ryan, who documented the Rwanda trip with Purvis. “It’s truly a three-way partnership where every group is giving and every group is getting something. It’s an exchange in every sense of the word.”The three partners are three very different schools – IU, Newark Collegiate Academy in Newark, N.J., and Kabwende Primary School in Kinigi, Rwanda, a northern town at the base of Volcanoes National Park.Each school contributes to and benefits from the give-and-take project. Mentoring charter school studentsAbout 25 students from the Global Village participated in Books and Beyond in the past year. Most were designated “writing partners” and mentored one middle or high school student from Newark Collegiate Academy to produce short children’s stories.The stories were then compiled into a book for Kabwende students, who are currently writing their own stories to send back.NCA, a member of the TEAM charter schools system in Newark, strives to send each of its students to college. Students are chosen from Newark city schools based on a lottery system.“Typical students entering fifth grade at NCA are about two years behind in math and three years behind in reading,” said Ali Nagle, who teaches fifth-grade reading at NCA and co-founded Books and Beyond. “Of my 112 students, about 15 are below kindergarten reading level.”Living in a city where only 9 percent of residents have bachelor’s degrees, NCA students escape Newark’s poverty cycle by setting their sights on higher education.“A kid goes into a TEAM school, and within six months, they’re performing markedly better on standardized tests,” Ryan said. “After a couple years in the TEAM system, they’re not only caught up with the national standard for students their age, they’re surpassing it.”Every single NCA student aspires to attend college, Nagle said, and IU students serve as mentors and role models.“All our middle schoolers were able to see actual people who go to college,” Nagle said. “They could talk to them about what it takes to get into college and how to succeed once there.”Many of the Global Village writing partners traveled to Newark during Spring Break to work face-to-face with NCA students and put the final touches on their children’s stories.In October, 18 students and two teachers from NCA will visit IU, a trip made possible by monetary donations from several directors of Residential Programs and Services.“Our kids here in Newark are going to be very prepared for college, and they are an untapped resource for IU,” Nagle said. “If IU and TEAM schools could capitalize on this partnership, we could get TEAM students to attend IU.” Promoting literacy in RwandaThe Kabwende Primary School, like many primary education facilities in Rwanda, has no electricity, running water or windows and never has enough books.There are 27 teachers for 1,900 students. Students may attend only half a day in order to fit everyone into the schedule.But despite the school’s lack of resources, its students, ages 5 to 17, are quite serious about learning.“I’ve worked in education for 10 years, and I’ve never seen students understand in this serious a way how education is their bridge to a better life,” Nagle said.In October 2008, the Rwandan Ministry of Education mandated that all primary school classes be taught in English rather than French. Most teachers there speak French or Kinyarwanda primarily, said IU School of Education professor and Books and Beyond adviser Beth Samuelson.As Rwanda continues to recover from the genocide it faced 15 years ago, Rwanda President Paul Kagame is attempting to gain international recognition by mandating English instruction in primary schools.“He really wants his country to get in the global mix in the reconstruction of his country,” said IU alumna Nancy Uslan, who first envisioned Books and Beyond after a 2005 trip to Rwanda. “The only way to really do that is for people to start speaking English.”But Rwanda’s teachers, who often don’t speak English any better than their students, get little government support.“The government has not provided teachers with any resources to improve their own English, let alone resources to teach English to their students,” Ryan said.Books and Beyond is playing a key role in advancing English literacy.Samuelson created an instruction manual and English lesson guide for the Kabwende teachers, and now Kabwende students have English children’s stories written by NCA students.In addition to supporting English literacy, Books and Beyond promotes an entirely different teaching methodology for Kabwende instructors.“There is no independent thought process in the schools there at this point,” Uslan said. “They teach the chalk-and-talk method: The teacher writes something on the blackboard and the children regurgitate what they see.”Samuelson expressed similar education concerns.“They learned a top-down teaching style from colonial rule,” she said. “The colonials were not interested in developing an intellectual class in their colonies, but just wanted people who would do what they were told.”Samuelson said her teaching guide includes discussion questions that encourage students to move beyond basic comprehension toward more critical analysis of the reading. Preparing for the futureKabwende students are now completing their stories, which will be compiled with the American students’ stories and sold in Bloomington and Newark in early 2010. Proceeds will fund the continuation of Books and Beyond.As the project begins its second year this fall, Uslan said she thinks Books and Beyond has the capability to expand to other Rwanda schools.“There’s no question that we have to let our program do its thing and see how it does within a three-year period,” she said. “But we are very hopeful that it will work ... and that we will be ready to expand.”Ryan said she and several others met with the mayor of the Musanze district, an area that includes Volcanoes National Park and Kabwende. She said he and the minister of education for Rwanda understood the benefits of Books and Beyond.“It’s something they would like to have expanded to other schools as being a resource for their teachers to learn English,” Ryan said.For now, the three-way partnership among IU, Newark and Kabwende prepares for a second round of story-sharing, and every student involved can tell his or hers.“From the very beginning, this project has always been built on sharing your story,” Nagle said. “Everyone has a story to tell.”
(08/13/09 12:41am)
Certain situations call for a certain soundtrack.
(08/13/09 12:37am)
A decade by decade playlist of the best songs to do it to.
(08/13/09 12:33am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The word “sex” doesn’t appear in Wikipedia’s “Woodstock Festival” entry. Maybe professors are right about not trusting Wikipedia. Forty years ago this weekend, about half a million Baby Boomers convened in a rural New York field for “three days of peace and music.”And sex – lots and lots of muddy sex.The enormous festival and its throngs of shirtless 20-year-olds combined intimacy and music in a public, provocative way. It capped off a tumultuous decade of underground counterculture and established a new era of a sex-saturated mainstream pop culture.“One thing the ’60s generation did, for all the stupid things that happened, was to make love OK,” said IU music professor Glenn Gass, who teaches the popular History of Rock ’n’ Roll course at IU. “They took it from the back seats in the country where no one could find you and just brought it out into the open.”In the decades since the late-1960s sexual revolution, recording artists have pushed the sexual envelope relentlessly.Today’s top-10 bang songs like Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex” and Snoop Dogg’s “Sexual Eruption” are a far cry from the classic soul music and doo-wop ballads of generations past.But despite wildly different lyrics, their basic function is the same: to inspire the horizontal mambo. Evolution of make-out musicBefore iTunes and playlists was AM radio.“The radio becomes this sort of lifeline to this other universe,” Gass said, talking about the 1950s dating culture of muscle cars and cruising. “That sense of distance that suddenly is beaming in from somewhere on a dark night adds to that sense of wonder and mystery.”He said the radio had the same appeal as today’s shuffled playlist – people didn’t know what was coming up next. That is, if reception was good.“You’re at the mercy of the radio station,” he said. “People would find out where the clear channel stations from New Orleans were. ... I knew in Putnam County which hill I had to get on to be able to get this certain station to play specific music.”The 1950s saw a car culture with teenagers who had plenty of free time. Unlike the previous generation, which dealt with the Great Depression and World War II, teenagers in the ’50s grew up making out and going steady, all to a radio soundtrack.“I bet if you went up to people who grew up in the ’50s and said, ‘What’s ‘our song’ for you guys?’ I bet ‘In the Still of the Night’ would be the No. 1 pick,” Gass said.Doo-wop was the great romantic music of the ’50s, as were ballads by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.The innocent, sweet lyrics in these early styles of intimate music seem to contrast sharply with the explicit descriptions of sex in contemporary hip-hop and R&B.But the styles that are most commonly associated with baby-making music – doo-wop, soul, disco, rhythm and blues – are all products of the black American musical tradition.“(R&B) is a really emotional black style, which came largely out of the black church originally and then was brought to these secular romantic lyrics,” Gass said.He said the common notion that white singers can’t make real baby-making music is valid, considering how black artists invented the R&B style.“I think black American music is always viewed as the standard, that’s the real thing, and then the question becomes, ‘How close can you get to that?’” Gass said. “I don’t think there are that many dots to connect between doo-wop in the ’50s and the R&B or hip-hop now – and surprisingly so, too.”The artists and lyrics may change, and the content may push previous boundaries, but the purpose of the music remains the same.“There’s nothing better than love and nothing better to help it along than music,” Gass said. “Just like ‘The End’ from ‘Abbey Road’ says: ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’” Weddings, frat parties and booty callsMaybe not all baby-making music is created equal.A distinction must be made between romantic, intimate music and pure romp songs.“A lot of time people will say play a love song – any love song,” said Carlos Goins, a local disc jockey for about 30 years. “I would say the R. Kelly and K-Ci & JoJo would be more the booty-call type of thing, whereas, on the other hand, you have classic love songs like Luther Vandross and Earth, Wind & Fire.”Goins founded Ace Entertainment three decades ago. He said about 70 percent of his gigs are for wedding receptions, where the song selection is shifted toward older material.“For a wedding, there is usually a lot more sentimental music,” he said. “The bride and groom respect that there’s going to be older people there, so we’ll play a lot of classic stuff, even swing and early ’50s stuff.”He said fraternity and sorority parties comprise much of the rest of his business, and they are completely different atmospheres.“Most requested at the fraternity parties would be Madonna, Lady Gaga, Britney (Spears), Snoop Dogg ... Top-40 stuff.”As for how Goins constructs his playlist, he said choosing high-energy songs in the first couple hours is crucial, but then he mixes in sexy hook-up songs in the middle and at the end.“In the last hour, we won’t play any slow songs until the very end of the event,” he said. “And it’s, as they say, ‘The Booty Call.’” Science of sex vs. art of loveAlfred Kinsey was a music teacher before he practically invented the field of sexology.Kinsey, whose groundbreaking surveys of sexual behavior in the 1940s and ’50s profoundly affected social attitudes about the then-taboo topic, was actually an avid collector of LPs.In a 1956 article for High Fidelity magazine, Kinsey wrote about how studying sex is like studying music.He claimed that, although he spent much of his career meticulously and systematically collecting scientific data about sex, he never once presumed to understand the art of love.Similarly, he had collected records since he first encountered an “Edison Rec-cord” as a teenager and listened to music daily. He had scientists visit his home and listen to the newest release with him. But he was sure to separate the science of sound from the art of music.Kinsey said he thought the science of sex was completely separate from the art of love, which perhaps explains why the Kinsey Institute to this day has no research about the role of music in sex and intimacy.Baby-making music is all about the art of love. It’s the know-it-when-you-hear-it bass beat, the steamy singing and the do-it-like-this lyrics.It’s the music that helps us get it on, and it might even be the reason you’re reading this sentence today.
(08/06/09 1:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>There have been more Boy Scouts than students at IU this week.Since Saturday, hoards of 7,200 beige and green uniforms have crisscrossed campus. The Indiana Memorial Union is the event headquarters, complete with management and communications suites. A separate busing system operates alongside IU Campus Bus. Organizers even print an on-site newspaper, Cornerstone, and air all-day radio coverage on 101.1 FM.Bloomington is officially Scoutsville.But after five days of reading “NOAC Power of One” signs and giving directions to wandering Scouts, many IU students said they are still confused about whom these guests are, where they’re coming from, and why they all look the same.The Order of the Arrow is the national honor society for the Boy Scouts of America. The order was founded in 1915 to bring together the best of the Boy Scouts – those who “exemplify the Scout Oath and Law in their daily lives,” according the society’s Web site, www.oa-bsa.org.NOAC 2009 is the 30th convention of the order, which takes place every two to three years. IU was the host of the first NOAC in 1948, and this year’s conference is the 10th staged on the Bloomington campus. The most recent NOAC conference at IU was in 2002.Part service organization and part fraternity, Order of the Arrow is nothing less than an independent society. Order members, called brothers, range in age from 12 to 80 years, and all wear the official white Order of the Arrow sash. Dan Higham, the national vice chief of Order of the Arrow, is a junior majoring in human resources at State University of New York at Oswego. The national Order of the Arrow headquarters are in Dallas, and national committee members wear yellow shoulder stripes.Higham spent several hours Wednesday afternoon at the Founders Day fair in the tailgate fields south of Memorial Stadium signing sashes and meeting members from across the country.He said NOAC participants are elected by their lodges to attend the convention. He also explained the three levels of Order of the Arrow membership. The first is basic membership, which is attained after earning Arrow status in the Cub Scouts. Membership is signified by a white sash with a long, red arrow. After two years, brothers are able to earn two red bars on their sash by performing “cheerful service.”The third and highest level of Order of the Arrow membership is Vigil Honor and is attained only through approval of the national committee. Vigil is signified by a triangle embroidered on top of the sash’s red arrow.Higham also said women can be elected to the Order of the Arrow as advisers. Their role during NOAC is to provide guidance at training sessions and registration tents.As for Order of the Arrow’s religious ties, Higham said all brothers believe in a higher power but do not necessarily practice Christianity.
(08/05/09 10:46pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A recent IU graduate is in a coma after losing control of her vehicle midmorning July 30.Whitney King, 22, was rushed to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis at about 10:30 a.m. July 30 after sliding off Fairfax Road south of Bloomington, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. The heavy rain at the time made the notoriously dangerous road especially hazardous.King, a 2009 graduate and Noblesville, Ind., native, was driving to her summer waitressing job at Eagle Pointe Golf Resort near Monroe Reservoir when her vehicle drifted left of the center line. She overcorrected, and her vehicle struck a telephone pole on the driver’s side, said her father, Mike King, in a phone interview.Whitney King has improved from a scale 3 coma immediately after the accident to a scale 8 coma as of Wednesday afternoon. The Glasgow coma scale defines 0 as the deepest coma and 15 as fully awake and is based on eye opening, motor response and verbal response. In the week since her accident, King has opened her eyes for up to 20 minutes and responded to pain by moving her arms.An MRI brain scan Tuesday evening indicated no significant damage to King’s brainstem but some small tearing in her brain’s outermost level. The tearing affects the brain’s communication with the rest of the body and will require rehabilitation, according to the King family’s online journal.King’s other serious injuries include a broken pelvis, ruptured bladder and severe cuts and bruising.King graduated in May with a degree in broadcast journalism. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and the IU Essence hip-hop dance club. She worked at the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation building and led a cardio kickboxing group workout session there.Her older brother, Tyler King, graduated from IU in 2008 and recently completed his first year at the IU School of Medicine.Whitney King’s family is keeping friends and family up-to-date on her medical condition through CaringBridge, a nonprofit Web service provided by Methodist Hospital. For the latest developments in her recovery, Mike King urged anyone interested to read Whitney’s CaringBridge journal at www.caringbridge.org/visit/whitneyking.
(08/03/09 11:07pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A recent IU graduate is in a deep coma after losing control of her vehicle mid-morning July 30.Whitney King, 22, was rushed to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis about 10:30 a.m. July 30 after sliding off Fairfax Road south of Bloomington, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. The heavy rain at the time made the notoriously dangerous road especially hazardous.King, a 2009 IU graduate and Noblesville, Ind., native, was driving to her waitress summer job at Eagle Pointe Golf Resort near Monroe Reservoir when her vehicle drifted left of the center lane. She overcorrected and her vehicle struck a telephone pole on the driver side.As of Monday afternoon, King was in a deep coma awaiting further MRI and other brain imaging scans. Her intercranial pressure was still too unstable to go ahead with further brain scans, said her father, Mike King, in a phone interview. Whitney King’s other serious injuries include a broken pelvis, ruptured bladder and severe cuts and bruising.King graduated in May with a degree in broadcast journalism. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and the IU Essence hip-hop dance club. She worked at the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation building and lead a cardio kickboxing group workout session there.Whitney’s older brother, Tyler King, also graduated from IU in 2008 and recently completed his first year at IU School of Medicine.Whitney’s family is keeping friends and family up-to-date on her medical condition through CaringBridge, a nonprofit Web service provided by Methodist Hospital. For the latest developments in Whitney’s recovery, Mike King urges friends read Whitney’s CaringBridge journal at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/whitneyking.