At Brown, first-year student Chance Emerson finds opportunity to explore wide-ranging academic interests and pursue musical collaborations while perfecting his first full-length album, “The Raspberry Men.”
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Chance Emerson had been at Brown for barely two weeks when he learned firsthand the power of the perfect sound mix. (more…)
Hee Oh joined Yale’s math department this year from Brown. Here she talks about absolute abstraction, the joy of walking — and missing math during her years as a social activist.
You received your doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1997, then served on the faculties of Princeton, Cal Tech, and Brown, among others. What drew you back to Yale?
The math department at Yale has been well known for its strength in Lie groups, geometry, and dynamics for a long time. It was an honor and in itself a big draw for me to be asked to participate in continuing this tradition. In the end, however, I felt in my Christian faith that God was leading me this way, and I made the final decision accordingly. (more…)
Students at Brown, RISD, and the University of Erfurt are tackling a great challenge: Build a house that uses 90 percent less energy than a typical house, make it liveable, flexible, durable, and lightweight enough to be shipped from Providence to France — and design it better than 19 other top teams from around the world. That’s the Solar Decathlon. The Brown-RISD-Erfurt team calls its entry the “Techstyle Haus.”
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For two weeks next July, the grounds of France’s Palace of Versailles will be transformed into a solar-powered village, showcasing sustainable homes built by college students from around the world. Among them will be a house like no other, with a roof and walls made not of wood or metal, but almost entirely of durable, highly insulated textiles. (more…)
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the way carbon moves from within a planet to the surface plays a big role in the evolution of a planet’s atmosphere. If Mars released much of its carbon as methane, for example, it might have been warm enough to support liquid water.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study of how carbon is trapped and released by iron-rich volcanic magma offers clues about the early atmospheric evolution on Mars and other terrestrial bodies. (more…)
Space Station Commander Kevin Ford exchanged Valentine’s Day greetings with his adult kids Heidi and Anthony — he speeding by about 220 miles above Providence and they watching him fly past from Brown’s Ladd Observatory.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rhode Islanders with their eyes skyward around 6 p.m. last Thursday might have noticed a curiously bright speck speeding across the evening sky. No, it wasn’t a UFO or an asteroid. It was the International Space Station, and for Providence resident Heidi Ford, it was dad’s office.
Heidi’s father Kevin Ford is currently the commander of the ISS. And with the help of Brown’s Ladd Observatory and astronomer Robert Horton, Heidi and her brother Anthony, who was visiting from Houston, got to see last week’s flyby close up while they talked to their dad on the phone. (more…)
Rick Benjamin, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies and public humanities, was recently appointed state poet of Rhode Island by Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee. A five-year position, the state poet serves as principal advocate for poetry in Rhode Island. Benjamin has dedicated much of his career to the intersection of poetry and community service, a relationship he incorporates into “Poetry and Community Service,” a course he teaches at Brown and other schools. Courtney Coelho spoke with Benjamin about his poetry, his mission of service, and how he intends to incorporate the two in his new position.
Describe your poetry. What is your style? What are your influences?
I have a wide range of influences. I tend to learn everything through the ear. My early influences were always oral and musical, starting with poetry I probably didn’t really understand by Eliot that my mom was reading me. So she would say things like, “So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul should be resurrected only among friends some two or three, who will not touch the bloom that is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.” There’s not a lot of that that I would have understood when she said it, but I did hear it and I really loved the sound of it. And Langston Hughes is a poet I became acquainted with really early on and again it was the sound and the rhythm and the music in the poetry that I responded to first. In terms of poets that I read now: Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, Robert Hass, Kevin Young. (more…)
The so-called “fiscal cliff” — an increase in income tax rates, expiration of many tax benefits and automatic federal spending cuts known collectively as sequestration — still looms as a possibility come January 2. Unless a deal is reached, universities across the country will face unprecedented cuts in federal funding, including cuts to research and development funding. Kevin Stacey spoke with Clyde Briant, vice president for University research, about the implications of the fiscal cliff.
If no deal is reached, how would the fiscal cliff affect federal research funding?
It could trigger sweeping cuts to agencies across the federal government, including agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and others that provide the vast majority of the nation’s research and development funding. These are considerable, across-the-board cuts. The American Association for the Advancement of Science estimates that federal research and development spending nationwide could be cut by at least $50 billion over five years. Research universities all depend on those funds to support faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students, as well as to provide for equipment and facilities. If the level of support drops as dramatically as is called for under sequestration, it would profoundly change the way in which universities have to approach their research endeavors. (more…)
October marks the 50th anniversary of of the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union was building secret missile bases in Cuba. Forgoing the option of a Cuban invasion or air strikes, Kennedy asked Russian Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to remove all weapons from the island, and on Oct. 28, 1962, Khrushchev conceded, halting the standoff. Here, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, visiting professor of Slavic languages at Brown, reflects on the diplomatic lessons.
The perspective of the crisis has changed over time and today the history of the crisis is more focused not on the confrontation, but on cooperation.
The Cuban Missile Crisis showed that two leaders decided not to shoot first, but to think and negotiate with each other. And today that is very unusual, because we think we can only negotiate with friends. Today, we impose unconditional surrender and nobody surrenders unconditionally until fully defeated. (more…)
