Olivia DrakeWesleyan's non-commercial college and community radio station, 88.1FM WESU, is holding its sixth annual WESU Holiday Pledge Drive. This year’s drive continues through the end of live programming at 3 a.m. on Sunday Dec. 12. The goal for this year’s two-week drive is to raise $15,000 in listener support to sustain operating expenses throughout the coming year. Meeting this goal will keep WESU on track to raise $30,000 in community support before the end of the fiscal year in July. During its 71st anniversary year, WESU completed the 3-year project of quadrupling its broadcasting power from 1,500 to 6,000 watts (ERP). This upgrade…
Wesleyan’s Safety Committee is looking for volunteers willing to help make campus a safer place to work and learn. In the past few years, the committee has conducted a walk-through of 23 buildings on campus; provided personal protective equipment (safety glasses, gloves, ear protection and other equipment) to Physical Plant –Facilities staff; and helped deliver heavy tools and supplies to sites by installing mechanical lifts. They’ve also discussed ways to prevent accidents involving Wesleyan-owned vehicles and staff. “The committee really does care about safety on campus, and we want to make a difference,” says Safety Committee co-chair Chris Cruz, safety…
Wesleyan, in conjunction with the Price Carbon Campaign, an umbrella organization of climate-policy advocates, is convening a conference to discuss and develop new approaches to pricing carbon emissions that are destabilizing Earth’s climate and driving global warming. “Pricing Carbon: The Wesleyan Conference” will be held Nov. 19-21 at Wesleyan. Headline speakers include climatologist and Columbia University Professor James Hansen, author-activist Bill McKibben, and environmental-justice lawyer and advocate Angela Johnson Meszaros. “Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment was established in 2009 to help students become better stewards of our fragile Earth,” says Barry Chernoff, director of the College of the Environment and professor of biology. “We…
During Homecoming/Family Weekend 2010, more than 2,700 Wesleyan alumni, students, families, faculty and staff had the opportunity to attend WESeminars, root on the Cardinals in several Homecoming sporting events, tour campus and visit with old friends. Pictured are a few highlights of the weekend: (more…)
David PesciSo much has been written about the recession that befell the country in the late summer of 2008. It was "unprecedented;" it "caught experts by surprise;" "virtually no one saw it coming." After all, a recession triggered by a major segment of the economy that was vulnerable to speculation, occurring during a time of high government deficits, cuts in interest rates, and tax reductions combined with dramatic increases in federal spending? When has that happened before? “Dozens of times, if not more, during the last one hundred and fifty years or so,” says Richard Grossman, professor of economics, economic historian…
Mention “records and documents of a large bureaucracy” and images of stacks of dense paperwork, rows of beige filing cabinets, and perhaps even a slight sensation of suffocation comes to mind. But mention the same phrase to Laura Stark and her pulse steps up a beat as she sees something quite different: buried treasure. “I am interested in the power of bureaucracies and the discretion people within them have to interpret rules,” says Stark, assistant professor of science and society, assistant professor of sociology. “How people who work in big organizations, including government agencies, apply general rules to specific cases…
[youtube width="640" height="400"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGlPlEEmZlE[/youtube] This issue, we ask "5 Questions" of Eric Aaron, assistant professor of computer science. His article, "Action Selection and Task Sequence Learning for Hybrid Dynamical Cognitive Agents," was recently published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Aaron has a bachelor of arts in math from Princeton University; a master of science and Ph.D in computer science from Cornell University. Q: How did you become interested in computer science, and specifically artificial intelligence? A: I’ve always been interested in logical problem solving and how people think. As an undergraduate, I majored in mathematics and took courses in psychology and philosophy, but each…
Brian KattenWesleyan's varsity four entry Elliot Skopin '11, Terrence Word '11, Trevor Michelson '13 and Spencer Hattendorf '12 with coxwain Peter Chu '14 turned in an outstanding performance during the Collegiate Four event at the prestigious Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston Sat., Oct. 23. With a time of 17:41.27 over the three-mile course, the Cardinals quartet of rowers bested 39 other crews in the 41-boat affair, trailing just WPI by a seven-second gap. Wesleyan made up more than two minutes in moving past the University of Massachusetts team. (more…)
The Wesleyan Media Project has received a $100,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Wesleyan Media Project is a non-partisan initiative designed to perform comprehensive tracking and analysis of federal and gubernatorial political advertisements by candidates, parties and special interest groups. It also provides experiential learning for graduate and undergraduate students in the review, coding and analysis of political advertisements. Since its launch in late September 2010, The Wesleyan Media Project (more…)
On Nov. 1, Jessica Posner ’09 met with Wesleyan President Michael Roth and Rob Rosenthal, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, and the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, to share her “Do Something Award.” On July 19, Posner was declared the top world-changer among all Americans under 25 by VH1. She received a trophy and a $100,000 award for Shining Hope for Communities, an organization she co-founded in August 2009 with Kennedy Odede ’12. Shining Hope created the first free school for girls in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. The award ceremony is featured online here.
To view photos of Homecoming / Family Weekend 2010, visit one of our online galleries: http://www.wesleyan.edu/hcfw/2010/ http://www.facebook.com/wesleyan.university http://www.flickr.com/groups/wesleyan/ More photos will be posted in the November Wesleyan Connection.
A WESeminar will be held at 1:30 p.m. Sat., Oct. 23 in Memorial Chapel titled "Journalism and Social Change: A Conversation with Koeppel Journalism Fellows William Finnegan and Jane Eisner." The presentation will be moderated by Anne Greene, director of Writing Programs. William Finnegan, staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of award-winning works of international journalism. He has written about immigration issues and politics in Europe and Mexico; racism and conflict in Southern Africa; and poverty among youth in the U.S. Jane Eisner '77, editor of the Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper of major influence nationally and internationally. She…