Year: 2009

  • Health

    Clinicians override most medication safety alerts

    Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely instead on their own judgment.

  • Health

    Kou is shaking up the world of statistics

    Harvard statistics professor Samuel Kou, now 34, grew up in Lanzhou, a city in China’s mountainous northwest near the border with Inner Mongolia. The altitude there is higher than Denver’s storied mile, and earthquakes rumble through town several times a year.

  • Health

    Exploring abundance under the sea floor

    Called the North Pond Basin, the site — researchers at Harvard and beyond believe — can provide a window onto a vast world of subterranean microscopic life that extends kilometers below the Earth’s surface and which, according to rough estimates, could rival life above the surface in both diversity and sheer mass.

  • Health

    Neural wiring hints at nervous system gene limits

    Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears. These first-ever mammalian “connectomes,” or complete neural circuit diagrams, reveal that neural wiring can vary widely even in paired tissues…

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia

    Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”

  • Campus & Community

    HAA announces Overseers, Elected Directors candidates

    Appearing below are the Harvard Alumni Association’s (HAA) candidates for the 2009 election to the Harvard Board of Overseers and the HAA Elected Directors.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing sees remodeling potential

    The U.S. home improvement industry, much like the broader housing market, is experiencing a severe downturn, but prospects for growth are already developing, finds a new report released by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

  • Campus & Community

    HLS’s Olin Center and Harvard University Press offer first open access journal

    In partnership with the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School, Harvard University Press (HUP) launched the Journal of Legal Analysis, its first foray into online, open access publishing, on Feb. 3.

  • Arts & Culture

    Project on Soviet Social System goes online

    or decades, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS) has been a major source of information for researchers analyzing the Soviet Union between World War I and World War II. Due to its archaic and often-confusing indexing system, though, the HPSSS has also been a source of frustration for researchers trying to comb…

  • Campus & Community

    Civil rights legend recognized for years of service

    At times, the best way to truly honor those who have selflessly and tirelessly served is with a simple “thank you.”

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Feb. 20-March 8, 1901 —French literary critic Gaston Deschamps gives a series of eight Sanders Theatre lectures in French on “Modern French Drama,” sponsored by the Cercle Français (French Club).

  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending Feb. 9. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    THREE HMS PROFESSORS ELECTED TO MICROBIOLOGY ACADEMY; STONE ELECTED TO THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING; KLEINMAN HONORED BY SOCIETY FOR MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

  • Campus & Community

    In brief

    JOINT CENTER ACCEPTING GRAMLICH FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS; ISRAELITE BREAD-MAKING DISCUSSION AT THE SEMITIC MUSEUM; KISSEL GRANTS ARE AVAILABLE

  • Arts & Culture

    VES film features city on the move

    Maxim Pozdorovkin and Joe Bender, graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, respectively, have captured Kazakhstan’s dramatic emergence in a documentary film titled “Capital.”

  • Science & Tech

    Exploring hidden life’s abundance

    Two miles below the surface of the Sargasso Sea lies a depression in the Earth’s crust filled with sediment and, scientists believe, teeming with life — exotic, microscopic, and very…

  • Arts & Culture

    Panel of experts addresses Lincoln’s legacy

    On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.

  • Health

    Doctors override most electronic medication safety alerts

    Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely…

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Passion for the Arts’ translates into action

    Harvard University is taking the first steps recommended in December by its Arts Task Force, including finding more gallery space in existing buildings and creating a Web portal that will ease access to seeing, hearing, and learning the arts in practice.

  • Health

    Diverse ‘connectomes’ hint at genes’ limits in the nervous system

    Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears.

  • Campus & Community

    Sherwood-Randall establishes fund for undergrad opportunities

    The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University recently announced the establishment of the Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall Fund. The fund will be used to expose Harvard undergraduates to European public affairs and encourage them to pursue international experiences that include Europe.

  • Health

    International study identifies gene variants associated with early heart attack

    The largest study ever completed of genetic factors associated with heart attacks has identified nine genetic regions — three not previously described — that appear to increase the risk for early-onset myocardial infarction. The report from the Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium, based on information from a total of 26,000 individuals in 10 countries, was given…

  • Campus & Community

    Zellweger adds Hasty Pudding Pot to trophy shelf

    Academy Award-winning actress Renée Zellweger proves she is worthy of the shiny Pudding Pot that comes with being named the Woman of the Year by the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

  • Arts & Culture

    Rubén Blades donates papers, recordings

    He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for president of his native Panama and served as the Panamanian minister of tourism, but now Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 will add another credit to his resume: Harvard College Library benefactor.

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched

    A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…

  • Campus & Community

    José Ortiz new deputy director of Art Museum

    The Harvard Art Museum announced the appointment of José Ortiz as deputy director, effective March 2, 2009. Ortiz is currently deputy director/chief of finance and administration at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. A skilled and innovative administrator, Ortiz has a strong record of managing world-class cultural institutions, combined with…

  • Arts & Culture

    Du Bois exhibit a first in U.S.

    The images on the walls of the intimate gallery at 104 Mt. Auburn St. are hauntingly evocative. In “Black Friar,” a hooded figure stares out of the darkness, his gaze intense and unsettled. An opposing image, “Every Moment Counts,” offers a modern approach to Jesus, as a beloved disciple leans against the body of the…

  • Arts & Culture

    Du Bois Institute gives Houghton Library Masonic certificate

    The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.

  • Arts & Culture

    Innovative filmmaking marks VES program

    An intimate relationship between the residents of Harbin city in northeastern China and their mother river, the Songhua. A revealing insight into the personal struggles and national identity of Sudanese potters on the banks of the White Nile. These are the subjects of two ethnographic films premiering Feb. 11 at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology…

  • Arts & Culture

    Vivid scrolls from Japan tell timeless stories

    For nearly a decade, Melissa McCormick, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, has been absorbed in the study of elaborate works of fiction. The themes she encounters — love, temptation, even family drama — are timeless. The format — narrow horizontal scrolls of mulberry paper, with hand-painted images and columns of calligraphy —…