Today's rough economic times have hit nonprofits hard, and contributions from Tufts student volunteers have recently proven particularly helpful to a variety of organizations in the university's neighboring communities.
As workers labored to restore power to Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus and parts of Medford on Friday and Saturday, university administrators relied on an improved emergency alert system to keep students, faculty and staff abreast of the situation.
When the power went out on Friday, the electricity-powered fob system went down after burning through about a half-hour's worth of backup battery.
This month's hacking attack on over 100 computers at Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus came about after hackers compromised a number of passwords which allowed them onto the network, according to Dawn Irish, director of communications and organizational effectiveness for University Information Technology (UIT).
Restaurants and stores that have opened recently in Davis Square have caused Tufts students to take note of the area's growth. But few people understand the evolution and the history of the Davis area as well as Lee Auspitz.
Students watching the Olympics in Beijing last summer may have been interested in more than sporting events. Although the Tufts language requirement has always stimulated high enrollment in language courses, current events seem to heavily impact which languages students choose to study. The past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of students enrolled in Chinese and Arabic, languages spoken in regions that have received high media coverage in recent years.
The news media have been abuzz for the past few weeks with articles, documentaries and other features about the unearthing of a very old set of bones. The bones belong to Ardipithecus ramidus or, as she is commonly referred to, "Ardi." Her remains are the earliest of any hominid ever discovered. This revelation has been most exciting to the anthropological and archaeological communities, giving them fresh insight into how humans have evolved. But to many scholars within these fields, Ardi is old news. "It isn't a new discovery," said Stephen Bailey, associate professor of anthropology at Tufts. "We've been getting bits of descriptions for a long time now. And people who work in the field pretty much knew most of what was going to happen." People knew what was going to happen because, despite the recent hype, Ardi herself was actually discovered almost 15 years ago in Ethiopia. But the researchers had reservations about heavily publicizing the story until further study had been conducted. And completing satisfactory research took a long time — 15 years, to be precise. "They wanted to do such a detailed study and have it all out there," said Lauren Sullivan, a lecturer in Tufts' anthropology and archaeology departments. "The initial findings were released in 1994, [and] they put out press releases, that kind of thing. In the Science Magazine that came out recently, there were [about] 50 different scientists looking at her and doing analysis, and it takes a while to get that done and turn it into a publication." Bailey cited an additional reason for the length of time between discovery and release of information. "The cleaning is excruciatingly painstaking," he said. "It may take a year to clean something like a femur," he said, referring to a particular bone in the leg. "[It is] very tedious work, and you can't rush it." But now that the scientific community has conducted the research to support Ardi's weighty discovery, she is changing some of the most widely held perceptions about how humans evolved. A prevailing theory within anthropology for years has been the idea that bipedalism, or walking on two legs, developed when early hominids moved from the forest to the savannah. The idea was that early humans were scavengers, so being able to move around and carry things at the same time was an evolutionary advantage — especially for males, who could carry the groceries back to their chosen mates. But Bailey explained that the discovery of Ardi has altered this view. "Ramidus takes us away from that model — from the savannah into the forest. Ramidus quite clearly lived in the forest. You also see the morphology — the curved phalanges, [and] a skeleton that is probably equally as adept at going up a tree fast as it is walking on the ground," he said. Ardi's sheer age is also a significant factor in her academic importance. "One of the big things is the fact that they have a detailed analysis of an ancestor that's a million years older than ‘Lucy,'" Sullivan said. Lucy, found in 1974, was the oldest and most complete skeleton of an early hominid until Ardi's discovery. "Lucy is 3.2 million years old. Ardi is 4.4 million years old. Up until now Lucy was the largest portion of an individual that they'd found. She had 45 percent of her skeleton. So, with Ardi, they are able to get information on an individual going back about a million years," Sullivan said. Fossils even older than Ardi have been found, but they are fragments, making it more difficult to get an accurate vision of how the species lived. With a lack of fossils to study, it has been common practice for anthropologists to use chimpanzees as models for how early human ancestors would have behaved. Since the discovery of Ardi, many researchers have been rethinking that approach. "Since Ardi, chimpanzees have evolved along their own track, and humans have evolved too. Scientists hadn't necessarily realized that modern apes have evolved a lot more than previously thought," Sullivan said. Bailey referred to studying modern chimpanzees for their similarity to common ancestors as dangerous, since chimpanzees are so specialized. "They're knuckle walkers, they live in an increasingly marginalized environment, they're in danger of extinction. It's not clear that their behavior even in the wild is anything like it would have been 6 million years ago," Bailey said. "A long time ago, there were so many more of them that they could have been the successful ones, and we were the weird, offshoot population." Studying Ardi has allowed paleontologists to make great headway in their understanding of why humans have evolved the way they have, but the discovery also adds insight to the archaeological record. Archaeology is often thought of as the study of ancient buildings and artifacts, but Ardi lived 2 million years before the earliest manmade tools in the archaeological record. "This is just another kind of [archaeological] site, and this provides information about our ancestors way before buildings and way before we had social inequality and pottery and all the stuff that comes with that, so it gives people on the street that are just reading about it another perspective of what life was like many, many years before you see Homo sapiens," Sullivan said. "Most of the sites that people think about when you think about temples or pyramids are associated with modern Homo sapiens. When you're looking at human evolution and early bipedalism, you're pushing the record back millions of years ago and bringing in other species," Sullivan added. In the case of Ardi, Bailey said looking at how she lived matters because of the place she holds in history. "The large majority of physical anthropologists and human paleontologists see Ramidus as a direct ancestor of ours. There's a minority opinion that all of that line goes its own interesting direction and at best are [our] cousins. But I would say that in general people feel that she's on the main line — she becomes us," Bailey said.
Tufts' religion and anthropology departments officially settled into their new homes in Eaton Hall yesterday, christening their offices with a celebration attended by professors, students and University President Lawrence Bacow. The departments will share the third floor in Eaton Hall, previously home to the political science department. Professors Kevin Dunn and David Guss, chairs of the religion and anthropology departments, respectively, expressed satisfaction with the new space and the opportunity to share the office. "This is not a ceremony for two different departments, but a celebration of sharing the land, sharing intellectual space," Dunn said. "It is a marriage made in heaven." The departments were previously housed at 126 Curtis Street, a location that is considerably removed from Tufts' main campus, Guss said. At their new Eaton Hall location, both centers have the capability to expand and become more active voices in the Tufts academic arena. Renovations to Eaton's third floor were completed over the summer to make the setting more hospitable for both students and professors. The space features open conference rooms, windowed offices, a coffee bar and a glass display case for antiquities donated by Religion Professor Emeritus Howard Hunter. Prior to the facelift, Guss said the third floor closely resembled a Motel 6. Eaton is by no means new to religion and anthropology faculty; the basement of the building once housed the departments for 20 years, according to Guss. But the previous Eaton Hall basement was not at all an ideal working environment, Guss said. The new space, however, offers a good fit for the relatively small departments. Political science faculty and staff moved to the newly refurbished Packard Hall over the summer after the department's considerable growth. Guss said the university was "doing an impressive job" figuring out how to effectively accommodate the growth of maturing academic departments in a tight economy. Prominent members of both departments and the broader Tufts community attended the celebration for the departments' move. Bacow read a brief statement from the Talmud, and Hunter read a favorite poem to celebrate the move. University Chaplain David O'Leary recounted dozens of noteworthy religious events, ending at "the ninth year of the reign of Lawrence Bacow," to commemorate this critical development for the departments. Dunn said the new space complemented the growing value of studying religion, which has become even more pertinent thanks to today's explosive religious conflicts. "The study of religion is increasingly important," Dunn said. As a housewarming gesture, the departments followed a Palestinian tradition of placing a wreath made of dough and flowers over the department entryway to bring good fortune to both departments in the future. Guss read a Spanish proverb by Saint John and placed a piece of parchment featuring the traditional Spanish verse behind a plaque on the department doorway to bring good fortune to all students. Later in the ceremony, Dunn, the religion department's chair, honored Hunter for his pioneering attitude and his role in encouraging the growth of Tufts' religion department. "When religion was not modish, he persevered single-handedly," Dunn said. Bacow emphasized the responsibility of students to "inspire their faculty." To celebrate the growth of student interest in the two departments, Bacow read a proverb from the Talmud: "I have learnt much from my teachers, more from my fellow students, and most from my students." The ceremony concluded with a musical march through the new department offices.
Roger Winter, the deputy secretary of state's special representative from 2001 to 2006, last night delivered the Institute for Global Leadership's Dr. Jean Mayer Award Global Citizenship Lecture. The presentation, entitled "Sudan Before and After 2011" featured Winter and Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, the North American representative of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
The Somerville branch of the organization formerly known as National Student Partnerships is sporting a new brand after a national restructuring conferred additional attention and resources on the local office.
Students craving chili at Carmichael Dining Hall yesterday were at the right place. Spicy food was in no short supply as the eatery's annual Station House Chili Fest treated 107 local firefighters and police officers to lunch alongside Tufts students.
For centuries, artists, writers and intellectuals have traveled to Paris to be inspired. It has always been a cultural center, and for many — including Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Diego Rivera and Ernest Hemingway — the city's beautiful streets, people, culture and "je ne sais quoi" forever altered their lives and shaped the rest of their careers.
Between filling final major requirements, researching for honors theses and beginning the dreaded job search, seniors often look to social outlets in hopes of blowing off some steam. But Senior Pub Night, long a Tufts tradition, may no longer be an option for seniors looking to celebrate their final year.
Judging from my experiences, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who want everything to do with the French and those who want nothing to do with them. OK*, perhaps that's a slight oversimplification, but I'm sure you've seen it play out. For centuries, the French have been celebrated as sexy, sophisticated, stylish and classy — all of the things that are inherently "un-American" and inspire dishes like freedom fries and toast.
The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate will host the second-ever Boston Intercollegiate Leadership Council (BILC) summit on Saturday, bringing together student government leaders from 10 Boston-area colleges and universities in an effort to share ideas on ways to solve common problems in governance.
A group of politically-driven students brought to Tufts this semester a chapter of the Roosevelt Institute, a completely student-led think tank, with the goal of giving students a greater voice in national political issues.
The Medford and Somerville Police Departments have incorporated new technology into their operations in an effort to provide more up-to-date information to their communities about crimes occurring in their area.
This is the second article in a two-part series on free activities, items, food and events available to Tufts students.
Acutely drunken behavior during this year's first Senior Pub Night has cast doubt on the future of the event, widely seen as a staple of senior year — and now an independent student group is spearheading an alternative event to fill the void.
At some point in the future, the Joey might do more than just shuttle students to and from Davis Square. If a group of chemical engineers is successful, the Joey could also dispose of waste cooking oil produced in the kitchens of Tufts' eateries. Although the Tufts biodiesel project is only in its preliminary stages and may not come to fruition, those involved believe it can contribute to Tufts' mission of environmental sustainability.
