Tufts Recycles! last week started a month-long composting program in the Mayer Campus Center aimed at educating students and disposing of the building's food waste in an environmentally friendly manner.
Page Thompson, CEO of Omnicom Media Group, spoke yesterday evening in a packed room in Eaton Hall about his career and gave advice to attendees. Thompson played a video of advertising for McDonald's that his agency had designed. Imaginet, a Tufts student marketing communications group created last semester, sponsored the event.
Seth Merrin (LA '82), the co-founder, president and CEO of the groundbreaking financial company Liquidnet, Inc., shared his secrets to success on Tuesday in the spring installment of the Lyon and Bendheim Alumni Lecture Series.
Chef, author and television personality Anthony Bourdain entertained a packed Cabot Auditorium last night.
The Office of Undergraduate Admissions reported a 4 percent drop in applications this year but accepted 26 percent of applicants to the Class of 2013 -- down less than 1 percent from last year, the Daily learned yesterday, the date by which all applicants were notified of a decision.
For many individuals, taking a multivitamin is a daily ritual as common as brushing one's teeth. Americans spend $23 billion a year on multivitamins. Recent articles in newspapers such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe, however, have left some Americans questioning how useful this habit really is.
After years of fighting to achieve equal employment opportunities, women are finally beginning to close the employment gap. The reasons, however, may be surprising.
Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senators Chas Morrison and Brandon Rattiner have begun laying the foundations for their potential campaigns for the TCU presidency for the 2009-2010 academic year, though the two senators cannot yet officially announce their candidacies.
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy graduate and Navy Adm. James Stavridis (F '83, '84) was tapped last month by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to serve as commander of NATO.
Tufts' first-ever Class Week is taking place this week with events designed to provoke discussion on socioeconomically charged issues that affect student life both on and off campus.
The Office of Residential Life and Learning's (ResLife) claim that it was able to fully meet student demand at the lottery earlier this month was met with contention after several students reported they were waitlisted for housing.
This is the first article in a two-part series addressing LGBT issues and the work that senior Sofia Nelson has done to eliminate biases. The first installment will focus on Nelson's work at Tufts. The second article, which will be printed in Thursday's paper, will focus on her work at the state and community levels. Growing up in a small agricultural town in a conservative, religious part of Michigan, being a member of the queer community was not easy for senior Sofia Nelson. While living in this area, which was frequented by violence directed against gays, she developed a strong desire to fight for reform in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. Now an established member of Tufts community, Nelson has worked relentlessly to achieve these goals. "I appreciate my hometown, but I was very excited to come to Tufts and have the opportunity to be who I am — I didn't feel safe to be back at home," she said. Tufts' commitment to the gay movement, small classes and friendly professors appealed to her. But while she loves Tufts and the opportunities it has afforded her, she recognizes that the university is not perfect. "When I think Tufts is doing something wrong, I usually have not kept quiet … but I would not spend so much time trying to change Tufts if I did not really care about Tufts, she said. "Like any place, it can do better." Nelson has worked at Tufts LGBT Center since her freshman year. She has become involved with coordinating various programming events as well as creating and implementing policies. In 2004, the Tufts administration added gender identity and expression to its non-discrimination clause. Since arriving at Tufts, Nelson has worked to ensure that this policy is integrated seamlessly into the community. "I wasn't part of [the creation of the policy] because I was still in high school, but since then there have been efforts to make sure we stick with that non-discrimination policy," she said. "Just writing it down is not enough; we need to implement it. Everyone from human resources to professors needs to understand what that means and how their actions need to be augmented in accordance with that." Nelson is particularly interested in transgender issues. At Tufts, she has worked on the labeling of single stall bathrooms on campus. As a result of her efforts, the two single-stall bathrooms in the reading room of Tisch Library, which just a few years ago were labeled male and female, are now labeled gender-neutral or unisex. "I've worked on making sure that all single-stall bathrooms are gender neutral, to allow gender nonconforming students a space to feel safe when using the restroom," she said. Nelson also focuses some of her efforts on increasing awareness of and support for the transgender community. "I have worked to make sure programming around campus involving queer issues brings in more transgender speakers focusing on the transgender community," she said. "I think having conversations with the administration about broader transgender issues is important in order to educate people. Lots of people haven't heard the term or don't know what it means. There is a lot of education that needs to be done around these issues to make sure that people aren't acting in a way that hurts other people without even knowing it. This is the first step to creating change." In her efforts to bring change to the Hill, Nelson has been involved in LGBT awareness events like Coming Out Day and Day of Silence and has helped bring in speakers like Staceyann Chin, a poet and artist who speaks about the intersection of gender, class, race, sexuality, and nationality. One LGBT project sticks out to Nelson as her one of her proudest accomplishments at Tufts: the Open Letter Coalition. "Basically, a bunch of students were hurt by various events on campus — incidents involving the Primary Source, the university's response to those incidents, the lack of diversity training for students and faculty, the lack of faculty of color, the low retention rates of students of color," she said. "So we wrote a letter/ad that appeared in the Daily and got many signatures directed to the administration about changes we felt were necessary in relation to issues of diversity at Tufts." The open letter was a collaborative process; students from all types of groups on campus, from the Muslim Students Association to the Africana Center to the Asian American Center to the LGBT Center participated. According to Nelson, at least ten students contributed pieces of writing to the open letter, and it was coalesced into one document. "I think that that collaboration is really important — students from all these groups coming together to talk about issues of class, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity … to have these kinds of conversations," she said. Nelson feels that the open letter has been successful at creating a dialogue between the administration and students and in helping the administration understand student concerns and students understand the constraints the university is under. "We've had conversations with many administrative officials about student concerns, and the administration has been very cooperative. Groups of students [and I] have met with a trustee, the provost and others to talk about what we can do to make things better for minority groups on campus," she said. Nelson is proud that she is using her education to create positive change in the community. "I feel like I'm putting my academic understanding of intersexual impression into practice in collaborative work environments with other students to create the change we felt was necessary, to begin the process to create that change."
The organizer for a Tufts conference on medical research ethics has recused himself from planning the event after his committee rescinded an informal invitation to a congressional staffer over a potential conflict of interest.
Hillel's Moral Voices brought Gary Hirshberg, who serves as the president, chairman and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, to campus last night. Hirshberg talked about corporate responsibility and brought along free samples from his company, which produces organic yogurt.
After months of rumors and speculation, Apple iPhone was officially introduced to the world on June 29, 2007. In addition to an iPod and cell phone combination device, the iPhone has become popular for its large database of downloadable applications. While these applications began as playful distractions, similar to low-tech games found on other phones, they have since taken on more practical functions. There are now many applications that programmers, like Tufts sophomore Alex Williamson, refer to as "life-hack applications" — programs designed for help in everyday life. They include applications for splitting a restaurant check, identifying songs on the radio, translating speech and helping people with stuttering problems. Designers of the programs have a wide range of experience. Many professional programmers have used iPhone application development for business-related reasons. Others, like Williamson, design and program these applications as a hobby. "For me, creating these applications is a way of broadening my knowledge of computer science," Williamson said. "As a computer science and economics double major, most of the classes I take at Tufts are taught in C++, which is not the language of Macs and the iPhone, so I decided to download the Apple [Software Developing Kit] and have been fooling around with developing simple programs like a coin-flip application and a solitaire program." Unfortunately, creating and testing these applications is not free. As a result, Williamson creates most of the programs on his computer but is unable to test them out on his iPhone in order to tweak them and get them ready for mass distribution. "The big problem with creating iPhone applications is paying to put them on your phone," he said. "Obviously, I am a college student on a limited budget, so I don't really have the funds to be continuously paying to download the newest versions of my programs to test how well they work." As the popularity of the iPhone and its applications continues to increase, the question of whether or not the applications will start being used in everyday life as serious tools or retain their role as playful distractions for iPhone users remains unclear. And since the iPhone is still an extremely expensive luxury well beyond many budgets, some wonder whether or not such life-hack applications will ever be able to be programmed for phones from different companies. According to Williamson, even if people begin to see similar programs in other phones, the iPhone is likely to remain the most popular. "The iPhone will likely remain at the top of the application market because it is a niche market, and the iPhone already has a solid reputation, but also because the iPhone applications are so easily mass distributed and the iPhone has very broad options," Williamson said. "There are already over 20,000 iPhone applications available, with more being created and perfected every day." Some users are convinced that some iPhone applications are already witnessing widespread use as serious tools. Junior Nicholas Renner, an iPhone user, says he uses his iPhone applications for more than just fun. "I am constantly using my iPhone applications," he said. "The unit converter is very helpful for my homework, and I use Shazam [a song identification program] and Urban Spoon [a city restaurant guide application] all the time. I wouldn't say these applications are necessary, but they definitely do make my life easier — having them right on my phone — and I think that's all people are really looking for. To be fair though, I do still use my iPhone mostly for phone calls, music, and playing Risk." While there is a great deal of money to be made in the iPhone industry, there are many developers competing for original ideas, according to Williamson. "The biggest challenge associated with iPhone programming is coming up with a unique idea. With so many applications already created and so many people doing it, finding something new to do is quite a difficult task," he said. "[But] there is still money to be made in perfecting the ideas of others, and while I got started to expand my computer science knowledge, I definitely hope to turn this into a money-making hobby after college."
People at Tufts love thinking that they are the first to have an idea or hold a particular position, but if that's not a tenable stance, Tufts people act this out by staking out extreme positions. This is particularly popular when it comes to politics. There aren't a lot of moderate Democrats or conservative leaners, but there are lots of people who could be called radical. Conservatives at Tufts especially like to venture into wingnut territory.
As part of the latest wave of thefts, Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) officers responded to a burglary in progress on Whitfield Road at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday.
David Horowitz, a conservative writer and activist, spoke last night in Barnum Hall about academic freedom and liberal biases in higher education, telling an audience of around 40 that liberal professors across the country are indoctrinating students with their ideology.
Social experiments are usually viewed within the realm of science, but what happens when the scientists conducting the research are artists? Often, the results are a form of art that creates a powerful view into humankind's complex and often contradictory nature.
Experts discussed renewable energy infrastructure in front of a capacity crowd in the Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room during Saturday's Fourth Annual Tufts Energy Conference.
