Sunday, February 17, 2019

Energy (and Other) Events - February 17, 2019

Energy (and Other) Events is a weekly mailing list published most Sundays covering events around the Cambridge, MA and greater
Boston area that catch the editor's eye.

Hubevents  http://hubevents.blogspot.com is the web version.

If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe to Energy (and Other) Events email gmoke@world.std.com
What I Do and Why I Do It:  The Story of Energy (and Other) EventsGeo

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Details of these events are available when you scroll past the index

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Index
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Monday, February 18 - Monday, March 4
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February School

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Monday, February 18
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12:15pm  Strategies of Conflict: Performing Responsibility in the Missile Age
6pm  Engineers Week: The Citizen Engineering Movement
7pm  Spider's Canvas / Arachnodrone
9pm  Healing Voices // Online Screening & Discussion

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Tuesday, February 19
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10:15am  The Energy Transition in India—Towards Climate Change Mitigation
12pm  WEBINAR: AI for Good 
12pm  Program on Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate [PAOC] Colloquium: Matto Mildenberger (UCSB)
12pm  The Politics of Health in the Trump Era
12pm  BISG Lunch with Professor Cass Sunstein
12pm  From Me to We: Searching for the Genetic Roots of Sociality
12pm  The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future
12pm  Disability and the Social Implications of Communication Technology
12:30pm  Democracy and Inequality: Learning Through Sound in Tokyo, Boston, and Berlin
3pm  Microrobots as the Future of Tools: Designing Effective Platforms and Collaborative Swarms
4pm  xTalk with Michael Ioffee:  Text Messages and the Future of Digital Education
4:15pm  Book Talk: "The Future is Asian”
5:30pm  Feminist Economics
5:30pm  Elizaveta Osetinskaya: Understanding the Russian Media Landscape
6pm  Free Speech, Open Minds and the Pursuit of Truth
6pm  Conscious Conversation: An Inconvenient Act: How you can be a part of the climate crisis solution
6pm  Reparations for Slavery: The Role of Repentance in Politics
6:30pm  Donna Brazile
6:30pm  Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: “The Invention of Rivers”
6:30pm  Generation Citizen Bar Night: Beyond the Ballot
7pm  Merchants of Truth:  The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
7pm  FLP Open Meeting: Feed The Resistance with Author, Julia Turshen
7pm  Unpacking White Feminism: Boston

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Wednesday, February 20
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7:30am  Boston Sustainability Breakfast
10am  Nuclear Waste Management in the Near Long-Term
12pm  'Goodbye Congress, Don't Get Rolled’
12pm  Book Talk: Will China Save the Planet?
12pm  Narrative Events: Slavery, Testimony, and Temporality in the Afro-Atlantic World
12:30pm  Constitutional Crises in Central and Eastern Europe: A Legal Analysis
1pm  Bioethics on the Margins: Vulnerable Populations and Health Outcomes
1:30pm  Symposium on Contemporary Design Practice in Historic Chinese Cities
4pm  El Niño as a Topological Insulator: A Surprising Connection Between Climate, and Quantum, Physics
4pm  Henry L. Pierce Laboratory Seminar Series:  The Science Behind Understanding Attributes That Make a Community Disaster-Resilient
4pm  Algorithms and data structures in the brain
5pm  Civic Arts Series, “Bringing the War Home”: Visual Aftermaths and Domestic Disturbances in the Era of Modern Warfare
5:30pm  Promise and Perils of the Public Humanities Pivot
5:30pm  The Subversive Politics of Sentient Places: Climate Change, Collective Ethics, and Environmental Justice in Northern Peru
5:30pm  Chat & Chowder: Plagues and the Paradox of Progress with Thomas Bollyky
5:30pm  College Freedom Forum in Boston 2019
5:45pm  A Revolutionary Harbor: Boston's Maritime Underground Railroad
6pm  The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes
6pm  MIT Transportation Showcase 2019
6pm  Boston New Technology Business and Workforce Solutions Startup Showcase #BNT98
6pm  Innovation in Digital Health: Swiss and US Perspectives
6:30pm  Bernard-Henri Lévy
7pm  Practical Equality:  Forging Justice in a Divided Nation
7pm  "Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak”

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Thursday, February 21
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8:30am  Intro to Passive House
11:45am  The Purpose and Future of the Corporation
12pm  Pursuing a Career in Global Anti-Corruption
12pm  Patents and Market Concentration:  Measuring the Impact on Global Access to Medicines
12pm  Book Talk -- Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests
12pm  Building Healthier Communities Through Environmental Justice
12:15pm  Islamizing Rebel Governance: Jihadi Insurgencies and Symbolic Power
1pm  Fresh Pond: Vacation Week: Ecology Hike through an Urban Woods
3pm  Climate Change in Boston: Preparing for Impacts
3:30pm  It’s a Fluid Situation: Adaptive Strategies for Feeding and Moving in Marine Environments
3:30pm  Tech News & Tech PR: It's not just tech anymore
4:15pm  Women and the Holy City: Gender and Contested Sacred Space in Jerusalem
6pm  Possible Minds:  Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
6pm  The Future of the Book and Digital Access
6pm  Design as Protest: Building Power
6pm  Relevance: The Critical Role of Community Voice for Nonprofits
6pm  Sustainable Peace Café
6:30pm  The Lasting Influence of Early Adversity on Children's Brain Development
6:30pm  Water: The Global Crisis and What Must Be Done Now
6:30pm  Mass Incarceration : A Youth Film Screening and Community Conversation
7pm  Grabbing Pussy

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Friday, February 22 – Saturday, February 23
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Hack for Inclusion
8th Annual Conference on Advancing Human Progress

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Friday, February 22 - Sunday, February 24
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Tech for Truth Hackathon

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Friday, February 22
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9am  Community Engagement Training
9am  NULab: Climate Change/Crisis/Creativity Conference
10am  BU Questrom TechConnect 2019: Disrupt
12pm  Global Change and the Ecology of Vector-Borne Disease
12:15pm  From the Pacific Into the Anthropocene: Japanese-U.S. Research on Floating Structures, the Metabolist Movement, and Rising Sea Levels
6pm  #BUcityplanning Movie Screening: Paris To Pittsburgh
7pm  BetterMIT Innovation Across Disciplines Speaker Series

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Saturday, February 23 - Sunday, February 24
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BetterMIT Innovation Challenge

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Saturday, February 23
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8am  2019 Conference on Poverty and Inequality
9am  World IA Day Boston 2019
9:30am  The Every Voice Advocacy Summit
12pm  Identity In Industry 

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Sunday, February 24
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10am  Biophilia Series: Walking Meditation and Fellowship in the Spirit of Longfellow

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Monday, February 25
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12pm  Program on Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate [PAOC] Colloquium: Julien de Wit (MIT)
12pm  Waking Up to the Internet Platform Disaster
12pm  The Cost of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
12pm  Sociology Department Seminar: Down Out and Under Arrest: How Policing Shapes Everyday Life in Urban Poor Communities
12:15pm  American Geomimesis: The Earth's Past and Engineering Environments
5:30pm  Opioid Epidemic & Harm Reduction: Social Work, Public Health & Emergency
Services Approaches
6pm  CDD Forum - Nerding-out Over Design and Social Justice
6:30pm  Social Media 101 - How to Make the Most of Your Digital Presence w/ AIMC
6:30pm  Design for Augmented Intelligence
7pm  The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai

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Tuesday, February 26
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7:30am  EBC Climate Change Program: The Challenge of Designing Systems for an Uncertain Climate Future
12pm  Speaker Series: James Bennet
12pm  Fighting fake science: Barriers and solutions
12pm  Goodbye California? The New Tech Worker Market
12:30pm  Japan's Antiracism Movements: Gendered Negotiations of Violence and Vulnerability
1pm  Technology, Science, and Frontiers in the Arts
4pm  Coded Computing: A Transformative Framework for Resilient, Secure, and Private Distributed Learning
4:30pm  Focus on Russia: Putinism
6pm  Public Program:  Artist Talk by Olafur Eliasson
6pm  Yemen: The Human Cost of War, a conversation with Abby Maxman, CEO & President of Oxfam America
6pm  MIT Water Night
6:30pm  WHERE DOES THE PATH OF VIRTUE LIE ON ENGINEERING HUMAN GENOMES?:  Faculty Lecture with Professor Louis M. Guenin
6:30pm  Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: David Hartt, “Urban Futures of the Recent Past”
6:30pm  An Introduction to Conscious Language
7pm  The Shape of a Life:  One Mathematician's Search for the Universe's Hidden Geometry

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My rough notes on some of the events I go to and notes on books I’ve read are at:

A Just Transition to Zero on Climate Change

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Monday, February 18 - Monday, March 4
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February School

In the month of February, the MIT Program in Art, Culture, Technology will set up a temporary school in the Wiesner Gallery, Student Center (W20). 

Initiated in 2018, February School is an experiment in peer-to-peer learning which aims to intervene and critically reflect on the institutional and pedagogical structures of MIT. The School is a subsystem of education where students and the general public are invited to organize and attend classes, cinema cycles, exhibitions, community discussions, workshops, and construction projects throughout the month. Operating ‘within and against’ the structures and conventions of the Institute, February School explores other ways of learning, sharing, and building knowledge and community.

Schedule and Events:
Instruments of Protest: Speaker Tower
Nicolás Kisic Aguirre (SMACT ’18)
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
Pt 2: February 19th, 1-4pm
Pt 3: February 27th, 5-7pm

During the month of February, a series of protests are being held in the Boston area against Raytheon, a major US weapons contractor and war profiteer with strong ties to MIT. Raytheon seeks talent in local universities, sponsors different programs and has strong partnerships with the Institute. Throughout this workshop, participants will research the connection between MIT and Raytheon and collaborate on a sound piece to explore new ways of occupying the sonic space to manifest and strengthen a collective voice.  

Participants will engage with the Speaker Tower, a portable and autonomous instrument of protest developed by artist Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, in a series of workshops culminating in a performance and protest.

Giant Inflatables Workshop
Agnes Cameron and Gary Zhexi Zhang (SMACT ’19)
Wiesner Gallery, (W20-209)
February 23rd | 11am-4:30pm 

Over 2 sessions, we will collaboratively make a giant inflatable! No experience required. First session: intro to sewing and designing inflatables. Second session: make a room sized inflatable/an inflatable room. There will be food. 

An Analog Interface in a Digital World
Kalli Retzepi
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
Opening February 18th, 6pm 

Branden Hookway describes the interface as a “form of relation”. As interfaces increasingly work by inserting themselves in our subconscious ways of being, this short photographic exploration probes the nature of our encounters with them by creating a dialogue between digital and analog interfaces, and asks, given our techno-cultural context, what the consequences of these momentary mediations are. 

Kalli Retzepi is a graduate student at the Media Lab. She uses technology, design and images in order to explore the politics of digital interfaces, the narrative of the user and to imagine new metaphors for the Web. 

Traditional Dyeing Workshop
Elizabeth James Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), weaver
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 21st, 1-5pm

Participate in this fun hands-on workshop to learn how to dye with natural materials and traditional techniques. Through the process, learn about local plant ecology and textile arts traditions in the Northeast Algonquian Tribal Nations from Wampanoag culture-bearer and master weaver, Elizabeth James Perry. Make a dyed item to take away with you.

Elizabeth James Perry will also be speaking about her work on Wednesday February 20, 2019 7pm in the Bartos Theater.

 Skip Read Open Studio
Billy Foshay
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 22nd, 6:30-8:30pm

Skip reading is an adaptation of William Borough’s “cut-up method” that allows readers to skip freely around different portions of a text to create new non-linear interpretations. The goal is to surpass the linearity of reading by rearranging words through the readers’ discretion to composite a new text. Participants are encouraged to bring in a text of their choosing they wish to be skip read. This could be writing of their own or of another – a textbook, a poem, a paper, an online review, an email, etc. Each skip read text will require three readers, and therefore 3 electronic copies of the text. The readers will take turns reading a selected portion of the text – the next reader picking up where the previous left off and continuing the cycle until the group feels the composite is complete. The audio will be captured with microphones and recording devices. 

Billy Foshay is an MFA candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

REALIZSTANCE
Sultan Sharrief
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 23rd-24th, 1-6pm

A mixed reality performance piece in which a group comes together, develops a script that fits into an existing VR structure, and puts on an event for their peers. The narrative involves a message that has been sent back from the future and encourages people to come together and join in a compassion dance that is rooted in spiritual traditions from around the world. The event is creative with performance, set design, hair and makeup design, cosplay, live action role playing elements, as well as use of new technology like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in a communal setting. At the end of the experience, there is a curriculum that was developed with the transformative justice project in Detroit where the event partners facilitate discussions with the attendees. The goal is to use creative practice as a means of fostering collaboration across difference and creating safe space for sensitive but in depth dialog about race and class. 

Sultan Sharrief is a trans-media activist, filmmaker, educator and social entrepreneur. His interest lies at the intersection of art, business, and community impact.

Cybernetics Library: The Anti-Canonizer (working title)
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 25th, Time TBD

The Cybernetics Library, a collective of artists, architects and designers who have created a physical library around the history of cybernetics, as well as organizing events like the Cybernetics Conference in 2018, will be hosting a workshop as part of February School exploring connections between their work and collection and MIT. They will also bring some great books. More details to come!

Gardening Workshop
Laura Knott
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 27th, 10am-1pm 

It may seem that gardeners are growing tomatoes, or zucchini, or pumpkins, corn and beans. But the best gardeners are growing soil. And, in the meantime, they’re growing communities of bacteria and fungi and, sometimes, of neighbors and friends. This workshop brings together textual references and a little dirt, to think together about food, seeds, and gardening as a generative and regenerative action. 

Laura Knott is an artist, curator, editor and author, specializing in work at the intersection of art and technology. She is also an alumna of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. 

Ecosystem: The Sentence Versos the Line and the Line Verses the Sentence
Kevin McLellan
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
February 27th, 2-4pm

We must consider that each line of poetry is an independent division of information that has the ability to accommodate both separation and wholeness, yet each line also informs or speaks to the abutting lines, thus challenging: the sentence, the sentence’s preoccupations, and the reader’s expectations. In this seminar we will contemplate the sentence and the line; participate in a relevant writing prompt; and then engage in discussion. 

Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming), Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear in numerous literary journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, and Witness. Kevin is a Financial Assistant in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. 

Closing Party
Wiesner Gallery (W20-209)
Thursday February 28th, 8pm

Come celebrate the end of the February School 2019!

Mutual Pictures #6: November Actions
Hosted in collaboration with MIT Radius and MIT KSA
Bartos Theater (E15-070)
March 4th, 6pm

Film screening of excerpts of “November Actions”, a powerful documentary by Ricky Leacock following the protests of MIT students, faculty and staff against the war in Vietnam and MIT’s complicity in that war. Followed by a moderated conversation with a panel to provide focused discussion on three pressing issues/crises facing the MIT community: Ethics of AI and the #techlash movement of tech workers; MIT and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; and Local Impact of MIT: Housing and physical operations (sustainability/environmental issues?). We will invite one local expert on each of these issues to serve as panelist.

This event provides not only historical information but also inspiration and a strong sense of “what’s next” amongst the community for actions we can take now (letter signing re: KSA and MIT, lunches to talk about how to work in the tech industry within an ethical framework, how to learn more about MIT’s real estate dynasty and how that is impacting our area of Cambridge).


Editorial Comment:  This is an echo of what the Independent Activities Period at MIT used to be, an experiment in peer-to-peer learning.


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Monday, February 18
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Strategies of Conflict: Performing Responsibility in the Missile Age
Monday, February 18
12:15PM
Harvard, CGIS South S050, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
Please RSVP via the online form by Wednesday at 5PM the week before. 

Benjamin Tyler Wilson, Harvard, History of Science

STS Circle at Harvard 

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Engineers Week: The Citizen Engineering Movement
Monday, February 18
6:00pm
Tufts, Room 253, Robinson Hall, 212 College Avenue, Medford

As part of Tufts' celebration of Engineers Week (February 15-22), the School of Engineering and the Tisch College of Civic Life are pleased to welcome Cathy Leslie, executive director of Engineers Without Borders USA, to deliver a talk on the story of a citizen engineering movement that creates a mission-driven, highly-skilled professional who knows how to combat global poverty.

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Spider's Canvas / Arachnodrone
Monday, February 18
7:00pm
MIT Theater Building W97, MIT Theater 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 

Spider’s Canvas / Arachnodrone (US Premiere) is an immersive, synesthestic performance/installation that allows audience members to experience ‘life in the web.’

A co-creation of composer and MIT CAST Faculty Director Evan Ziporyn, composer/visual artist Christine Southworth, sound artist Ian Hattwick, spider researcher Isabelle Su, and based closely on a tent-web made by a South American cyrtophora citricola spider, the work is not simply interdisciplinary, but quite literally an interspecies collaboration.

Spider’s Canvas was inspired and commissioned by visual artist Tomas Saraceno, and was premiered in November as part of Saraceno’s acclaimed exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

To see excerpts of the Paris performances, please visit http://arachnodrone.com

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Healing Voices // Online Screening & Discussion
Monday, February 18
9:00 PM EST
online

As a social action documentary, "HEALING VOICES" has made a meaningful impact in communities around the world with regard to how we think about and talk about mental health.

Join the Producers of "HEALING VOICES" and organizers of "REAWAKEN AUSTRALIA" Monday, February 18th for a free online screening and panel discussion intended to promote the upcoming "REAWAKEN" conference and Digital Eyes Film's next social action documentary "RECOVERING ADDICTION: A PUBLIC HEALTH RESCUE MISSION.”

Registrants will receive a private link to watch "HEALING VOICES" starting at 9:00pm EST, followed by a live panel discussion including questions from the audience. *Please note that this screening begins at 12:30pm February 19th Australian Central Daylight Time.

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Tuesday, February 19
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The Energy Transition in India—Towards Climate Change Mitigation
Tuesday, February 19
10:15AM TO 12:00PM
Harvard, Rubenstein Building,Room 414 A/B, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge 

Speakers: 
Mr. Ajay Kumar Bhalla, Secretary, Ministry of Power, Government of India
Dr. Ajay Mathur, Director General, The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi; India
Prof. Johannes Urpelainen, Founding Director, Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP), Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C.
Mr. Ranjit Bharvirkar, Principal and India Program Director, Regulatory Assistance Project, Vermont
Moderated by Professor John P. Holdren,  Co-Director,  Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program
The seminar will begin with an introduction of the Science, Technology, & Public Policy Program and its focus on India's energy decarbonization and then each speaker will present for 15 minutes. This will be followed by a panel discussion and question and answer session moderated by Prof. John P. Holdren.

Coffee & Tea will be provided.
Co-sponsored by the Consortium of Energy Policy Research.

Contact Name:  Kaveri Iychettira

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WEBINAR: AI for Good 
Tuesday, February 19
12pm

ONE HOUR OF DISCUSSIONS AT 17:00 GMT
LEARN HOW WE CAN LEVERAGE AI FOR GOOD
SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS TO EXPERTS

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Program on Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate [PAOC] Colloquium: Matto Mildenberger (UCSB)
Tuesday, February 19
12:00pm to 1:00pm
MIT, Building 54-915, 21 Ames Street, Cambridge

About this Series
The PAOC Colloquium [PAOCC] is a weekly interdisciplinary seminar series that brings together the whole PAOC community. Seminar topics include all research concerning the physics, chemistry, and biology of the atmospheres, oceans and climate, but also talks about e.g. societal impacts of climatic processes. The seminars take place on Monday from 12-1pm in 54-923. Lunch is provided after the seminars to encourage students and post-docs to meet with the speaker. Besides the seminar and lunch, individual meetings with professors, post-docs, and students are arranged. Contact the 2018/2019 Coordinators: paoc-colloquium-comm@mit.edu.

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The Politics of Health in the Trump Era
Tuesday, February 19
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Harvard, Wexner Conference Room, Wexner Building, Room 434AB, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

Rachana Pradhan is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro. Before coming to POLITICO, she spent more than three years at Inside Health Policy focusing on implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Prior to that, Pradhan worked at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., and spent most of her time covering city government (with the occasional foray into stories on urban chicken-keeping and the closure of neighborhood pools).

Pradhan is a rare local of the Washington, D.C., area and graduated from James Madison University. She was also news editor of JMU’s student newspaper, The Breeze.

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BISG Lunch with Professor Cass Sunstein
Tuesday, February 19
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Harvard, Taubman Building, 5th floor, 520 NYE A, 15 Eliot Street, Cambridge

Launched in 2013 and directed by faculty chair Todd Rogers, the Behavioral Insights Group (BIG) brings together Harvard’s outstanding group of decision research scholars, behavioral economists, and other behavioral scientists to focus their energies on improving how decisions are made, both by leaders, and by individuals. The Behavioral Insights Student Group (BISG) is the student arm of the Behavioral Insights Group (BIG). Run by students, for students, BISG brings together students from across Harvard who are interested in the application of behavioral science to policy challenges.

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From Me to We: Searching for the Genetic Roots of Sociality
Tuesday, February 19
12:00pm
Harvard, BioLabs Building, Room 1080, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Gene Robinson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 

Studies of genes and social behavior, aided by new genomic resources, are coming of age. Here, I highlight three of the insights that have emerged from these studies that shed light on the evolution and mechanisms governing social life: 1) Nature builds diverse social brains from common genetic blocks in insects and vertebrates, including those related to metabolism and transcriptional regulation; 2) Changes in the wiring of gene regulatory networks are involved in the operation and evolution of insect societies; and 3) The social brain is addicted to altruism.

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The Smart Enough City:  Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future
Tuesday, February 19
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West B (Room 2019, Second Floor), 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Ben GreenSHARE TOSmart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself.
The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future By Ben Green, MIT Press 2019

This event will be live webcast on https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-19/smart-enough-city at noon on the event date.

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Disability and the Social Implications of Communication Technology
Tuesday, February 19
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST
BU, Castle Room, 213 Bay State Road, 4th Floor, BU Hillel House, Boston

While the field of communication increasingly addresses the role of new media in the lives of marginalized populations—spanning race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and diaspora—disability and its relationship with social, cultural, and political life is little understood. Meanwhile, people with disabilities are the largest minoritized group in the U.S.—nearly 20% of the population according to the Census. This exclusion not only masks the multifaceted ways that disability and specific disabilities intersect with other dimensions of difference, but also dislocates disability from important theoretical and conceptual debates. In this talk, I will present an overview of my on-going research on disability, youth, and communication technology in three respects: exploring the shifting nature of learning, voice, and most recently, sociality. My work aims to fundamentally alters how we conceive of the “human” in mediated human communication by incorporating insights learned from and alongside young people with disabilities.

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Democracy and Inequality: Learning Through Sound in Tokyo, Boston, and Berlin
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, CGIS Knafel, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262), 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Program on U.S.-Japan Relations
SPEAKER(S)  Ian Condry, Professor of Japanese Culture and Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderated by Theodore Bestor
Reischauer Institute Professor of Social Anthropology, Harvard University
COST  Free and open to the public

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Microrobots as the Future of Tools: Designing Effective Platforms and Collaborative Swarms
Tuesday, February 19,
3:00pm
MIT, Building 36-462, Allen Room, 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Daniel Drew
Abstract: In the near future, swarms of millimeter scale robots will be vital and common tools in industrial, commercial, and personal settings. With applications ranging from distributed chemical sensing to tangible 3D interfaces, providing mobility platforms to low-power sensing and actuation nodes will push us that much closer to the dream of ubiquitous computing. In this talk I will present my efforts to develop a flying microrobot, the “ionocraft”, which uses atmospheric ion thrusters to move completely silently and with no mechanical moving parts. Spanning from development of novel MEMS actuators to incorporation of onboard sensor packages for control, I will discuss system design at the resource-constrained edge of robotics. Even given a working mobility platform, a bevy of interdisciplinary challenges remain to make microrobots useful tools; I will further discuss strategies for enabling future autonomous swarm deployments as well as for studying human-robot interaction outside the context of traditional social robotics.

Bio: Daniel Drew received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Kris Pister. His research focused on the design and fabrication of centimeter-scale robotic systems and human-computer interaction in the context of novel debugging and development tools. He recently began as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering, working with Professor Sean Follmer on human-swarm interaction and swarm platform development. Daniel received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2013 and an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2019.

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xTalk with Michael Ioffee:  Text Messages and the Future of Digital Education
Tuesday, February 19
4:00pm to 5:00pm
MIT, Building 3-133, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

In early 2018, Babson College and USC worked together to create the first text message course for students trapped in the Yemeni conflict. The resulting initiative, Arist, is now building the first text message university, designed to serve the 2 billion students worldwide without regular internet access.

In this talk, Michael Ioffe, the 19-year-old founder of Arist (and the social entrepreneur behind TILE.org, the world's largest conversation series, and Energy.org, a student-led environmental advocacy organization), explains why text messages are the next frontier in digital education, and how SMS can be a more scientific, relevant, and novel approach to learning for students of all kinds.

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Book Talk: "The Future is Asian”
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, 4:15 – 6 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, CGIS South (S250, Second Floor), 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Sponsored by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and the Harvard University
Asia Center
SPEAKER(S)  Parag Khanna, Author; Managing Partner of FutureMap
Chair, Professor Tarun Khanna
Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute

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Feminist Economics
Tuesday, February 19
5:30 pm
Radcliffe, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge

Boston Seminar Series on the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
These papers begin a conversation on the intersection of the study of the women’s liberation movement with the history of capitalism. Danielle Dumaine’s paper “Sisterhood of Debt: Feminist Credit Unions, Community, and Women’s Liberation” examines the role of feminist credit unions in the women’s liberation movement. Julie Enszer’s paper, "'a feminist understanding of economics based on a revolutionary set of values': Feminist Economic Theories and Practices" looks at the feminist organizations that created the feminist economic network.
SPEAKERS:
Danielle L. Dumaine, University of Connecticut
Julie R. Enszer, University of Mississippi
COMMENT: Juliet B. Schor, Boston College

The Boston Seminar Series on the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality—cosponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—offers scholars and students an opportunity to discuss new research on any aspect of the history of women and gender in the United States, without chronological limitation.

To RSVP and for more information: e-mail seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579.
Registered participants may access the papers online at the Massachusetts Historical Society website.

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Elizaveta Osetinskaya: Understanding the Russian Media Landscape
Tuesday, February 19
5:30 PM – 7:30 PM EST
Tufts, Fletcher School, Cabot 702, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford

Please join the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School for a dinner conversation with Russian journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya about the Russian media landscape. Dinner will be provided. Attendance is by registration only on Eventbrite. Please only register if you know you can attend, as spaces are limited.

Elizaveta Osetinskaya graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University and received an MBA from the joint program of the Academy of National Economy and Kingston University. She began her career as a correspondent for the economic department of the RosBusinessConsulting information agency. In 1997, she became a columnist for the newspaper Segodnya. In 1999, she began working for the newspaper Vedomosti. Working nearly 12 years for the publication, she was the head of the department of the fuel and energy complex and industry, the deputy editor-in-chief, the editor-in-chief of the publication, and the editor-in-chief of the website vedomosti.ru. In 2011, she took the lead of the Russian version of Forbes magazine. In 2013, she became the chief editor of RBC projects. In 2016, Elizaveta became a scholar of the prestigious international program at Stanford University "Innovations in Journalism." In 2017, Elizaveta launched her own media project for business people The Bell. She also received a scholarship to the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Free Speech, Open Minds and the Pursuit of Truth
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, 6 – 7 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, JFK Jr. Forum, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
SPEAKER(S)  Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard University
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University.
CONTACT INFO IOP Forum Office, 617-495-1380

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Conscious Conversation: An Inconvenient Act: How you can be a part of the climate crisis solution
Tuesday, February 19
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
ImpactHub, 50 Milk Street, Boston
Cost:  $5 - $20

The reality about climate change is somewhere in between doomsday scenarios and science denialism. This presentation and group discussion will clear up the uncertainties about climate change today, and outline clear steps that you can take tomorrow to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.  

You'll learn: 
What is the reality behind the climate crisis?
What solutions are at hand to solve the climate crisis?
How can you and your business contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation?

Speaker
Larry Yu, Thought leadership consultant
Larry Yu is a business writer and consultant specializing in thought leadership. He is Managing Editor of the Milken Institute Review and was formerly Managing Director of Kite Global Advisors, Executive Editor of strategy+business and Global Thought Leadership Fellow for PwC. Larry trained as a speaker with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in 2017.

About the Conscious Conversations series  Our Conscious Conversations are designed to facilitate peer exchange about a specific aspect of Conscious Capitalism. Each event consists of a short panel discussion, followed by small group discussions to allow participants to share ideas, challenges and solutions. We leave plenty of time to make new connections with other conscious capitalists.

Who we are  Our mission is to connect, educate and inspire leaders and workers to consciously build businesses that positively impact the world. Members of the Boston chapter of Conscious Capitalism are diverse individuals who recognize the power of capitalism to improve the human condition and create enduring value for all stakeholders. We come from organizations large and small, at different stages of our careers, from CEO to student. We’re bound by our common curiosity about these ideas and the desire to create change in organizations and society.


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Reparations for Slavery: The Role of Repentance in Politics
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, 6 – 8 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Sperry Room, Andover Hall, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture
SPONSOR Student-Initiated Event
DETAILS  United States presidential candidate, spiritual lecturer, and number one New York Times best selling author of A Return to Love will offer a lecture at Harvard Divinity School titled "Reparations for Slavery: The Role of Repentance in Politics" with an opening talk by HDS student Kassi Underwood, MDiv '19.

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Donna Brazile
Tuesday, February 19
6:30 PM
Tufts, ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Intercultural Center, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford

Join Tisch College for a conversation about contemporary politics, and about past and future presidential elections, with Donna Brazile, former Chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of the most astute political strategists in America. A veteran of Democratic politics and campaigns, Brazile worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 to 2000, when she was the first African American woman to run a presidential campaign when she served as campaign manager for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential bid. Known for her candor, she is a sought-after political commentator who has appeared on CNN and ABC; she is also a best-selling author of Hacks, which tells the inside story of Democratic Party machinations during the 2016 presidential election. Her recent book which she co-wrote, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics, was released last fall.  The recipient of numerous awards including the Congressional Black Caucus’ highest award for political achievement, Brazile moonlights as an actress and has made cameo appearances on CBS’s The Good Wife, Netflix’s House of Cards, and BET’s Being Mary Jane. Follow the conversation live at #BrazileAtTufts.

Sponsored by Tisch College, the Africana Center, the Political Science Department, and the Tufts Democrats.

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Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: “The Invention of Rivers”
Tuesday, February 19
6:30PM TO 8:00PM
Harvard, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 42 Quincy Street, Cambridge 

Separating land and water is not just an act of division; it is also an act of creation. It creates land and water from ubiquitous wetness, defining them on either side of a line. It is one of the first acts of design, setting out a ground of habitation with a line that has largely been naturalized in features such as the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These features are subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little awareness of the act that brought them into being. Today, however, with the increasing frequency of flood and, not unrelatedly, sea-level rise attributed to climate change, the line of separation has come into sharp focus with proposals for walls, levees, natural defenses, and land retirement schemes. These responses raise questions on where the line is drawn, but they also raise questions on the separation that this line facilitates. Is this separation found in nature or does nature follow from its assertion? Are there other beginnings to design and consequently, other possible natures and grounds of habitation?

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He is co-director of the Risk and Resilience program at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and Adjunct Professor at the GSAPP, Columbia University. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His new book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was just published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15913.html). In 2017, da Cunha along with Anuradha Mathur received a Pew Fellowship Grant in recognition of their collaborative work. They are currently working on a multimedia exhibition titled The Ocean of Rain. http://www.mathurdacunha.com


Contact Name:  events@gsd.harvard.edu

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Generation Citizen Bar Night: Beyond the Ballot
Tuesday, February 19
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST
TripAdvisor, Inc. Boston Office, 226 Causeway Street, Boston

Hosted by the Generation Citizen Associate Board of Young Professionals, our annual bar night is focused on going ‘Beyond the Ballot’ and the ways that Greater Boston community members can impact their communities and engineer change beyond voting. We will be hosting three amazing local changemakers who epitomize modern civic engagement for a casual Q/A and networking session. 

Join us at 6:30 on February 19th at the TripAdvisor Boston space for our annual bar night! Come grab a drink, hear about some of the amazing work of your peers, and find out more about how to drive more change in 2019!

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Merchants of Truth:  The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
Tuesday, February 19
7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome renowned journalist JILL ABRAMSON—Harvard University senior lecturer and former executive editor of the New York Times—for a discussion of her latest book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.

About Merchants of Truth
Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business told by one of our most eminent journalists.

Jill Abramson follows four companies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE Media over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials. We get to know the defenders of the legacy presses as well as the outsized characters who are creating the new speed-driven media competitors. The players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron (The Washington Post), Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet (The New York Times), Jonah Peretti (BuzzFeed), and Shane Smith (VICE) as well as their reporters and anxious readers.

Merchants of Truth raises crucial questions that concern the well-being of our society. We are facing a crisis in trust that threatens the free press. Abramson’s book points us to the future.

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FLP Open Meeting: Feed The Resistance with Author, Julia Turshen
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, 7 – 8:30 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, CGIS Knafel K050, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Sustainability
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Food Literacy Project
SPEAKER(S)  Julia Turshen
COST  Free
DETAILS  Whether you know her as the first host of Radio Cherry Bombe, the current host of Keep Calm and Cook On, a podcast, or the bestselling author of cookbooks Feed The Resistance, Small Victories or most recently, Now & Again, Julia Turshen brings a breadth of experience to the table that is deeply inspiring. Julia will be joining us via Skype, highlighting her book about advocacy through food, Feed The Resistance, as well as a project she founded called Equity At The Table (EATT): the inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. EATT is inspired by the aphorism that it’s better to “build a longer table, not a higher fence.”

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Unpacking White Feminism: Boston
Tuesday, February 19
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EST
District Hall, 75 Northern Avenue, Boston
Cost:  $30

Join Rachel Cargle in Boston for an exclusive presentation of her Unpacking White Feminism lecture. 
This lecture explores the history of feminism through the lens of race. Unpacking the problematic effects that white centered activism has had on the past and present of the feminist movement and our collective mission.
An opportunity for all self-proclaimed feminists to learn, digest and take actions toward a more inclusive feminism.


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Wednesday, February 20
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Boston Sustainability Breakfast
Wednesday, February 20
7:30 AM – 8:30 AM EST
Pret a Manger, 101 Arch Street, Boston

Join us every month for Net Impact Boston's informal breakfast meetup of sustainability professionals for networking, discussion, and moral support. It's important to remind ourselves that we are not the only ones out there in the business world trying to do good! Feel free to drop by Pret a Manger any time between 7:30 and 8:30 AM.

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Nuclear Waste Management in the Near Long-Term
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 10 – 11:30 a.m.
WHERE  Harvard Kennedy School, Littauer Building, Fainsod Room, 324, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Science
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Project on Managing the Atom, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
SPEAKER(S)  Katlyn Turner
Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom
CONTACT INFO Jacob Carozza
617-495-4219
DETAILS  Nuclear waste is a toxic, radioactive, and long-lasting byproduct to the generation of nuclear energy. It must be disposed of safely and ethically, ensuring that it will be isolated from the biosphere for millennia. Although burying nuclear waste in an underground repository has been extensively researched since the concept was proposed in the 1950s, the safe and ethical disposal of nuclear waste has not been successfully demonstrated anywhere in the world. There are two sets of challenges: 1) the technical difficulties involved in emplacing these radioactive materials underground and ensuring that they will remain there trapped for millennia, and 2) the social barriers arising from communities opposing the burial of nuclear wastes in their vicinity. Most of the technical research conducted thus far has been concerned with the behavior of the waste thousands to millions of years into the future, after it has been permanently emplaced underground. Social science research has largely focused on getting communities to accept repositories. Neither stream has studied the challenges of the near long-term, the period that could last several decades, between the start of construction of a hypothetical repository and its sealing off, when wastes are being transported and placed underground. How the challenges of the near long-term are addressed could affect both public perceptions and the longer term performance of nuclear waste repositories.
Katlyn Turner is a postdoctoral research fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom. She earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, an MS in Earth & Environmental Sciences from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford University. Her dissertation examined the atomic structures of nuclear materials in extreme pressure environments. Her research interests include how emerging technologies to reprocess spent nuclear fuel affect nuclear security, waste management, and the fuel cycle. She grew up in Granger, Indiana.

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'Goodbye Congress, Don't Get Rolled'
Wednesday, February 20
12 – 1PM
Tufts, Olin Center, Packard Avenue, Medford

Join Tisch College for a special screening of “Goodbye Congress, Don’t Get Rolled,” the newly released short film from documentarian Alexandra Pelosi that is a farewell to departing members of congress and a window into the inner workings of the institution itself. Pelosi sits down for a series of insightful, honest, and highly entertaining exit interviews that offer a unique look at congress as it is seen from within its own walls. A short Q&A with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
tischcollege.tufts.edu/content/goodbye-congress

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Book Talk: Will China Save the Planet?
Wednesday, February 20
12:00PM
Harvard, Lewis 214A, HLS, 1557 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

A Harvard Law School Library Book Talk with Barbara Finamore '80, Senior Attorney and Asia Senior Strategic Director, Natural Resources Defense Council; author of Will China Save the Planet?. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library; Environmental Law Society and East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; and China Project, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Light lunch will be served. 


Contact Name:  Tiffany Chan

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Narrative Events: Slavery, Testimony, and Temporality in the Afro-Atlantic World
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 12 – 1:30 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Barker Center, Thompson Room, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research
SPEAKER(S)  Nicholas Rinehart, Doctoral Candidate, English, Harvard University
COST  Free and open to the public
DETAILS  A Q&A will follow the colloquium

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Constitutional Crises in Central and Eastern Europe: A Legal Analysis
Wednesday, February 20
12:30 pm to 2:00 pm (Lunch served at 12:15. Talk begins at 12:45)
BU School of Law, 765 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 410 (Redstone Building), Boston

Speakers: Dominika Harasimiuk, PhD (Faculty of Law and Administration, Lazarski University, Warsaw), Vlad Perju, Professor of Law and Director of the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy (Boston College)

Convener: Daniela Caruso, Professor of Law and Jean Monnet Chair (Boston University School of Law)

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Bioethics on the Margins: Vulnerable Populations and Health Outcomes
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 1 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Braun Room, Andover Hall, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture
SPONSOR Women's Studies in Religion Program
CONTACT 617.495.5705
DETAILS  Wylin D. Wilson, 2018-19 WSRP Visiting Associate Professor, will deliver the lecture "'Bioethics on the Margins: Vulnerable Populations and Health Outcomes." Lunch will be served.

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Symposium on Contemporary Design Practice in Historic Chinese Cities
Wednesday, February 20
1:30pm to 5:00pm
Northeastern, Curry Student Center, 333, 346 Huntington Avenue, Boston

The symposium will focus on contemporary architectural design works, urban planning, and historical preservation projects in historic cities including Beijing, Guangzhou, Ningbo, Xi’an and Kashgar.


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El Niño as a Topological Insulator: A Surprising Connection Between Climate, and Quantum, Physics
Wednesday, February 20
4:00pm to 5:00pm
MIT, Building 54-915/923, 21 Ames Street, Cambridge

EAPS Department Lecture Series - Brad Marston, Brown University
Symmetries and topology play central roles in our understanding of physics. Topology, for instance, explains the precise quantization of the Hall effect and the protection of surface states in topological insulators against scattering from disorder or bumps. However discrete symmetries and topology have so far played little role in thinking about the fluid dynamics of oceans and atmospheres. In this talk I show that, as a consequence of the rotation of the Earth that breaks time reversal symmetry, equatorially trapped Kelvin and Yanai waves emerge as topologically protected edge modes. Thus the oceans and atmosphere of Earth naturally share basic physics with topological insulators. As equatorially trapped Kelvin waves in the Pacific ocean are an important component of El Niño Southern Oscillation and other climate processes, these new results demonstrate that topology plays a surprising role in Earth’s climate system. [See Science 358, 1075 (2017).]

About this Series
Weekly talks given by leading thinkers in the areas of geology, geophysics, geobiology, geochemistry, atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, and planetary science. Lectures take place on Wednesdays from 3:45pm in MIT Building 54 room 915, unless otherwise noted.

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Henry L. Pierce Laboratory Seminar Series:  The Science Behind Understanding Attributes That Make a Community Disaster-Resilient     
Wednesday, February 20
4:00pm to 5:00pm
MIT, Building 1-131, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Prof. Bruce R. Ellingwood 
Abstract:  Community resilience depends on the performance of the built environment and on supporting social, economic and public institutions which, individually and collectively, are essential for immediate response and long-term recovery within the community following a disaster.  A community’s social needs and objectives (including post-disaster recovery) are not reflected in the codes, standards and other regulatory documents applied to design of individual facilities.  Furthermore, science-based measurement tools to evaluate performance and resilience at community scales, fully integrated supporting databases, and risk-informed decision frameworks to support optimal life-cycle technical and social policies aimed at enhancing community resilience are in a rudimentary state of development.  A new approach is required, one that reflects the complex inter-dependencies among the physical, social and economic systems on which a healthy and vibrant community depends and involves engineering, social sciences, and information sciences. The Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, headquartered at Colorado State University, was established by The National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2015 to advance the measurement science for understanding the factors that make a community resilient, to assess the likely impact of natural hazards on communities, and to develop risk-informed decision strategies that optimize planning for and recovery from disasters.  This presentation summarizes the approach taken by the Center management and research teams to advance the science underlying community resilience assessment and provides an illustration of how physical, social and infrastructure models can be integrated in a risk-informed decision context.

Bio:  Dr. Ellingwood is Co-Director of the NIST-sponsored Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning at Colorado State University.  His teaching, research and professional interests center on the application of methods of probability and statistics to structural engineering.  He is internationally recognized as a leading authority on structural load modeling, reliability and risk analysis of engineered facilities and as the seminal figure in the technical development of probability based codified standards for design of structures.   He has authored more than 400 research papers and reports, is Editor of Structural Safety, and serves on five other editorial boards.  He is recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions, is a Distinguished Member of ASCE and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Algorithms and data structures in the brain
Wednesday, February 20
4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
MIT, Building 32-G499, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Speaker: Saket Navlakha , Salk Institute for Biological Studies 
Abstract: A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to understand the algorithms that neural circuits have evolved to solve computational problems critical for survival. In this talk, I will describe how the olfactory circuit in the fruit fly brain has evolved simple yet effective algorithms to process and store odors. First, I will describe how fruit flies use a variant of a traditional computer science algorithm (called locality-sensitive hashing) to perform efficient similarity searches. Second, I will describe how this circuit uses a variant of a classic data structure (called a Bloom filter) to perform novelty detection for odors. In both cases, we show that tricks from biology can be translated to improve machine computation, while also raising new hypotheses about neural function. I will conclude by arguing that the search for "algorithms in nature" is not limited to only the brain and could include many other areas of biology, including plant biology.

Bio: Saket Navlakha is an assistant professor in the Integrative Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He received an A.A. from Simon's Rock College in 2002, a B.S. from Cornell University in 2005, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland College Park in 2010. He was then a post-doc in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University before starting his lab at the Salk Institute in 2014. His lab studies algorithms in nature, i.e., how collections of molecules, cells, and organisms process information and solve computational problems. In 2018, he was named a Pew Biomedical Scholar, and in 2019, he was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Contact: Mary McDavitt, 617-253-9620, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu

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Civic Arts Series, “Bringing the War Home”: Visual Aftermaths and Domestic Disturbances in the Era of Modern Warfare
Wednesday, February 20
5:00pm
MIT, Building 4-270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge

At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In this paper Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the “War on Terror” through a consideration of Martha Rosler’s photo collage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967-2004). The technique of collage reinforces the artist’s emphatic effort to bring together seemingly incommensurable elements—images of exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities, and landscapes and bodies damaged by warfare. Literally bringing wars waged by the United States throughout this long durée into the hyper commodified environment of fashion layouts and magazine advertisement, Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of limiting domestic space, an impossibility that challenges representation across genres and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” resonate as powerful “aftermaths” of wars visible and invisible, always already underway.

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).

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Promise and Perils of the Public Humanities Pivot
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Houghton Library, Edison and Newman Room, Quincy Street and Harvard Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Houghton Library, the Mahindra Humanities Center, and he Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
SPEAKER(S)  Mariët Westermann, Executive Vice President, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
COST  Free and open to the public
CONTACT INFO  humcentr@fas.harvard.edu
DETAILS  At a time when the humanities appear to be losing prestige — as measured by declining enrollments and skeptical views expressed by public officials, parents, and students — humanists and their institutions are seeking to highlight the worldly utility of the humanities to societies and individuals under the rubric of the Public Humanities. This talk describes some of the most promising current efforts to bring humanities research into wider worlds, and also considers the potential risks that might arise when universities channel their commitment to the humanities in the direction of immediate and evident public value.

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The Subversive Politics of Sentient Places: Climate Change, Collective Ethics, and Environmental Justice in Northern Peru
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Religion
SPONSOR Center for the Study of World Religions
CONTACT CSWR, 617.495.4476
DETAILS  Poor mestizos in northern Peru offer a new way to theorize humanism and sentient landscapes that interact with humans in terms of environmental justice, collective ethics, and health. This model transcends the limits of ontological cosmopolitics and political ecology. Mestizos respond to climate change and environmental devastation and challenge the governance of late liberalism by engaging indigenous sentient landscapes as leaders of environmental movements and co-creators of an interethnic world. They attach moral agency to the natural world for social and environmental transformation and open up a new kind of political debate. By defining “community” and “well-being” as humans-in-relationship-to-places-as-persons, poor mestizos resignify “nature” itself as an anchor for social justice.
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York-Buffalo, has worked with Mapuche shamans in Southern Chile and shamans on the north coast of Peru. She has authored 5 books and over 55 articles. Her most recent books are Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Patagonia (University of Texas Press, 2016) and Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among the Chilean Mapuche (University of Texas Press, 2007). Bacigalupo’s work has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Radcliffe Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the School of Advanced Research, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Divinity school and the Center for World Religions at Harvard University, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

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Chat & Chowder: Plagues and the Paradox of Progress with Thomas Bollyky
Wednesday, February 20
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST
McDermott, Will & Emery, 28 State Street, Suite 3400, Boston
Cost:  $15 – $25

How are there consequences of improved global health? Thomas Bollyky presents contemporary case studies!
About this Event
Plagues and parasites have played a central role in world affairs, shaping the evolution of the modern state, the growth of cities, and the disparate fortunes of national economies. The recent decline of pestilence has led to incredible improvements, but it has also created unintended consequences. In Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, Thomas Bollyky interweaves a grand historical narrative about the rise and fall of plagues in human societies with contemporary case studies of the consequences.

Thomas J. Bollyky is director of the Global Health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Mr. Bollyky has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and has served as a member of committees on strengthening food and drug regulation in developing countries and on the role of science, technology, and innovation in the future of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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College Freedom Forum in Boston 2019
Wednesday, February 20
5:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST
Harvard, Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Join the global movement!
We are excited to welcome you to the College Freedom Forum in Boston, hosted by the Human Rights Foundation in partnership with Harvard University's International Relations Council. Students, staff, faculty, and community members are welcome at this event. Join us for a unique opportunity to learn from world-renowned activists about the state of human rights globally!
The College Freedom Forum (CFF) 

The College Freedom Forum (CFF) is a series of one-day events produced by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) and designed to educate and enlighten students about the state of individual liberty and freedoms around the world. The program brings dissidents and human rights advocates from dictatorships and authoritarian societies to college campuses to share their stories and inspire students to protect freedom at home and advance it abroad.

Featured speakers include nonviolent resistance expert Jamila Raqib,Venezuelan violinist and pro-democracy activist Wuilly Moises Arteaga, Chinese human rights advocate Ti-Anna Wang, and Syrian citizen journalist Abdalaziz Alhamza. Information about additional speakers will be released soon.

We will be collecting flash drive donations to support HRF's Flash Drives for Freedom Program. 

About the Human Rights Foundation (HRF)
Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF's work includes effective campaigns to free political prisoners, world-class events such as the Oslo Freedom Forum and College Freedom Forum, and programs such as 'Flash Drives for Freedom' that directly support human rights defenders at risk, as well as the Oslo Scholars Program that connects activists to students through a summer internship.
Do you have questions about CFF or HRF? Contact college@hrf.org!
About Harvard University's International Relations Council (IRC)
The Harvard International Relations Council (IRC) is one of the oldest and largest student-run organizations at Harvard College. Our mission is simple: promoting awareness of international issues and using the resources available to us to educate ourselves and our peers, at Harvard and around the world. Serving more than 500 members with an annual budget of over $750,000 and assets exceeding $1 million, the IRC forms an integral part of its members’ college experience, with an extensive network of alumni around the world. We are a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and an accredited NGO with the United Nations Department of Public Information, and we were first incorporated in Massachusetts in 1974.
Do you have questions about IRC? Go to https://www.harvardirc.org. 

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A Revolutionary Harbor: Boston's Maritime Underground Railroad
Wednesday, February 20
5:45 PM – 7:00 PM EST
Atlantic Wharf, 290 Congress Street, Boston

Join the National Park Service and Boston Harbor Now in the second of three winter lectures exploring our Revolutionary Harbor.
During the years preceding the American Civil War, Boston served as one of the most important stops on the Underground Railroad. Did you know that many of the fugitives escaping from enslavement came to Boston by stowing away on ships from southern ports? Join NPS Ranger ShawnQuigley as we explore the untold stories of men and women making daring escapes to freedom through Boston Harbor. 

Light refreshments and drinks provided. 

Funded in part by Boston Harbor Now.

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The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes
WHEN  Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, 6 – 7 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Education, Lecture, Science
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in collaboration with the Amazon Conservation Team and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
SPEAKER(S)  Mark Plotkin, Co-Founder and President of the Amazon Conservation Team
Brian Hettler, GIS and New Technologies Manager of the Amazon Conservation Team
Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist and conservationist who has focused on the plants and peoples of the Amazon since the late 1970s. A former student of the renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, Plotkin is well known for his bestselling book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice and the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film Amazon. Plotkin is President and a board member of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). He previously served as a vice president of Conservation International and as U.S. Director of Plant Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. Previously, he was a research associate in ethnobotanical conservation at the Harvard University Herbaria. He received his education at Harvard, Yale, and Tufts universities.
Brian Hettler is a cartographer with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) who works with Indigenous communities in South America on participatory mapping initiatives that support Indigenous land rights and rainforest conservation. For the past six years, Brian has been leading ACT’s efforts to map and monitor isolated Indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest—and the many threats facing these vulnerable communities—using high-resolution satellite imagery provided by DigitalGlobe. When not in the field, Brian partakes in a range of projects including monitoring forest covering using remote-sensing techniques, designing maps in both static and interactive digital formats, and supporting ACT’s field staff and Indigenous partners in the innovative use of spatial data collection and monitoring tools.
COST  Free and open to the public.
CONTACT INFO 617-496-1027
DETAILS  Richard Evans Schultes — ethnobotanist, taxonomist, writer, photographer, and Harvard professor — is regarded as one of the most important plant explorers of the twentieth century. In 1941, Schultes traveled to the Amazon rainforest on a mission to study how Indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. A new interactive online map, produced by the Amazon Conservation Team, traces the landscapes and cultures that Schultes explored in the Colombian Amazon. Plotkin and Hettler will share this map and discuss the relevance of Schultes’ travels and collections for science, conservation, and education in the twenty-first century.
Lecture. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage.
This event will be livestreamed on the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture Facebook page. A recording of this program will be available on the HMSC Lecture Videos page approximately three weeks after the lecture.

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MIT Transportation Showcase 2019
Wednesday, February 20
6:00pm to 9:00pm
MIT Museum, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

The Transportation Showcase is the MIT Transportation Club's flagship event, and is widely attended by the students, alumni, faculty, and professionals that make up the MIT transportation community. As the only transportation-specific career fair in the Boston area, the Showcase is a great way to meet representatives from a wide variety of transportation organizations ready to recruit, including public sector transportation agencies, private sector service providers, consultants, software developers, and much more! The event also showcases the transportation research carried out at MIT, strengthening the connections among the MIT transportation community, particularly between industry and academia.

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Boston New Technology Business and Workforce Solutions Startup Showcase #BNT98
Wednesday, February 20
6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Microsoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
Cost: $15.00 /per person

Join us to:
See 7 innovative and exciting local Business and Workforce Technology - Solution demos, presented by partners and startup founders
Network with attendees from the Boston-area startup/tech community
Get your free professional headshot photo from The Boston Headshot (non-intrusively watermarked)
Enjoy pizza, salad and beverages

Each company presents an overview and demonstration of their product within 5 minutes and discusses questions with the audience.

Please follow @BostonNewTech and support our startups by posting on social media using our #BNT98 hashtag. We'll retweet you!

To save on tickets and enjoy exclusive benefits, purchase a BNT VIP Membership: http://bit.ly/bNtvip

Brought to you by:
Microsoft New England was founded with the recognition that the greater Boston area is home to the world’s leading universities, cutting edge technology and the vibrant investment and emerging growth company community. http://bit.ly/BNTmsftne

From the travel innovators who brought you KAYAK comes Lola.com, a super easy, completely stress-free and fun — yes, fun! — way to manage corporate travel.

DigitalOcean provides the easiest cloud platform to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size, removing infrastructure friction and providing predictability so developers can spend more time building what they love. Try DigitalOcean for free with a $100 credit: do.co/boston

Cape Ann Development - Enterprise-class software, app and web development for startups! We offer the best value for early-stage companies who are not ready to hire full-time technical staff or need to quickly augment their existing IT staff. Contact Chris Requena at Chris "at" CapeAnnDevelopment.com.

TRBdesign - WordPress Maintenance, Development and Website Marketing from experts! Contact Reiko Beach at reiko "at" trbdesigns.com

Your Profile Video is a full-service video production agency, specializing in content creation strategies and digital marketing. Call or email us today for a free strategy consultation! www.YourProfileVideo.com

The Boston Headshot - You only get one shot to impress a potential client. www.TheBostonHeadshot.com

The Yard: Back Bay - Coworking, dedicated desks, and private offices in the Hancock. The Yard offers flexible, month-to-month memberships for entrepreneurs and creatives. High-tech conference rooms, lounges, monthly events and hundreds of amenities. Sign up for a tour and get a FREE week trial: http://bit.ly/BNTyard

Chuck Goldstone | Strategies and Stories - It's about your story. Getting audiences to listen. Like you. Do what you want. www.ChuckGoldstone.com

Climbing The Success Ladder helps you with Goal Setting. Positivity. NLP Coaching. Change. Getting Unstuck. Tom Maloney trains entrepreneurs to be successful! www.ClimbingTheSuccessLadder.com

Products & Presenters:
1. Lola.com - Agile Travel Management is a quick, dynamic and flexible way to create a corporate policy that enables employees to do what's right for the business. Happy employee travel experiences within a policy can be set up in five minutes.
2. Live Undistracted: Phone Safe System / @SmartPhoneSafe - A novel approach to eliminate the phone as a driver distraction in commercial fleets. (Mike Falter)
3 - 7. Sign up to present: http://bit.ly/bntdemo

Agenda:
6:00 to 7:00 - Networking with pizza, salad and beverages served and free headshot photos (non-intrusively watermarked)
7:00 to 7:10 - Welcome & BNT Partner Introductions
7:10 to 8:30 - Business and Workforce Technology Solution Presentations, Q&A
8:30 to 9:00 - More Networking and free headshot photos

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Innovation in Digital Health: Swiss and US Perspectives
Wednesday, February 20
6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
swissnex Boston, 420 Broadway,  Cambridge

The Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) & swissnex Boston invite you to a panel discussion featuring Swiss and American experts from the connected healthcare ecosystem.

What are the key components to innovate in today’s highly competitive digital health industry? CSEM (The Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology) & swissnex Boston invite you to a panel discussion featuring Swiss and American experts from the connected healthcare ecosystem to highlight some of the crucial points that will enable the development of tomorrow’s connected solutions.

Switzerland as a leader in medical innovation
Just like the Greater Boston Area, Switzerland hosts some of the most innovative organizations in the field of medical technologies. As a leader of the industry, CSEM is committed to developing solutions that will pave the way for the future of healthcare. Come meet some of the executives and companies using their disruptive algorithms and sensors.

Program
6:00 pm: Doors open
6:30 pm: Welcoming remarks, swissnex Boston
6:35 pm: Lightning talks
CSEM – Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology
Biospectal – optical blood pressure monitoring through ubiquitous connected devices
MyStetho – connected stethoscope for telemedicine
7:10 pm: Panel discussion
Jens Krauss – VP of Systems, CSEM
Eliott Jones – CEO, biospectal
Josie Elias – Program Manager, Brigham Digital Innovation Hub
Cris De Luca – Global Director, Digital Innovation at Johnson & Johnson Innovation
Moderator: Mary Ann Picard, Director of Operations, M2D2
7:45 pm: Networking reception & demos

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Bernard-Henri Lévy
Wednesday, February 20
6:30pm
Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker and author of more than thirty books including The Genius of Judaism, American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared extensively in publications throughout Europe and the United States. His documentaries include Peshmerga, The Battle of Mosul, The Oath of Tobruk, and Bosna! Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racisme and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.

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Practical Equality:  Forging Justice in a Divided Nation
Wednesday, February 20
7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome constitutional law expert and American University professor ROBERT L. TSAI for a discussion of his latest book, Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation. He will be joined in conversation by Harvard Law School professor NOAH FELDMAN.

About Practical Equality
Equality is easy to grasp in theory but often hard to achieve in reality. In this accessible and wide–ranging work, American University law professor Robert L. Tsai offers a stirring account of how legal ideas that aren’t necessarily about equality at all―ensuring fair play, behaving reasonably, avoiding cruelty, and protecting free speech―have often been used to overcome resistance to justice and remain vital today.
Practical Equality is an original and compelling book on the intersection of law and society. Tsai, a leading expert on constitutional law who has written widely in the popular press, traces challenges to equality throughout American history: from the oppression of emancipated slaves after the Civil War to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to President Trump’s ban on Muslim travelers. He applies lessons from these and other past struggles to such pressing contemporary issues as the rights of sexual minorities and the homeless, racism in the criminal justice system, police brutality, voting restrictions, oppressive measures against migrants, and more.

Deeply researched and well argued, Practical Equality offers a sense of optimism and a guide to pursuing equality for activists, lawyers, public officials, and concerned citizens.

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"Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak"
Wednesday, February 20
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EST
Harvard Coop, 1400 Mass Avenue, Cambridge

In 2014 after fighting through yards of bureaucratic red tape, leaving her family, and putting her own health at risk in order to help suffering strangers, Kwan Kew Lai finally arrived in Africa to volunteer as an infectious disease specialist in the heart of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. What she found was not only blistering heat, inadequate working conditions, and deadly, unrelenting illness, but hope, resilience, and incredible courage.
Lest We Forget chronicles the harrowing and inspiring time spent serving on the front lines of the ongoing Ebola outbreak--the complicated personal protective equipment, the chlorine-scented air, the tropical heat, and the heartbreaking difficulties of treating patients she could not touch. Dr. Lai interweaves original diary entries to create a gripping narrative about life, death, and human relationships that will leave no reader unmoved.

About the Author
Kwan Kew Lai is an infectious disease specialist. More than a decade ago, after first volunteering in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami, she left her position as a full-time professor of medicine and now divides her time between practicing clinical medicine and aiding with disaster relief in various parts of the world. Seeing the horrific effects of the Ebola outbreak on the people of West Africa, she felt a moral obligation to be both a participant and a witness of the efforts to stamp out this epidemic.


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Thursday, February 21
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Intro to Passive House
Thursday, February 21
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM EST
Hercules, Floor 17, 50 Milk Street, Boston
Cost:  $30

PassivHaus, Passive House or PH for short: we know you have been hearing about it, if you subscribe to high-performance building. This well-known standard has made its way to the Americas and now is growing roots in Massachusetts. Come connect with the leaders at Passive House Massachusetts and learn the basics of the system.
Passive House comprises a set of design principles used to obtain a quantifiable and rigorous level of energy efficiency and building comfort. Where did the Passive House standard come from and how has it evolved over the years? In this session, participants will learn the history of Passive House as a building concept and the differences between the national and international standards as well as how they relate to LEED and other building standards. A great opportunity to learn the basics of Passive House and get your questions answered.
Learning Objectives:
Learn the basics of Passive House principles
Introduce yourself to Passive House Massachusetts and how you can learn more in upcoming sessions
Find out how Passive House is being integrated into code in different areas nationally and internationally
Network with other Passive House practitioners and those interested in the practice

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The Purpose and Future of the Corporation
WHEN  Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, 11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Littauer Building, Fainsod Room (Third Floor), 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Lecture, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG) at the Harvard Kennedy School.
SPEAKER(S)  Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the University of Oxford.
Moderated by John Ruggie, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs, HKS
DETAILS  Lunch will be served. RSVPs are helpful: mrcbg@hks.harvard.edu

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Pursuing a Career in Global Anti-Corruption
WHEN  Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, 12 – 1 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Austin Hall (308), Morgan Courtroom, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Law, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR East Asian Legal Studies
SPEAKER(S)  Michael Huneke, ’05, Partner, Hughes Hubbard and Reed
Rayhan Asat, LL.M. ’16, Visiting Specialist, Hughes Hubbard and Reed
CONTACT INFO Mike Zaisser

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Patents and Market Concentration:  Measuring the Impact on Global Access to Medicines
Thursday, February 21
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET
Harvard, Wasserstein Hall, Room 2009 (Second Floor), 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Padmashree Gehl Sampath
Mark Wu
Please join us for an event featuring Padmashree Gehl Sampath, a leading expert on trade policy, innovation policy and economic development, in conversation with Mark Wu, Henry L. Stimson Professor at Harvard Law School.

Despite the vigorous strengthening of the global patent system in recent years, not only in industrialized economies like the USA, but also in the developing world, there have been limited attempts to measure the rise in concentration levels due to the patent system.  This talk provides a first empirical assessment showing that concentration of patents results in market concentration in the pharma sector in the USA and contributes to greater returns for affiliates of U.S. companies in developing country markets of India, China and Brazil. A number of questions for intellectual property policy and competition policy are examined. 

Padmashree Gehl Sampath is a leading expert on trade policy, innovation policy and economic development. She works at the United Nations in Geneva and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, and is currently a 2018-2019 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University. She has worked on issues of IP and access to medicines for over two decades, as an academic and in the UN system, serving first as an expert to WHO’s Committee on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Public Health in 2005 and then leading WHO’s work on local production, technology transfer and access to medicines in 2009-2010. She has coordinated large inter-agency projects of the UN on local production and access to medicines, authored several white papers on the topic, as well as been as consultant to various donor UN agencies on the topic of promoting capacity building in African and Asian countries to improve drug pricing, access to medicines and health innovation.  She is the author of five books, several journal publications and book chapters. 

Mark Wu is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Director of the Berkman Klein Center. His work focuses on international trade and international intellectual property matters. Prior to joining HLS the faculty in 2010, Mark Wu was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School and a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has served as the Director for Intellectual Property in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where he led negotiations on the IP chapters of various free trade agreements. In addition, he worked as an engagement manager for McKinsey & Co., as an economist and operations officer for the World Bank in China, and as an economist for the United Nations Development Programme in Namibia.

This event is a brown-bag luncheon and we encourage you to bring lunch to enjoy during event. Please note this event is not being live webcast and we encourage you to attend in person.

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Book Talk -- Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests
WHEN  Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, 12 – 1:15 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Ash Center Foyer, Second Floor, Suite 200N, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
SPEAKER(S)  Yao Li, China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center, author of "Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable Despite Rising Protests”
COST  Free
CONTACT INFO info@ash.harvard.edu
DETAILS  Join us and Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies for a discussion with Yao Li, China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center, author of Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests. Elizabeth Plantan, China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center, will serve as a respondent. Anthony Saich, Ash Center Director, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, HKS, will moderate.
Lunch will be served.

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Building Healthier Communities Through Environmental Justice  
Thursday, February 21
12:00PM-1:30PM
Brown Rudnick, 1 Financial Center, Boston

Panel: Cassandria Campbell, Co-founder of Fresh Food Generation, Kalila Barnett, Program Officer of Climate Resilience at the Barr Foundation, and Lead Innovator Patricia Spence, Executive Director of The Urban Farming Institute of Boston, Inc.
Facilitated by: Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.
Featured Innovator: The Urban Farming Institute of Boston

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Islamizing Rebel Governance: Jihadi Insurgencies and Symbolic Power
WHEN  Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, 12:15 – 2 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, 1 Brattle Square (Room 350), Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR International Security Program
SPEAKER(S)  Christopher Anzalone, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program
CONTACT INFO  susan_lynch@harvard.edu
DETAILS  Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come, first served basis.

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Fresh Pond: Vacation Week: Ecology Hike through an Urban Woods
Thursday, February 21
1 to 2:30pm
Meets at the Ranger Station (under the clock tower), 250 Fresh Pond Parkway, Cambridge 

Ready your winter boots and venture off-trail with Ranger Tim! Take a close look at some of the things that make the woods habitable even in winter and learn about what animals call Cambridge home. Bundle up! Great for families.  Questions: Ranger Tim at tpuopolo@cambridgeMA.gov/ 

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Climate Change in Boston: Preparing for Impacts
Thursday, February 21
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
Northeastern University Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex, 805 Columbus Avenue, Room 102, Boston

Coastal cities face unique challenges from the effects of a warming planet. What issues are most likely to impact Boston, and how can our city best prepare itself? In this panel discussion hosted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, we bring together premier experts from industry and academia to examine our vulnerabilities to climate change and how civil and environmental engineers can help build a more sustainable, resilient Boston.

Moderator: Dr. Matthew Eckelman, Associate Professor, Northeastern University
Panelists: Dr. Auroop Ganguly (Professor, Northeastern University), Dr. Jim Chen (Professor, Northeastern University), Dr. Paul Kirshen (Professor UMass Boston), and Dr. Indrani Ghosh (Technical Leader, Kleinfelder)

About the Panelists
Dr. Matthew J Eckelman is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair For Research at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He is an affiliated Faculty member with the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Marine and Environmental Sciences, and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Yale University in 2009. His research interests include energy efficiency and emissions modeling, life cycle assessment, material and energy use in urban buildings and infrastructure, nanotechnology, and environmental engineering and health.
Dr. Paul Kirshen is a Professor of Climate Adaptation at the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is an expert in water resources, coastal zone management and climate variability and change. Kirshen has worked on several projects for the EPA, US NOAA, US Army Corp of Engineers and the Union of Concerned Scientists studying the impact of climate change on the greater Boston area. He is the Director of the UMass Boston Sustainable Solutions Lab, which assesses the impact of climate change on underserved populations and investigates solutions to these complex issues. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.
Dr. Indrani Ghosh is the Technical Leader for climate change science at Kleinfelder. She models the impacts of climate change on future flooding and heat to identify risks and evaluate adaptation strategies at the local scale. Dr. Ghosh has published several papers which describe how cities and municipalities can translate the uncertainty of climate change into engineering design criteria. She has worked on several projects predicting flooding impacts in the greater Boston area, including climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation plans, sea level rise modeling for coastal towns, and the Disaster and Infrastructure Resiliency Plan for Boston’s Logan International Airport. She was the recipient of the 2014 Clemens Herschel Award from The Boston Society of Civil Engineers (BSCES) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.
Dr. Qin Jim Chen is an expert in coastal engineering and science, particularly in the development of state-of-the-art numerical models to address coastal resiliency and sustainability. He leads the Coastal Hydrodynamics Lab out of the Nahant Marine Science Center at Northeastern University, where he is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, interdisciplinary with the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences. Through grants from the National Science Foundation, US Geological Survey, US Army Corp of Engineers and the Department of Treasury, Chen conducts research into the effects of extreme weather and climate change on coastal regions. Chen received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Old Dominion University, in collaboration with Danish Hydraulic Institute.
Auroop R. Ganguly, Ph.D., is a hydrologist and a civil engineer, and currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA, where he is the Director of the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab). He is also Professor by courtesy of multiple NU departments and colleges, specifically, Khoury College of Computer and Information Sciences, Marine and Environmental Sciences, Political Science, and Public Policy and Urban Affairs, as well as a Visiting International Professor of Computer Science and Environmental Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He is a member of the United Nations Environmental Program review panel and the lead author of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) section of the Sustained National Climate Assessment of the United States. He is the Chief Specialty Editor for water and built environment of the upcoming Frontiers in Water journal and serves on the editorial board of the journal PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports published by Nature, as well as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. Ganguly received his Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from MIT in 2002.

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It’s a Fluid Situation: Adaptive Strategies for Feeding and Moving in Marine Environments
Thursday, February 21
3:30PM
Harvard, Room 1080, Biological Labs Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge 

Bradford Gemmell, University of South Florida, Tampa

OEB Special Seminar

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Tech News & Tech PR: It's not just tech anymore
Thursday, February 21
3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
BU, COM- 209, 640 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

Speakers Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt (Visiting Research Fellow at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California)
What is tech news today? And consequently, what is tech PR? Research by Dr. Weiss-Blatt discovered a major turning-point in both practices. Her previous study examined “Who sets the technological agenda?” by analyzing millions of articles/posts, and deploying time-series and network analyses. Her current research focuses on the role of tech PR due to the accumulating tech scandals. Her talk will summarize the rapid changes in the tech news ecosystem and provide preliminary conclusions, both theoretical and practical.

Contact Name Susannah Blair
Contact Email susieb@bu.edu

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Women and the Holy City: Gender and Contested Sacred Space in Jerusalem
WHEN  Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, 4:15 – 5:30 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Wexner Building, Room 434A, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School
SPEAKER(S)  Lihi Ben Shitrit, MEI Research Fellow and Assistant Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia
DETAILS  A seminar with Lihi Ben Shitrit, MEI Research Fellow and Assistant Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia. Moderated by Tarek Masoud, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, HKS and MEI Faculty Chair.

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Possible Minds:  Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
Thursday, February 21
6:00 PM (Doors at 5:30)
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge
Cost:  $6 - $29.75 (book included)

Harvard Book Store welcomes one of the nation’s leading science editors JOHN BROCKMAN—founder of The Edge Foundation, Inc. and editor of Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, and other volumes—for a discussion of his latest book, Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI.

About Possible Minds
"Artificial intelligence is today's story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI."  —John Brockman

More than sixty years ago, mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener published a book on the place of machines in society that ended with a warning: "We shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions . . . The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door." 

In the wake of advances in unsupervised, self-improving machine learning, a small but influential community of thinkers is considering Wiener's words again. In Possible Minds, John Brockman gathers their disparate visions of where AI might be taking us.

The fruit of the long history of Brockman's profound engagement with the most important scientific minds who have been thinking about AI—from Alison Gopnik and David Deutsch to Frank Wilczek and Stephen Wolfram—Possible Minds is an ideal introduction to the landscape of crucial issues AI presents. The collision between opposing perspectives is salutary and exhilarating; some of these figures, such as computer scientist Stuart Russell, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and physicist Max Tegmark, are deeply concerned with the threat of AI, including the existential one, while others, notably robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and bestselling author Steven Pinker, have a very different view. Serious, searching, and authoritative, Possible Minds lays out the intellectual landscape of one of the most important topics of our time.

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The Future of the Book and Digital Access
Thursday, February 21
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Boston Public Library in Copley Square, 700 Boylston Street, Boston
RSVP required

The ebook landscape is rapidly changing for both libraries and publishers.  While recently published materials are readily available in ebook form, older books often have no ebook equivalent or digital access.  Book scanning projects have made strides in bringing public domain literature online, but materials published after 1923 are still not widely available due to US copyright restrictions. The Internet Archive has developed a controlled digital lending service that enables libraries to lend a digital version of a non-circulating book stored on their shelves. Through controlled digital lending, libraries can make twentieth century scholarship available that is largely absent from their digital holdings in a way that respects the rights of authors and publishers. Publishers, too, can participate in controlled digital lending; projects between Internet Archive, MIT Press, and other university presses are digitizing backlist and out-of-print books and making them available through controlled digital lending. Facilitated by Boston Public Library’s David Leonard, this panel will bring together leaders from the library and publishing communities to discuss the future of the book and digital access, including Amy Brand from MIT Press, Brewster Kahle from Internet Archive, and Maria McCauley from Cambridge Public Library.

Amy Brand, Director, MIT Press
Amy Brand was named Director of the MIT Press in July 2015. Previously, she served as VP Academic and Research Relations and VP North America at Digital Science. From 2008 to 2013, Brand worked at Harvard University, first as Program Manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication and then as Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information. Before moving to Harvard, she held long-term positions as an Executive Editor at the MIT Press and as Director of Business and Product Development at CrossRef. Brand serves on the Boards of Directors of Creative Commons, Crossref, Duraspace, the Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and, was a founding member of the ORCID Board. She holds a B.A. in linguistics from Barnard College and a PhD in cognitive science from MIT.

Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 20 petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.

David Leonard, President, Boston Public Library
David Leonard is President of the Boston Public Library, a thriving 170-year-old institution and one of Boston’s great educational, cultural, and civic treasures. David began working at the BPL in 2009, bringing with him a wealth of experience from the technology, management, and consulting fields. Appointed President by the Library’s Board of Trustees and Mayor Martin J. Walsh in June 2016, David’s focus is on developing the BPL as a twenty-first-century institution that provides dynamic library experiences to the residents of Boston, of Massachusetts, and beyond. David’s prior experience spans academia and the nonprofit sector as well as the IT consulting world, with roles in business development, management, and technology consulting. David is currently enrolled in a PhD program in Library Information Science at Simmons College. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and mathematics and a master’s degree in philosophy from the University College Dublin. He did further graduate work in philosophy at Boston College and was a member of the 2010 Emerging Leaders Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Maria McCauley, Director of Libraries, City of Cambridge
Maria McCauley has served as Director of Libraries for the City of Cambridge since August 2016 where she oversees seven libraries. She began her library career 18 years ago at the Cambridge Public Library in Circulation and Reference Services. Before returning to Cambridge, Maria served as the Director of Libraries in Santa Monica, Director of Libraries for the City of Somerville, and held several library positions at Northeastern University. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio Wesleyan University, a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD from Simmons. She is an American Library Association (ALA) Councilor-At-Large and has recently been elected to ALA’s Executive Board. Her research has been published in College & Research Libraries, Library Management and portal.

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Design as Protest: Building Power
Thursday, February 21
6:00pm to 8:00pm
MIT, Building 7-429, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Bryan Lee & Sue Mobley
Design as Protest explores the privilege and power structures that have defined injustice from America's inception. Like all institutions, Design imposes its power through policies, procedures, and practice and is subject to its own inherited biases. We look at the history of the design justice movement and how the theory of practice continually advocates for the dismantling of power ecosystems that use architecture and design to create injustice throughout the built environment. The lasting permanence of our professional decisions requires us to pay particular attention to the residual impact of our work in and to seek Design Justice wherever possible. Architecture has the power to speak to the language of the people it serves, we as designers, are at our best when we are willing to serve the people denied power.

Bryan Lee is an Architect, educator, and Design Justice Advocate. He is the founder/Design Director Colloqate Design in New Orleans LA, a nonprofit multidisciplinary design practice dedicated to expanding community access to design and creating spaces of racial, social and cultural equity.  Architect and Design Justice Advocate. Founder/Director of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit multidisciplinary design practice. Founding organizer of the Design Justice Platform and organized the Design As Protest National day of Action. Bryan has led two award-winning architecture + design programs for high school students and has received multiple national awards and fellowships most recently noted as one of the 2018 Fast Company Most Creative People in Business.

Sue Mobley is Director of Advocacy at Colloqate Design. She comes to Colloqate with over a decade of experience in New Orleans non-profit and policy sectors. Mobley holds a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola University New Orleans in Anthropology and a Masters of Arts in Political Science from the American University in Cairo. Her primary research interests are in urban studies, public history, and design ethnography with a focus on race, class, and gender. She is the author of Human Rights, Human Wrongs, Observation of Human Rights Law and Norms in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations.

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Relevance: The Critical Role of Community Voice for Nonprofits
Thursday, February 21
6-8pm.
WeWork One Beacon,1 Beacon Street, Boston

Are you an emerging leader hoping to learn how to make your donations of time, talent, and treasure more impactful?

Please join Doris Buffett’s Learning by Giving Foundation on Thursday, February 21 for the first event of a four-part series: Relevance: The Critical Role of Community Voice for Nonprofits. We will host an in-depth conversation about the critical influence of the community on nonprofit work.

The four-part series will dive into each attribute of the RISE framework developed by the Social Impact Lab at Northeastern University, which is used by nonprofit leaders as a dashboard for assessing and building their organizational capacity, and by donors seeking to support the work of high-performing organizations. The series is hosted by Learning by Giving's
Emerging Leaders Council .

This event is free but attendees are encouraged to support LxG classes with a donation of $25. Free drinks and food will be provided.

We hope to see you there!

Speakers:
Christina Haines, Volunteer Manager, Silver Lining Mentoring
Mario Hines, Chief Program Officer, InnerCity Weightlifting
Peter Ducharme, Director of Program Services, Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Amy Kingman, Executive Director, Learning by Giving Foundation
Shanna O’Berry, Director of Academic Programs, Learning by Giving Foundation

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Sustainable Peace Café
Thursday, February 21
6 – 8:30pm
Harvard, Braun Room, Andover Hall, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge
Space is limited. RSVP is required.

What forms of nourishment bring you inner peace and comfort? Is there a particular food or drink that brings you closer to the people around you, your home, your community, or your identity?

Join us as we explore these questions, surrounded by food, stories, fireplace, and companions. You are welcome to bring a recipe, sample of a dish, or a story to share.

Sustainable Peace Cafés welcome Harvard students and alumni from across the University and friends and colleagues from the local area to come connect with new companions aspiring to advance sustainable peace.  Together, we will nurture our commitment to the practice of peace; contemplate our visions of peace and how to make peace in our communities substantive, shared, and sustainable; and share insights and practices from our spiritual and cultural traditions and life experiences.

Each session features a new theme and activities, touching upon six dimensions of holistic peace practice to which we attend in the emerging “One Harvard” Sustainable Peace Initiative (SPI):
sharing inspiration and wisdom
self-cultivation and virtue-cultivation
friendship-building and bridge-building
leveraging resources of culture
leveraging resources of institutions and communities
practical projects for shared flourishing

Attendees are encouraged to explore ways to advance the SPI global trend in their own contexts.  A light dinner is served, and informal networking time follows.

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The Lasting Influence of Early Adversity on Children's Brain Development
Thursday, February 21
6:30pm 
Aeronaut Brewery, 14 Tyler Street, Somerville

Katie A. McLaughlin


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Water: The Global Crisis and What Must Be Done Now
February 21
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Central Square Library, 45 Pearl Street, Central Square, Cambridge

There is a global water crisis — increasing drought, desertification, floods, migrations, and social justice stressors. This forum will focus on the connection between the unfolding climate catastrophe and the water crisis; outline a global view of the ecological  problems; focus on places that serve as case studies of resource scarcity and conflict; and point toward possible solutions.

Adam Sacks, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Dorotea Manuela, Color of Water, Encuentro 5

6:30 snacks and socializing
7:00 Panel presentation/slide show 
Sponsored by the Mass. Peace Action Peace and Climate Working Group, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate and the AFSC
For information call 617-354-2169

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Mass Incarceration : A Youth Film Screening and Community Conversation
Thursday, February 21
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM EST
100 Warren Street, Boston

Join us for a youth film screening and community conversation about mass incarceration in the state of Massachusetts. Joining us is the Emancipation Initiative, who will be conducting their "Struggle Sessions"! 
Programming includes:
Two youth produced short films/ documentaries
A panel conversation about mass incarceration
Resources on incarceration in MA, citizen rights and anti-incarceration organizations
*Light Refreshments provided!*
This is a youth centered event but open to all ages! We want to foster inter-generational community conversation.

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Grabbing Pussy
Thursday, February 21
7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated performance artist and NYU professor KAREN FINLEY for a discussion of her latest book, Grabbing Pussy.

About Grabbing Pussy
Based on her widely praised performance piece Unicorn Gratitude Mystery ("Wickedly funny," as described by The New York Times), Karen Finley’s Grabbing Pussy explores the Shakespearean dynamics that surface when libidos and loyalties clash in the public and private personas of Donald Trump, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, and now Harvey Weinstein.

Standing in the tradition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Finley’s words jolt the reader into new insights about the ways the darkly private can drive the public realm in dizzying twists and turns. The aggression of intimacy, the disparity of gender, and the vital importance of hair are all encompassed in Finley’s exhilarating canter.

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Friday, February 22 – Saturday, February 23
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Hack for Inclusion
Friday, February 22, 11:00 AM – Saturday, February 23, 8:00 PM EST
MIT Media Lab, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge
Cost:  $20

Hack for Inclusion will bring together some of the best and brightest minds from surrounding communities to build solutions that address some of today's biggest problems related to bias, diversity, and inclusion. This event will bring together both technical and non-technical backgrounds to address 15-20 different challenges related to diversity and inclusion. Key topic areas will range from racial bias, gender bias, and culture bias. 

The event will take place at the MIT Media Lab on Friday, February 22 and Saturday, February 23. All meals during the event will be served free of charge. 

Full list of challenges will be sent to participants in January. At that point, participants will be asked to rank challenges by interest for team formation purposes. 

For additional information, please visit: mitbreakingthemold.com, where challenges, speakers, agenda, and sponsors are being updated regularly!

NOTE: $20 ticket fee will be refunded upon attendance.

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8th Annual Conference on Advancing Human Progress
Friday, February 22,6:30 PM – Saturday, February 23, 5:00 PM EST
BU, Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Road, Boston

It is my pleasure to invite you to the Pardee Graduate Council's 8th Annual Pardee Conference on Advancing Human Progress. The event will be hosted at Boston University on February 22nd and 23rd. We want to invite you to our dinner in honor of Dr. Rita Kiki Edozie who will be speaking on “Choosing Its [African] Own Partners: Navigating “Infantilization” and Agency in a Post-Liberal World.” We hope to see you the next day at the conference as well. 
This is an excellent opportunity to see both Pardee students and students from the greater Northeast present their research and hard work. We will have panels based on the topic area such as public diplomacy, the role of civil society, and the political economy of war.
We kindly ask that you RSVP here by February 18th.
Please contact pardeegc.bu@gmail.com with any questions.

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Friday, February 22 - Sunday, February 24
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Tech for Truth Hackathon
Friday, February 22 - Sunday, February 24
MIT, Building E70, 12th Floor, 1 Broadway, Cambridge

How will we use technology to find and communicate truth in the 21st century?

Theme areas:
Track 1: Using technology to understand the impact of climate change to enable and support aid and humanitarian efforts
Track 2: Truth in a digital world (i.e. combatting fake news, social media bots, and deep fakes)
Track 3: Ensuring supply chain integrity
Prize:  The winning team in each track will receive Platinum passes to SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, TX with roundtrip airfare and lodging.

Hosted by: MIT Innovation Initiative
Sponsor: Lockheed Martin

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Friday, February 22
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Community Engagement Training
Friday, February 22
9:00am - 4:00pm
MAPC, Conference Room, 60 Temple Place, Boston
Registration fee: $100 Regular, $50 Student/Americorps/Intern

Instructors:  MAPC Community Engagement Division
Are you kicking off a community planning process and beginning to think about outreach and engagement? Are you feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to start? Have you had little success in engaging more than the usual suspects?

This hands-on interactive training proposes 5 Steps that break down the process of creating a public participation strategy. Learn best practices for thoughtful community engagement including examples of meeting design and engaging ways of getting public participation outside of the traditional public meeting format.

Done right, community engagement builds trust – even when consensus is out of reach. It brings fresh thinking, new voices, and creates a more informed, involved public. It brings people into the process, and brings the process to them. That means new ideas, new participants – and plans with wider support.

This training is for anyone who wants to enhance their outreach practices, including municipal staff and others doing similar work.  It includes a Community Engagement Guide, a Strategy Chart, example activities and more! 

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) is a regional planning agency serving the people who live and work in the 101 cities and towns of Metropolitan Boston. Our mission is promoting smart growth and regional collaboration. Making sure we are working for the best interests of everyone in the Metro Boston Region is a critical component of MAPC’s mission. Therefore, effective community outreach and civic engagement is at the core of our success!

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NULab: Climate Change/Crisis/Creativity Conference
Friday, February 22
9:00am - 5:30pm
Northeastern, Raytheon Amphitheater, 120 Forsyth Street, Boston 

Join us for a one-day conference, “Climate Change/Crisis/Creativity,” featuring lightning talks by Northeastern faculty and staff, presentations by artists whose work engages with climate change, a hands-on workshop session, and a keynote lecture by Bethany Wiggin, University of Pennsylvania.


This all-day conference will begin with lightning talk presentations by a range of Northeastern faculty and staff whose research relates to climate change:
Daniel Aldrich, Political Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Joan Fitzgerald, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Brian Helmuth, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Laura Kuhl, Public Policy and Urban Affairs and International Affairs
Kyla Van Maanen, Global Resilience Institute
Dietmar Offenhuber, Art + Design and Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Jennie Stephens, Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Dean’s Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy
John Wihbey, Journalism
Sara Wylie, Sociology and Health Science

Following these talks will be a keynote address by Bethany Wiggin, co-founder of the Data Refuge project. After lunch, there will be a hands-on workshop session and then a panel of presentations by artists whose creative works intersects with climate change:
Carolina Aragón, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, UMass Amherst
Geoffrey Hudson, Composer, creator of “A Passion for the Planet”
Sarah Kanouse, Art + Design, Northeastern University

Schedule
9:am: Breakfast and registration
9:15am: Welcome
9:30 to 11:15am: Lightning talks by Northeastern faculty and staff
11:30am to 12:45pm: Keynote: Bethany Wiggin
2:45 to 2pm: Lunch
2 to 3:30pm: Hands-on workshop session
4 to 5:30pm: Artist presentations: Carolina Aragón, Geoffrey Hudson, and Sarah Kanouse

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BU Questrom TechConnect 2019: Disrupt
Friday, February 22
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM EST
BU, Questrom School of Business, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
Cost:  $25 – $35

Please join us for Questrom’s 5th Annual TechConnect Conference, an event that brings together a diverse audience of students and professionals. This year's conference will highlight the impact that disruptive technologies are having on the business landscape. Featured breakout panels will cover a variety of topics including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Cybersecurity, and Internet of Things (IoT). 
Schedule: 
10:00am - 10:30am Registration 
10:30am - 11:15am Opening Keynote 
11:30am - 12:00pm Oracle Drone Product Demo 
12:00pm - 1:30pm Networking Lunch 
1:45pm - 3:00pm Breakout Panels
3:15pm - 4:00pm Closing Keynote 
4:00pm - 5:00pm Networking Reception
Keynote Speakers
Madge M. Meyer -- Former EVP, CIO, and Technology Fellow at State Street Corporation
Paul Krasinski -- CEO and Founder of Epicenter Experience
Participating Companies
Oracle 
CVS Health/Aetna 
Dell EMC 
State Street Corporation
Buoy Health
iRobot
Crayon 
LIFARS 
Neurala 
If purchasing a student ticket please bring a student ID to validate your affiliation with a univeristy.

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Global Change and the Ecology of Vector-Borne Disease
Friday, February 22
12:00pm to 1:00pm
MIT, Parsons Laboratory, 48-316, 15 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Prof. Erin Mordecai, Biology Department, Stanford University
Global anthropogenic changes in climate, land use, species invasions and extinctions, and population growth and movement are rapidly transforming the Earth's ecosystems and with them, the landscape of human health. Vector-borne diseases spread by mosquitoes and other biting arthropods are particularly prone to responding to global change because transmission depends on climate and habitat and how humans interface with them. In this talk, I present our work on how changing climate and land use affect a range of diseases including malaria, dengue, and Zika, and how humans can respond to that changing risk. Our work shows that understanding vector ecology is critical for predicting changes in disease burden because many responses are nonlinear and complex. By taking a mechanistic approach we show that intermediate temperatures (25-29°C) are optimal for transmission of malaria, dengue, and other pathogens, suggesting that warming climate will shift, rather than expand, the seasonal and geographic burden of disease. At a local scale, climate interacts with land use to determine vector abundance, biting rate, and infection rates in humans. Urban and sub-urban vectors like Aedes spp. do not occur in forests or forest edges, suggesting that intact forest might prevent dengue and Zika spread. By contrast, Amazonian malaria vectors thrive in forest edge habitats, and incidence is highest at edges created by deforestation. Finally, we show evidence that human behavior responds to malaria risk by reducing deforestation in the highest-incidence sites. Better understanding the complex and often nonlinear ecology of vector transmission is critical for predicting how future anthropogenic changes will affect human health—and for mitigating their impacts.

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From the Pacific Into the Anthropocene: Japanese-U.S. Research on Floating Structures, the Metabolist Movement, and Rising Sea Levels
WHEN  Friday, Feb. 22, 2019, 12:15 – 2 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, CGIS South, S153, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard University Asia Center; Co-sponsored by the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
SPEAKER(S)  Stefan Huebner, Visiting Scholar (SSRC), Harvard University Asia Center; Research Fellow, National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute
Chair: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Department of History; Acting Director, 2018-2019, Harvard-Yenching Institute

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#BUcityplanning Movie Screening: Paris To Pittsburgh
Friday, February 22
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (EST)
BU, College of Arts and Sciences, 725 Commonwealth Avenue, CAS-B36, Boston

Join the Boston University City Planning and Urban Affairs Program for a screening of Paris to Pittsburgh.
"From coastal cities to America's heartland, Paris to Pittsburgh celebrates how Americans are demanding and developing real solutions in the face of climate change. And as weather grows more deadly and destructive, they aren't waiting on Washington to act." -paristopittsburgh.com
Open to the public. 

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BetterMIT Innovation Across Disciplines Speaker Series
Friday, February 22
7:00pm to 8:30pm
MIT, Building W20: Stratton Student Center, La Sala, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Come here from great leaders across different fields!

Free Food!!

Chandra Briggman -- Director Venture Cafe
Prof Martin Culpepper -- MIT Project Manus
Dr. Joel Salinas -- Harvard Med School & MGH
Anantha Chandrakasan -- Dean of Engineering
Susan Silbey -- MIT Prof of Anthropology

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Saturday, February 23 - Sunday, February 24
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BetterMIT Innovation Challenge
Saturday, February 23 - Sunday, February 24
9:00am to 10:00pm
MIT, Building W20: Stratton Student Center, La Sala, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Come work on projects to better MIT & the world! Work with great resources & mentors and compete for awesome prizes! Great workshops on the innovation process, designing majors, making change happen!
Food, workshops, prizes!
Register at goo.gl/iC2o51

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Saturday, February 23
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2019 Conference on Poverty and Inequality
WHEN  Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019, 8 a.m. – 7 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, 79 John F Kennedy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Conferences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Students for the Alleviation of Poverty and Social Inequality
Harvard Kennedy School
SPEAKER(S)  Philip Alston, Keynote Speaker
See website for other speakers
COST  $30 - $35.00
CONTACT INFO Maya Kiel  mkiel@hsph.harvard.edu
DETAILS  The Conference on Poverty and Inequality is a student-run conference at the Harvard Kennedy School that focuses on social issues, public policy, and community activism relating to social and economic inequality in the United States. The conference strives to reduce poverty and inequality in the United States by creating a platform to increase dialogue, highlight effective policies, and cultivate a community of current and future practitioners.
This year, the conference will be based on the report on the United States authored by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston. Our sessions are broadly aligned to the sections of the report, and we are excited that Professor Alston will be delivering the Keynote Address.
You can learn more about the Conference and register here: conferenceonpovertyandinequality.org

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World IA Day Boston 2019
Saturday, February 23
9:00 AM – 4:30 PM EST
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Tower Auditorium, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Cost:  $20 – $50

With Richard Saul Wurtman, Moshe Sadie, Abi Jones, Mahima Pushkarna, Heather O’Neill, Alba Villamil, Dan Klyn
World IA Day Boston 2019 is a one-day event celebrating information architecture and this year's global theme, "Design for Difference."

Your registration includes:
An amazing program with a rare opportunity to learn from major design leaders like Richard Saul Wurman, Moshe Safdie, Abi Jones, and more, all in one place. (Visit the WIAD website for speaker bios.)
Morning coffee/tea
Lunch
Giveaways & raffles
Most importantly, this event relies on community support—your contribution helps provide necessary resources for the success of this non-profit, volunteer-run event.
For information about volunteering or to discuss corporate sponsorship, contact boston@worldiaday.org.
Program
Design for Difference involves designing through conversation. Diverse points of view come together in dialogue, giving us a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. For this year’s World IA Day, we’ve planned a series of conversations and talks with a varied list of speakers, special guests, and you (the audience).
8:00 am – 9:15 am: Registration, Coffee, Networking
9:15 am – 9:30 am:  Opening Remarks
9:30 am – 10:30 am:  A Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman and Moshe Safdie. An on-stage conversation between life-long friends and fellow students of Louis Kahn.
10:30 am – 10:45 am: Break
10:45 am – 12:00 pm:  A Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman and Special Guests (to be announced)
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm: Lunch (provided)
1:00 pm – 4:30 pm:  Lightning talks and discussion with Abi Jones, Mahima Pushkarna, Heather O’Neill, Alba Villamil, and Dan Klyn
To help shape the day's conversations, send your questions for our speakers to boston@worldiaday.org or tweet them to @WIADBOS.
Location
Visit the WIAD website for the location, directions, and other details.
This is a rain or shine event. We'll see you on February 23rd!
This year's celebration is hosted by MassArt.

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The Every Voice Advocacy Summit
Saturday, February 23
9:30 AM – 3:30 PM EST
Harvard, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

This summit is an opportunity to bring together activists and students from across Massachusetts working to pass sexual violence reforms.

For far too long, university administrators and lawmakers have failed to implement solutions that create communities free of sexual violence afflicting schools across the country. In Massachusetts — home to over 114 universities and 250,000 students — legislators have a particular duty to take action. The Every Voice Summit is an exciting opportunity to build, galvanize, and mobilize our intercollegiate network of activists and affiliated organizations for passing long-overdue legislation at the statehouse. 

Guided by the Every Voice Coalition mission to fight sexual violence on campuses across Massachusetts, the Summit will be student-centered & action-focused. Attendees will be briefed on the law & legislative priorities, develop advocacy skills to use from campus to Congress, and hear from experienced perspectives in the field. Through both plenary panels and training sessions, students will gain the tools needed for holding institutions accountable.

For more information please visit our website: http://everyvoicema.org/
Or venmo: @Every-voice

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Identity In Industry 
Saturday, February 23
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
Wentworth Institute of Technology - Center for Engineering, Innovation & Science Commons, 555 Parker Street, Boston

Gallery Walk | Alumni Panel | Professional Panel | & More 
This event is designed to challenge the minds of individuals, to understand how intersectionality impacts the daily work life of professional and students.

Learning Outcomes: 
Dive deep to strengthen understanding of intersectionality, systemic issues regarding race & ethnicity based on perspective. 
Learning through curiosity, discussion and sticky notes to spark conversations of how to create an inclusive space for all. 
Building strong conversations that seeks diverse perspectives and include the voices of racially diverse people to ensure positive dialogue is protected and sustained in the workplace. 

Increase understanding of the climate of various institutions, racial climate of the united states and the lack of progression with increasing diversity in the tech industry.

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Sunday, February 24
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Biophilia Series: Walking Meditation and Fellowship in the Spirit of Longfellow
Sunday, February 24
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST
Mt Auburn Cemetary, Bigelow Chapel, Chapel Avenue, Cambridge

We will enter the environment of Mount Auburn in a contemplative walk from Bigelow Chapel with guided meditation incorporating the Poems of Longfellow.

After a 30 minute walk we return to Bigelow Chapel for hot cocoa, and a brief welcome followed by a 45 minute session of sitting meditation with meditation guidance based on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. All are welcome, regardless of experience or religious background.

Chairs will be provided along with a limited number of meditation cushions. Feel free to bring a cushion if you prefer to sit on the floor.

Rich Snow has been a meditation instructor with Rigpa Fellowship for 26 years, and currently hosts weekly meditation sessions in Waltham. Rich has studied with teachers in the Nyingma and Drikung Kaygu Buddhist traditions as well as the indigenous Bon tradition of Tibet.

Program runs rain or shine, we will adapt to the weather.
Registration required, limited Enrollment

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Monday, February 25
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Program on Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate [PAOC] Colloquium: Julien de Wit (MIT)
Monday, February 25
12:00pm to 1:00pm
MIT, Building 54-915, 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

About this Series
The PAOC Colloquium [PAOCC] is a weekly interdisciplinary seminar series that brings together the whole PAOC community. Seminar topics include all research concerning the physics, chemistry, and biology of the atmospheres, oceans and climate, but also talks about e.g. societal impacts of climatic processes. The seminars take place on Monday from 12-1pm in 54-923. Lunch is provided after the seminars to encourage students and post-docs to meet with the speaker. Besides the seminar and lunch, individual meetings with professors, post-docs, and students are arranged. Contact the 2018/2019 Coordinators: paoc-colloquium-comm@mit.edu.

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Waking Up to the Internet Platform Disaster
Monday, February 25
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET
Harvard, Austin Hall, Austin Hall North Room 100, 1515 Massachusetts AVenue, Cambridge

Roger McNamee
Lawrence Lessig
Join us for a conversation with Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook and Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School.

Facebook, Google and other internet platforms employ a business model – surveillance capitalism – that is undermining public health, democracy, privacy, and innovation in unprecedented ways. They use persuasive technology to manipulate attention for profit.  They use surveillance to build data sets with the goal of influencing user behavior. The negative externalities of internet platforms are analogous to those of medicine in the early 20th century and chemicals in the mid-20th century, situations that required substantial regulatory intervention. 

This event will be live webcast at https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-25/waking-internet-platform-disaster at noon on event date.

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The Cost of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Monday, February 25
12:00PM
Harvard, Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge

Jim Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University
Lunch will be served. This event is free and open to the public. 

HKS Energy Policy Seminar

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Sociology Department Seminar: Down Out and Under Arrest: How Policing Shapes Everyday Life in Urban Poor Communities
Monday, February 25
12:00 pm to 1:30 pm 
BU, Room 241, 100 Cummington Mall, Boston

Forrest Stuart, Associate Professor of Sociology, Stanford University, will present his work “Down Out and Under Arrest: How Policing Shapes Everyday Life in Urban Poor Communities.”Since the 1990s, American cities have embraced hyper-aggressive policing policies. Drawing on over 7 years of in-depth, ethnographic fieldwork alongside police and residents in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and on Chicago’s South Side, Dr. Forrest Stuart analyzes how the omnipresent threat of harmful police contact reshapes the cultural contexts and patterned behaviors in criminalized neighborhoods. In the hope of reducing such police contact, residents adopt a particular cognitive schema—which he refers to as “cop wisdom”—that transforms the way residents understand and interact with physical environments, peers, and strangers. He traces how cop wisdom leads to new and potentially troubling forms of behavior and social interaction.

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American Geomimesis: The Earth's Past and Engineering Environments
Monday, February 25
12:15PM
Harvard, CGIS South S050, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
Please RSVP via the online form by Wednesday at 5PM the week before.

Daniel Francis Zizzamia, Harvard, Solar Geoengineering, will discuss "."

STS Circle at Harvard

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Opioid Epidemic & Harm Reduction: Social Work, Public Health & Emergency
Services Approaches
Monday, February 25
5:30 – 7:00 pm
BU, Kilachand Center, 610 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

This event will feature diverse perspectives of individuals working at the forefront of the opioid epidemic. Panelists will discuss care for people who use opioids (or other substances), and opportunities for prevention, harm reduction, and inter-professional collaboration.

Speakers:
Chief Scott Allen, Chief of Police, East Bridgewater; Member of the PAARI (Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative) National Advisory Police Council
Caitlin Clark, MSW, Social Worker, Project RESPECT Clinic, Boston Medical Center
Tyshaun Perryman, Recovery Coach, Project RECOVER, Boston Medical Center
Clare Schmidt, MPH, Program Coordinator, AHOPE Needle Exchange, Boston Public Health Commission
Christopher Salas-Wright, PhD, MSW, Assistant Professor, Boston University School of Social Work, moderator

The first half will be focused on panelists’ experiences in the field and the second half will be a moderated panel discussion with Q&A from the
audience.

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CDD Forum - Nerding-out Over Design and Social Justice
Monday, February 25
6:00pm
MIT, Building 9-255, 105 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Jason Schupbach, Director of the Design School at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, ASU
Nerding-out Over Design and Social Justice: Insights from a recovering Federal employee who tried to help the designers working to make America better. Come hear an inside view on how the Federal government supports good urban design, and to hear about the people and projects across the country that are building more equitable communities.

Jason Schupbach is the Director of the Design School at Arizona State University. Previous to this position he was Director of Design and Creative Placemaking Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw all design and creative placemaking grantmaking and partnerships, including Our Town and Design Art Works grants, the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, and the NEA's Federal agency collaborations. Previously, Jason served Governor Patrick of Massachusetts as the Creative Economy Director, tasked with growing creative and tech businesses in the state. He formerly was the Director of ArtistLink, a Ford Foundation funded initiative to stabilize and revitalize communities through the creation of affordable space and innovative environments for creatives. He has also worked for the Mayor of Chicago and New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. He has written extensively on the role of arts and design in making better communities, and his writing has been featured as a Best Idea of the Day by the Aspen Institute.

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Social Media 101 - How to Make the Most of Your Digital Presence w/ AIMC
Monday, February 25
6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST
Microsoft Store Prudential Center, 800 Boylston St #27, Boston

You hear it all the time from social media and marketing professionals to your own children, that you need to be active daily on all of the social media platforms for your personal brand or business to survive in today's digital world. It can get confusing and overwhelming managing your time on social media and understanding what works and what doesn't. 
The purpose of this presentation is to review the major social media platforms and their purpose as well as some tips/techniques to make the most of your time on the social platforms whether it is for personal growth or to build your business & career.
Jeffrey DeSocio, Owner/Principal of AIMC Business Solutions, will be the guest speaker and will provide a great overview of the "A Social Media 101 - How to Make the Most of Your Digital Presence"
The event will take place on Monday, February 25th from 6:30pm - 8pm at the Microsoft Store in the Prudential Center, Boston.

Our event is a combination of networking and presentation. Here is the agenda:
6:30pm - 6:45pm: Introductions and Networking
6:45pm - 7:30pm: "A Social Media 101 - How to Make the Most of Your Digital Presence"
7:30pm - 8:00pm: Q/A and More Networking
More details to follow.

This event is being run by AIMC Business Solutions. We look forward to meeting you.

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Design for Augmented Intelligence
Monday, February 25
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST
IDEO Cambridge, 80 Prospect Street, Cambridge
Cost:  $17 – $22

Data is shaping how we live and consume digital services today. Design has long been about creating tools that augment human experiences. Now with the development of artificial intelligence, we are faced with new possibilities. How can we use AI to make things better for people?

Join us for a conversation about “augmented intelligence.” IDEO believes that data science and machine learning can help us design intelligent products, services, and systems that improve people’s everyday lives. In order to have a truly positive impact, AI-powered technologies must be grounded in human needs and work to extend and enhance our capabilities, not replace them.

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The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai
Monday, February 25
7:00 pm
Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline

Elizabeth Flock in conversation with Min Jin Lee
Elizabeth Flock has observed the evolving state of India from inside Mumbai, its largest metropolis. She spent close to a decade getting to know these couples—listening to their stories and living in their homes, where she was privy to countless moments of marital joy, inevitable frustration, dramatic upheaval, and whispered confessions and secrets. The result is a phenomenal feat of reportage that is both an enthralling portrait of a nation in the midst of transition and an unforgettable look at the universal mysteries of love and marriage that connect us all.

Elizabeth Flock is a reporter for PBS NewsHour. She began her career at Forbes India magazine, where she spent two years as a features reporter in Mumbai, and has worked for U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post. She has also written for major outlets, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Hindustan Times, and The Hindu. She lives in Washington, DC. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea is her first book.

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Tuesday, February 26
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EBC Climate Change Program: The Challenge of Designing Systems for an Uncertain Climate Future
Tuesday, February 26
Registration: 7:30 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
Program: 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Pierce Atwood LLP, 100 Summer Street, 2nd Floor, Boston
Cost:  $50 - $185

This EBC Climate Change program explores the design and liability issues associated with designing resilient systems that are able to withstand increased demands due to climate change impacts. Traditionally, design professionals rely on historical data to design systems that have a 50 to 100 year timeframe. Due to the impacts of climate change, historical data may not be the appropriate basis of design for future systems. This EBC program will explore the dilemma that design professionals have in designing systems with uncertain design parameters. It will also explore the potential exposures and liabilities associated with designing for an uncertain future.

Ample time is provided for discussion with program speakers during the moderated panel discussion.

General Continuing Education Certificates are awarded by the EBC for this program (3.5 training contact hours). Please select this option during registration if you wish to receive a certificate.

Program Chair:
Scott Turner, Director of Planning, Nitsch Engineering
Speakers:
Sandy Brock, Chief Engineer, Nitsch Engineering
Barbara Landau, Counsel, Noble, Wickersham & Heart LLP
Deanna Moran, Director, Conservation Law Foundation Massachusetts
Ellen Watts, President & Co-Founder, Architerra, Inc.

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Speaker Series: James Bennet
Tuesday, February 26
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Harvard, Wexner Conference Room, Wexner Building, Room 434AB, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, is in charge of the Opinion department. He oversees the editorial board and the Letters and Op-Ed sections. Mr. Bennet became editorial page editor in May 2016. Before this role, Mr. Bennet was the president and editor in chief of The Atlantic. Under Mr. Bennet, who was named editor in 2006, The Atlantic substantially increased its editorial reach and impact while returning to profitability for the first time in recent history. Adweek named Mr. Bennet editor of the year in 2012 and Ad Age did the same in 2009. The Atlantic was honored with the National Magazine Award four times during his tenure, including Magazine of the Year and best website, for TheAtlantic.com.

Before joining The Atlantic, Mr. Bennet worked for The Times for 15 years in several roles, including Detroit bureau chief, White House correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief. He also served as a staff writer for The Sunday Magazine. Before joining the Times, Mr. Bennet was an editor with The Washington Monthly. He and his wife have two sons.

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Fighting fake science: Barriers and solutions
Tuesday, 26 February
12 noon
Webinar

Ivan Oransky, M.D., New York University and  Richard Harris, B.Sc.
It is no secret that science has come under increasingly derisive attacks in recent years. There are those who view science as being inconsistent, untrustworthy, and even unethical. The findings by some researchers revealing that many published experiments cannot be easily repeated—prompting the so-called reproducibility crisis—have further fueled this narrative and led to serious concerns about wasteful spending on bioscience research. Recent media reports about the gene-editing experiments performed on human embryos by rogue Chinese scientist He Jiankui have given rise to fears that science operates with lax ethics. On the flip side, scientists face overwhelming pressure to publish and win grants, creating an atmosphere in which ethical and scientific standards are being squeezed to the breaking point. Although science provides enormous value to society, this message is often drowned out by the negative press, a situation made more critical when solid science is depicted as fake and fake science as real.

This webinar attacks the issue of fake science head-on, examining what can be done to combat bad science and how good science can be encouraged and promoted. The expert panel will discuss solutions to counteract fake science and explore how the scientific community can better communicate truth over falsehood.

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Goodbye California? The New Tech Worker Market
Tuesday, February 26
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Harvard,  Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West B (Room 2019, Second Floor), 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Moira Weigel
Yarden Katz
The past several months have seen a wave of worker actions at major tech firms. Tech workers have challenged their company's contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other government agencies. They have organized for safe and equitable workplaces, free from sexual harassment and discrimination. They are demanding better wages, benefits, and working conditions for both white and blue collar contractors. My talk will place these actions in context, drawing on several years of research and writing on the movement and my work as an editor of Logic magazine and publisher of the book Tech Against Trump (2017). In addition, I will propose that these actions point to the need for new frameworks for interpreting the culture or world view of the tech industry--frameworks beyond "The Californian Ideology" that has dominated since the 1990s. To this end, I visit several recently proposed alternatives for thinking about "tech work" (e.g. platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism) that members of tech worker organizations themselves have studied and drawn on. 

Join us for a presentation by Moira Weigel, followed by a conversation with recent Berkman Klein Fellow, Yarden Katz.

This event will be live webcast at https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/goodbye-california at noon on event date.

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Japan's Antiracism Movements: Gendered Negotiations of Violence and Vulnerability
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, CGIS Knafel Building, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262), 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Program on U.S.-Japan Relations
SPEAKER(S)  Vivian Shaw, Postdoctoral Fellow, WCFIA Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University
Moderated by Christina Davis, Acting Director, WCFIA Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Professor of Government and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
COST  Free and open to the public

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Technology, Science, and Frontiers in the Arts
Tuesday, February 26
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
MIT, Wong Auditorium, Tang Center, Building E51, 2 Amherst Street, Cambridge

A symposium at MIT exploring the intersection of the frontiers of science and technology with artistic practice.

Co-organized by MIT.nano and the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), this afternoon symposium will examine art forms and expressions enabled by the emergence of new materials and by advances in computing paradigms. The program will showcase artistic collaborations and innovations from across disciplines. The four sessions are:

1. Frontiers: Art and Computing
2. Frontiers: Art and Materials
3. Frontiers: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Arts
4. Collaborations in Art, Science, and Technology at MIT

Each session will feature lightning talks, panels, and presentations from an interdisciplinary array of MIT faculty, visiting artists, and other researchers, practitioners, and innovators.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration required.

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Coded Computing: A Transformative Framework for Resilient, Secure, and Private Distributed Learning
Tuesday, February 26
4:00pm to 5:00pm
MIT, Building 32-155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Salman Avestimehr, University of Southern California 
ABSTRACT:  This talk introduces "Coded Computing”, a new framework that brings concepts and tools from information theory and coding into distributed computing to mitigate several performance bottlenecks that arise in large-scale distributed computing and machine learning, such as resiliency to stragglers and bandwidth bottleneck. Furthermore, coded computing can enable (information-theoretically) secure and private learning over untrusted workers that is gaining increasing importance in various application domains. In particular, we present CodedPrivateML for distributed learning, which keeps both the data and the model private while allowing efficient parallelization of training across untrusted distributed workers. We demonstrate that CodedPrivateML can provide an order of magnitude speedup (up to ~30x) over the cryptographic approaches that rely on secure multiparty computing.

BIOGRAPHY;  Salman Avestimehr is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and co-director of Communication Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 and M.S. degree in 2005 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2003.  His research interests include information theory and coding, distributed computing, and machine learning. Dr. Avestimehr has received a number of awards, including a Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Young Investigator Program (YIP) award from the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and several best paper awards. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a General Co-Chair of the 2020 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).

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Focus on Russia: Putinism
Tuesday, February 26
4:30pm to 6:00pm
MIT, Building E40-496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge

What is Vladimir Putin up to? Drawing on his new study, Brian Taylor will argue that we can only understand Putin’s Russia if we understand the set of ideas, emotions, and habits that influence how Team Putin views the world.

Each semester the MIT Security Studies Program, together with the MISTI MIT-Russia Program, and the MIT Center for International Studies, presents a speaker series entitled “Focus on Russia,” which considers a number of current issues in Russian domestic and foreign policies. The public is welcome to attend.

About the Speaker:  Brian Taylor is Professor and Chair of Political Science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Copies of Taylor's latest book The Code of Putinism will be available for purchase for purchase at the event.

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Public Program:  Artist Talk by Olafur Eliasson
Tuesday, February 26
6:00pm
MIT,  Building 32-123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Join us for the dedication of Northwest Passage by Olafur Eliasson. This program is in celebration of one of the newest additions to MIT’s Public Art Collection. Olafur Eliasson works through multiple mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. This piece is a site-specific work for the ceiling of the breezeway of Building 12, MIT.nano.

Please note: this event is SOLD OUT. Additional tickets will be made available 2 weeks before the event. Please stay tuned for more information.

About MIT’s Percent-for-Art Program
The MIT List Visual Arts Center maintains one of the most active Percent-for-Art programs in the country.  Over the years MIT’s campus public art collection has continued to grow with new commissions by important and critically acclaimed contemporary artists.

All programs are free and open to the general public.

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Yemen: The Human Cost of War, a conversation with Abby Maxman, CEO & President of Oxfam America
Tuesday, February 26
6:00pm to 7:30pm
Northeastern, Renaissance_Park, 909, 1135 Tremont Street, Boston

Abby Maxman is the president and CEO Oxfam America, a global non-profit dedicated to ending the injustice of poverty. Abby brings more than twenty five years of experience in international humanitarian relief and development to her role. In this talk, she will discuss her recent trip to Yemen and the ongoing humanitarian crisis there.

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MIT Water Night
Tuesday, February 26
6:00pm to 9:00pm
MIT, Building 50: Walker Memorial, 50-140, 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

Come join the MIT Water Club for its annual Water Night, a family-friendly event to celebrate water on the evening of Feburary 26 with research posters, art exhibits, interactive demos, and more. Researchers at MIT, local universities and industries will present their water-related work. In addition to a research showcase, we will feature artistic and experimental displays, as well as company and NGO tables! Open to everybody -- attendance is FREE and food will be provided. Don't miss this amazing opportunity to interact with the local water community!

Call for Presenters: Are you working on a great water-related topic? Do you have an experiment that you'd like to show the world? Do you have cool artistic items - pictures, paintings, displays, etc - related to water? Are you a company or organization working in the water space? Then hesitate no more and come present at the MIT Water Night by filling out the form on ourwebsite! Over $1000 in prizes available to the top presenters.

Volunteering Opportunities are available with the MIT Water Night organizing team. If you are interested in artistic and scientific content development, or gaining experience in PR, fundraising, or event organizing, please send an email to water-night@mit.edu expressing your interests and our team will get in contact with you.

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WHERE DOES THE PATH OF VIRTUE LIE ON ENGINEERING HUMAN GENOMES?:  Faculty Lecture with Professor Louis M. Guenin
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019, 6:30 – 8 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard Club of Boston, 374 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Education, Ethics, Health Sciences, Lecture, Science
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard Club of Boston
SPEAKER(S)  Professor Louis M. Guenin
COST  Complimentary with registration
CONTACT INFO  To register, contact Matt Hegarty at mghegarty@post.harvard.edu
DETAILS  WHERE DOES THE PATH OF VIRTUE LIE ON ENGINEERING HUMAN GENOMES?
Advances in molecular biology have yielded efficient laboratory maneuvers by which to select components of a human genome. Philosopher Louis M. Guenin, Lecturer on Ethics in Science in the Department of Microbiology, Harvard Medical School, who works in moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science, will discuss how fundamental moral reasoning may be brought to bear on whether and how it is virtuous to practice human genetic engineering.

Concerning a related controversial practice, embryonic stem cell research, his book The Morality of Embryo Use (Cambridge University Press), named Outstanding Academic Title for 2009, presents a justification, constructed within an overlapping moral consensus, for the use of donated embryos in service of humanitarian ends. He has served as a consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services on research ethics and as co-chair of the Ethics Committee, International Society for Stem Cell Research. In other writings he has discussed issues in distributive justice, the patentability of human life forms, and the theory of social choice.

On the one hand, genetic engineering poses the prospect of curing and preventing diseases of known genetic origin. On the other hand, such interventions pose the risk of errors. We shall hear how these prospects, joined with concerns of propriety even if risk can be minimized, pose a challenging question for collective resolution.

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Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: David Hartt, “Urban Futures of the Recent Past”
WHEN  Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019, 6:30 – 8 p.m.
WHERE  Harvard, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Art/Design, Conferences, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard University Graduate School of Design
SPEAKER(S)  David Hartt
CONTACT INFO Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.
DETAILS  This talk borrows the sub-title from Reyner Banham’s seminal book Megastructure, published in 1976.  As a reference, Banham’s text critiques the failure of translating the energy and optimism of 60’s era civic projects into lasting institutions; thus creating fertile conditions for the seeds of our own post-ideological crisis to germinate in the capitalist restructuration of the mid 70’s.  Hartt will focus on the relationship between the speculative and documentary aspects of his practice and, in particular, works that continue this narrative forward into our own age of fiction.
David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.

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An Introduction to Conscious Language
Tuesday, February 26
6:30 pm
Impact Hub Boston, Edison Room, 15th floor, 50 Milk Street, Boston

This February, EFA Boston will be having Jill Campbell come talk about conscious language.
Often without our realizing it, our word choices can make the difference between presenting a biased, potentially stigmatizing message and a respectful, inclusive one. This talk will cover some language categories in which unconscious bias is common and suggest alternatives to problematic terms so that we can all ensure we are being mindful of a variety of readers’ perspectives.
Jill Campbell is the senior copy editor at America's Test Kitchen, where she has edited the nationally distributed magazines Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country as well as the recent New York Times best seller The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs. She has earned editing certificates from the University of Chicago and Emerson College and has been a member of ACES: The Society for Editing since 2014. She tweets about editing, mental health, and the frustrations of the MBTA @jillysull and Instagrams too many cat photos @jillybeansoup (just kidding—there's no such thing as too many cat photos).

The entrance to the building is on Devonshire Street. Please check in at the desk with a photo ID.

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The Shape of a Life:  One Mathematician's Search for the Universe's Hidden Geometry
Tuesday, February 26
7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned mathematician and Harvard professor SHING-TUNG YAU and science writer STEVE NADIS—contributing editor to Astronomy and Discover magazines—for a discussion of their new book, The Shape of a Life: One Mathematician's Search for the Universe's Hidden Geometry.

About The Shape of a Life
Harvard geometer and Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians. Beginning with an impoverished childhood in China and Hong Kong, Yau takes readers through his doctoral studies at Berkeley during the height of the Vietnam War protests, his Fields Medal–winning proof of the Calabi conjecture, his return to China, and his pioneering work in geometric analysis. This new branch of geometry, which Yau built up with his friends and colleagues, has paved the way for solutions to several important and previously intransigent problems. With complicated ideas explained for a broad audience, this book offers readers not only insights into the life of an eminent mathematician, but also an accessible way to understand advanced and highly abstract concepts in mathematics and theoretical physics.






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