Parents and Families

Andy Palmer ’88

Andy Palmer, Class of 1988, has received the Angel Investor of the Year award from the New England Venture Capital Association’s first venture capital awards ceremony, the Boston Globe reports.

Palmer is a serial entrepreneur who has helped start, fund or found more than 25 companies in technology, health care and the life sciences. Most recently, he founded Koa Lab, a shared workspace in Harvard Square for promising start-ups. He also co-founded Data Tamer with MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. Previously, Palmer was co-founder and founding CEO of Vertica Systems (acquired by Hewlett Packard), and before that was a member of the start-up team and the SVP and CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI).

Andy earned his MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 1994 and his undergraduate degrees in English and history (with a computer science minor) from Bowdoin College in 1988.

Softball: The Bowdoin softball team dropped its opener of the NESCAC Tournament in a 3-0 loss to Middlebury. Middlebury improves to 26-9 while Bowdoin falls to 28-13. The Polar Bears will play Wesleyan in an elimination game at 10:00 a.m. Saturday while the Panthers advance to a winner’s bracket contest against Tufts.

Women’s Tennis: A sweep in doubles play propelled third-seeded Bowdoin to a sweep of sixth-seeded Trinity, 5-0, in the opening round of the 2013 NESCAC Women’s Tennis Championship Friday, hosted by Amherst College. With the win, fifth-ranked Bowdoin (14-3) advances to tomorrow’s semifinal where they square off with second-seeded (and national #3) Williams at 1:00 p.m.

Everyone knows that the northernmost settlement in Maine is Estcourt Station, right? And that the westernmost is Wilson’s Mills (?!). Now you can find out what strange unknown places define the inhabited borders of your own state, thanks to this comprehensive list compiled by The Weekend Roady.

Alicia Eggert gives a talk at TED2013 in Long Beach, Calif., earlier this year (Photo credit: Ryan Lash)

Alicia Eggert, assistant professor of art at Bowdoin, has been featured in an interview on the TED Blog. A conceptual artist who creates sculptural works using words as found objects, Eggert was awarded a TED Fellowship last fall.

In the interview Eggert talks about her artistic origins and inspirations and describes her recent experience touring around the U.K. with a neon sculpture titled “You are (on) an island.”

Eggert’s work is showcased on her website and blog.

Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic sheds light on the “Deciders,” as he calls them — the tech leaders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — who are crafting company policies for hate speech and censorship on the Internet.

The article profiles Dave Willner ’06, who leads Facebook’s six-person content policy team at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. Hundreds more staff, stationed in Austin, Denver and India, review the more than two million complaints that come in weekly about offensive material — nudity, porn, violence and hate speech.

“At the time Willner joined Facebook’s content policy team, the company had no rules on the books for what speech violated its terms of service. So Willner decided to write them himself. He chose as his model university anti-harassment codes, since he himself had just graduated from college,” Rosen writes. Eventually, this policy evolved to Facebook’s current free-speech decision to ban attacks on groups, but not on institutions — empowering “the company to resist growing calls for the wholesale deletion of speech that foreign governments and their citizens consider blasphemous.”

David McCandless, who visualizes information, ideas, stories and data on his website, Information Is Beautiful, has created a “consensus cloud” of the “books everyone should read.” The consensus comes from the sources he mined — book polls, reader surveys, Pulitzer Prize winners, Oprah’s Bookclub list, etc. He used a frequency analysis to see which book titles were mentioned the most.

Click the image to see a larger version.

Huffington Post writer Ted Harro reports on negative leadership qualities that have somehow become virtues in the workplace today. He believes that these six character flaws are celebrated because employees have come to believe that these character traits led powerful individuals to their success. In contrast, Harro outlines six characteristics that would foster respect rather than a defense/attack mode.