Parents and Families

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.

Geoffrey Canada '74 and Stanley Druckenmiller '75 on "Morning Joe."

Next week, educator Geoffrey Canada ’74 and investor Stanley Druckenmiller ’75 will visit campus to present a talk, entitled “Generational Theft: How Entitlement Spending is Stealing Opportunity from America’s Youth,” which will be streamed live on the Bowdoin Daily Sun on Tuesday evening, May 7, 2013, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. It will also be archived with other videos on Bowdoin Talks.

Following a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in which they write of their shared concern that “government spending levels are unsustainable,” Canada and Druckenmiller, though from different backgrounds and with different political beliefs, have united to bring their message to the masses, appearing on CNBC’s Closing Bell and Squawk Box, and MSNBC’s Morning Joe. They warn that failing to reform an entitlement culture, reaffirm long-run objectives, and re-establish a common purpose will mean diminished opportunities for America’s youth.

Linda Nelson '83

As a classically trained musician, it’s not surprising that music is important to Linda Nelson ’83, founding executive director of Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine. But, as she explains in Maine Public Broadcasting’s “Music That Moves Me” audio diary series, there’s a particular song that inspired her during the late 1970s, when “as in all revolutions,” she says, “we danced…a lot.” It’s a song that reminds her still that “life, even in struggle, is joyous, and we are—all—family.”

Paul Miller, a writer for the technology website The Verge, unplugged from the internet a year ago to re-examine his “real” life. What he learned surprised him.

Farmers in the “heart of tobacco country” are trying to grow chickpeas, the Wall Street Journal reports, to satisfy American’s growing appetite for hummus. Evidently, the Middle Eastern staple appeals to consumers who want to dip into a healthy snack.

“Sabra Dipping Co., a joint venture of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) and Israel’s Strauss Group Ltd., wants to cultivate a commercial crop in Virginia to reduce its dependence on the legume’s main U.S. growing region—the Pacific Northwest—and to identify new chickpea varieties for its dips and spreads,” the Journal reports.

Sales of “refrigerated flavored spreads”—a segment dominated by hummus—totaled $530 million at U.S. food retailers last year, up 11% from a year earlier and a 25% jump over 2010, according to the Journal.