Parents and Families

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.

Memorial Hall

This summer, August 8-11, Bowdoin College will present the Alumni College program, “The Afterlife of the American Civil War” — a study of culture, music, art and poetry following the Civil War.

As a part of this sesquicentennial commemoration, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives is writing a blog, On this Day in Civil War History…, as a daily reminder of what occurred 150 years ago. The posts derive from Special Collections’s historical resources: a passage from a letter to a soldier, a soldier’s diary entry, a note of condolence, a daily surgeon’s morning report, an account of activities on the home front.

Thursday [April 30, 1863]. In forenoon finished the case of Theodate Melancon….I felt obliged to vote “Not guilty” on both charged & specifications, there appearing to be ground for a very reasonable doubt in regard to his guilt, & I felt bound to give him the benefit of it.” — From the Diary of Isaac Winslow Case [Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection]

Cambodia exchange students Rada Chhorn and Kimsrung Lov

As young girls growing up in Cambodia’s countryside, both Kimsrung Lov and Rada Chhorn faced steep odds in obtaining a college education.

Lov’s father, a small business owner in a town 57 miles outside of Phnom Penh, believed that because girls were only destined to become housewives, it was a waste for them to receive an education.

Chhorn was raised on a small farm in a village with no electricity or plumbing, and her family could not afford to pay for college.

Despite these obstacles, Lov and Chhorn not only earned undergraduate degrees, but they became two of just a handful of Cambodian students to study abroad in the United States.

Read the full story here.

Zillow.com is a real estate search site that reveals prices paid for homes and  names of homeowners. Arrests.org lists mug shots by state. These are only two of the endless amount of websites that have access to your personal information including your name, birth date, address and more. While yes, this information has always been public record, the web is making it more accessible and more public.  Mashable describes what personal details are circulated online and what is being done to regulate it.

From watching TV before bed to working out late at night, we seem to have developed many sleeping habits that are counterproductive to catching a quality slumber.  Huffington Post exposes what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to these 12 sleeping myths.

Bowdoin Green Athletes Alex Tougas ’14, Tricia Thibodeau ’13 and Emma Chow ’15

The Green Athletes, a group of students dedicated to making athletics at Bowdoin more sustainable, have hooked up with Michael Aronson ’83 to collect discarded shoes and send them to merchants in West Africa.

Aronson runs a for-profit business called Rerun Shoes, based in Amherst, Mass., that collects wearable used shoes — kid’s shoes, cleats, sneakers, sandals, dress shoes for men and women — and supplies them to micro-entrepreneurs in Mali, Guinea and Liberia. The merchants refurbish the shoes and sell them at local markets.

Donated shoes can be dropped off in boxes at the Buck Center and Farley Field House.

Read the full story here.

Using the Twitter data from the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) scare, researchers at Penn State University found that negative tweets about children’s vaccines were more likely to be shared than positive ones.  By collecting 318,397 tweets about positive, negative and neutral feelings toward the swine flu, the study more generally found that a high volume of both positive and negative tweets seemed to be contagious, both encouraging users to tweet more negatively.

Students were treated to nonstop sun this weekend for the annual Ivies celebration. Guster, Hoodie Allen and Bowdoin student group Phar\os played at Saturday’s concert.

Continue here for slideshow.

Are the eyes on the back of your neck just in your imagination? Possibly. New studies have shown that in cases of uncertainty — such as when someone is wearing sunglasses — we tend to favor the notion that they are looking directly at us… even when they’re not.

“It’s a quirk of evolution, the researchers suggest: Given the possible threat that another poses, better to assume he’s lookin’ at you than to suppose he’s just benignly looking in your direction,” according to the Los Angeles Times.