Thricely

Thricely?  Is that even a word?  No matter:  it’s what Scope Quarterly has become — Scope thricely.

This year’s spring issue appears in alumni mailboxes in late April.  But this summer we won’t be printing, and we’ll omit the summer edition every year into the foreseeable future.  We’re sorry to have less frequent contact with our readers, but in the current financial and electronic circumstances this arrangement has so many up-sides that nobody could argue against it.  

 * Saving one issue per year means the planet saves 2.2 million pages of paper, plus buckets of ink and solvents, and untold kilowatts to run huge presses and dryers and binders and bundlers.

 * Skipping that one issue saves Skidmore more than $20,000 in printing costs and another $10,000 in postage.

 * Now that Skidmore offers its ScopeMonthly e-mail and various Web news outlets, Scope readers can pick up and share a lot of news online, without having to wait for the magazine.

 * This summer’s batch of class notes will be posted online, and printouts will be added to a regular summer mailing that goes to all alumni anyway.

 * The upcoming fall magazine will be a bonanza — catching up on spring and summer news and also providing an in-depth look at the hot-button issue of whether liberal-arts colleges like Skidmore are really worth their big pricetags.

 So have a nice, slow summer.  And in September look for a big, busy fall Scope crammed with photos and stories about Skidmore’s big, busy community of students, professors, coaches and counselors, alumni, parents, guest artists…  

 

Sing a song of Darwin

         

 

 

Readers of the winter ‘09 Scope Q article about the Phi Beta Kappa lecture on Darwin’s influence in popular culture might be curious to hear one of the comic songs that was played at that lecture.  Many of hese songs are geopolitically incorrect (not to mention disturbingly racist) for our time, but they were considered pretty clever and cute at the turn of the 20th century.  Here’s a fairly tame one:  a 1904 wax-cylinder recording of J. W. Myers singing “In Zanzibar” (borrowed with permission from Glenn Sage’s tinfoil.com Web site); lyrics are printed below.

The link takes just a few seconds to start up:

\”Zanzibar\” song

 

(Trouble with this audio file?  Click this to visit tinfoil.com and listen there instead.)

 

In Zanzibar (My Little Chimpanzee)
Words by Will D. Cobb, music by Gus Edwards

First verse.
In Zanzibar, great land of glory –
A monkey Czar, so runs the story –
Came from afar with love o’er laden –
To win and woo a monkey maiden – with twang Darwinian –
Sang this opinion.

Chorus.
My little Chimpanzee, you’re all this world to me –
A branch I’ll find for thee in my own fam’ly tree –
No monkey shine for me –
A wedding fine there’ll be –
In high society – In Zanzibar.

Second verse.
In Zanzibar’s great cocoanut castle –
Hail to the Czar – each monkey vassal –
Great King Gazoo – my great ancestor –
Sang to his bride as he caressed her – with chin bone chattering
His Panzie flattering.

Racing, Saratoga style

When Scope writer Barbara Melville saddled up for a ride on the National Racing Museum’s simulator, photographer Charlie Samuels took stills to accompany the magazine article.  Then they switched:  Charlie took a ride and Barbara video’d him.  Here’s his nearly jockey’s-eye view of the simulator experience — hang on tight:

If this video box doesn’t open, just click here instead.

Virtual vivisection?

Virtual vivisection? Not really. Roy Meyers is no mad scientist, but he is mad about the value of IT in teaching lab sciences.

Many years ago Skidmore biologist Roy Meyers wanted to make a virtual human-physiology model more user-friendly for his students (see Skidmore’s upcoming fall ’08 Scope Quarterly), so he enlisted the help of Leo Geoffrion, an info-tech staffer who specialized in academic support. (Both a gearhead and an egghead—with a PhD as well as software and programming savvy—Geoffrion was long a favorite resource for faculty in a wide range of fields. He’s now a Skidmore retiree but still lives in Saratoga and works in the IT world.)

The 1980s-vintage simulator that Meyers wanted to adapt was designed for Unix and then microcomputers; inputting wasn’t easy and the output was just text in tabular format. Meyers and Geoffrion created a Web-based “wrapper” or interface. The output was made more dynamic, featuring time-series plots—that is, color-coded line graphs tracing the effects of a drug or treatment on blood pressure, pulse rate, core temperature, and other functions. The wrapper was a hit. Meyers remembers a time when the Web went down and he had the students use the modeling program without it: “They were pretty dismayed. It really wasn’t easy.”

In fact, the simulator is now so welcoming—plus Meyers has attended professional conferences and given how-to workshops—that “WebHuman” is used by people and institutions all over the world. (Click here to take it for a spin.) Of the roughly 30,000 simulation sessions run in a typical year, Meyers says, most are done from outside Skidmore—recently including the University of Seville’s med school and Australia’s University of Adelaide.

Although WebHuman is based on a narrowly drawn “average” person (without much variation for age or gender or fitness taken into account), Meyers appreciates its wide testing range: “You can track many more responses at once—for example, neural and vascular and renal physiology—than you could in a ‘wet’ lab unless it had a staggeringly complex setup.” Another advantage over real-world labs is that users can save their simulations, share them with others, and refer to them later.

He says, “I used to hear physicians or researchers sometimes say, ‘No simulation can suffice; to really understand and appreciate cardiac physiology you must hold a beating heart in your hand.’ I don’t hear that so much any more, because the models are really useful and comprehensive.” Nevertheless, he adds, “I make sure my students get experience in a live lab as well as with a model. In fact, it’s great to have both together—students can run a lab on themselves and then do the same on the Web model and compare outcomes.”

How does Meyers like other IT resources? Let him count the ways. “Just doing our data collection digitally is a huge improvement. Data can be saved, measured, compared, manipulated much more easily. The only downside is the cost, since computer hardware and software keep changing so fast.

“Digital imaging nice too—no longer having to attach a camera to the eyepiece of a microscope! In fact, digital technology is what lets a confocal microscope even be a confocal microscope. And now, from all the microscopes, you can save the image, manipulate it, share with others…

“I’ve found video helpful too. in my ‘Biology of the Mind’ course, I used to discuss the language disorders that result when particular areas of the brain are injured, and I would act them out, demonstrating how the various aphasia patients would talk. But recently, just on a whim, I searched for these aphasias on YouTube and there they were! I found some excellent videos of actual aphasia patients, so now I can provide students with a genuine, true demonstration. And I found YouTube videos of university experiments with brain-impulse sensors implanted in a monkey, some MRI imaging, a shark dissection lab, researchers discussing their work… It turns out YouTube has a lot of academically useful footage; not just TV clips and home movies.”

His take on the wired world: “You can’t not use technology. It’s infiltrated everywhere. And that’s mostly a good thing.”

More about the Skidmore “Mounties”

Deborah D’Angelo and Richard Pelzer, Skidmore’s own “Mounties,” are on-call officers who work with the college’s Campus Safety office. Their equine partners, Killian and Kodiak, belong to the officers, who manage their board, training, and care. (See a related Scope story here.) Here are some fun facts about them:

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STYLE NOTES: Both horses wear vintage World War I McClellan military saddles with wide Y-shaped girths and large leather stirrups.

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Google the McClellan and you learn that it’s named for its designer, the Civil War general George B. McClellan. While a captain in the mid-1850s, McClellan adapted it after studying Prussian and Spanish-tree saddles. Jefferson Davis—who was the U.S. secretary of war in those pre-Confederacy years—selected the McClellan for U.S. War Department use in 1859, and it remained standard cavalry issue through World Wars I and II. The McClellan is used nowadays by historical reenactors and for ceremonial events like Commencement.

The saddles are lightweight, with deep seats that look like they’d keep cavalrymen solidly in their saddles during military maneuvers. (McClellans also have a distinctive midline opening running front to back, further lightening their weight.) Killian and Kodiak work in halter/bridles, whose bits can be removed to permit easy grazing, and the horses wear festive-looking bright yellow neck cords that do double duty, serving as lead-lines when riders have time to dismount and let the horses graze.

Like the Skidmore graduates they honor with their presence on Commencement day, the horses get thoroughly spiffed up for the big event. Killian and Kodiak get baths the day before, their manes, fetlocks, and whiskers are trimmed, their feet polished. The next morning, they’re loaded on their trailers by 7:30 a.m. and undergo a final neatening, brushing, and saddling right off the trailer in the SPAC parking lot.

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SKILLS: Both horses have undergone rigorous Mounted Police training that taught them to cope with things that would startle or spook most horses—everything from baby carriages, bicycles, umbrellas, and sudden noises to sirens, flashing lights, and even gunfire. So at SPAC each year, the horses stand calmly even when barking dogs rush at them, dozens of people reach out to pet them, and the occasional toddler walks right up to hug their legs.

BIOS:
D’Angelo’s Killian is a 25-year-old chestnut Thoroughbred who stands approximately 16:1 hands tall. (A “hand,” the traditional equine unit of measurement, is four inches.) D’Angelo has owned the big chestnut since he was 13, and they served together in the Warren County Sheriff’s Mounted Unit from 1989 to this year. D’Angelo has been riding for 40 years. She has ridden and shown in both English and Western pleasure styles and competed in barrel racing. Killian is boarded at a friend’s barn.

Pelzer’s Kodiak, a 15-year-old Shire/Percheron cross, weighs 1800-plus pounds. They’ve been partners since Kodiak was two; Pelzer taught the big colt to ride and drive. Kodiak lives at home in Pelzer’s barn.

TASKS ON DUTY: At events like Commencement, explains Pelzer, “We’re there to assist in any way we can. We help with traffic and parking. Sometimes we’re needed to clear space for the grads to walk through. After the ceremony, we do lots of photo-taking”….

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–”and sometimes we do a little crowd control. This is a friendly crowd, so ‘crowd control’ means riding quietly up and explaining where we want people to move to.” Pelzer served 33 years with the New York State Park Police, where he started and directed the mounted unit. He retired seven years ago as a sergeant.

“Most people like horses. It’s in the American DNA,” he grins. Nonetheless, in his experience, it’s unique to have the horses at Commencement and other college events. Not many colleges field a mounted unit, Pelzer says, although the idea just might be catching on. “The University of Massachusetts at Amherst just started one, SUNY Albany wants to, and the city of Saratoga Springs has two and wants to add another couple.”

AVAILABILITY:
Skidmore’s mounted escort can be hired, through Campus Safety, to dress up “almost any event,” says Pelzer. The horses are “great public relations, ” adds D’Angelo. Says Pelzer, “The good thing about the horses—when you’re on them, you’re ten feet tall. Makes it much easier to get people’s attention.”

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Photos by Gary Gold and Barbara Melville

Viewer’s choice: Personal picks of the Molecules artworks

The first—and extremely eye-catching—piece of art you will encounter at the Malloy Wing entrance to Molecules That Matter, the art-and-science exhibition at the Tang through April 13, 2008, is Jean Shin’s Chemical Balance 2, and it is a doozy.

It’s a shimmering sculptural installation made of—ready for this?—hundreds of those little orange prescription pill bottles, stacked up in shining towers set on round mirrors. Similar pill-towers dangle like stalactites from the gallery’s ceiling. The longest towers and spires are dozens of pill-bottles long and they very nearly—but not quite—meet in the middle.

So why pill bottles in an art museum? Well, because the piece appears in conjunction with penicillin, one of the show’s ten major modern molecules of the twentieth century. (Interestingly, Chemical Balance can be said to relate not only to its gallery-mate, penicillin, but also to two more of the exhibition’s top molecules: the antidepressant Prozac and, of course, the orange plastic of the little vials that both drugs come in.)

But there’s more: Peer closely at the little empty bottles and you note that patients’ names, dates, and prescriptions are clearly legible on some labels, while others are heavily blacked out: donators’ choice. There are sociocultural tales typed onto those labels, if we only knew how to read them. And when light blazes through Chemical Balance 2, especially on a bright day, all that meaning transforms into a startling example of visual beauty, albeit one comically cobbed together out of stuff we usually toss or recycle.

But picking favorites among the terrific artworks on display in Molecules is a very tough choice, because as critic Lisa Bramen wrote in the Glens Falls Post-Star, there’s enough outstanding contemporary artwork in the show to make up a perfectly good show of its own. For instance, there are Bryan Crockett’s Anger, Gluttony, and Sloth, three elegant, over-sized marble sculptures of lab mice, each representing a creature genetically designed to be used in a particular kind of medical research.

And there’s a delicious 1985 wall piece by Tony Cragg called New Figuration, a semi-human-shaped wall installation, standing some eight feet tall and made of bits and pieces of brightly colored scrap plastic items pasted directly onto the gallery wall.

It’s playful and a bit poignant—all those lost toys and broken garden tools, empty Bic lighters, etc. remind us that the damn plastic will take a kazillion years to biodegrade but once discarded, it becomes as transient as autumn leaves or days of our lives. Cragg, who was honored last fall with Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture, explains cheekily in the wall text that he chose plastic garbage as his art medium because, hey, it was cheap and plentiful.

In checking out any art exhibition, there’s always one piece that falls into the fanciful category of What I’d Steal if No One Were Looking and I Knew I’d Never Get Caught With the Goods. In Molecules, it’s the complete set of Roxy Paine’s six poured-molten-plastic sculptures, gleaming black and curvy as melted candle wax.

The accompanying wall text says Paine made these luscious, sensual pieces using a computer he programmed to release the flow of liquid plastic into various patterns; they hardened into low-density polyethylene sculptures. Ranging from about a foot to maybe 18 inches high, they’re shiny, glossy, sassy, and seemingly as touchable as caramel candy or smooth polished stone. You just want to reach out and rub them.

Full disclosure: The first thing I thought of when hearing that Molecules That Matter would showcase art as well as science and cultural history, was how will the art fit in with—and stand up to—the science-power generated by this big, innovative show? You’ll be gobsmacked at how stand-alone fine the Molecules art is.

Photo credits: Art Evans, for the Tang Museum

Winter dance concert brightens chilly weekend

Scope writer Barbara Melville offers her take on last weekend’s Winter Dance Concert.

Skidmore dance students in “A Gathering” (Photo by Steve Nealey)

The tribute to dance writer and arts advocate Mae Banner, who died last April, filled the Dance Theater for three performances, on Friday and Saturday nights and Saturday afternoon. Banner would have loved every move and moment of the richly varied program, which featured seven dance works presented by six dance department faculty choreographers working in an array of dance styles.

For starters, a troop of tunic-clad dancers leaped and fluttered across the stage in Isadora Duncan’s 1910 Valse Brillante, restaged by department chair Mary DiSanto-Rose and Duncan expert Jeanne Bresciani ’72. Aliza Reidt ’08 and new transfer Sara Miller-Hornick were especially eloquent in recreating the lithe, ingenuous Isadora spirit. Next up, the Copasetics Chair Dance featured six tap dancers, butts planted and feet flying, in a routine handed down from Harlem tap-dance greats, the Copasetics. When the Skidmore dancers finished, they picked up and folded their chairs, and walked off, clearing the stage for a memorable solo by guest student dancer Devin Johnson in The Phrase, a short, intense tap piece by Tina Fretto Baird. Johnson kept a cool poker face above staccato heels and toes, with live music from Skidmore dance accompanist/pianist Carl Landa and musical buddy Charlie Tokarz on clarinet.

In Debra Fernandez’s new work, Stitch (for my father), twelve dancers, men and women, stitch-stepped across the stage in patterns suggesting quilt squares. The weird and compelling music was credited to string quartet Ethel, and Jordan Taler ’07 created the handsome video backdrop; filmed in somber cream-and-black, it featured sewing machines and what appeared to be operating-room equipment, rhythmically pumping in tempos that matched the dancers’.

The new work most clearly dedicated to the Banner memory was Mary Harney’s A Gathering, performed to new music from Landa and inspired by “the spirit of klezmer music,” which Banner loved. Starting out with slow, mournful movements, the piece ended in gale-force klezmer, with ten dancers whirling to Landa’s catchy, bouncy tune, performed live on piano, clarinet, and accordion.

The program closed with a boldly sweet work by Debra Pigliavento, What a Wonderful World—all simplicity and smiling dancers—and Holberg Suite, a lushly beautiful ballet choreographed by Denise Warner Limoli to Edvard Grieg’s three-movement work. Corps dancers in pale peach, soloists in deeper apricot, and partnering pairs clad in russet made both elegant lines and eye-pleasing visual impact. Brendan Duggan ’10 danced like a flame.

“Over the past few years,” Mae Banner wrote appreciatively in 2006, “the Skidmore College dance program has become so rich and has branched out to so many dance forms that one…concert is not enough to hold them all.” She was right.

Athletics at Skidmore

As promised in the fall ’07 issue of Scope, here are a few extra thoughts and quirks about athletics at Skidmore. Gimme a shout (srosenbe@skidmore.edu) with any thoughts or quirks of your own on this topic.

1 — summer-camp diversity. In recruiting for varsity athletes, Skidmore’s coaches often visit summer sports camps, whose participants don’t necessarily attend the “feeder schools” from which we often draw applicants and enrollees. These kids might never hear of or consider applying to Skidmore otherwise. That’s one reason that the admissions staff and others cite athletics as a diversifier of the student body.

2 — food for thought. Sociology professor and Athletics Council member Kate Berheide told me that an often-overlooked problem at Skidmore is meal and travel money for varsity players. Apparently Skidmore has been pretty parsimonious, although recently it increased these allowances. But the cap is still around $15 a day [--I’m doublechecking on this right now!--], which often has to cover two or even three meals. Berheide says, “You can’t feed an active athlete on that, even at McDonald’s! And you certainly can’t get healthy food.” She says she’s traveled along on a team bus and seen the coach stop at a grocery store to buy food for lunches so that she can stretch the allowance to afford a dinner for her players.

3 — an admissions trend. The article “In Recruiting, A Big Push from Small Colleges Too” (New York Times, 9/11/05) says that as college admissions nationwide grow more competitive, “high school students and their parents are looking for any edge, and an athletic resume is seen as the extra ingredient that can get a student’s name on the precious list” of admits. Skidmore’s student-affairs dean Pat Oles, corroborates that report: “Colleges used to look for well-rounded kids, but now we aim more for a well-rounded class. So we do look for some exceptional talents or experiences in individual kids. And athletes are, by definition, kids with a special talent.”

4 — big fish and small ponds. The Game of Life — the popular book that critiques college sports in the US — made an interesting point about varsity athletes and campus culture: While athletes on bigtime Division I teams are very visible to fans and even national TV audiences, they don’t have a big impact on their campuses because they’re such a small minority of the student body; by contrast, Division III athletes, like Skidmore’s Thoroughbreds, influence their campuses much more strongly because there are so many of them — around 25 to 40 percent of the student body at a typical D-III school.

Check out http://www2.skidmore.edu/athletics/ for facts and stats about Skidmore’s varsity teams.

What we’ll talk about

Welcome to the Skidmore Scope blog, “Scopedish.” Here’s where Scope editors and writers will try to share stories that didn’t make it into the final magazine, or intriguing news or fun trivia we learned during the course of reporting Scope stories, or whatever else we think might be enlightening and entertaining.

If you have requests or ideas for what you’d like to read here, or any feedback about the magazine or its Web site, just let us know. I’m at srosenbe@skidmore.edu

Thanks — and come on back every now and then.

Sue Rosenberg
Scope Editor
Skidmore College

Advice, and at least a little consent

This week the Scope staff met with three Skiddies in the newspaper and magazine business:

* Phoebe Mitchell, parent of a Skidmore sophomore, is the arts editor for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, in central Massachusetts

* Tim Blagg, UWW ‘93, is editor of the Recorder, the daily in Greenfield, Mass.

* Diana Gold Murphy ‘85 was editor of Country Living Gardener and has led a number of related magazine and online projects

They each got a night at the fabulous old Surrey Inn on campus, and in return we got to pump them for advice, critiques, and ideas to improve Scope magazine.

They scolded us for not including enough faces, and not always identifying the ones we do use. And they urged us to add a bit of text on Scope covers, to explain or preview what the cover story is about, instead of expecting the cover’s mystery to pique readers’ curiosity enough for them to want to open the cover and read.

Dang! We’ve enjoyed the covers’ mystery and curiosity. But, oh, all right.

Our little advisory session also got us talking about topics and approaches for future articles, and generated a ton of ideas to increase the interactivity of Scope — ways to invite readers to chime in about a story through Scope’s Web site, ways to collect comments or stories through the Web site and then run a compilation on the Web and in a future issue of the printed magazine, and so on.

We’re pretty jazzed about some of these new ideas. Got any of your own to throw into the mix? We’d love to hear them — just e-mail me: srosenbe@skidmore.edu