A group of New York inmates has toppled Harvard’s prestigious debate team.
It took place at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch. The Ivy League undergrads were invited last month to debate the inmates who take in-prison courses taught by Bard College faculty.
Harvard’s team won the national title this year and the world championship in 2014.
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Republicans running for president might as well skip any fundraisers at Ivy League universities like Harvard, where a new analysis shows 96 percent of faculty donations over the last three years went to Democrats.
Academia in general, and the elite northeastern schools in particular, have long been seen as a bastion for left-wing professors. Nationally, about two-thirds of college professors say they are liberal and less than a tenth identify themselves as conservative, according to one study. The imbalance at Harvard, uncovered by the student newspaper Harvard Crimson surprised even Harvard administrators.
“I am amazed at how high that number is,” Harvard Dean Michael D. Smith told the Crimson.
New signage in Divinity Hall: pic.twitter.com/D5GuyUsFAL
— Harvard Divinity (@HDSNews) October 3, 2014
When it comes to soft robots, researchers have finally managed to cut the cord.
Developers from Harvard’s School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have produced the first untethered soft robot — a quadruped that can stand up and walk away from its designers.
Working in the lab of Robert Wood, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a team of researchers that included Kevin Galloway, Michael Karpelson, Bobak Mosadegh, Robert Shepherd, Michael Tolley, and Michael Wehner was able to scale up earlier soft-robot designs, enabling a single robot to carry on its back all the equipment it needs to operate — micro-compressors, control systems, and batteries. The design is described in a paper in Soft Robotics that appeared online Sept. 1.
“Earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine in some applications, but what we wanted to do was challenge people’s concept of what a robot has to look like,” said Tolley, a research associate in materials science and mechanical engineering at the Wyss Institute and the study’s first author. “We think the reason people have settled on using metal and rigid materials for robots is because they’re easier to model and control. This work is very inspired by nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the basis for robots.”
The Harvard Crimson published an editorial urging conservatives not to apply to Harvard if they intend to criticize the university down the line for political points.
The editorial, titled “Warning: Do Not Enroll,” denigrates famous conservatives who graduated from Harvard and later sharply — and perhaps hypocritically — complained about the university’s liberal ideology, including former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly.
“If we could have spoken to these three men, we would have told them never to come to Cambridge,” wrote the staff of the Crimson. “We at The Crimson urge anyone who plans on one day scoring political points by maligning Harvard to neither apply, enroll, nor graduate from this fine institution.”
But the Crimson editorial may inadvertently support some conservatives’ assertions about the liberal campus’ hostility toward conservatives.
“Harvard liberals sure are an accepting bunch,” wrote Nathan Harden, editor of The College Fix. “I wonder where anyone ever got the idea that Harvard was hopelessly biased?”
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CAMBRIDGE — Harvard University locked the gates to its storied yard tonight to prevent protesters, including students, from erecting tents as part of the national Occupy movement.
University officials said at 9:20 p.m. they planned to allow students with identification cards back into the yard soon, but were concerned about a possible uprising from protesters not affiliated with Harvard. Some had appeared at a rally at Harvard Law School earlier in the evening.
After that rally, several hundred students and other protesters found themselves temporarily locked out of the yard. They chanted and waved signs as flashbulbs went off. Police closed a gate the protestors were trying to open, provoking cries of ‘‘let them in’’ and ‘‘the whole world is watching.’’
Harvard University Police briefly detained one demonstrator, Jeff Bridges, who yelled, ‘‘I’m a student!’’ Bridges, a third-year divinity student, said he had pushed his way in, waving his ID.
‘‘I think what they’re doing is wrong and immoral, and as a divinity student I should know,’’ he said. Police allowed him to stay inside.
Harvard students met repeatedly — sometimes for three or four hours at a time — in recent weeks to hatch their plan to occupy the university’s yard. A rotating group of undergraduates and graduate students had planned to reside in the tents for days, leaving at intervals for class or visits with family and friends. They are calling on the university to amend its investment practices and to negotiate a new contract with custodial workers.
(Daily Mail) -A memo from a University of Hawaii foreign student advisor said that Obama senior had ‘been running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied that he would “try” to stay away from the girls.’
It also considered his earlier Kenya marriage as a grounds to deny him a visa extension but concluded that ‘polygamy was not an excludable or deportation charge’.
He is further described as ‘a slippery character’, and his relationships with ‘several women’ are discussed and investigated, while questions about his ‘marital problems’ are repeatedly raised.
Another immigration memo, from June 1964, records that Harvard officials were trying ‘to get rid of him’ and ‘couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had’.