Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

The Mystery of 47

February 13, 2015 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

“To the uninitiated, 47 is a mystery. To knowledgeable Pomona Sagehens, 47 is dogma. To sociologists, 47 is a prime example of a minor piece of whimsy that somehow developed into a legend of mythical proportions…”
—Pomona Student Handbook, 1985-86

In 1964, a tongue-in-cheek student project to determine whether the number 47 appeared more often in nature than other random numbers turned into a wholesale 47 hunt that has continued to this day and is even celebrated at Pomona on April 7.

After all, you can’t deny the evidence:

Pomona College is located at Exit 47 of the San Bernardino Freeway.
There are 47 pipes in the top row of the Lyman Hall organ.
At the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894, there were 47 students enrolled.
The Bible credits Jesus with 47 miracles.
The Declaration of Independence has 47 sentences.
There are 47 strings on a concert harp.
In the freshman class that entered Pomona College in the year 2000, there were 47 valedictorians.
The tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are located 47 degrees apart.

Even Hollywood has gotten in on the act. From art films to sci-fi to Will Ferrell vehicles, Pomona’s enduring in-joke has slipped past countless millions of movie-goers and tube-watchers in recent years. On TV’s Lost, 47 people survive the plane crash. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell keeps a collection of 47 G.I. Joes. Watch Monsters Inc. closely and you’ll spot an “Accident Free for 47 Days” sign on the Scare Factory floor. The 2009 blockbuster reboot of Star Trek alludes to 47 Klingon vessels being destroyed. There is even a much-viewed YouTube spoof of Jim Carrey’s The Number 23, substituting—you guessed it–the No. 47.

It goes as far back as the The Absent-minded Professor (1961). The Disney comedy features a basketball game filmed at Pomona’s old Renwick Gym. The final score? 47-46.

The recent spate of number-dropping started in the ’90s in earlier incarnations of Star Trek. Joe Menosky ’79 was a writer for The Next Generation (and later Voyager and Deep Space Nine) when he started slipping 47s into the shows. A producer eventually got wind and shut down the underground effort. But 47 keeps popping up in all sorts of shows.

If Menosky has moved on, how come our secret number keeps landing bit parts time and again? Is our 47 tradition at risk of overexposure? There’s no getting a straight answer out of Tinseltown on this sort of stuff, so—in a playful spirit—we turned to graphic novel artist Andrew Mitchell ’89 in our Fall 2009 issue of Pomona College Magazine for a creative take on the mystery (page 22 of the PDF).

Big Laughs for Joel McHale at Little Bridges

September 8, 2014 by Laura Tiffany Comments Off

mchaleblog2 Comedian Joel McHale entertained a packed house of Claremont Colleges students at Little Bridges on Saturday night.

McHale, who is the host of “Talk Soup” and stars on the sitcom “Community,” did his research, commenting that Claremont is like Tolkein’s Shire and ribbing the audience on the differences between the colleges. From his time hosting E!’s “The Soup,” McHale shared stories of angering reality TV stars like Tyra Banks and the Kardashians, as well as shared a tribute joke for Joan Rivers, before segueing into stories about raising young sons.

He even took a crack at Pomona’s beloved mascot: “Cecil the Sagehen is not very intimidating. It’s like, ‘We’re gonna beat you… if you were to eat us and we were undercooked. We’re gonna salmonella you all over the field!’”

The event was co-sponsored by the CUC Holmes Fund; Bridges Auditorium, which produced the event; and Bridges Hall of Music, which hosted the event. Each of The Claremont Colleges received a set amount of free tickets, distributed through the respective college’s student affairs staff.

Pomona College often hosts top-bill comedians, including Wanda Sykes, Eddie Izzard and Aziz Ansari in recent years.

mchalecrowd

Andrew Hong ’13

September 4, 2014 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Andrew Hong ’13 wants you to start tinkering. As Public Programs Coordinator for the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass., Hong works to shine a light on the university’s high-tech research break throughs while bringing science education to local communities. Along the way, he’s found an outlet for his passion for getting people to engage with new technology and making the field of science less intimidating and more accessible for everyone.

INNOVATION MEETS EDUCATION

At MIT, Hong organizes programs designed to demystify research and create a “public face” for the institution. To draw in children and families, the museum offers interactive discussions with MIT scientists who share their latest experiments and discoveries, from projects like creating new prosthetic body parts to designing better solar-powered lighting. Other events are geared more to an older crowd, like a program called “Drinkable Science” that explains the physics and chemistry behind the trendy art of mixology. The idea is to “sneak science into fun, everyday topics,” Hong explains.

A key mission of the museum is encouraging people to reconsider their assumptions that a certain technology or concept might be too complicated to understand. Hong tries to make visitors feel more confident about their abilities by giving them a taste of the trial-and-error process that engineers and scientists wrestle with every day. “We structure our activities with failure built in,” he says.

“There’s an expectation that you’re not going to get it right the first time.”

DELVING INTO DESIGN

One of Hong’s favorite projects has been creating a new design and engineering space called the Idea Hub, where museum-goers can experiment with unfamiliar tools and learn skills like computer programming. Visitors do hands-on activities like assembling electronic circuits and creating art with 3D printers. “Our goal is to teach people—to give people this hands-on experience—so that they feel empowered to engage with technology in the future.”

Hong has been building up his own expertise by taking advantage of the resources he’s found in Cambridge. The job gives him access to courses at MIT, where his assignments include tasks like programming 3D printers to generate artistic designs and models. “Since getting here, it’s just been a constant crash course in how to build things and how to tinker,” he says.

By expanding his knowledge, Hong says he’s been inspired to get others excited about tinkering. “It feeds back into my desire to show people that you can do this stuff. I’m a walking example of someone who didn’t have a background in this field, and now is competent enough to teach people creative problem-solving and the design process.”

FINDING HIS FIT

A neuroscience major at Pomona, Hong was always fascinated with the sciences, but didn’t picture himself as a teacher or researcher. After sophomore year he began to chart his own path, starting with a SURP project at Professor of Art Mark Allen’s L.A. nonprofit, Machine Project, where he was exposed to the idea of learning about technology through the use of art and creativity. The next summer he landed an internship funded by the Career Development Office at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, known for its participatory exhibits.

His experience in Cambridge has given Hong a clearer vision for the future. His ultimate goal is to design educational technologies for the museum field, like the kind he uses every day in his work. Wherever he ends up, Hong says he will keep following his personal career philosophy, inspired by the advice of Pomona neuroscience professor Rachel Levin.

“Her advice to me was, ‘Get really good at something you love, and convince someone that they need you.’”

On Board:

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Jack Long, chairman and co-founder of SchoolAdmin, LLC, and father of a Pomona graduate and a current student, has been named to the Pomona College Board of Trustees.

Long’s SchoolAdmin produces web-based administrative systems for K–12 independent and charter schools—more than 130 in all. Long is past chairman and co-founder of PeopleAdmin, Inc., and Lone Star Overnight, L.P., both recognized in Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately-held businesses. In 1994, he was named an Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. In 2003, Long became part of the founding faculty of the Acton School of Business, where he currently teaches. Prior to that, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business MBA program.

Long serves on the board of directors of Blue Avocado Company and Greenling, Inc. His nonprofit work includes serving on the boards of the Texas chapter of The Nature Conservancy, the Pilatus Owners and Pilots Association and the Board of Visitors of Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Business. He is a past trustee and finance chair of St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. Long and his wife, Carolyn, have chaired the Pomona College Parent’s Council for the last three years.

Currently pursuing a bachelor of science in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, Long earned his undergraduate degree in business administration from the University of Richmond and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Long and his wife make their home in Austin, Texas. He is the father of Adam Jackson Long ’13 and Carlen Elizabeth Long ’15.

Letter Box

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Old and New

The spring issue was an amazing mix of the old and the new—descriptions of some incredible people keeping the values we cherished in more bygone days when I attended Pomona and later practiced pediatrics in Claremont, and the far-out stereoscopic pictures of beautiful California.

It was uplifting for me to hear of Dr. Juan Guerra’s perseverance as he pursued his desire to truly serve his community. I was also pleased to learn that when he was told he wasn’t going make it because of his failure of a biology course, he seemed to realize that the art of medicine was more important than the science. I find that too much emphasis on the science of medicine can lock a physician into a system that won’t allow innovation and cuts off knowledge the physician can gain by listening to his/her patients.

Matt O’Connor, the young man of many talents, unabashedly speaks of his part in Christian Athletes, which shows he is aware of where his talents come from.

The addition of the stereoscopic pictures of naturally beautiful California provided some real nostalgia and balanced the “old” with the “new.”

Let me know if anyone remembers a kindly pediatrician who practiced in Claremont in the ‘60s. He has two pediatric books, with an emphasis on nutrition, that can be browsed on Amazon: books, Ralph Campbell.

—Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. ’50
Polston, Montana

3D Collector’s Item

I appreciate the quality of the content and the professional design of the Pomona College Magazine compared to similar endeavors from other colleges and universities. Your magazine outshines any others I have seen; and I hate to admit, I have attended classes or completed degrees at Scripps College, University of Colorado, University of South Florida, Western Michigan University, The University of Kansas, and Gonzaga University in addition to Pomona College (class of 1970). I am writing because you really outdid yourselves with the Spring 2014 issue. I absolutely loved the 3D photos and appreciated greatly the way you interweaved them from front cover to content to back cover. I have been in love with 3D since the early 1950s Viewmasters and 1953 Hollywood 3D films. You did an outstanding job; what a find to have come across 1870s stereo views of California (I am what was known in the past as a “prune picker,” an old term for someone who was born, raised and lived in California. My dad, Leland Williams [class of 1929], also had this distinction.)

Thanks so much. I will be adding this very special issue to my extensive collection of 3D photography.

—Randy Lee Williams ’70
Spokane Valley, Washington

Environmental Faux Pas

During my son’s remarkable time at Pomona, his mother and I have immensely enjoyed the Pomona College Magazine. And this compliment comes from a magazine publisher (we own three in the field of recycling).

But the Spring 2014 issue was designed with a serious environmental error. The inclusion of 3D lenses was a major mistake on your part. Only two things can happen with these non-recyclable items. The reader might not put them on, and thus the lenses end up contaminating the paper recycling stream, or they end up in the trash. The other result is the reader uses them, and then throws them away.

So it seems your decision meant you harmed paper recycling or added to the waste stream. I think a so-called technology vendor sold you a bill of anti-environmental goods.

Again, I compliment you on a wonderful product. Your product is remarkably comprehensive and well-written. But in the future, please assess the environmental consequences when you consider any publishing changes (paper, inks, etc.). As one publisher to another, I’d love to provide advice to make sure poor environmental decisions such as this do not occur again.

Go Sagehens!

—Jerry Powell
Portland, Oregon

Time for Divestment

The time has come for Pomona College to divest its endowment from the fossil fuel industry and redirect its investments into the energy sources of the future. I don’t believe I need to go into detail about why fossil fuels are problematic, as 97% of the world’s scientists have long since identified human use of fossil fuels as the primary driver of climate change.

I am certainly not the first to suggest the College make such a move. For 18 months Pomona students have been asking for change, yet last September President Oxtoby and the Board of Trustees rejected divestment, claiming it would cost the school $485 million in lost earnings and citing the many environmental initiatives occurring on campus.

I am proud of the work Pomona College has done to receive a gold rating from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS), its LEED-certified green buildings, and its environmental analysis academic program. But that is not enough.

I live in Montana, a place with a lot of beautiful, unspoiled landscapes and rivers. But it also has coal strip mines, and its pristine nature is increasingly under threat from fracking as a means of oil and gas development. In addition to harmful climate-change emissions such as fugitive methane from oil and gas extraction, fossil fuel development has extensive impacts on the land, surface water, groundwater and air sheds. Aquifers are polluted, residents get nosebleeds from the fugitive methane, and spills occur regularly, killing fish and waterfowl.

People protest, and the fossil-fuel industry uses heavy-handed tactics to buy off politicians and silence dissent. This is happening here in my home, Montana.

I do what I can as an architect, homeowner and bicycle commuter to implement a fossil-fuel-free future, but I know that my action alone is not enough. And far too much is at stake. So I work long hours through a local citizens’ group to hold industry and governing powers accountable. I would like to have my alma mater, Pomona College, as an ally in this work rather than as an opponent. And I am only asking Pomona to uphold its stated core values, as I have challenged myself to do.

I call upon President Oxtoby and the Board of Trustees to become committed and creative about working toward a divestment solution as though their lives depended on it. In the big picture, my life, my home and everyone’s lives do.

—Ed Gulick, ’94
Billings, Montana

Error Card

According to Wikipedia, an “error card” is “a trading card that shows incorrect information or some other unintended flaw.”

Alas, your Summer 2013 issue’s “Pomona All-Stars” baseball card of Mike Salk ‘00, which shows him standing in front of a large banner proclaiming Boston sports radio station WEEI 103.3 FM, has been rendered an “error card” just a half-year after the magazine’s publication.

Although it was the perfect job for Salk, a known—and deeply knowledgeable—sports fanatic since his undergraduate days, it was also an impossible situation: ever since the advent of a rival sports radio station, 98.5 The Sports Hub, WEEI has been inexorably bleeding listeners, ratings and advertisers in the metro Boston market.

An upper-management shakeup, new hires (such as Salk) and other innovations have so far proven unable to resurrect WEEI’s “brand,” as 98.5 is now perceived as the younger, hipper alternative to the “dinosaur” that is WEEI. Not even a cross between the two Howards—Cosell and Stern—could revive WEEI’s fortunes.

With his dedication, intelligence, and likeability, it is no surprise that Salk has already landed on his feet with a new announcing job at Seattle’s ESPN 710.

Perhaps PCM can quietly airbrush out, Soviet-style, the “WEEI 103.3” from the online version of Salk’s “Pomona All-Stars” card, and replace it with “ESPN 710”?

Teasing with affection…

—Doug Meyer ‘01
Waltham, Massachusetts

Drumbeats

James Schlesinger, the rare public servant who served in the Cabinet of both Republican and Democrat presidents, died last week. He was Secretary of Defense for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and later Secretary of Energy for President Carter. He also headed the CIA when its credibility was threatened at the height of President Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Schlesinger was brilliant and blunt, two qualities that don’t always show up together and don’t always work well together in Washington. I met Jim in the 1990’s when we were seated together at a luncheon. As people do in Washington, we looked for common ground. When I told him I was a graduate of Pomona, he immediately started singing, “Drumbeats, drumbeats, drumbeats rolled over the silence profound, high above Pomona, he ne terra toma.” A Harvard man, Jim was in a college singing group when he heard the Pomona men sing “Torchbearers” nearly 50 years earlier. He called it the best college song he had ever heard, bar none. Neither of us knew that “Torchbearers” would become the painful subject of campus debate a few years later. Some were offended by the made-up dialect and the historically inaccurate imagery of Native Americans in the Pomona Valley. Those who loved the song and paid little or no attention to the words thought the controversy was political correctness gone berserk. After a lengthy study, a special committee recommended (if my memory serves) that in the future the song should only be sung at alumni gatherings and only if the offensive words were changed. Sounds like a Washington, D.C., solution (unless it deals with the Redskins). I wonder what ever became of “Torchbearers.” Like Jim Schlesinger, I’ve never been able to get those wonderful, haunting sounds out of my head. If today’s students don’t get to hear it, it’s a shame.

—Allen Moore ‘66
McLean, Virginia

Saddened

I was deeply saddened to learn that my classmate, Emory Zimmermann had passed away. I sang first soprano in the Women’s Glee Club, and Emory sang bass in the Mens’ Glee Club. I earned Emory’s annoyance one year by lining up not one but two speakers for the Annual Glee Club Banquet: my great uncle, Howard Ross (‘04), an early member of the Men’s Glee Club, and my grandmother, Katharine Bird Twinting (‘04) who knew the origins of “Torchbearers.” She knew Prof. Brackett and David Barrows who copied the music from the local Indians and turned it into Pomona’s “Torchbearers.”

“Torchbearers” requires low basses. Fortunately, Emory had a deep bass voice. One could always hear Emory singing the bass part. Though we grieve that his voice is now stilled, in my mind’s eye, I can always recall the resounding sound of “Torchbearers” and Emory singing the low bass part.

He will be missed by us all.

I was also saddened to learn that my academic advisor, Edwin A. Phillips, emeritus professor of botany, had passed away. I rarely agreed with him, but I was part of the NSF grant studying hybridization of Quercus dumosa x Quercus douglasii. I did complete my Ph.D. magna cum laude in 1966 at the University of Bern, Switzerland, with a dissertation on photosynthesis.

I left biology for physics in 1970, but the Botany Gang was a unique group.

—Katharine Holtom Jones ‘61
Alpine, California

[Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.]

Hackers

September 4, 2014 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

It was almost dawn outside Lincoln and Edmunds halls, and the clicking of laptop keys on a Saturday morning had slowed to a persistent few. Three students slept in chairs in the Edmunds lobby, one next to a lone coder at his keyboard. In the Lincoln lobby, a quilt lay seemingly abandoned in a clump on the floor. Then it moved, and the petite student who had been slumbering beneath it climbed into a chair and disappeared under the quilt again.

Upstairs, John Verticchio ’15 looked around the windowless room where he’d spent the night working with three friends. “Is the sun up yet?” he asked.

Welcome to the 5C Hackathon, the all-nighter that lures as many as 250 students from The Claremont Colleges each semester to stay up building creative and often elaborate software projects and apps in a mere 12-hour span. It is a deadline-driven, energy-drink-fueled rush to create something that just might become a Silicon Valley startup but is more likely to be remembered as one of those crazily fun things people do in college when they are alight with intelligence and passion.

The event is student-created and student-led, built from scratch by three Pomona College students in 2012 with a budget of $1,000 and 30 participants. By the fifth 5C Hackathon in April, the budget had grown to $13,000 and the semiannual event had drawn sponsors that have included Intuit, Google and Microsoft. The codefest also is supported by Claremont McKenna’s Silicon Valley Program, which helps students of The Claremont Colleges spend a sort of “semester abroad,” studying while interning at a technology company in Northern California.

The 5C Hackathon is a one-night gig. Competitors are allowed to come in with an idea in mind, but “the rules are that you have to start from scratch. You’re not allowed to have pre-written code,” said Kim Merrill ’14, one of the three co-founders. “It’s all about learning, having fun, staying up all night. It’s not a heavy competition.”

As students wandered into the Seaver North Auditorium around 7 on a Friday night, Merrill, who will go to work for Google as a software engineer in the fall, sat on a table in front wearing shorts and a green H5CKATHON t-shirt as hip music played on the audio system.

The aspiring hackers—how odd that a term that once referred to computer criminals has become a compliment—carried backpacks and laptops, sleeping bags and pillows, the occasional stuffed animal and Google swag bags holding USB chargers, blue Google knit caps and Lego-like toys in boxes emblazoned with the words “google.com/jobs.” This looked like serious fun, and contrary to the stereotypical image of computer geeks, there were women everywhere.

“Having Kim leading the whole thing, I think, has been really powerful for that,” said Jesse Pollak ’15, a former Pomona student who was visiting Claremont for the event he co-founded with Merrill and Brennen Byrne ’12 before leaving school last year to join Byrne in founding a Bay Area startup. (Clef, a mobile app, replaces user passwords on websites with a wave of your smartphone and has been featured by The New York Times.)

“I came in my first year and I knew I wanted to study computer science, and I was hoping there would be, like, a scene here for people who like building stuff, and there wasn’t then. There was nothing,” said Pollak, who didn’t start coding until his senior year in high school. “So I started trying to track down people who were interested in that sort of thing.”

He found them in Byrne and in Merrill, who had planned to be an English major but started coding after an introductory computer science class as a freshman at Pomona.

The event they founded gave the 5Cs an early start on what has now become a national phenomenon. “Hackathons were a new thing and most were on large campuses,” Merrill said.

Hackathons have exploded into prominence in the last two years. The second LA Hacks competition at UCLA in April drew more than 4,000 registrants from universities that included UCLA, USC, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Harvard for a 36-hour event it touted as a “5-star hacking experience” with VIP attendees. Civic groups and government organizations have gotten into the act, too, with the second National Day of Civic Hacking on May 31 and June 1 featuring events in 103 cities, many focused on building software that could help improve communities and government.

While some hackathons have gone grander and glitzier—MHack at the University of Michigan awarded a $5,000 first prize this year and HackMIT drew 1,000 competitors to compete for $14,000 in prizes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year—the 5C Hackathon has remained doggedly itself. “We really wanted, instead of pushing for bigger things, to think about how we can get more people into this,” Pollak said. “You’ll see people present (projects) in the morning who didn’t know how to code at the beginning of the week and who actually built something. It’ll be small and ugly, but it will work.”

A centerpiece of the 5C Hackathon is “Hack Week,” a free beginners’ course of four two-hour evening tutorials leading up to the event, with students teaching other students such basics as HTML and CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and MongoDB, all of it an alphabet soup to the uninitiated.

Christina Tong ’17 tried her first hackathon the fall of her freshman year, picking up ideas during Hack Week that helped inspire her team to fashion a restaurant-ordering app for the Coop Fountain. This spring, continuing to teach themselves more programming languages with online tutorials, her team built a financial tracking system called Money Buddy.

It’s the “forced deadline” of a hackathon, Tong said, that helps coders power through the inevitable snags and bugs of building a program. Pressing on is a huge part of the task. “When you’re fresh, you could probably figure out those bugs decently quickly, but around 3 o’clock, it’s past your normal bedtime and you’re staring for hours at things you probably could fix when you’re fresh,” she said.

Tong’s strategy is catnaps and sustenance. The spring 5C Hackers got an 11 p.m. food truck visit and a snack spread featuring clementines, jelly beans, Oreos, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, bananas and a veggie tray. And at 3 a.m., just because it’s tradition, Merrill—who typically spends much of the night mentoring beginning teams—rallied the students for a two-minute, middle of the night campus run. “It can be hard to motivate people to run at 3 a.m.,” she said.

By 4 a.m., someone had scrawled a message on a whiteboard dotted with listings for tutors: “Countdown 4 hours!”

Some didn’t make it—“I think we lost a lot more teams than we usually do,” Merrill said—but by mid-morning Saturday, 30 teams of two to four people had made one-minute slam demonstrations of their completed projects, roughly half beginners and half advanced.

Judged by America Chambers, a Pomona visiting assistant professor of computer science, and representatives of some of the sponsoring tech companies—this could be the new model of campus recruiting—the entries included efforts such as 5Cribs and the Cyborg Dorm Chooser, designed to help students pick the best dormitory rooms or suites for them.

There was a Craigslist-type site exclusively for The Claremont Colleges and an app to help recreational athletes find a pickup game on campus. One called Expression uses a webcam and face recognition to automatically select music that seems to fit the user’s mood. Another named Echo was a message-in-a-bottle app that allows people to leave audio messages for strangers that can only be heard when the person is standing near the same spot.

The Drinx app suggests cocktail combinations based on what ingredients are in the fridge. But the winning advanced project—sense a theme here?—was the Shotbot, a boxlike robot controlled by a Siri hack that makes mixed drinks automatically. Nonalcoholic, for demonstration purposes.

“Siri loves to serve drinks,” the familiar voice said after taking an order.

“We definitely used it at parties the next few weeks,” said Sean Adler, Claremont McKenna ’14, who built the project, using Arduino, Python, iOS and Node.js, along with three other Claremont McKenna computer science students—brothers Joe and Chad Newbry, both ’14, and Remy Guercio ’16. Their prize? Each team member received an iPad2.

The winners in the beginners’ division, Matt Dahl, Patrick Shao, Ziqi Xiong and John Kim—all Pomona ’17—won Kindle Fires for their project, a “confessions” site similar to other popular sites that allow people to post anonymous secrets or desires. The Pomona students added several features—systems for sorting posts, marking favorites and for hiding offensive content, often a concern on confessions sites.

The next 5C Hackathon will be in the fall, but with Merrill’s graduation in May—she was working for the nonprofit Girls Who Code in San Francisco during the summer before starting at Google in Seattle in late September—the three founders have left Pomona. Andy Russell ’15, Aloke Desai ’16 and Ryan Luo ’16, all of whom helped organize and competed in the spring hackathon, will return to stage more all-night programming binges, the tradition now entrenched.

Russell, his night of coding done, walked out into the quiet of an early Saturday morning, unable to make it to the presentations. He had a Frisbee tournament at 8.

Code

September 4, 2014 by Mark Wood Comments Off

This is surely a first, so (cue the trumpet fanfare) welcome to the first editor’s letter ever written in code.

Not all of it, of course—as you can tell from the simple fact that you’re reading this. But in an issue on the theme of “code,” in addition to articles about genetic code and computer code and decoding animal calls, there had to be something about the clandestine side of the word. But alas, try as I might, I was unable to unearth a single Pomona source for a story about ciphers. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose, since the world of cryptology is, by its very nature, a secretive one.

So to fill that void, please forgive me for offering this light-hearted tutorial on a subject I’ve found intriguing ever since my secret decoder ring childhood.

Each paragraph below demonstrates a different cipher, and—don’t say I didn’t warn you—the codes get progressively harder as they go along. There are instructions in each paragraph to help you translate the next, but if you want to play along, you’ll have to work for it.

We’ll start with one of the oldest and simplest of codes—the Caesar cipher, named for the great Roman himself, who used it in his letters. In this substitution cipher, each letter is replaced by another a fixed number of letters up or down the alphabet. Once you figure out that number, the rest is easy.

Ecguct ekrjgtu ctg ejknf’u rnca vq fgeqfg, dwv vjga ctg cnuq vjg dcuku qh eqorngz eqfgu nkmg vjg Xkpgig`tg ekrjgt, kp yjkej c yqtf rtqxkfgu vjg mga hqt ownvkrng Ecguct ekrjgtu kp c tqvcvkpi ugswgpeg. Vjg pgzv rctcitcrj, hqt gzcorng, wugu “CDE” cu kvu mga. Vjwu, vjg hktuv ngvvgt ku qpg ngvvgt qhh, vjg ugeqpf vyq qhh, vjg vjktf vjtgg qhh, vjgp dcem vq qpg, cpf uq qp.

Sfb Ugkdeb`qc tzq qgmrffq sm yd skapbzixajb, asq hl zqwmsmdqymgw, qgmpd yod dxlmrr jxrr tnpar. Red mkkw qqsix skapbzixajb bgmgco hq qgc “lmc-qhkb oya,” vffbf rrcp zl bmrfqc qdvq zq x jcv. Sm adalcc, vns ptzqqyzs red lrlcohaxk txksb nd bzae kcqsco hl qgc hdw (X dorzjp ycon; X bpsxkq 25) cqmj sfb dorhtxkcks jbsrbq gk sfb lcprydd. Yac 26 rl zlv mcdzrfuc odqrkr. Ffllqc poyzdq xmb mtlzssxsglm, uehae zpb ccidrbc gk qcxk alcca lcpryddq xmwtzw. Qgc hdw edpb hq qgc chpps nxqydqymg mc sffr jbsrbq.

Bm ggc’nw wfqp rhna wsk qcw gyla fx rm ucxknghjd sc ysogg mw b of. Zs hweykewceokaarl.

And with that, welcome to the wonderful world of code.

///////////////////////////////

Stray Thoughts (decoded)

Here is the plain text of the three enciphered paragraphs in the Stray Thoughts:

[Caesar Cipher:]
Caesar ciphers are child’s play to decode, but they are also the basis of complex codes like the Vinegère cipher, in which a word provides the key for multiple Caesar ciphers in a rotating sequence. The next paragraph, for example, uses “ABC” as its key. Thus, the first letter is one letter off, the second two off, the third three off, then back to one, and so on.

[Vinegére Cipher:]
The Vinegère was thought to be unbreakable, but in cryptography, those are famous last words. The only truly unbreakable cipher is the “one-time pad,” which uses an entire text as a key. To decode, you subtract the numerical value of each letter in the key (A equals zero; Z equals 25) from the equivalent letter in the message. Add 26 to any negative result. Ignore spaces and punctuation, which are deleted in real coded messages anyway. The key here is the first paragraph of this letter.

[One-Time Pad Cipher:]
If you’ve come this far, you must be as intrigued by codes as I am. So congratulations.

Alumni Awards for 2014

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2014

The Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award honors alumni for achievement in their professions or community service, particularly those who have lived up to the quotation from James A. Blaisdell which is inscribed into the gates of the College: “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” This year, there are three winners:

Ifeanyi “Tony” Menkiti’64 taught philosophy at Wellesley College for 40 years and is the author off our collections of poetry: Before a Common Soil (2007), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), and Affirmations (1971). He is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the nation’s oldest continuous all-poetry bookshop.

Born in Onitsha, Nigeria, he came to Pomona in 1961 on the ASPAU program (African Scholar-ship Program of American Universities). After Pomona, he attended Columbia University Pulitzer School of Journalism, New York University and Harvard University. In 1975, he received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts State Council on the Arts and Humanities, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his collections, his poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review and other publications.

In 1996, he received the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Wellesley College.

Joe Palca’74 has been a science correspondent for National Public Radio since 1992. He has covered a range of topics, from biomedical research to astronomy, and is currently focused on the series, Joe’s Big Idea, which explores the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.

Palca began his career in 1982 as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington,D.C. In 1986, he began a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first with Nature and then with Science Magazine. In 2009, he took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Palca has won numerous awards for his work,including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

A psychology major at Pomona, he later earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology.

Rip Rapson’74 is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a national, private foundation based in Detroit. Since 2006, he has led Kresge in developing programs in arts and culture, education, environment, health,human services and the renewal of Detroit, distributing approximately $150 million annually.

Rapson was a political science major at Pomona, graduating magna cum laude. After at-tending Columbia Law School, he joined the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard. He was recruited in 1989 to become the deputy mayor of Minneapolis under Mayor Don Fraser, and was primary architect of the pioneering Neighborhood Revitalization program, a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Prior to joining Kresge, Rapson was president of the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation and also launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a new regional agenda fort he Twin Cities.

He is the author of two books: Troubled Waters, a chronicle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act legislation, and Ralph Rap-son: Sixty Years of Modern Design, a biography of his father, a renowned architect.Inspirational Young Alumni Award Lt.

Inspirational Young Alumni Award

Francine Segovia’04, a U.S. Navy Reserve research psychologist at the Robert E.Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, assists survivors recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She is part of a team of scientists and medical specialists examining how optimism and resilience may boost the health of extreme trauma victims.

Segovia, who will return to active-duty service at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, attributes her research skills to experience she gained while at Pomona, including participation in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). “The critical thinking skills graduates from an institution like Pomona possess have a direct impact on all your work moving forward,” she says. “These skills have helped me tremendously as I navigated my career.”

Jerry Maguire Moments

September 4, 2014 by Jeremy Kniffin Comments Off

The walls of the Athletes First offices are filled with autographed jerseys, photos and other memorabilia from their National Football League clients, including such household names as Aaron Rodgers, Ray Lewis, Drew Bledsoe and Clay Matthews. Among the jerseys and photos in Andrew Kessler’s office is a framed copy of Newsday from 2011 showing a photo of New York Jets quarterback and Athletes First client Mark Sanchez celebrating a 28–21 playoff win over the New England Patriots with an exuberant scream and a handshake over the front railing of the stands.

Kessler ’03, who is a certified contract advisor and player agent with Athletes First in Laguna Hills, and who helped negotiate the (yes) 47-page rookie contract for Sanchez, is on the receiving end of the handshake. “My Jerry Maguire moment,” he laughs. “That was an AP photo, so it ended up everywhere.”

After graduating from Pomona with a degree in English, and playing for four years on the Sagehens football team, Kessler jumped right into his current field working at IMG Sports with Tom Condon, ranked by Sports Illustrated as the most influential sports agent in the country last year. Kessler, whose father has been a long-time legal representative for the NFL Players Association, had already served an internship with NBA agent Marc Fleisher while attending Pomona, traveling with 18-year old client Tony Parker to various NBA workouts (Parker has since gone on to win four NBA titles with the San Antonio Spurs and former Sagehen coach Gregg Popovich).

In his first two years at IMG, Kessler assisted Condon in putting together landmark contracts for Peyton Manning (seven years, $90 million) and Eli Manning (six years, $54 million), while also attending law school at the University of Texas. In his decade in the field at IMG and Athletes First, where he has worked primarily with David Dunn (No. 11 on the Sports Illustrated list of most influential agents), Kessler has been a part of negotiating contracts that total well over a billion dollars.

Most recently, Kessler helped put together a four-year, $40 million dollar deal for Super Bowl champion safety Earl Thomas of the Seattle Seahawks, making him the highest-paid player ever at his position. Kessler returned to his original home in New York City in February to see Thomas win Super Bowl XLIII at the Meadowlands, before helping to negotiate his landmark deal. Of course, Athletes First was guaranteed to be on the winning side of that Super Bowl regardless, as the firm also represents several members of the Denver Broncos, including wide receiver Wes Welker and linebacker Von Miller.

Kessler, who resides in Laguna Beach with his wife, Alison, and son, Jordan (2), has found success in a highly-competitive, big-money industry at an age when he has been younger than some of his clients. He draws some personal parallels to his playing days for Pomona-Pitzer football, when his teams went a combined 17–15 over four years despite fielding small rosters that were often significantly outweighed by their opponents.

“One lesson I learned from playing at Pomona is that you can’t judge a book by its cover,” he said. “Just about every game we played, we would lose the eyesight test. Sometimes if you just looked at the two teams in warm-ups, you’d think we’d lose by three or four touchdowns, but then the game would start and we’d win by playing harder, smarter or more fundamental football. You see the same things on the job, whether it be negotiating a contract or signing a player or issues with a client. The odds might look against you from the outside looking in, but you can accomplish your goals by digging deeper than the other guys and not being intimidated.”

He is also quick to point out that his academic experience at Pomona has been a big influence on his career. “Most of what I have learned in this business has come from on-the-job training or from my dad,” he said. “But the critical thinking and analytical skills that I use in my profession have come just as much from what I learned at Pomona, as an English major studying Henry James novels, as they have from taking law school courses in contract law.”

Although Kessler willingly made a reference to Jerry Maguire, the fictional sports agent played by Tom Cruise in the 1996 movie (best remembered for the phrase, “show me the money”), he does laugh at the way the movie portrays his line of work. “I imagine it’s the same way that real spies view James Bond movies,” he says. “People may see the eight-figure deals in the headlines, but there’s a real grind and blue-collar element to the job, which I enjoy. It takes months of negotiations and legwork to reach those deals. You can’t just walk in and say ‘give me this, I want it.’ You have to justify your rationale to the team.”

The life of a sports agent can also involve much more than negotiating the fine print of a 47-page contract, and Kessler feels that makes it even more rewarding. “One of my favorite things about this business is that you get to be involved in a lot of different charitable endeavors and other outside interests for your clients,” he says. “I’ve helped our clients raise money for sick kids, families of veterans, youth football organizations and all sorts of things. Some clients just want you involved in one specific part of their lives, and with other clients, you find yourself wearing a lot of different hats—relationship counselor, wedding planner, financial advisor, and you get to talk to them all the time.”

Kessler may also have a career-building opportunity as the primary agent representing Marqise Lee, a second-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2014 NFL Draft. Lee has a Hollywood-type story of overcoming a rough childhood that saw him bounce around several foster homes before becoming the Fred Biletnikoff Award winner at USC as the nation’s top wide receiver.

While his professional experience has been largely centered on the NFL, Kessler has also used his success at Athletes First to begin his own side project called K3 Tennis, which is representing Ernesto Escobedo, a 17-year-old rising star from West Covina. “I’m excited about it,” said Kessler. “It’s still in its early stages and if nothing else, it’s really fun. Some might call it a risky move to invest in something on my own, but that’s always been my personality. I traveled 3,000 miles from New York City to attend Pomona, which was a little bit risky, and I really liked my time at Pomona. When a risk like that pays off, you’re more willing to take other risks.”

His career as an athlete and as an agent has also given Kessler some philosophical perspective. Athletics is, by its nature, hyper-competitive, with a player’s or team’s value often defined by just a simple list of wins and losses. That attitude spills over into other sports-related industries as well. An agent’s success can be defined by wins and losses in contract negotiations, clients signed and dollars generated. Failures happen, and he sometimes sees colleagues who take each defeat as hard as the players on the field do.

“You have to appreciate successes,” he said. “You hear people say that they hate losing more than they like winning, and I understand that philosophy, but you have to have balance or you won’t be happy. My bad days aren’t really all that bad. On my good days, I’ve been there to see Earl Thomas win a Super Bowl. I’ve been there with Marqise Lee and his family when he was drafted, after he overcame so much adversity.”

Of course, he was also there to celebrate a big playoff win with Mark Sanchez and end up with his picture in newspapers all over the country.

“If you can’t enjoy a moment like that,” he says. “Something’s wrong.”

History & Change

September 4, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Hong Deng Gao ’15

MAJOR: History
SUPPORTED BY: Financial Aid, Draper Center for Community Partnerships, Summer Undergraduate Research Program, The Annual Fund

A native of China, Hong and her mother moved to Brooklyn in 2005. When her mother developed life-threatening liver disease, Hong helped her navigate the often confusing public hospital system. Determined to improve access to health care for other low-income immigrants, Hong developed a proposal through the Draper Center to train college volunteers as health navigators for patients with limited English proficiency and literacy. Hong devotes much of her free time to the Draper Center, working as a coordinator for programs such as Alternabreak, a community engagement spring break program.

History as explanation

“Because of my immigrant background, I like to trace things back to their origins, whether it’s the earliest pilgrims, or Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s, or recent refugee groups. It can really help explain some of what we see now. Why do Chinatowns exist in the U.S. today? What were the Chinese discriminatory laws that were passed back then and how do they still impact people today?”

In the library and on the ground

“I’ve been working with Professor (Samuel) Yamashita on the impact Chinese restaurants have had on Chinese-American communities. In the summer after my sophomore year, I went to New York, where I interviewed and observed children who help out in their parents’ Chinese takeout restaurants and Korean grocery stores. I went back to New York this summer, and to Honolulu and San Francisco, where I conducted archival research in local libraries and museums on high-end Chinese restaurants. I wanted to know what these upscale restaurants mean in the context of Chinese immigration and race relations, and the history of restaurants in the three cities. So, in a sense, my research has been both sociological and historical.”

A mother’s struggle, a daughter’s inspiration

“My mom was the inspiration for my social entrepreneurship project with the Draper Center. She had liver disease, and from the time I was about 15 years old, I helped her deal with the public hospital system, because it was hard for her to do it on her own. She didn’t really speak any English and couldn’t read the signs or the documents or bills. When I got to Pomona, I started thinking more about this issue and how I could help other non-English speaking immigrants.”

Building a bridge to better health care

“The idea I came up with is Health Bridges, where bilingual college volunteers work with local hospitals to give parents like my mom the emotional support they need and help them understand and navigate the system.

The students are definitely going to be a lot more competent in understanding the hospital procedures than these immigrant patients who are already sick and tired and can’t really deal with the system anymore.” [Health Bridges is dedicated to Hong’s mother, Jian Li Lin, who died in 2011.]

Coaching from the Draper Center

“Emily Arnold-Hernandez ’99, who teaches a social entrepreneurship workshop at the Draper Center, helped us develop our visions, goals and budgets, and to understand every single detail of how nonprofit organizations work. Where do you get funding? What are all the questions that you need to think about and have prepared before you can pitch the proposal to a funder? It was really great. I’m planning to start a pilot project this semester and, if it works out, to take a gap year before grad school to fully develop the program in different hospitals and expand it to other college campuses.”

Academia and social change

“I’ve been thinking about the question of how to bridge academia with social justice and social change. Some people see them as very distinct fields, but I think as a scholar you can still make a huge impact in society. You can change the mindset of your audience. And if the audience is policy makers or other scholars or even college students, and if they go on and take this message with them, then that’s the impact that I’d like to have.”

Daring Minds

“When I think of Daring Minds, I think of three characteristics. One is to have a vision; second is to be willing to take the risk of implementing that vision; and third is accomplishing your goal by taking concrete steps, not being afraid of failure and persevering until the end.”

«‹74 757677 78 ›»