At Brown

Festival of Historic Houses seeks Brown volunteers

The Providence Preservation Society is sponsoring its annual Festival of Historic Houses on Saturday, June 7. This year’s festival features historic Brown buildings.

The society is seeking Brown volunteers to staff the various buildings, present historic and anecdotal information, and help festival guests. After their two-hour shifts are completed, volunteers are invited to take the tour at no charge.

Interested volunteers may contact the Providence Preservation Society’s Alli Wray at 831-7440 or Rosemary Rocchio at 353-1362.

Awards and Honors

George Em Karniadakis, professor of applied mathematics, has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International.

The grade of Fellow is conferred upon a member with at least 10 years active engineering practice who has made significant contributions to the field. The 120,000 members of ASME International focus on technical, educational and research issues.

Brown University will be honored for the restoration of the Corliss House at Rhode Island’s Annual Statewide Historic Preservation Conference on April 12. The newly restored Admissions and Financial Aid Office will receive a project award, presented in recognition of outstanding restoration of historic buildings, structures, landscapes, or sites.

Brown hired Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels Architects to plan and implement the restoration project. Working with architect Michael Viveiros were consultants Carol Sanderson, historic interiors; Mary MacDonald, office design; and project manager Joanna Saltonstall of Brown’s Facilities Management. The plan improved circulation, including handicapped access, upgraded lavatory facilities, enhanced office arrangement, and increased storage. The deteriorating brownstone exterior was restored using a variety of techniques appropriate to each specific problem.

The State Historic Preservation Awards, chosen by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission from nominations by the public, honor individuals, organizations, and projects for their contributions to the preservation of Rhode Island’s historic resources. Awards are presented in the categories of Projects, Planning, Education, and Stewardship.

Anne Kirk '03 won first place in the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists’ Young Artist Competition. She will proceed to the regional competition this summer. Kirk, a concentrator in music and international relations, studies with University Organist Mark Steinbach. She will present her senior recital April 6 at 4 p.m. in Sayles Hall, performing works of Bach, Dupre, Barber, Couperin, Paert and Franck.

Research Notes

The Women Writers Project (WWP) has received a $25,000 award from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for a project that will allow WWP staff to revise and publish its documentation on methods of digitizing printed books. The resulting electronic publication will be made available to other scholars and institutions pursuing their own text-encoding projects.

The WWP has been engaged in research for nearly 15 years on applying the work of the Text Encoding Initiative (www.tei-c.org) to the digitization of early printed books. The WWP's internal documentation was developed during that period to support the training of WWP encoders (Brown graduate and undergraduate students) and to document the research being done for the benefit of other projects. The WWP's encoding methods have been used as a model by other text-encoding projects, and its documentation has been shared informally, but never published for a wider audience.

The WWP's approach is distinctive within the text-encoding world because it is highly detailed and provides a nuanced, high-quality representation of literary and cultural texts. Texts encoded in this way can support a wide variety of scholarly research and teaching uses.

The WWP was founded in 1988 by a group of faculty at Brown and several other institutions as a result of significant funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In 1999, the WWP's electronic textbase was published as Women Writers Online (www.wwp.brown.edu), and now has over 230 institutional subscribers worldwide.

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, based in New York City, supports the advancement of humanistic inquiry and research by supporting research libraries and other institutions, as well as by encouraging excellence in scholarship and the performing arts.

Brown in the News

From U.S. News & World Report of March 31: An article headlined “Betting the budget” examines how many states are looking toward gaming revenue to solve their fiscal crises. Darrell West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy, was interviewed for the article. He commented that “a lot of states have gotten addicted to gambling money. … But it's a short-term fix that doesn't provide long-term stability."

From the Washington Times of March 28: In a commentary headlined “The treatment of POWs,” Andrew Bostom, M.D., associate professor of medicine, notes that Iraq’s foreign prime minister “was quoted as saying that the already brutalized U.S. POWs captured in southern Iraq would ‘be treated according to the principles of Islam.’ …Unfortunately, this statement is not reassuring at all.” Bostom wrote that two respected jurists – one who lived in the eighth century, the other in the 11^th century – “wrote the following, based on their interpretations of the Qur'an and Sunna (i.e., the recorded words and deeds of Muhammad): ‘that one can even … finish off the wounded, or kill prisoners who might prove dangerous to the Muslims.’”

“Let us pray that humane elements among the Iraqi regime prevail in deciding the fate of U.S. POWs, and they rely exclusively upon the dictates of the Geneva Convention, and not Islamic jurisprudence,” Bostom concluded.

From Newsday of March 28: An article headlined “Europe faces crisis of aging ” reports on a new study of the European Union’s 15 member nations. The study notes that “ European families are having fewer children, and are exacerbating the problem by delaying child-bearing. As a result, the research team said, Europeans face higher health and welfare costs, fewer wage-earners, and an impact on national productivity. In other words, a downward spiral has begun, and soon fewer young workers will be supporting more and more old retirees.”

Brian O'Neill, assistant professor (research) at the Watson Institute, worked on the study and was interviewed for the article.

Brown faculty are often quoted in the media. For regular online updates, go to Brown in the News.