Omnia Magazine: Spring/Summer 2016 by Penn Arts & Sciences

A Career in Two Parts

Found In Translation

Linguists Try to Preserve Spoken Indigenous Languages by Writing Them Down

Why Isn’t Shakespeare Dead Yet?

A Status Update for the 21st Century

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

Peter Decherney’s Journey From Film Scholar to Filmmaker

FIELD NOTES How Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth’s Life Among Primates Is Influencing the Next Generation of Scientists

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OMNIA

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FIELD NOTES

THREE PENN ALUMS UPSET THE POLITICAL APPLECART— AND MAKE HAY

A CAREER IN TWO PARTS

How Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth Are Influencing the Next Generation of Scientists By Blake Cole

EDITOR’S NOTE

By Abigail Meisel

OMNIA, Now Online

Thinking Globally By Steven J. Fluharty

SCHOOL NEWS STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

By Blake Cole

FINDINGS Grit For Success

By Blake Cole

DEAN’S COLUMN

Peter Decherney’s Journey From Film Scholar to Filmmaker

4 8

Race, State, and Marginalized Populations

12 13

Machine Learning at Arraignments Can Cut Repeat Domestic Violence

Chemists Lay Groundwork for Countless New, Cleaner Uses of Methane

Behind the Scenes at the American Zoo

Researcher Explores Why Voters Ignore Local Politics

CONTENTS

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

34 24

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

BRAIN’S LOCATIONTRACKING CELLS USE TRANSCENDENTAL NUMBER SYSTEM

WHY ISN’T SHAKESPEARE DEAD YET?

Linguists Try to Preserve Spoken Indigenous Languages by Writing Them Down By Michele Berger

By Evan Lerner

A Status Update for the 21st Century By Susan Ahlborn

FACULTY OPINION

A Most Dangerous Year in United States-Russian Relations

(INS)OMNIA

Summer Reading Lists

By Mitchell A. Orenstein

Office Artifacts

MOVERS & QUAKERS

Three Questions

Partnership Made at Penn By Sacha Adorno

IN THE CLASSROOM From Classroom to Newsroom: Penn’s PORES Program Takes Undergrads to NBC By Susan Ahlborn

LAST LOOK A New Look for Math

EDITOR’S NOTE

OMNIA

OMNIA, NOW ONLINE As we roll out the second issue of OMNIA we are happy to announce the launch of our new site: omnia. sas.upenn.edu. The site places an emphasis on multimedia with exclusive content like our Origin Stories series, which explores the beginnings of our scholars’ research interests. And who better to kick off a series on beginnings than physicist Mark Trodden, whose pioneering research investigates the very early universe. OMNIA online will also feature a new podcast series, OMNIA: All Thing Penn Arts and Sciences. The podcast covers everything from policy debates on evolution to primate social bonding behavior, a segment that features the subjects of our cover story, biologist Dorothy Cheney and psychologist Robert Seyfarth. In addition, we are launching two new sections, both online and in print: (Ins)omnia and Student Spotlight. (Ins)omnia will offer lighter content informed by scholars in the arts and sciences, whether it’s summer reading suggestions, or an explanation of objects found a professor’s office. Student Spotlight features exciting research from students, such as doctoral candidate in earth and environmental science Emma Harrison, who discovered a symbiotic relationship between earthworms and top soil stability, and undergraduate English major OMNIA is published by The School of Arts and Sciences Office of Advancement EDITORIAL OFFICES School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 300 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3284 Phone: 215-898-5162 Fax: 215-573-2096 E-mail: pennsas@sas.upenn.edu STEVEN J. FLUHARTY Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Meg Pendoley, who edits Doublespeak, a student-run magazine that features original translations of poetry and essays about translation, culture, and bilingualism. As you browse through the issue you’ll also notice icons highlighting the themes of the Penn Arts and Sciences strategic plan (see key on right). Our cover story, as well as the feature on the brain’s location-tracking cells, spotlights the “Mapping the Mind” portion of the plan, which explores the relationship between brain activity and the human consciousness. Our feature on Applecart, the political consulting firm started by three very recent Penn alums, speaks to the “Public Policy and Social Impact” portion of the plan, which places an emphasis on faculty, students, programs, and centers engaged in research on social issues and matters of public policy. Additional foundations of the plan include themes such as “Energy, Sustainability, and Environment” and “Humanities in the Digital Age.” With the launch of our new site and each new issue we are committed to keeping you in touch with all the ways Penn Arts and Sciences is affecting both its local and global communities. We’ll see you online.

LORAINE TERRELL Executive Director of Communications REBECCA REBALSKY Senior Director, Communications and Donor Relations BLAKE COLE Editor SUSAN AHLBORN Associate Editor MATTHEW LEAKE Art Director ASHLEY MacDONALD MATTHEW LEAKE Designers

Diversity, Inequality, and Human Well-Being

Energy, Sustainability, and Environment

Humanities in the Digital Age

Mapping the Mind

Arts and Culture

Global Inquiries

Public Policy and Social Impact

Quantitative Explorations of Evolving Systems

www.sas.upenn.edu/strategic-plan

—Blake Cole CHANGE OF ADDRESS Alumni: visit QuakerNet, Penn’s online community at www.alumniconnections. com/penn. Non-alumni: e-mail Development and Alumni Records at record@ben. dev.upenn.edu or call 215-898-8136. The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial

aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215) 898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover Illustration: Emiliano Ponzi

DEAN’S MESSAGE

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THINKING GLOBALLY BY

STEVEN J. FLUHARTY

But as dean I also understand that within the predictable cycle of the academic calendar, there is movement forward. Over the past two years, this momentum has been provided by the School’s strategic plan, Foundations and Frontiers. As the 2015-2016 academic year drew to a close, examples of this progress were easy to find. Senior research and capstone presentations this year, like every year, demonstrated the excellence of our students through topics as diverse as a Visual Studies project on the cultural politics of representations of Israel and Palestine and a biology major’s research on the neuroscience of song production in birds. But looking beyond the excellence of individual students, we also see that there are new avenues open for them to pursue. This year, the first cohort of students graduated from the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER). The outstanding projects these students presented reflect the impact of this program’s rigorous curriculum, combined with mentorship and the

opportunity to gain research experience in cutting-edge labs. VIPER also speaks to one of the key priorities of the strategic plan: our focus on Energy, Sustainability and the Environment. This spring has given me a number of reasons to be excited about this topic. I had the pleasure of discussing the emerging area of environmental humanities at a recent panel discussion on campus, and I can say with conviction that humanistic disciplines add a necessary dimension to the conversation on sustainability and our relationship with the environment, and that the Penn Program on Environmental Humanities is in a unique position to lead in these conversations. In the final weeks of the academic year, I also got the incredible news that our energy and sustainability initiative is receiving transformational support from Roy and Diana Vagelos, allowing us to establish the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology (p. 6). The new Vagelos Institute will bring together world-class researchers and dramatically expand Penn’s ability to pursue sustainable solutions to our energy needs. With the momentum that comes from support like this, the intellectual innovation of our faculty, and programs like VIPER, I know that where we are with energy in 5 years will be very different from where we are now. I anticipate much the same progress in all the priorities identified in our strategic plan. So while the coming academic years will undoubtedly proceed according to their well-established rhythm, I know that our forward progress will continue.

Candace DiCarlo

This month marks the completion of my third year as dean of Penn Arts and Sciences, a fact which I’m finding hard to believe. As a long-time academic, I’m fully immersed in the cycle of events that comprise an academic year: the arrival of students, the start of classes, midterms and finals, publications and conferences, recognition of accomplishment, all topped off by graduation. As dean, adding in the task of managing the budget for our $500 million enterprise and overseeing recruitment and retention for our nearly 500 faculty, the rhythm that makes up each year is no less predictable—just a bit more complex.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience

SCHOOL NEWS

NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR BROADER IMPACTS SUMMIT FEATURES ARTS AND SCIENCES DEANS

OMNIA

PROFESSORS SHARE IN BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE IN FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Collaboration, which includes physicists from Penn Arts and Sciences, is sharing the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The prize was presented by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.” The $3 million prize is shared with four other international experimental collaborations studying neutrino oscillations: the Super-Kamiokande, KamLAND, T2K/K2K, and Daya Bay scientific collaborations.

The National Alliance for Broader Impacts (NABI), a network comprised of universities, professional societies, and informal science organizations, held its annual summit on Penn’s campus this past April. NABI is a community of practice focused on the development, implementation, and evaluation of science communication and public engagement programming—generally designed to meet the National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts criterion: improving society through scientific research, building and diversifying the STEM workforce, and innovating for the future.

Courtesy of University Communications

The theme of this year’s summit was “Broadening Participation.” The event brought together more than 100 broader-impact professionals from around the country—including Penn Arts and Sciences’ own Steven Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience; and Larry Gladney, Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence, and Professor of Physics and Astronomy—to talk about successful and ongoing efforts to increase the diversity of students and professionals in STEM-related fields of study.

Members of the Penn team at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory during its construction.

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The research at SNO—which is housed two kilometers underground in the Vale Creighton mine near Sudbury, Ontario—demonstrated that neutrinos change their type, or “flavor,” on their way to Earth from the sun, a discovery that requires neutrinos to have a mass greater than zero. The results also confirmed the theories of energy generation in the sun with great accuracy, solving a decades-old question known as the Solar Neutrino Problem.

“The Penn team was an exceptional group of people who made major contributions to this important science,” says Klein. “We are happy to have been a part of solving a problem that was older than many of the group members.”

A MEETING OF MINDS: VISITING RUSSIAN SCHOLARS INTERFACE WITH FACULTY This past February the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, together with the Perry World House, hosted Russian American Relations in Historical Perspective: A Symposium. The public event, designed to exam-

Alex Schein

The Penn group, which includes professors of physics and astronomy Joshua Klein and Eugene Beier, began working on the SNO project in 1987. Their contributions include constructing specialized electronic instrumentation for the detector’s 9,600 photo sensors and leading both the detector operations and the data analysis for the project.

Visiting scholars from the European University at Saint Petersburg Ilya Utekhin, head of the department of anthropology, and Ekaterina Borozdina, a research fellow with the gender studies program.

ine Russian-American relationships amidst ongoing international crises such as the violence and destabilization in Ukraine and Syria, drew on expertise from a host of historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and cultural historians. Featured at the symposium were scholars from the European University at Saint Petersburg (EUSP), eight of whom spent the week at Penn engaged with a variety of Penn scholarly communities. Penn’s collaboration with EUSP represents a unique opportunity to interface with academics from the region. EUSP is Russia’s most cosmopolitan academic institution. One of the few private higher-education universities in Russia, it was founded in the 1990s in a reflection of the unprecedented new openness to global cooperation and liberal educational values of that era. Kevin M. F. Platt, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Penn’s lead organizer of the exchange program, remarks, “Thanks to the support of the Global Exchange Fund, we were able to host specialists from EUSP for a really innovative program of scholarly ex-

change. We hope that this program will be the beginning of even more robust collaborations with EUSP.”

PROGRAM HELPS TO INCREASE ACCESS TO SCHUYLKILL RIVER Inspired by urban river projects that have revitalized the cities of Los Angeles and New York, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) is collaborating on a project with Bartram’s Garden and River Corps to increase access to the Lower Schuylkill River, helping more people connect to the storied waterway. “We’ve been working and collaborating on the river all year long,” says Bethany Wiggin, an associate

SCHOOL NEWS professor of Germanic languages and literatures and founding director of the PPEH. “The experience of getting on the water—whether in Bartram’s public kayaks or in our public Lab at WetLand—has been absolutely central.” The project seeks to supplement a number of ongoing riverfront programs and projects underway at Bartram’s Garden. They include the PPEH Lab at Wetland, a public art project for “experiments in sustainability” based in a houseboat on the river. The first phase of the project will culminate in river and watershed tours led by the corps of certified river guides in kayaks, bicycles, and on foot. In phase two, a website will be created with information about the Schuylkill River, its past, and future. The third phase will involve development of a mobile app to enable visitors to explore the river on their own through self-guided tours.

PENN HOSTS CONFERENCE ON ENGAGED PHILOSOPHY In April of this year, philosophy graduate students Ben Baker, GR’19, Louise Daoust, GR’17, and Rob Willison, GR’17, launched a three-day conference on engaged philosophy, bringing together professors, graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students to talk about philosophy and its role in public life. Philosophy faculty members commented on original research papers written by Philadelphia public high school students engaged in Philadelphia Futures, a college readiness and success program, while other professional phi-

OMNIA losophers gave talks on how they have called upon their philosophical training to deal with problems in Rwanda, in national politics, and within local neighborhoods. Ira Harkavy, associate vice president and founding director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships, also presented on the importance of bringing research to bear on real-life problems. In addition, students at all levels participated in panel sessions with professors on the vital role that philosophy plays in addressing the daily challenges facing our local, national, and global communities. Zubaida Salman AlQaissi of Northeast High School in Philadelphia, who recently was accepted to Penn, says, “I don’t know where to begin when talking about the experience [of this conference], but every time I talk to someone, I catch myself unable to stop smiling. I’ve even said this past weekend was the climax of my life because of how great the experience was.”

PENN ARTS AND SCIENCES LAUNCHES VAGELOS INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Penn Arts and Sciences has announced the creation of the Vagelos Institute of Energy Science and Technology. The new institute will bring together world-class researchers to solve scien-

tific and technological problems related to alternative sources of energy and energy use and storage, reinforcing the University of Pennsylvania’s position as one of the premier energy research and technology centers in the nation. “The Vagelos Institute will galvanize the research efforts of our stellar faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and across many areas of the University,” says Penn President Amy Gutmann. “It will capitalize on Penn’s strategic strength in integrating knowledge across disciplines to address one of the most critical challenges facing our world today—the need for alternative energy sources. Penn is deeply grateful to Roy and Diana Vagelos for their vision and their extraordinary generosity.” “The Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology will be home to a powerful constellation of scientists who will carry forward an aggressive research and teaching agenda in the areas of energy and sustainability,” says Steven J. Fluharty, Dean, Penn Arts and Sciences. “Finding sustainable solutions for energy needs is a critical priority for the nation and the world, and that’s why expanding our capabilities in this area is also a priority of Penn Arts and Sciences’ new strategic plan.” Penn Arts and Sciences is developing the Vagelos Institute in partnership with Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “Energy is one of the grand challenges facing our planet. It is one that requires not only fundamental advances in the basic science but also technological innovation to bring these advances to practice,” says Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The Institute will be led by prominent senior scientists, who will be joined by other exceptional faculty and outstanding fellows and students on

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team-based research in collaboration with experts across the University. Penn is currently recruiting a director for the new Institute who will serve as the Vagelos Professor of Energy Research. The Vagelos Institute will foster advances in energy research by providing faculty with seed grants to develop early-stage projects that can then be parlayed into competitive grant proposals. “Our partnership with faculty in the School of Engineering— and throughout the University—will enable us to effectively compete for the big grants which are essential to funding the most innovative research,” says Dean Fluharty. Graduate and postdoctoral fellowships will enable the Institute to train the next generation of energy researchers. The Institute will also sponsor seminars, lectures, and symposia on key energy research topics, attracting to Penn’s campus a diverse group of national and international scholars and students.

Bill Shore, C’77, founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, was the guest speaker at this year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences on May 15. Based in Washington, D.C., Share Our Strength has raised and invested more than $528 million in the fight against global hunger and poverty. The student speaker was Laura Sorice, C’16, of Old Bridge, N.J., a political science major with minors in Italian Studies and Urban Studies. Sorice was a Fox Leadership Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she conducted public policy research for Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. She plans to attend law school and hopes to work in First Amendment law.

Lisa Godfrey

“There are so many technologies that can be looked to for future sources of energy—solar, fuel cells, wind, hydrogen fission—not to mention the chemicals that we don’t even know anything about now, which could hold answers for alternative energy. My wife and I are passionate about this

Dr. Roy Vagelos, a chemistry major who graduated from Penn in 1950 before going on to receive a medical degree from Columbia University, is the retired chairman and chief executive officer of Merck & Co. He served as chair of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1995 to 1999, and he is a former member of Penn Arts and Sciences’ Board of Overseers and the former chair of the Committee for Undergraduate Financial Aid. Diana Vagelos is a former overseer of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The Vagelos’ longtime support of Penn Arts and Sciences also includes gifts to establish the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, the Vagelos Endowed Scholars Program in Molecular Life Sciences, the Vagelos Science Challenge Scholarship Award, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories of the Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and support for the renovation of the Undergraduate Chemistry Laboratories.

2016 COLLEGE GRADUATION SPEAKERS

Courtesy of Bill Shore

The Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology is made possible by a $20 million gift from emeritus trustee and alumnus Dr. P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, Hon’99, and his wife, Diana, PAR. This most recent philanthropic investment in energy research at Penn follows the couple’s 2015 gift to endow two professorships focused on energy research in Penn Arts and Sciences and their 2012 creation of the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, an undergraduate degree program of Penn Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

subject, and we have the notion that Penn can make a unique contribution,” says Vagelos.

Bill Shore, C'77, (left) and Laura Sorice, C’16.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

REDEFINING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION A. Rahman Ford, G’15, has dedicated his research to answering, simply, “What is affirmative action?” It’s a question that eludes the vast majority of people, and is under-researched, he says, because most debates surrounding the topic are too limited. Ford, a political science Ph.D. whose dissertation was titled Affirmative Action Reconceived: A Comparative Study of Constitutional Precommitments to Group Preferences for Racial Minorities and Women, says narrow approaches to policy debate are only cementing misunderstanding. For his dissertation, Ford analyzed constitutional provisions for disadvantaged groups in over 30 countries. “My research shows that affirmative action often coincides with democratization,” says Ford, “particularly in societies that have heterogeneous populations that have a large degree of ethnic and racial diversity.”

OMNIA Ford also found that America has a particular obsession with the racial component of affirmative action, which works against the average citizen’s comprehension of other provisions, Ford says, often because the media does not cover them. “Most people don’t realize that Barack Obama, in his first term, issued an executive order expanding affirmative action for people with disabilities.”

STUDENT MATHEMATICIAN PARTICIPATES IN NSF RESEARCH PROGRAM Before last summer, Suneil Parimoo, C’16, W’16, had never worked on partial differential equations (PDEs). But that didn’t stop the recent graduate from spending eight weeks on one such problem at a Math REU, or Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

Dozens of these highly selective National Science Foundation–sponsored programs take place across the country. Parimoo, of Bridgewater, N.J., sought out the REU’s collective problem solving. “I had done some research, but more on an individual level,” he says. “This gave me a good opportunity to collaborate.” Typically, mathematicians use PDEs to formulate problems with several variables; Parimoo and his research partner focused on how the point in space called the interface evolves in time. He offered a wave’s motion as an analogy. “Ideally we would like to find the exact shape of this wave and precisely how it moves. Instead we look at the crest. How do changes to wind pressure and other factors alter its behavior?” he says. “We worked on fully classifying for which parameters this crest moves forward, backward, remains stationary or waits before moving forward.” Parimoo now works for a consulting firm doing data analytics. Eventually he plans to attend grad school for economics, statistics, or pure math.

Courtesy of A. Rahman Ford

LISTENING TO CYBORGS When we think of a cyborg, we picture a person part-human, part-machine— someone with superhuman powers. The idea has been around in science fiction and has entered the popular imagination through both movies and television shows. Recently two Penn graduate students explored the concept of the cyborg through the lens of everyday interactions between people and technoloA. Rahman Ford

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

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Brooke Sietinsons

Listening (to) Cyborgs co-founders Maria Murphy, GR'22, (left) and Roksana Filipowska, GR'22, take a moment during rehearsal to discuss voice processing effects.

gy—specifically sound technology—by hosting a series of collaborative workshops called Listening (to) Cyborgs. Maria Murphy, GR’22, and Roksana Filipowska, GR’22, describe their project as “media archaeology” of communication technologies. “We started thinking about the aural technologies that infiltrate our lives on a daily basis,” Murphy, a Ph.D. candidate in music, says. “We wanted to look at the implications of this technological infiltration.” Filipowska, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in art history, adds, “One of our greater goals was promoting interaction between the humanities and the sciences at the graduate level.” And they succeeded—the workshops drew students from a wide range of disciplines, including engineering, design,

art history, music, communications, and linguistics.

Positive Psychology Center, along with researchers from Harvard, Thomas Jefferson University, and NASA, are studying this “overview effect” to better understand such emotions.

INTENSE AWE IN SPACE

They have two goals: to look at implications for space flight as the aeronautical community heads toward yearslong missions to places like Mars and to replicate the sensation for non-astronauts.

Picture Earth in a frame. It looks unassuming, a fleck against a black interstellar backdrop, yet the image likely evokes some reaction. Now imagine this view from space.

Yaden and colleagues analyzed excerpts from astronauts worldwide who documented viewing Earth from space. Themes emerged like unity, vastness, and connectedness.

Astronauts who experience Earth from orbit often report feeling awe and wonder. Penn research fellows David Yaden, LPS’12, and Johannes Eichstaedt, LPS’11, GR’22, and intern Jonathan Iwry, C’14, from Penn’s

“We watch sunsets when we travel to beautiful places to get a little taste of this kind of experience. These astronauts are having something more extreme,” Yaden says. “By studying

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT the more-extreme version of a general phenomenon, you can often learn more about it.” The researchers, who published their findings in Psychology of Consciousness, aim to collaborate with private groups like SpaceX as an interim step to working with astronauts back from space and on their way up.

DOUBLESPEAK: THE ART OF TRANSLATION The word “translation” comes from the Latin for “bearing across”—a

OMNIA bridge from one language to another. But a look at Penn’s student-run magazine DoubleSpeak reveals it can also mean much more than that. DoubleSpeak features original translations of poetry and essays about translation, culture, and bilingualism. It was launched in 2011 by a group of undergraduates led by Ross Karlan, C’14. “The students were studying languages and were also interested in writing,” explains Meg Pendoley, C’16, DoubleSpeak’s editor-in-chief. “And while there were a lot of publications on campus, there was nothing specifically for translation.” Currently DoubleSpeak is published twice each year—fall online and spring in print. Pendoley developed the magazine’s website, doublespeakmagazine.com, which features current and archived content, a blog, and podcasts.

Kelly Writers House provides funding for the magazine, space for meetings, and recording equipment. Future plans include events, interviews with Penn faculty members who translate, and a series of personal essays by bilingual students. English lecturer Taije Silverman is a poet and DoubleSpeak’s faculty advisor. She came to Penn in 2012 specifically to teach translation. Since then, all of the magazine’s editors have come out of the course she developed. Silverman says Penn’s student body makes a project like DoubleSpeak especially relevant. “I couldn’t be teaching this translation course at another school,” she says. “Penn is incredibly international and diverse, and this generation of students is deeply global.”

Brooke Sietinsons

Trask Roberts, GR'25, a Ph.D. candidate in French Studies, recites his translation of Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” at a reading hosted by DoubleSpeak.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

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Brooke Sietinsons

Jordan Wolfheimer, C’17, works with local students at the “Synaptic Land” exhibit, which features a game designed to teach kids about the anatomy and mechanics of a synapse at the Kids Judge! fair.

PENN HOSTS KIDS JUDGE! NEUROSCIENCE FAIR Over 100 third- and fourth-graders from the Cornerstone Christian Academy and Beulah Baptist Christian Day School spent a morning on the Penn campus “judging” hands-on science activities developed by students at Penn, including undergraduate Biological Basis of Behavior (BBB) program majors and graduate students in neuroscience. “It was clear from the first Kids Judge! that Penn was uniquely positioned to do this because of the BBB program, our strengths in neuroscience, and the presence of the Mahoney Insti-

tute for Neurosciences,” says Steven Fluharty, Dean and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience. “But none of us imagined how it would grow over time to reach such a broad audience, including schools with non-traditional students."

WHEN EARTHWORMS ARE EARTH SAVERS Emma Harrison studies the effects of erosion on topsoil, particularly erosion caused by landslides, which is a major problem in agriculture worldwide. In her field research in the mountains of northeast Puerto Rico, she uncovered an unexpected protector of this rich and nutrient-dense layer of soil: mas-

sive earthworms that grow as long as a person’s forearm. “The worms burrow deep into the earth and create tunnels,” Harrison, GR’24, explains. “They act as natural excavators and flush excess water out of the soil so the soil doesn’t become waterlogged, which is how landslides start.” Once back at Penn, Harrison recreated the earthworms’ habitat in a lab, where they repeated the same behavior, confirming her initial hypothesis. Harrison presented the results of her experiment at a recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, and her work was also reported in the prestigious scientific magazine Earth. “Since we now understand why erosion has slowed in this particular region, we can identify ways that topsoil can be preserved,” Harrison says.

FINDINGS

OMNIA

GRIT FOR SUCCESS BY

SACHA ADORNO

Why do some people succeed and others fail? Is it raw talent or intelligence? Or something more? Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology, posits the answer is simply, but powerfully, grit—a steely combination of passion and long-term perseverance for a singular goal. The pioneering educator and researcher discusses the implications of stick-to-itivness and tenacity in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, her first book. Grit offers new insights into Duckworth’s landmark research on stamina, self-control, and other non-IQ competencies that predict success. Among these insights: Why effort counts twice toward goals, how lifelong interest is triggered, if warm embraces or high standards are better for children, and whether grit can be learned regardless of IQ or environmental, economic, and other circumstances.

Published in early May, Grit is making waves—a distinguished and diverse group of notables have praised it and media outlets like PBS Newshour, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, and Freakanomics Radio have covered it. “I’m thrilled the book is being read! Writing it was the hardest thing, by far, I’ve ever done,” reflects Duckworth, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and founder and scientific director of Character Lab, a national nonprofit with the mission to advance the science and practice of character development. “My husband insisted that a book that put together the most important scientific insights into the psychology of high achievers would be appreciated. I guess he was right!”

Duckworth shares lessons from history, literature, and her own interviews with high-profile, high-grit people in tech, sports, media, science, finance, education, arts and culture, and more. She also walks readers through two places—West Point and the National Spelling Bee—where stratospheric IQ scores abound but grit often determines who remains standing. The book argues that accomplished people in these areas share similar characteristics. “No matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways,” says Duckworth. “First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.” Duckworth came to this interest in character by way of her personal experiences as a former McKinsey management consultant; math teacher in Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco’s toughest public schools; and founder of a summer school for children from disinvested communities.

Max Nesterak

Although she has spent years studying the subject, her research can guide all of us who are looking to develop grit or encourage it in others. “Really, everyone is a psychologist,” Duckworth explains. “We’re always trying to figure out ourselves, our kids, the people with whom we work. Why do we do what we do? Why do we sometimes give up on things we care about, and how do we come to care about those things in the first place? In this book, I use both stories and statistics to communicate some fundamental insights about the psychology of achievement.”

Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology

FINDINGS

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RACE, STATE, AND MARGINALIZED POPULATIONS BY

BLAKE COLE

The “Comparative Politics” lectures were given by a historian named Edward Augustus Freeman, one of the founding members of the history department at Oxford University. Though examples of comparative politics in literature and thought can be traced back to Aristotle, Freeman was attempting to define and elevate the field into a science for inquiry into modern politics. In Freeman’s view, racial hierarchy and the study of modern politics were one and the same. “He saw himself as creating this new scientific discipline centered on the comparative study of political institutions, which in his mind would prove the political supremacy of Euro-Aryans,” says Hanchard. In 1882, Freeman was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University. Hanchard found that Freeman’s writings and lectures had a significant impact on the Seminary of Historical and Political Science founded by historian Herbert Baxter Adams, which greatly influenced the graduate students and faculty there,

including a Ph.D. student who turned out to be none other than Woodrow Wilson, future 28th president of the United States. Wilson, along with other statespeople and political thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, devised what Hanchard refers to as racial regimes: the formal and informal institutions that operate to deny political rights to specific populations, even in some of the most robust democratic places in the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Hanchard says that Woodrow Wilson’s political legacy, ranging from the League of Nations to the re-segregation of the U.S. civil service, resembles certain features of British and French domestic and foreign policy. “These are populations that have been institutionally segregated through disproportionately higher levels of unemployment, high levels of under-education, and lack of opportunity. It’s the result of policy, not just idiosyncratic practices.” The Spectre of Race in Comparative Politics traces examples of discriminatory citizenship regimes all the way back to ancient Athens, often seen as the birthplace of many democratic systems. Pericles’s Citizenship Law 451 was an attempt to base citizenship on bloodlines and descent in order to limit the possibility that Athenians could be enslaved, thus defining who had rights and who was forced to the margins. Focusing on the contradictions between democratic institutions and practices and anti-democratic institutions and practices within the same society is key to understanding the dynamics, Hanchard says. “The ques-

Courtesy of Michael Hanchard

While preparing to teach a graduate course, Michael Hanchard happened upon an obscure citation of a series of lectures entitled “Comparative Politics.” It became the impetus for his forthcoming book The Spectre of Race in Comparative Politics, which seeks to shine a light on the role of racial hierarchy in modern politics. Hanchard, a recently appointed professor of Africana studies, is a political scientist who specializes in nationalism, racism, and transnational black politics. Hanchard is the author of multiple books, including Orpheus and Power: Afro-Brazilian Social Movements in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988 and Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought.

Michael Hanchard, professor of Africana studies

tion becomes, what are the mechanisms that turn people into citizens and what are the mechanisms that either limit or prohibit citizenship for every member of a society?” In order to bolster discussion around these complex issues, Hanchard is spearheading the Marginalized Populations Project within Africana studies. The initiative aims to examine Afro-descendant populations in a comparative perspective, including Afro-Latin populations, scheduled castes in India, and black populations in the United States and the African continent—all examples of populations who experience the denial of political rights. Hanchard hopes to put together a working group, a workshop, and an international conference at Penn over the next two years.

FINDINGS

OMNIA

MACHINE LEARNING AT ARRAIGNMENTS CAN CUT REPEAT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BY

MICHELE BERGER

In one large metropolitan area, arraignment decisions made with the assistance of machine learning cut new domestic violence incidents by half, leading to more than 1,000 fewer such post-arraignment arrests annually, according to new findings. In the United States, the typical pretrial process proceeds from arrest to preliminary arraignment to a mandatory court appearance, when appropriate. During the preliminary arraignment, a judge or magistrate

Greg Benson

Richard Berk, professor of criminology and professor of statistics at the Wharton School.

chooses whether to release or detain the suspect, a decision intended to account for the likelihood that the person will return to court or commit new crimes. This is especially important in domestic violence, which is often a serial offense and directed at a particular individual. Arraignments are usually brief, with outcome projections made based on limited data. However, Richard Berk, a professor of criminology, and a professor of statistics at the Wharton School, and Susan B. Sorenson, a professor of social policy in the School of Social Policy and Practice, found that using machine-learning forecasts at these

proceedings can dramatically reduce subsequent domestic violence arrests. “A large number of criminal justice decisions by law require projections of the risk to society. These threats are called ‘future dangerousness,’” Berk says. “Many decisions, like arraignments, are kind of seat-of-the-pants. The question is whether we can do better than that, and the answer is yes we can. It’s a very low bar.” For domestic violence crimes between intimate partners, parents and children, or even siblings, there’s typically a threat to one particular person, says Sorenson, who directs Penn’s Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence. “It’s not a general public safety issue,” she says. “With a domestic violence charge, let’s say a guy—and it usually is a guy—is arrested for this and is awaiting trial. He’s not going to go assault some random woman. The risk is for a re-assault of the same victim.” To understand how machine learning could help in domestic violence cases, Berk and Sorenson obtained data from more than 28,000 domestic violence arraignments between January 2007 and October 2011. They also looked at a two-year follow-up period after release that ended in October 2013. A computer can “learn” from training data which kinds of individuals are likely to re-offend. For this research, the 35 initial inputs included age, gender, prior warrants and sentences, and even residential location. These data points help the computer understand appropriate associations for projected risk, offering extra information to a court official deciding whether to release an offender.

“In all kinds of settings, having the computer figure this out is better than having us figure it out,” Berk says. That’s not to say there aren’t obstacles to its use. The number of mistaken predictions can be unacceptably high, and some people object in principle to using data and computers in this manner. To both of these points, the researchers respond that machine learning is simply a tool. “It doesn’t make the decisions for people by any stretch,” Sorenson says. These choices “might be informed by the wisdom that accrues over years of experience, but it’s also wisdom that has accrued only in that courtroom. Machine learning goes beyond one courtroom to a wider community.” In some criminal justice settings, use of machine learning is already routine, although different kinds of decisions require different datasets from which the computer must learn. The underlying statistical techniques, however, remain the same. Berk and Sorenson contend the new system can improve current practices. “The algorithms are not perfect. They have flaws, but there are increasing data to show that they have fewer flaws than existing ways we make these decisions,” Berk says. “You can criticize them—and you should, because we can always make them better—but, as we say, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The Penn researchers published their work in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

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CHEMISTS LAY GROUNDWORK FOR COUNTLESS NEW, CLEANER USES OF METHANE BY

KATHERINE UNGER BAILLIE

Methane is the world’s most abundant hydrocarbon. It’s the major component of natural gas and shale gas and, when burned, is an effective fuel. But it’s also a major contributor to climate change, with 24 times greater potency as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. With a new method, a research team led by Daniel J. Mindiola, Presidential Term Professor of Chemistry, has demonstrated the potential to use methane not as a fossil fuel, but as a versatile chemical building block with which to make more complex molecules, such as pharmaceuticals and other value-added substances. The reaction also offers a way of taking advantage of the properties of methane without releasing greenhouse gases.

Courtesy of University Communications

(From left) Kyle Smith, GR’23, lead author; Simon Berritt, director of Penn’s High Throughput Screening Center; and Daniel Mindiola, Presidential Term Professor of Chemistry.

“Finding ways to use methane besides burning it as a fuel constitutes a practical approach to using this abundant gas,” says Mindiola, senior author on the paper, published in the journal Science. “Our method will hopefully provide inspiration to move away from burning our resources and instead using them more as a carbon building block to prepare more valuable materials.” Methane comprises a carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms. When burned, all four carbon-hydrogen bonds break, resulting in the production of carbon dioxide and water, both of which are greenhouse gases. Selectively breaking just one or two of those carbon-hydrogen bonds— which could allow for the synthesis of larger hydrocarbons—has been difficult, however. Chemists have therefore considered methane relatively inert unless burned. In addition, because methane is a gas at ambient temperatures and pressures, it can be difficult to manipulate. But Mindiola had a brainstorm: What if he tried a borylation reaction using methane while varying pressure conditions? Carbon-hydrogen borylation is a process in which a hydrocarbon reacts with a boron-containing compound, catalyzed by a metal. The result is the replacement of a carbon-hydrogen bond with a carbon-boron bond. This bond can then be easily swapped to bond the carbon to another chemical group. Though borylation was discovered more than a decade ago, no one had tried it using methane, the simplest of hydrocarbons.

Mindiola’s team decided to try. They searched the literature to identify a promising combination of compounds and catalysts, then used a computational approach to evaluate which conditions and reagents might improve the reaction’s efficiency. Finally, they used Penn’s High Throughput Screening Center, which allows for the testing of 96 different reactions at once, to identify the most efficient conditions for the reaction. The most favorable reaction, conducted under relatively mild conditions of 150 degrees Celsius and 500 pounds per square inch of methane, using the metal iridium as a catalyst, resulted in yields as high as 52 percent borylated methane with high selectivity for the carbon-hydrogen borylation of one C-H bond as opposed to multiple bonds. “It turns out methane is not as inert as one would have expected,” Mindiola says. “We were able to borylate it using off-the-shelf reagents, which is very convenient.” Methane is currently so abundant that the petrochemical industry burns upwards of $50 million of methane each year in gas flares, in part due to a lack of storage capacity. And while some methane is used for steam reforming, a process that forms carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells or to make ammonia for fertilizers, the researchers believe the borylation reaction can offer a meaningful alternative use for methane. “I think this work is going to inspire a lot of chemistry and get people thinking about methane in a different way,” Mindiola says.

FINDINGS

OMNIA

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE AMERICAN ZOO When David Grazian began to make weekend visits to the Philadelphia Zoo with his young son, he didn’t imagine that he would one day find himself on the other side of the exhibits mucking out cages, presenting boa constrictors and lizards to zoo visitors, and preparing meals of beef soaked in cow’s blood for wildcats. But Grazian, an associate professor of sociology, became fascinated by the cultural world of the American zoo. And so the social scientist traded in his professorial tweed for khakis and work boots and spent four years as a zoo volunteer. The result is his recently published book American Zoo: A Sociological Safari. According to Grazian, the boundary between nature and human civilization is an artificial one, and nowhere is this idea more starkly illustrated than at the zoo. He writes, “With its carefully curated animal collections, audiovisual entertainment media, educational and conservation programming, and staged encounters with wildlife, the zoo provides a fitting model for how humans distill the chaos of the outdoors into legible representations of collective meaning and sentiment that project our prejudices and desires, past and present.” Grazian’s fieldwork took him to 26 zoos, aquariums, and marine-mammal parks across the country to study animals and exhibits; the zoo-going public; and the communities of zookeepers, educators, designers, marketers, and volunteers who make the contemporary zoo experience possible. Today’s zoos have moved away from the stark animal cages of the past and have embraced naturalistic models of presentation that mimic animal habitats, yet the book explores the many ways in which they present a highly mediated view of nature. Most obviously, major zoos have invested heavily in special attractions like interactive tours, 3-D movies, animal rides, birthday parties, Easter egg hunts, and hot-air balloons. But since their beginnings in the 19th century, American zoos have also carried the mantle of conservation, both through long-established captive-breeding programs for endangered species and, more recently, through fieldbased conservation efforts. It is in this area, Grazian argues, that zoos can and should play a vital role in educating people about threats to both animal life and human societies, especially global warming. “Doing the research for this book helped open my eyes to a wide range of environmental issues that sociologists have

JANE CARROLL

been slow to study,” says Grazian, whose current research focuses on the cultural consequences of climate change. “I’m interested in how we as humans experience and invest meaning in changes that have already begun to occur as a result of human-induced global warming.” Grazian proposes three crucial roles that zoos can play: They should continue to function as animal sanctuaries, though he argues for a scaled-down form that concentrates resources on a smaller number of species using the highest standards of care. He also urges zoos to take the lead in educating the public about climate change by functioning as schools of environmental education. Finally, Grazian argues, zoos can be urban showcases for green infrastructure such as sustainable energy systems, green roofs, and water recycling systems—infrastructure that he says cities will need to adopt to survive in a warming world. “Zoos attract people from all walks of life,” says Grazian, “and so in a way zoos offer us perhaps an ideal place for communicating with the largest possible mass audience about the dangers of the current environmental crisis, the importance of biodiversity, and the threats to the continued existence of life on earth.”

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RESEARCHER EXPLORES WHY VOTERS IGNORE LOCAL POLITICS BY

JILL DISANTO

Daniel Hopkins says that, while today’s voters are more engaged in federal elections, they’ve pretty much abandoned state and local politics. In a book that he’s developing, called The Increasingly United States, Hopkins, whose research as an associate professor of political science focuses on American elections and public opinion, says American federalism was based on the idea that voters’ primary political loyalties would be with the states. But that idea has become outdated. “With today’s highly nationalized political behavior, Americans are no longer taking full advantage of federalism. Contemporary Americans are markedly more engaged with national politics than with state or local politics,” Hopkins says. “We now know more about national politics,

vote more often in national elections, and let our national loyalties dictate our down-ballot choices.” The book presents evidence about Americans’ voting and political engagement and offers two reasons to explain why today’s voters are paying more attention to federal elections. The first, Hopkins says, is a landscape in which the political parties offer similar choices at the national level. “Just as an Egg McMuffin is the same in any McDonald’s, America’s two major political parties are increasingly perceived to offer the same choices throughout the country,” Hopkins says. The second reason is the changes in the media and how Americans get their news, an environment that allows people to follow their interests in national-level politics, making local and state-level politics easy to ignore, he says. “As Americans transition from print newspapers and local television news to the Internet and cable television, they are also leaving behind the media sources most likely to provide state and local information,” Hopkins says. “The result is a growing mismatch between the varied challenges facing states and voters’ near-exclusive focus on national politics.”

Courtesy of Daniel Hopkins

Daniel Hopkins, Associate Professor of Political Science

For The Increasingly United States, Hopkins examined historical and recent surveys from the 50 states, along with election results from gubernatorial and mayoral races dating back nearly a century. He also traced the evolution of political media coverage from the Los Angeles Times’ coverage during the Great Depression through the expansion of local television news during the 1960s and the role of social media today. “Voters’ attention, engagement, and campaign contributions are targeted more toward national politics,” Hopkins says. “This ‘nationalization’ is likely to have profound consequences for state and local politics and policymaking. Accordingly, this book seeks to document and explain the nationalization of contemporary Americans’ political behavior.”

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FIELD NOTES

How Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth’s Life Among Primates Is Influencing the Next Generation of Scientists By Blake Cole

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Illustrations by Emiliano Ponzi

OMNIA

Courtesy of Cheney and Seyfarth

Professors Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth’s camp in the Moremi Game Reserve, in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. The kitchen is made of letaka reeds, which grow in the swamps.

mother’s distress at the sound of her young being threatened—what could be more natural? But Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth weren’t just the watching the mother. They were watching her friends—the community. And the response spoke volumes. “Two nearby females looked at the mother, as if to say, I know that scream, that’s that juvenile, and that juvenile belongs to you,” says Cheney. “And that was one of our aha moments, the first indication that baboons recognized the relationships that existed among others, and that you could demonstrate this experimentally.” It was 1992 when Dorothy Cheney, professor of biology, and Robert Seyfarth, professor of psychology, began their longterm study of free-ranging baboons in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. The wife-and-husband team, together with a group of graduate students and postdocs, spent the next decade and a half documenting the behavior, communication, and social cognition of these group-living primates.

This work culminated in their highly influential 2007 book Baboon Metaphysics. Since then, the pair, set to retire this year, have published a multitude of scholarly articles and studies in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Animal Behaviour, including “The Evolution of Language From Social Cognition,” “Affiliation, Empathy, and the Origins of Theory of Mind,” and “The Extent and Limits of Cooperation in Animals.” Cheney’s and Seyfarth’s legacy looms large over the field of primate study, influencing a new generation of researchers from a plethora of different disciplines.

LIFE IN THE FIELD The pair’s first field study, under Robert Hinde, an eminent animal behaviorist at the University of Cambridge, was where they first became acquainted with baboons. “We were really lucky to get in at the ground level, because no one had really focused in on individual primates’ social behavior,” says Cheney. “The first person to do this was Jane Goodall and a lot of scientists criticized her for being overly anthropomorphic and trying to give her study subjects personality. Of course, it turned out she was right.”

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But Cheney and Seyfarth longed to dig deeper, to employ new concepts and novel experiments in order to gain a better understanding of what wild primates were really like. “Modern psychology is designed to embark on a scientific study of personality, of social relationships,” says Seyfarth. “So the question was, why shouldn’t we be able to do that on nonhuman primates? After all, we’re really interested in what it is that makes our social behavior and social relationships different from those of animals.” Prior to Botswana, Cheney and Seyfarth studied vervet monkeys in Kenya for 11 years, at a camp they kept staffed by students and colleagues year round. “We had to come back to the university to teach, and you can only get in the field for so much time,” says Seyfarth. “And with monkeys, it’s not like anthropology where you can go back to the tribe that you visited two years ago and get them to tell you what happened while you were away. Somebody’s got to be there all the time. So every day, we or our students would go out and study these animals.” When they transitioned to the camp in Botswana, Cheney and Seyfarth knew they had found something

special. “In Botswana you have a rarefied experience because you’re in the middle of nowhere in a kind of Disneyworld of nature,” Cheney says. “You have a lot of other animals that just wander through. And we always preferred working on animals in the wild because you can study them in the context in which presumably their behaviors evolved without the interference of humans.” Not only did the pair put down roots, they eventually moved their daughters to the camp as well. “Our two

Courtesy of Cheney and Seyfarth

For much of the year the only way to gain access to the camp is by boat.

“In Botswana you have a rarefied experience because you’re in the middle of nowhere in a kind of Disneyworld of nature ... and we always preferred working on animals in the wild because you can study them in the context in which presumably their behaviors evolved without the interference of humans.”

OMNIA

daughters spent about half their life, up until high school, going back and forth to these tents, where they would more or less teach themselves their school curriculum,” says Seyfarth. “This is a camp where elephants and lions wander through. It’s an extraordinary existence. Our daughters still return to this day.”

became apparent they were dealing not just with individuals interacting with each other, but with individuals acutely aware of and interested in the relationships that pertained among other individuals in the group.

THE COMPLEX SOCIAL LIFE OF PRIMATES

There are a few dangers in the field. Elephants, for example, pose a trampling risk for humans if they veer too close. It was a lion, though, that left the biggest impression. “It’s a good story to tell afterwards, but it was not a pleasant experience at the time,” laughs Seyfarth. “Usually in the savannah people are walking in groups and the animals tend to stay away, but I was walking alone. From a group of seven a rather aggressive lion took up chase. The first thing you learn is not to run or you’re the ball of yarn. So I walked slowly to the nearest tree and went up. At the time I thought, thank goodness, this tree has these little knobs on the trunk, and it was just like going up a ladder. But later when I went to revisit the tree, it had smooth sides. So it was pure adrenalin that got me up there.”

The social life of a primate has more similarities to a human’s than you might think. Take gossip, for instance: “These are voyeurs, essentially, and as a result, you can show that the animals recognize not only their own relationships and dominance ranks, but also those of others,” says Cheney. “It immediately begs the question, of what advantage is it to you to be acutely aware of what other individuals are doing? It opens up a whole new view of social behavior in animals, where there are complex relationships beyond the level of just the pair that’s interacting with each other.”

As Cheney and Seyfarth began using audio recordings to reveal the primates’ social bonding behavior, it quickly

Whenever a complex social hierarchy exists, Seyfarth says there’s an inevitable give and take. “The structure of pri-

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mate society introduces the fundamental dilemma that any group-living animal faces: You’re better off living in a group than being on your own, and yet when you join a group you also acquire a number of competitors.” One of the breakthrough developments in regard to this dilemma was the pair’s study of reconciliation. They found that when two animals got into a fight, they sometimes reconciled with each other afterward, the way humans might. The most common form of reconciliation in baboons is a simple grunt. Cheney and Seyfarth were able to observe primates making threatening gestures, and then a few minutes later those same dominant individuals would return and grunt, which the researchers describe as “greasing the social wheels and facilitating interaction.” In subsequent experiments they played the grunt of a close relative of the initial aggressor. “We got the same sort of result, suggesting that the victim was, in her mind, saying, ‘I was threatened by Betty. Betty chased me. Now I hear Betty’s daughter grunting to me, so I guess everything is okay with that family now,” says Cheney.

“The structure of primate society introduces the fundamental dilemma that any group-living animal faces: You’re better off living in a group than being on your own, and yet when you join a group you also acquire a number of competitors.” The social stratification created by dominance hierarchies manifests itself in other decidedly human ways. For instance, low-ranking females might potentially have a lower fitness, or reproductive rate, due to food scarcity. But the long-term data Cheney and Seyfarth collected show that low-ranking females can overcome this limitation by forming close bonds with other females—bonds that are correlated with better offspring survival and greater longevity. The pair say this is one of the most striking results to emerge from their 16-year study, and that it makes them wary of research on monkeys in captivity, where individual monkeys can be shifted around from one group to another, disrupting their natural social organization. “If you look at monkeys in captivity, you’ll often find that very low-ranking females have very high levels of stress,” says Cheney. “And in part that’s because their groups are so unstable and so unpredictable that they’re being shifted around all

the time, and they don’t have the opportunity to form the strong, enduring social bonds that, it turns out, are a crucial feature of primate life.” These kinds of dynamic behavioral scenarios inform a recent journal article Seyfarth and Cheney wrote with their former student Michael Platt, GR'94. When he was fresh out of college with an anthropology degree, Platt chose Penn for his graduate work in part because of Cheney’s and Seyfarth’s research on primates. “Dorothy and Robert had been getting quite famous around that time,” says Platt. “They coedited a big volume called Primate Societies that I read as an undergraduate, and so I applied [to Penn] to work with them.” Now, Platt has returned to Penn as the James S. Riepe University Professor. Their recent paper, “Adaptations for Social Cognition in the Primate Brain,” marks a reunion for the three and a potential springboard for future joint research.

A COLLABORATION 25 YEARS IN THE MAKING Platt reconnected with his mentors after a two-day symposium at which he and Cheney spoke back to back. “Her presentation naturally just led right into mine, and so it seemed like a great opportunity to try to synthesize what we had been working on,” says Platt, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor who has appointments in the Department of Psychology, the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Department of Marketing in the Wharton School. “It’s so funny it took us this long to actually write something together.” The article explores primates’ ability to form cooperative social bonds as an alternative to competition; the adaptive choices that balance competition and cooperation, often with the same partner; and how populations of neurons in the brain specifically encode the type, importance, and value of social information. Platt says it was actually his mentors—a psychologist and a biologist—who helped steer him toward hard neuroscience in the first place. “My career followed a pathway that was opened by Robert and Dorothy because they introduced me to Paul Glimcher, who had been a Ph.D. student and a postdoc here at Penn in the psychology department.” Glimcher, GR’89, was recruiting researchers for a new neuroscience lab at New York University and invited Platt to join the team. It turned out to be a good fit because Platt’s wife, Elizabeth Brannon—who, like Platt, studied under Cheney and Seyfarth and is now a professor of psychology at Penn—was studying at Columbia University at the time. “Paul basically needed a warm body in the lab to get things

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Courtesy of Michael Platt

started,” says Platt. “I was keen to say to him, ‘I don’t want to do lab research, I’ve been a field guy.’ But he said to me, ‘I can give you the tools, if you just commit to doing the work.’ And it turned out to be true.” In 1999, Platt and Glimcher co-authored the paper “Neural Correlates of Decision Variables in Parietal Cortex” in Nature, considered one of the seminal articles in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, the interdisciplinary study of decision making. But Platt says with his recent work, he’s come full circle, back to the type of fieldwork Cheney and Seyfarth were pioneering decades ago. One of Platt’s current projects includes leading a large-scale research program on an island called Cayo Santiago, off the coast of Puerto Rico. The site is famous because in 1938 over 400 rhesus macaque monkeys were brought there from India. The island now houses over 1,600 animals, with half a dozen or more research assistants following the monkeys one at a time, recording everything they do. “They do little experiments like Robert and Dorothy did, like come out of the bushes, holding a picture of a threatening monkey or a monkey from another group, so we can measure their responses,” says Platt. Researchers also gather blood samples from the monkeys in order to sequence their DNA. They are steadily building up to what Platt says will be one of the largest databases of quantitative behavioral measurements and genetics on known individuals in a naturalistic environment. The data from the island site has already begun to address a lot of the things that Cheney and Seyfarth worked on, like why some monkeys are really socially savvy and others peripheral.

Michael Platt, GR'94, James S. Riepe University Professor. Platt is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor who has appointments in the Department of Psychology, the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Department of Marketing in the Wharton School.

“We’re getting the entire read, which allows us to ask whether it’s specific genes or pathways or the whole genetic makeup of the animal that is affecting behavior,” says Platt. Cheney, Seyfarth, and Platt all attest to the fact that the melding of field and lab work has strengthened their joint research. But the observational component is only possible when studying group-living primates in a stable environment—an opportunity they say is becoming more and more endangered.

PRESERVING GROUP-LIVING PRIMATE OBSERVATION As primate research continues, there is a mounting battle for balanced funding when it comes to lab work versus field studies in more natural settings. The sheer expense and difficulty of replicating a complex living environment—for researchers unable to relocate to a natural environment— often translates into reduced funding for observational studies. According to Seyfarth and Cheney, the loss of social behavioral data would pose a huge risk. “It’s especially frustrating because by not adopting this more evolutionary perspective, science becomes less informative,” says Cheney. Moving forward, Cheney and Seyfarth say there are many aspects of primate life that bear further investigation, aspects likely possible only if funding for research in natural environments is made available. And the work is by no means simply observational. In fact, one of Cheney’s and Seyfarth’s most important contributions is to bring exper-

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

Courtesy of Cheney and Seyfarth

Dorothy Cheney, professor of biology, and other researchers follow baboons during a water crossing. The baboons have to wade and swim from island to island during the annual flood. >

Alex Schein

imental methods into the field. Vocal communication in primates, a phenomenon the pair have been researching for decades, is of particular interest. “What is it like to say that a monkey knows something when it doesn’t have a word for that something? Vervet monkeys, for instance, have an alarm system where they appear to give different calls to different types of predators,” says Cheney. “It’s almost like they have a word for a leopard, or a word for eagle. And we can show that animals respond differently to these different calls.” But does this mean that, when a vervet monkey hears another vervet’s leopard alarm, it creates the same kind of mental representation that we do when we hear the word “leopard”? Although there are tantalizing hints that some monkey calls function like words, the vocal repertoires of monkeys and apes are still very limited, especially when compared with our own ability to learn to produce new sounds. Cheney and Seyfarth say very little progress has been made in understanding this limitation, and why monkeys don’t seem to learn phonetically. “Under natural conditions they certainly have interesting vocalizations,” says Seyfarth. “But if they have such a rich understanding of other animals’ calls, why do they produce so few? It’s a real puzzle, because the same animal is both a creative listener and a very limited speaker. Where does this limitation come from? The speech apparatus? The brain? Or is it just a matter of motivation?”

Dorothy Cheney, professor of biology, and Robert Seyfarth, professor of psychology. <

As far as the next generation of research is concerned, Platt says a lot hinges on this ability to use reliable field data to inform lab work. “The way that I think about behavior, and the way I think about the brain, originated from being here, learning from Dorothy and Robert—the way they thought about things,” says Platt, who is planning to work with Cheney and Seyfarth to turn their coauthored piece into a more in-depth review. “I have my lab and my trainees and some are faculty at universities with their own students. And I think the way that Dorothy and Robert think about behavior, cognition, and biology is still alive in all these people. And so we’re sort of terraforming, if you will, at least a small part of the intellectual academy. So we’ll see where it goes. Hopefully they’ll all be really successful.” Cheney and Seyfarth don’t plan to leave fieldwork behind any time soon. Just this past winter they visited Botswana, and they continue to visit Kenya. “There was a professor who once looked at us and said, ‘God, this fieldwork, you guys are really committed. You practically live with your students,’” says Seyfarth. “And we have in fact lived with a lot of our students, and they’re our friends, and now our children’s friends. So we’ve been very lucky.”

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heir story reads like a film treatment: Three college students—all politics junkies—meet through their involvement in campus politics and hit it off. From their dorm rooms, they launch a political technology business. Soon after, they are hired to turn around two gubernatorial races in elections where the candidates are underdogs. They not only succeed in flipping the races and getting their candidates elected, they gain prominence as one of the nation’s leading campaign data and analytics firms in the process—all while trying to keep up with their homework. This is, in essence, the true tale of three Penn alumni: Anthony Liveris, C’14, Matthew Kalmans, C’15, G’15, LPS’15, and Sacha Samotin, C’15. Today, the friends are the principals of the political technology firm Applecart, based in Manhattan, and they continue to work their magic on political campaigns. The firm currently consults for campaigns nationwide including the presidential bid of Ohio governor John Kasich. In general, Liveris says, Applecart signs on with clients who are “solutions-oriented governing Republicans.” The trio’s success is based on a relatively simple concept. Traditional means of mass campaigning—like robocalls, blitzes of TV and radio ads, and yard signs—fail to move the opinions of voters in large numbers. And generic outreach that aims to persuade indistinguishable masses simply isn’t effective, the Applecart founders say. In fact, the only traditional type of campaigning that is consistently, measurably effective for the purpose of mobilizing voters is knocking on doors: person-to-person contact.

(From left) Anthony Liveris, C’14, Sacha Samotin, C’15, Matthew Kalmans, C’15, G’15, LPS’15

“A campaign’s approach to impacting voters needs to be customized to the individual to be successful,” Kalmans says. All three had worked on political campaigns and had seen both firsthand and in extensive academic literature that conventional means of campaigning just didn’t work. What does motivate voters, they all agree—and the literature confirms—is leveraging personal relationships. For that reason, from their dorm rooms the Applecart founders sought to invent a process for identifying and leveraging “influencers” in digital and real-world social networks, people at the center of a group who can sway opinions and help motivate friends, family, and coworkers not only to vote, but to support specific candidates. It is this capability that has allowed Kalmans, Liveris, and Samotin to change the conventional wisdom about how to run a successful political campaign at the highest levels of national politics. Their process is an analog-digital hybrid. It begins with identifying the population of voters relevant to a specific election. The firm works backward to find the influencers among them. To uncover these social networks, they comb through publicly available online and offline records to identify people who went to high school together or who currently go to the same church or play in the same softball league. “The literature began by identifying neighbors as a vehicle to influence political behavior,” Kalmans explains. “Recognizing that in the 21st century many people simply don’t

OMNIA

Kalmans says—they pitched their idea to some potential funders. “Politics is a cartel. Campaigns do not test the efficacy of their tactics. These operatives certainly weren’t used to a bunch of kids stepping in and asking for tens of thousands of dollars to test out ideas about how big data could reinvent their industry,” says Liveris. “Not one bit.”

The Applecart team strategizes in the headquarters near Times Square.

know their physical neighbors, we expanded on that by building technology to find the friends, bosses, colleagues, and people in communities who can sway the opinions of others in a more significant way.” At Penn, they crunched the numbers themselves and created a series of algorithms that constructed a web of relationships between voters in a given geography. As the firm has expanded, they have hired engineers and data scientists with backgrounds in Silicon Valley to create a more sophisticated, scalable platform to expand the process nationwide. “Politics has always been a social activity,” says Samotin. “Every part of the process, with the possible exception of pulling the lever in the voting booth, is social. People watch TV debates with their friends, they talk with their colleagues over water coolers and with their families around the dinner table. It’s fundamentally an interpersonal activity.” The inspiration for this data-driven, socially focused strategy was twofold. They’d seen how successful the Obama presidential campaigns had been in engaging a digital-savvy

electorate using social media, and they wanted to harness that power to benefit their candidates. Kalmans, Liveris, and Samotin were also influenced by the studies they read as research assistants for John DiIulio, Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society. In particular, they took interest in a seminal 2008 study by Yale political scientists, theorizing that social pressure to vote is what influences voter turnout the most. Using public records, the Yale researchers mailed letters to thousands of registered voters telling them they would publicize to their neighbors whether or not they had voted in the most recent election. When this social pressure was applied, registered voters responded and showed up to the polls. This idea captured the students’ attention, and they put theory to practice. They became partners in a new enterprise, a business that would take research about voting and apply it in a real-world context. But they needed start-up capital as well as actual campaigns where they could test out their ideas. After burning through their pooled personal savings—“including our bar mitzvah money,”

First Round Capital, founded by Josh Kopelman, W’93, and located just off Penn’s campus, came to the rescue with its “Dorm Room Fund,” a student-run venture capital fund that gave them a $20,000 grant to get their fledgling operation off the ground. They were additionally aided by several mentors on campus who helped them make connections. These included DiIulio, who served as a senior advisor to President George W. Bush; Greg Rost, chief of staff to Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, who had also been chief of staff to former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell; and David Thornburgh, who served as executive director of Penn’s Fels Institute of Government through 2014. “We have to give credit to Penn,” says Kalmans. “If we went to any other school, the project wouldn’t have been possible.” Finally, they got a break. The Republican Governors Association had narrowly lost several winnable races in the 2010 election cycle. The organization was getting nervous about losing several incumbents in the 2014 elections, in particular two governors who were falling behind in the polling leading up to the general election. The association hired Kalmans, Liveris, and Samotin to test their concept in the 2014 primary

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cycle, as a proof of concept ahead of the general elections of these dark-horse incumbents.

The difference they made shocked them. They produced a 14.6 percent increase in voter turnout, the largest ever recorded in U.S. history as a result of a single intervention. Six months later, on the night of the general election: “[We] were sitting at Tap House [a Penn watering hole] watching the results come in for the campaigns that had hired us: two underdog governors and two candidates for U.S. Senate. All four of our candidates won their elections,” recalls Samotin. “We were laughing about the fact that we were three undergrads flipping gubernatorial and senatorial elections from our dorm rooms.” The election wins catapulted the three partners onto the national stage. In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, they had offers to work on the Bush, Christie, and Kasich campaigns. They chose the last. “We believe strongly that elimination of mainstream candidates [like Kasich], especially in primaries, puts politicians in office who are less willing to see things from the opposing point of view, and it’s a policy problem at the end of the day,” says Samotin. “This is why Congress is filled with obstructionist politicians who won’t cooperate to pass reasonable legislation, like immigration reform.” Applecart now has 15 full-time employees in its Manhattan office. They are continuing to work on major elections while also branching out to see if they can apply their model to the corporate world. “If a person takes a vacation on a cruise ship, you can bet that they come home and talk to their friends about it—and those friends are now the ideal target for the cruise ship company to sell to,” Kalmans says. Looking back over the friends’ own journey during the past few years, he says, “It’s been a wild ride thus far, but we’ve only gotten started.” •

Anthony Liveris, C’14, Matthew Kalmans, C’15, G’15, LPS’15, and Sacha Samotin, C’15, cite as an influnce Penn’s John DiIulio, the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society; director of the Fox Leadership Program for undergraduates; and former senior advisor to President George W. Bush. We reached out to DiIulio for perspective on his former students’ beginnings at Penn, and for his thoughts on their current success: “I’ve taught the basic course on American government for more than 30 years across three different Ivy League universities, but I never had two students make a topic all their own the way that Matt and Sacha—who I dubbed “Thing 1” and “Thing 2,” à la The Cat in the Hat—made the best empirical get-out-the-vote literature all their own. Each instantly saw that what the political scientists had found via actual field experiments, regarding what worked to motivate voters, could be tested more fully and then developed into a more refined, digital-age technology. “And their big civic hearts pounded at the prospect of getting more people to participate, and the possibility that doing so might also make it harder for extremist candidates to succeed electorally. Their Fox research fellowships helped to give them the chance to really plumb those depths. Some experts reasonably doubted that these two kids, along with Anthony, who I got to know a tad later in the process, could do what few advanced graduate students would so much as attempt. But inside a year they were on the way to doing enough actual field experiments of their own to merit six doctoral degrees. And the leap from concept to new adaptations to today’s Applecart—now a thriving firm working for major candidates—was made lightning fast, yet with unbelievable intelligence, poise, and savvy. “For me, the best part is not their worldly or financial success, but that these are three recent Penn grads who are doing what they love doing, with people they like being with, in places they want to be. They model the gray matter, grit, and goodness of the Penn student at his or her best. I can hardly imagine what they might do for an encore or two over the next 50 years, but I’m just blessed to have gotten to know them and help a little back when.”

Courtesy of John Dilulio

“The primary election was the perfect test tube environment for us,” says Liveris. “There were no competitive races on the ballot and the voters had no reason to turn out, so if we could boost turnout in that race, we could boost turnout anywhere.”

NOTES FROM A MENTOR

OMNIA Peter Decherney recalls the moment when he truly understood the power of media. “When I was in high school, one summer I rode my bike across the country from New York to Seattle with a group of friends,” says Decherney. “We crossed the first time zone, and we all changed our watches. But when we went into a store, the clocks were still set for the East Coast time. I said, ‘You know, you’re on the other side of the line, right?’ And they told me they set their clocks according to their television reception, and they got East Coast TV shows. I realized how much the media drives so many aspects of our everyday lives.”

CAREER IN TWO PARTS

PETER DECHERNEY’S JOURNEY FROM FILM SCHOLAR TO FILMMAKER By

Blake Cole

It was an experience that would help shape Decherney’s career-long interest in media’s past, present, and future. Today, as a professor of English and cinema and media studies, Decherney immerses himself in a range of projects, exploring territory that ranges from copyright law to software platforms to the history of cinema—and, in the process, he is crossing the line that often separates scholars from makers. Decherney says he learned to love film at an early age after watching classics like Double Indemnity and Rebel Without a Cause on television. His latest book, Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction, reflects these roots and condenses a decade of teaching to ask the question: How can today’s technological, political, and social changes help us understand the past, and vice versa? The book addresses everything from the progression of the studio system to the darker periods of Hollywood, such as the blacklist during the Cold War. Decherney argues that many of the elements of Hollywood we view as natural—stars, genre-driven storytelling, and blockbuster franchises—are products of cultural, political, and commercial forces. Much of the content was shaped by questions from students in Decherney’s classes.

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“I regularly get emails from former students who are now working in the industry,” says Decherney, recipient of multiple teaching awards during his time at Penn, and who, as part of the Penn-in-Cannes program, travels with students to France for the festival as both an instructor and go-between for introductions to major industry players. “They always tell me how important it was to study film and media history.”

Putting today’s Hollywood in context requires an understanding of the complex history of the film industry, and few issues have made as much of an impact on how movies are made than copyright law and the public domain. In the grand scheme of things, a legal battle over the hairstyle of the Munchkins in Disney’s 2013 Oz the Great and Powerful doesn’t seem very significant. But Decherney teaches that in the film industry, minor decisions make major ripples. His 2012 book, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet, is widely cited as a seminal study of intellectual property law in the entertainment industry, and he has lent his expertise to myriad court cases, including Golan v. Holder, a Supreme Court case dealing with the extension of copy-

Peter Decherney, a professor of English and cinema and media studies

right protections to works previously in the public domain. “Until 1911, most films were adaptations of books, plays, biblical tales, or news stories,” says Decherney, who in 2009 was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar, awarded to scholars whose work examines the cultural, educational, historical, theoretical, or scientific aspects of theatrical motion pictures. “Filmmakers didn’t get permission to make adaptations, and no one really tried to stop them from being made.” That changed in 1909 when the Kalem Company, an American film studio founded in New York City in 1907, made a film adaptation of Ben-Hur. “This was both a best-selling book and a huge Broadway extravaganza that included

Lisa Godfrey

“MOOCs are one of a number of exciting changes that are encouraging us to rethink the way that we teach,” says Decherney. “Like writing a textbook, they allow us to make elements of our teaching available publicly.”

Lisa Godfrey

Decherney hopes to reach an even wider audience of film enthusiasts with his upcoming MOOC (massive open online course) on the history of Hollywood, which will use content he has pulled together from years of teaching to provide free online lectures. Long a proponent and advocate of fair use exemptions for educational purposes, Decherney plans to utilize a wide range of film clips and interviews to illuminate Hollywood’s complex history.

horses running on treadmills. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, where the court decided that filmmakers need permission to adapt plays and books.” To address this issue, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the decision, had to adapt patent law doctrine to copyright law. Patent law states that if you make something that only can be used for an illegal purpose, then the creator of the product can also be held responsible. “The example I use in my book is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Before they created the Apple computer, they sold ‘blue boxes.’ The only thing the boxes could do is trick payphones into making free calls,” says Decherney. “And so if you bought one of their boxes and used it

OMNIA Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies Professor Peter Decherney (left) interviews Myanmar actress and activist Grace Swe Zin Htaik (center), while Annenberg School for Communication Ph.D. candidate Sandra Ristovska (right) adjusts the camera. Tin Win Hlaing

to make a free call, Wozniak and Jobs would have been responsible even though they weren’t present when the call was made.” Similarly, after the 1911 Supreme Court case, for the first time film producers could be held responsible when theaters showed film adaptations for which the producers had not obtained permission from the copyright holders. “It may seem surprising to us, but for over a decade and half, American filmmakers could adapt works without permission,” says Decherney. “The notion of what is and is not piracy is always shifting.”

“It may seem surprising to us, but for over a decade and half, American filmmakers could adapt works without permission. The notion of what is and is not piracy is always shifting.” Evolving technology, encompassing everything from VCRs to file-sharing services like Napster, has presented a whole new set of challenges to courts, Decherney says. “It is the same question as the Ben-Hur case. Is Sony responsible if people use the VCR in illegal ways? In the end, Sony was not held responsible, because VCRs have many legitimate and socially productive uses.” More recently, peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Grokster, similar to its Napster and Kazaa predecessors, were not so lucky. “The Supreme Court decided in the Grokster case that

Grokster was responsible for users’ infringing uses, because Grokster advertised itself as a tool for infringement, for piracy. And so if you’re building a business model based on illegal uses, you could be held liable.” In addition to addressing copyright and new technology, Decherney has written about the use of the public domain in filmmaking. Navigating the maze of what is and isn’t public domain is a challenge even to film historians. All the early Walt Disney films, for example, were based on public domain stories. “When Disney decided to make his first feature-length animated film, Snow White, it was very expensive,” says Decherney. “One of the reasons he was able to take that kind of risk was that he knew Snow White was a time-tested story that was going to work. Disney built something new on the foundation of something old, something in the public domain.” But even though a story might be in the public domain, a company is able to use copyright law to protect the original elements added in their own versions. When Disney made Oz the Great and Powerful, for example, they had to digitally alter the shade of the Wicked Witch’s green skin and the hairstyle of the Munchkins because those specific aspects were protected by the copyright in the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. Surprisingly, some big franchises buck the trend, like fan favorite Sherlock Holmes, which falls under free use. Decherney, a frequent contributor to Forbes, has written multiple articles detailing the history of copyright surrounding the famous detective. “Sherlock Holmes has a long, complicated history of character protection in the U.S., because he straddles the 1923 line that separates the public domain from copyrighted works,” says Decherney. Holmes, like many classic characters, also spawns fan fiction, now almost a cottage industry for aspiring writers.

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As the genre becomes ever more popular—including mega-hits like Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as fan fiction of the Twilight series—the subject of re-appropriation of our favorite characters becomes more and more cloudy. Some services are embracing it. “Amazon offshoot Kindle Worlds allows you to create and upload your fan fiction,” Decherney says, “and then they’ll sell it for you and split the revenue between the fan author and the publishers.”

Decherney had traveled to Myanmar with a few filmmakers in tow, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Yangon. The mission of the visit was to explore the cultural legacy of film and how it played into modern politics in the country, so that both U.S. and Myanmar-based filmmakers and scholars could learn more about the other’s respective industries. The larger context went back to 2011, when the dissolution of the junta led to a relaxing of censorship. This, in turn, ushered in an explosion of creativity in today’s 35th Street filmmaking district in Yangon, a collection of storefronts run by small units of filmmakers who can often be seen hand labeling their self-manufactured DVDs. “I love to have people tell their stories, and there were all these exciting things happening in the three years after the relaxing of censorship,” says Decherney. “But there was a real sense that the 2015 election was going to be a litmus test to see if these creative liberties would be maintained. It occurred to me that this was the moment in time to tell the story of this little-known industry and its complexities, so we went back halfway across the world and started filming.” Thus Filmmaking for Democracy in Myanmar, Decherney’s first film project, was born. For Decherney, whose only experience up to that point had been amateur photography, finding a local crew to support his efforts was crucial. He hooked up with Tin Win Hlaing, a local cinematographer. In addition to being a talented cameraman who would help capture the natural beauty of the country, Hlaing also served as a sort of guide. “Some of our best interviews were accidents,” says Decherney. “The last day we were shooting, we went to a village about an hour outside of Yangon that functions as

Peter Decherney

Though it may seem like Decherney’s vast knowledge of the film industry would provide an excellent launch pad for a film project of his own, the impetus was more a case of being in the right place at the right time: specifically, in January of 2014 in Myanmar, where he encountered a cultural moment he feared might be lost to a global population. Suddenly, the line between scholar and maker became blurred, and Decherney set about the task of making his first movie. A Myanmar actress puts on traditional thanka makeup in preparation to play a village girl.

a kind of living set—film companies shoot there every day. A car drove up, and an actress got out, and she knew Tin. We talked with her about the industry as she put on her thanaka makeup, a tree bark-based paint the women use, and she appears in the film.” In order to tell the inside story of an industry at odds with what many regard as a fascist regime, Decherney needed to network with a variety of local filmmakers. They included Wyne, who made the first horror film in the country to be theatrically released; Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a human rights filmmaker known for organizing groups of films and filmmakers in order to travel the country and show their work; and Lamin Oo, a young documentary filmmaker who studied in the U.S. and has been cited by President Barack Obama for his talent as a storyteller. Films focused on human rights have been bolstered by the newly established Human Rights Film Festival, sponsored by one of the country’s most revered figures, Aung San Suu Kyi, chairperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD). Decherney plans to return to Myanmar for follow-up footage, especially important now that the elections have taken place (the NLD won a landslide victory, which made way for a historic meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and the military general). The results are encouraging for the future of censorship-free filmmaking, but the future remains uncertain until the dust settles. “I’d like to see what people think afterwards. There were many projects in development that I need to follow-up on with the filmmakers. There seems to be a lot of excitement in the country, but again, it’s cautious optimism.”

Found in Translation

Linguists try to preserve spoken indigenous languages by writing them down By

Michele Berger

Marjorie Pak

o get to the tiny Mexican village of Santa Maria del Mar in Oaxaca—population 800 or 1,500, depending on whom you ask—requires a 45-minute boat ride through always-choppy waters huddled under a tarp in near darkness with two dozen companions. A decade-long territorial dispute with a neighboring village has closed off other entry points.

But to Rolf Noyer, an associate professor of linguistics, making the uncomfortable journey is worth the prize at its end: The chance to work with community members on a written version of their spoken language, Huave. It’s one of a few places in the world left with speakers of this isolate, meaning it has no known relatives. “I was the first academic linguist to work on that language in 100 years,” he says. The result of two six-week stays was an online dictionary comparing four Huave dialects and a printed volume containing extensive vocabulary and basic spelling and grammar rules for one of the languages, copies of which are now in Santa Maria

del Mar. This tale of a linguist teaming up with native speakers to document a threatened tongue is part of a larger story, one about collaborations between academics and indigenous peoples to save endangered languages from extinction.

The Need for Protection Part of this effort stems from a push by Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI). “The organization has been involved in trying to arrange practical orthographies for indigenous unwritten languages,” Noyer says. This past March, INALI put out a notice saying that all indigenous speakers have the right to use their languages in private and public life. It’s a step toward broader acceptance of native languages, but some of these communities, aided by linguists like Noyer and Brook Lillehaugen of Haverford College, say they also want to figure out a way to write down their spoken words. “A lot of people think languages aren’t valued or respected until they’re written down, which isn’t really true,” Noyer says. “There

Noyer at the entrance to the village. The arch reads “Welcome to San Mateo del Mar.”

is a strong sense in a lot of the indigenous language communities that because their language is not written, it’s less important.” These groups have been discriminated against for conversing in one of the only ways some of them know, adds Lillehaugen. “Language use is really tied into identity,” she says. “Indigenous Oaxaca is one of the most diverse linguistic areas in the world.” Lillehaugen works there on languages in the Zapotec family, which most speakers currently do not write. However, these have a long-standing written record using the Roman alphabet, with the oldest works dating back to 1565, of which many modern native speakers aren’t aware—something Lillehaugen aims to change. She’s working with Laurie Allen, Penn Libraries’ Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship, to track down, transcribe, digitize, and analyze as many Zapotec texts as they can find. They have so far entered into their database 50 manuscripts and a 300-page book, and just received permission from the National Archives to post 50 more. “Many academics who view themselves as allies with indigenous groups are asked by the communities to help them devel-

op a way to write their language,” Lillehaugen says. “One reason is really for prestige of the language. There are other reasons: You might want to write to be able to communicate, to keep track of things, to have a written record.” It also emboldens language users. In April, Allen and Lillehaugen traveled to Oaxaca to give a workshop to Zapotec speakers. “It was amazing for me to see them work through their language,” Allen says, “work through it in the writing of 18th century [texts] and wills.”

A Language Democracy For the Huave speakers in Santa Maria del Mar, the path to a standard orthography wasn’t quite so smooth. This small village is one of four in close proximity; they all speak a version of Huave, but not the same one, and each feels pride in its variation. In addition to Santa Maria del Mar, there’s San Mateo del Mar, the largest of the quartet and the one at odds with Santa Maria, plus San Francisco del Mar and San Dionisio del Mar. They’re

OMNIA

Marjorie Pak

An interview subject and his family listen as Noyer reads to them in a traditional Huave house. The village’s writing system was established by missionaries beginning in the 1940s.

all located on the Pacific Ocean, and enclose a bay called Laguna Superior. Noyer has worked in all four places.

ture,” he says. “The workshops involved this interplay between the community and people from the outside.”

The linguist studied Huave in graduate school but had never been to the places where it was spoken. In fact, he penned several papers about the language before he ever heard its sound. In 2004, he joined a group from the University of California, Berkeley, visiting the villages, then went back in 2006 with a cohort of Penn graduate students. When he returned to Philadelphia, the dialects fresh in his mind, Noyer created the online Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Huave Languages, which he hoped would provide a reference for researchers, a resource for Huave speakers, and a start to the documentation process.

Unexpected Challenges

“I began to develop this reputation as being someone who knew the most about [these languages],” Noyer says. INALI invited him to participate in a set of workshops aimed at bringing together linguists from around the world and schoolteachers from these Oaxacan villages—what Noyer describes as the area intelligentsia—to write down the languages. These are equivalent to elementary schoolteachers, people tasked with educating the village children. “The linguists, we came with an artificial understanding of these languages. We don’t speak them natively, but we understand language struc-

Unforeseen disputes arose, like one Noyer didn’t expect over spelling. Most historical attempts to write down Huave came from Spanish-speaking priests or missionaries who tried to keep spelling consistent with the language they knew. This had a backlash effect, in some cases prompting modern native speakers to move as far away from Spanish as possible in how they wrote their words. For instance, one group decided that any word with the lettering “ti” or “te” in it should instead be spelled “tyi” or “tye” in an effort to precisely reflect the sound of the letter t in Huave rather than its Spanish pronunciation. Linguistically, however, this was impractical because t, when placed before an i or an e in Huave, already has the sound these speakers sought. Another challenge arose over use of the letters k, c, and q. Most linguists prefer the k for that hard sound because it’s simpler and less ambiguous, but some older speakers—having learned the c and q spellings when they learned Spanish—held this lettering to be more proper. “The younger speakers, in line with

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a general trend among indigenous language speakers in Mexico and Guatemala, have taken up the use of k as a way of distancing themselves from Spanish,” Noyer says. “This letter alone has come to symbolize a kind of indigenous pride.” Each group’s specific dialect is another source of pride. One community might want to vary how it writes a word simply to symbolize its individuality. The four Oaxacan villages even have different names for their languages, which none actually calls Huave. San Dionisio and San Francisco call it umbeyajts. For San Mateo, it is ombeayiiüts and for Santa Maria, it is umbeyüjts. Each is some variation of the phrase “our mouth.” Often, Noyer says, these clashes take on social or political significance. “I was trained as a linguist; I understand this intellectually. But I am not an anthropologist and I am not a politician,” he says. “It’s really interesting to observe this dynamic and to work within it, to find something that is satisfactory to everyone and is linguistically sensible.” Sometimes, like when he worked in San Dionisio del Mar, it came down to an actual raise-your-hand vote.

“One thing that’s really important in preserving languages is to get children to learn them,” he says. In the United States, one model pairs elderly with preschoolers, tasking the older generation to educate the newest on what they know. “Ultimately, this is something they would like to do in Mexico, have older people in the community … teaching [children] the language,” he adds. Noyer is currently working on children’s picture books full of local animals and plants that grandparents can read to their grandchildren. It will take at least such efforts, aided by the support of advocates like Noyer, Lillehaugen, and Allen, to preserve these native tongues. “These are endangered languages,” Allen says. “They’re losing more speakers than they’re gaining all the time.” With INALI backing the push to preserve them, this battle is one linguists know is worth fighting.

The Future of this Work Ultimately, the future of these languages lies with the next generation. To that end, Lillehaugen is working on another Zapotec project that supported half a dozen teenagers who speak the language to write in it by tweeting at least five times a week for seven weeks. Her students at Haverford promised to “read” the tweets (though they themselves don’t speak the language) and engage in conversation with the Mexican high schoolers. Lillehaugen left it up to the Zapotec speakers to determine spelling. “Rolf is working on creating a standard orthography. We took a slightly different route,” she says. “We basically said, ‘Write any way you want to.’ There is no codified way.” Each tweet contains the hash tag #usatuvoz, which means, “Use your voice.” “If you look for #usatuvoz, you’ll find hundreds of tweets in Zapotec,” Lillehaugen adds. “It’s a way to encourage people to write in a very unusual situation.” According to the researcher, the project invigorated the high schoolers, who continue tweeting in Zapotec even though their commitment has concluded. Rolf Noyer

Noyer says in San Mateo del Mar, with its population of around 13,000, children learn both Huave and Spanish at school and at home, but in the other three villages, finding Huave speakers— let alone those interested in documenting the language—poses a challenge. In at least one of them, Noyer guesses the youngest natives who know Huave are in their 40s; in another, the youngest have already reached age 70.

“A sign from the elementary school in Santa Maria del Mar showing the names of numbers in Huave. Also depicted are the corresponding spelling of the words in the orthography that Rolf and his team designed.”

OMNIA

Brain’s Location-Tracking Cells Use Transcendental Number System By

Evan Lerner

However, the way grid cells encode and decode this information to produce a usable mental map is still a mystery. Individual grid cells don’t differentiate between the points on their corresponding grids; to the brain, each point looks like the same burst of electricity. How can the brain translate those signals into something that says, “you are here?” Researchers now have a theory for how grid cells work together to allow a rat—or a person—to accomplish this task.

By digging into the fundamental mathematics of the grids they encode, Vijay Balasubramanian, the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Xue-Xin Wei, GR'15, have shown that grid cells form a kind of number system, with different-sized grids acting as the equivalent of the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands place in a decimal number. They used this theory to make a key prediction— that different sized grids would be found in ratios based on the “transcendental” mathematical constant e—which has been borne out by evidence gleaned from earlier experiments. In collaboration with Jason Prentice of Princeton University, they published their theory in the journal eLife. Partly for his work on this subject, Wei received the 2015 Louis B. Flexner Award for Outstanding Thesis Work in Neurosciences.

Animals use specialized neurons in their brain known as grid cells to keep track of their physical location. The subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they earned that name because, when researchers monitored an individual grid cell in a moving rat, mapping the places where the neuron fired produced a regular triangular grid.

Researchers knew that activation patterns of specialized neurons correspond to triangular grids of real-world locations. But with each cell representing an entire grid rather than any one point on it, they didn’t know how organisms could use that information to determine where they were.

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Vijay Balasubramanian, the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy < Courtesy of Vijay Balasubramanian

Rather than assign a different neuron to keep track of each location on a number line, a computer scientist would use something like binary code. The research found that evolution produced a similar coding system based on Euler’s number. >

“What’s been clear for the last decade or so is that grid cells will respond when you are in one of several places, which form a triangular grid if you were to plot it on a map,” Balasubramanian says. “Each grid cell is responsible for maintaining one grid, and other cells are responsible for maintaining grids with different orientations or scales. So the mystery has been to figure out how the brain can use the overlap between these different grids to figure out where you are.” Wei and Balasubramanian figured that the brain must have some sort of indexing system to relate the position on multiple grids of different sizes; combining that information is what gives an organism a good sense of where it is on a given mental map. Just as it would be massively inefficient to have a unique numeral for every number from 1 to 1,000, the researchers theorized that grid cells also use something like the decimal system, exploiting grids with different sizes. A specific location could be represented by a series of grid cells, with each contributing a “digit” to the overall “code,” getting more and more precise by moving from cells that represent larger to smaller grids. “Each grid cell’s firing represents a number of different locations, just like saying a number that has a five in the ones place doesn’t by itself tell you what the number is,” Balasubramanian says. “Our proposal is that grid cells are essentially a two-dimensional number system, so when they fire, they are collectively making a number out of the values in each of the different grids—just like 135 is a one in the hundreds place, a three in the tens, and a five in the ones.” The next step was to determine what base this number system would use, given that it was a product of evolution rather than human ingenuity, like the decimal system base 10, or binary’s

base 2. The researchers showed that, if evolution selected for the most amount of information using the least amount of cells, it would use something based on the mathematical constant e, or Euler’s number. Like pi, e is transcendental, meaning, among other things, that its decimals trail off into infinity without repeating patterns. Also like pi, e is found everywhere in nature, but rather than describing the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference, it is the basis for logarithms, exponential functions, and normal distributions, otherwise known as bell curves. “It’s as if evolution figured out a deep theorem in number theory,” Balasubramanian says. “That’s what is beautiful about all this from a conceptual standpoint.” For animals navigating a two-dimensional map, Balasubramanian and Wei predicted that the digits in the grids’ code would be related in square-root-of-e increments. Looking at actual grids derived from experiments with rats, this prediction was borne out: There are clusters of cells that represent grids that are successively square-root-of-e larger than one another, just like the digits in the tens place are ten times bigger than the ones. “The crucial aspect is that this connects grid cells of different scales,” Wei says, “which allows you to solve the problem of figuring out where you are. So far, researchers have measured five grid scales in rats, but we predict they are going to find about 10. We think a 10-digit number is what you need to represent the 50 to 100 meters that make up the natural homing range of a rat.”

OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

Why Isn’t Shakespeare

Dead Yet? A status update for the 21st century by

Susan Ahlborn Jonathan Reinfurt

Illustration by

As of April 23, William Shakespeare has been dead for 400 years. The day came complete with its own hashtag, #Shakespeare400, and an emoji of the globally recognizable bald guy. But why do we care? When was the last time you read some Shakespeare on the train, or even saw one of his plays performed? “One thing that’s remained constant over 30 years of teaching is that students think they know Shakespeare but are also intimidated by it,” says Rebecca Bushnell, School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English, of the distance created by the works’ language, highbrow reputation, and some characterizations we now find repugnant. One high school teacher recently caused an uproar by dropping Shakespeare from her lesson plan as irrelevant to her students. Others try to connect their pupils with his plays by studying the characters and their motivations “almost as if they’re real people,” says Bushnell, a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Actors and directors have done the same, according to Cary Mazer, associate professor of theatre arts and English and author of Double Shakespeares, a history of contemporary performances, and the play Shylock’s Beard. Performances today include radical departures from the script, especially in international productions that may not feel limited by the famous language. One version interviewed middle-school students about Romeo and Juliet and acted out the responses, while another, Sleep No More, was staged in a warehouse. As audience members walked around the set they’d realize that the story was Macbeth, presented out of order and mostly unspoken. “The plays are alive. They feel very present,” says Bushnell, whose books include A Companion to Tragedy and Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance. “But they were created at a particular moment in English and European history and they mean something in that context. We want it to be relevant, but we also want you to understand that it’s different from you, and that difference is interesting.” “I think the students are very surprised, once we get more in depth, by some of the things that are happening in the plays and the strangeness of the Shakespearian world,” says Melissa Sanchez, an associate professor of English. The author of Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Litera-

ture, Sanchez cites scholars who say that most Europeans at that time still believed in the “one sex” model: that women and men had the same sex organs but inverted. “That meant that women and men were actually not so different, and theoretically women could become men and men women,” she says. “So when Lady Macbeth says ‘Unsex me here,’ she might mean that literally.” Sexual norms were also different, with same-sex activities not specifically defined as gay or lesbian, and rape prosecuted as a property crime. Sanchez says, “The Shakespearian sexual world, much less all the other worlds that he represents to us, is not just this exciting and interesting and liberating world. It’s a very disturbing and troubling and upsetting world in a lot of ways.” Instead of using history to contextualize Shakespeare, Margo Todd uses Shakespeare to teach history. The Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History specializes in early modern English and Scottish history and uses Richard III and Henry VIII in her classes. “Richard III is a great play, Henry VIII is not, but both are great historical pieces,” she says. Both works give a positive picture of the Tudors who ruled England; when Elizabeth I is born in Henry VIII, she is presented as a “heaven-sent princess.” “Shakespeare always had an eye to contemporary politics, not just to curry favor but to give warnings,” says Todd. “Richard III sends messages about what is legal and moral and what is not.”

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Other recent approaches include ecocriticism, which examines the way the characters engage with the politics, social aspect, and aesthetics of nature; and the use of ideas from psychology and cognitive studies to look at what Shakespeare says about how our brains work. Bushnell herself is working on a book that connects tragedy in drama, film, and videogames. “Videogames have something to tell us about how tragedy works because they bring out the idea of being able to manipulate and control action and time, which is the heart of any classical tragedy,” she says. “While historical context is important, I’m also arguing that contemporary media can tell us something about the works of the past.”

The plays were written for a particular set of shared conventions and codes by which the audience understood the performance, Mazer says, and yet there’s enough there for later artists to appropriate material from which they can make their own theater pieces. “In Shakespeare the characters come to understand one another’s feelings by the act of empathy, and in the audience, whether or not we share values with them, we empathize with them.” “Everybody knows him,” Bushnell sums up. “Some see that as a kind of global expansion and imperialism of English culture. I don’t, because one of the wonderful things you see when you look at what’s happened to Shakespeare over 400 years and the span of an entire globe is that everyone takes it and makes it their own. There’s something about that body of text in those plays that has a kind of power that people want to tap into, but they also want to adapt and possess and transform it. And I think that’s great.”

English Professor Zachary Lesser will be considering these approaches and more as one of the three general editors of the fourth series

SOME SHAKESPEARE STATS

(OFFICIALLY)

of the Arden Shakespeare, a leading scholarly edition begun in the 1890s. “Students ask, ‘Oh, you work on Shakespeare. How could you ever come up with something new to say?’” he says. “But because Shakespeare’s so central to English literature, it means he changes constantly because the way we think about literature changes.”

PLAYS

In the 21st century, the digital humanities are giving us new ways to study Shakespeare using big data. These include stylometrics, a controversial approach to determining authorship by doing an analysis of style, grammar, and vocabulary. The arguments about whether or not William Shakespeare really wrote the works credited to him have subsided somewhat with the understanding that most dramatic writing at the time was done collaboratively. “It’s not what they show in Shakespeare in Love, with Joe Fiennes sitting up in his study writing about his relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow,” Bushnell says. “Instead you have this amazing culture of collaborative production of stories.”

154 SONNETS

5 POEMS

FILMS OF HAMLET

46,450 WORDS (OPEN SOURCE SHAKESPEARE)

1,224 CHARACTERS

(OPEN SOURCE SHAKESPEARE)

1,395 QUOTES (BARTLETT’S)

Penn’s Incredible Shakespeare Collection Penn’s H. H. Furness Memorial Library contains virtually all English-language editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, including all four of the folios and even rarer materials such as Hamlet’s third quarto. School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English Rebecca Bushnell helped to develop the virtual version of the library, but says, “For all of our ability to see everything on the Internet, the books themselves are still really powerful.

“For years I’ve taken my students in to see these books, and they’re blown away. The books embody the aura and power of the past, which they feel they can touch,” she says. “But recently I’ve realized I was in a new world because they all had their cell phones out and were taking pictures.”

FACULTY OPINION

A MOST DANGEROUS YEAR IN UNITED STATES-RUSSIAN RELATIONS By Mitchell A. Orenstein Illustration by Jon Krause

OMNIA

2016 is turning out to be the most dangerous year in United StatesRussia relations. Trust between the governments of the two countries is extinguished. The United States has sanctioned Russia for its annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine. Russia has sent troops to Syria to prop up the government of Bashar al-Assad that the U.S. would like to see deposed. The U.S. is sending troops and equipment to Eastern Europe to bolster their defenses. Russia has unleashed a propaganda war against the U.S., spreading disinformation and stirring up anti-U.S. sentiment at home. Arms control deals appear to be falling apart. Russian warplanes buzz U.S. ships and aircraft in the Baltic Sea.

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Why is all this happening now, in the last year of the Obama administration? This administration entered office promising a rapprochement or “reset” of relations with Russia, rising from the lows reached in the George W. Bush administration. It canceled the missile shield the Bush administration planned to install in Eastern Europe. Yet, the final year of the Obama administration has become the most dangerous time in United States-Russian relations. The answer is simple, but troubling: Russia perceives President Obama to be weak and the West in general to be in crisis. As a result, Russia sees 2016 as perhaps the optimal moment to cut the U.S. and the Western alliance down to size. That Russian President Vladimir Putin sees President Obama as weak should be no secret to anyone who has watched the body language of their meetings together. Rightly or wrongly, Putin perceives Obama’s actions and inactions in Syria as weak. Obama did not stand firm on his announced intentions to punish the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons. Obama agreed to a nuclear deal with Iran that appears to have failed to meet a number of key U.S. objectives. Whereas President Obama often appears indecisive, President Putin’s moves by contrast appear bold and decisive, even risky. It is not just the personalities, however, but also the circumstances that make this an ideal time for Russia to strike. The U.S. and the European Union have suffered from significant crises and remain weakened economically and politically. The effects of the global financial crisis fell more heavily on the West than on other world regions, but while the U.S. has returned to growth, at least tentatively, Europe remains in an austerity-induced crisis. Anti-system politics in Europe has reached new highs with

Greece suffering from repeated failed bailouts and the U.K. on the verge of a contentious vote on leaving the EU. In this context, the Putin administration calculates that this year the time is ripe to increase pressure on the West to new heights. While relatively weak economically and militarily compared to the West, Russia has sought to divide and rule, for instance by uncovering and advertising U.S. spying on European partners through the National Security Administration. Russia plays generous host to Edward Snowden and has hoped to stoke anti-American feeling in Europe. Russia also has sponsored far-right political parties in Europe that oppose the European Union, on the condition that they advocate a pro-Russian foreign policy. Russia seeks to frighten Sweden and Finland, which are considering bids to join NATO, by sending its warplanes to buzz U.S. ships in the Baltic. All of these efforts seem to be intensifying in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. How can the West respond? Unfortunately, there is no easy way. Opinion in the West remains divided between those who wish to see more engagement with Russia, regardless of its domestic political regime, and those who hope to contain Russia and its influence on neighboring states. The former are afraid of confrontation with a large, nuclear-armed state with an unpredictable leadership. The latter are afraid of Russian sponsorship of anti-liberal forces that could tear apart the European Union and dissolve the Western alliance. Faced with an opponent that views weakness as an opportunity to project power, there is no question that the best way to address Russia is through a Western projection of strength. But how to project strength when the reality is that the West is divided? The U.S. presidential cam-

paign has demonstrated this clearly, as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has indicated that he wants a warmer relationship with Russia and views President Putin as someone with whom he can do business, even a role model. While Trump brags about his body parts, Putin actually shows them off in publicly staged photos. Meanwhile, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton takes a hawkish view of Putin and Russia. Europe, which has closer economic ties with Russia, also remains divided about how to approach Russia, with many Europeans not wishing to anger Russia or to give up on a rich trade and investment relationship. The French Assembly, whose votes are mostly symbolic, recently voted to instruct the government to vote to end the European Union’s sanctions regime against Russia, imposed after the invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems determined to hold a tough line on Russia, not accepting its aggression toward Ukraine and other Eastern European neighbors and its disinformation and support for anti-EU parties within Germany itself. Containing Russian ambitions to exert its dominance over Eastern Europe will remain a tough battle. Every election matters. And Russia can be counted on to exert its influence to support those in the West who are ready to overlook Russia’s misdeeds in Ukraine. Yet 2016 has shown that appeasement is not the answer. Russia’s ambitions to be a European great power require a firm response. The U.S. and its Western allies must commit to containing Russia and upholding Western unity now that we see Putin’s challenge more clearly than before. Mitchell A. Orenstein is a professor of Slavic studies.

OMNIA

Vivid blue fossilized walrus ivory necklace with white diamond pavé on a black oval diamond bead chain

Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Monique Péan and Stephen Glass, both C’03

Meteorite cufflink: Scandinavian meteorite signature cufflinks

PARTNERSHIP MADE AT PENN By Sacha Adorno

A mutual friend brought Monique Péan and Stephen Glass, both C’03, together senior year. Thirteen years later, the two are partners in marriage and business. After a post-Penn stint at Goldman Sachs, Péan started an eponymous fine jewelry company in Manhattan; Glass, leaving behind a career in real estate private equity, joined her a few years later. Launched in 2006, MONIQUE PÉAN now employs 17 people. Its sculptural one-of-a-kind designs, environmentally friendly practices, and commitment to philanthropy have earned a fan base that includes actors Lupita Nyong’o, Alicia Vikander, and Jennifer Lawrence, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama and style influencers like Vogue, Elle, and W magazines. Q: How did you meet? Monique Péan: Our friend Fred Berger, C’03, was having a party. Steve and I were reluctant to attend because we had other plans. Fortunately, we did go or we might not have met. We are still very close with Fred, who officiated our wedding. Q: Finance to fine jewelry—tell us about the career switch. MP: My decision to stop working in finance was prompted by the passing of my younger sister Vanessa in a car accident when she

MOVERS & QUAKERS

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was 16. I began taking design classes and found working with my hands was therapeutic. When I went into stores wearing my designs, a few storeowners expressed interest in selling my work, making me think there was an opportunity. Stephen Glass: I joined the company in 2012. Monique was having a lot of success with the business and needed help. I had traveled with her to Beijing and Shanghai to explore business opportunities in China. When she had to return home early for an event at the White House, I stepped in to lead the meetings. This trip made us realize that we partnered well at work. Q: What are your unique roles at MONIQUE PÉAN—and what is it like working with your spouse? MP: I am creative director and CEO and involved in all aspects of the business. One of the most remarkable parts about working with Steve is that I know he cares about the outcomes of a project as much as I do, so I can depend on him to give 180 percent. It’s also nice that we often travel together now—before we both had very busy, but separate, work travel schedules. SG: As COO, I focus on operations but also work in a number of other areas of the business. When MONIQUE PÉAN was smaller, I was involved with the nitty-gritty; as we’ve grown my role has become more managerial. Monique and I try to divide and conquer, so it sometimes feels that we’re not working at the same company. Other times we collaborate very closely. Q: Philanthropy, fair trade, and sustainability are core values at MONIQUE PÉAN. How do you decide which initiatives to support and where to source materials?

MP: We support traditional craftsmanship by partnering with artisans around the world. I research sustainable materials before deciding where to travel for my annual design inspiration trip and am always looking for new and unique materials to incorporate into my collections. For example, traveling through Utah and seeing artist Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, a remote oversized installation in the Great Basin Desert, inspired my most recent collection called SOLCIN. It features materials native to the Colorado Plateau, including fossilized dinosaur bone from the Jurassic age and septarian, a material formed during the Cretaceous period. SG: Proceeds from MONIQUE PÉAN sales contribute to philanthropic organizations that focus on global health, development, and basic human needs. We have a long-standing relationship with charity: water, which provides clean drinking water and sanitation to people in developing nations. We’re proud to have built clean water wells in Mali, Malawi, Mozambique, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Nepal. It was natural for us to focus on clean water because of the negative impact mining new gold can have on water supplies and local communities. To avoid supporting environmentally destructive gold mining, we use 18-carat recycled gold as well as found materials and repurposed stones. Q: In what ways did Penn equip you to build and run an ethically focused design business? MP: Majoring in political science, economics, and philosophy prepared me to be an entrepreneur and designer. Overall, Penn encourages its students to be inquisitive and examine the world. This analytical

approach inspired me to find a new, more environmentally sustainable model for fine jewelry rather than to rely on traditional industry practices. SG: Studying history taught me how to think critically, weigh the merits of conflicting arguments on any topic, and write effectively. These skills have been extremely useful throughout my career. Q: From winning a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award to outfitting Olivia Pope’s finger on Scandal, MONIQUE PÉAN has earned diverse recognition, while also promoting sustainable practices. What are you most proud of? MP: It has been amazing for me to realize a dream of combining philanthropy, design, art, travel, and business by creating sustainable designs that can effect change. SG: When MONIQUE PÉAN first started, luxury and sustainability were generally seen as mutually exclusive. I am proud of the way Monique has helped to pioneer the principle that the two can coincide. I am also thrilled about the organizations and people that we’ve been able to support through our business. Q: Do you stay involved with Penn? SG: Along with donating to the College of Arts and Sciences and the University, MONIQUE PÉAN always looks to hire Penn grads—our first hire was an alumna. Also, Monique has visited campus to speak to students about entrepreneurship and the fashion industry. Penn has had such a positive effect on our lives, and we enjoy supporting the University in many ways.

IN THE CLASSROOM

FROM CLASSROOM TO NEWSROOM Penn’s PORES Program Takes Undergraduates to NBC By Susan Ahlborn Photos by Alex Schein

OMNIA

Four Penn undergraduates are witnessing this extraordinary primary season from behind the “decision desk” at NBC, thanks to a new program run by John Lapinski, associate professor of political science and elections unit director for the network. The Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) gives undergraduates the opportunity to conduct social research in the public interest on issues of national and international importance. PORES aims to develop a data-driven approach to understanding political outcomes in the United States through public opinion survey research and poll analysis.

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IN THE CLASSROOM

PORES fellows and staff in New York (from left): Iman Charania, C’17; Hannah Hartig, LPS'16, assistant director of PORES; Jacob Gardenswartz, C’18, LPS’18; Alisha Chowdhury, C’18; John Lapinski, associate professor of political science and director of PORES; Zac Endter, C’16; and William Ford, C’15, a former PORES student who is now an NBC page, in the elections unit at NBC. <

Alisha Chowdhury, C’18, analyzes data at NBC. >

“A lot of people are looking at polling right now because of the election,” says Lapinski. “But polling in general is important because when we want to figure out how government can be responsive to its citizens, it’s the only really good vehicle we have. I think it’s important for the people making the policies that they should actually hear what the citizens have to say.” PORES fellows take courses on survey research, American elections, and statistics, then put what they’ve learned into practice as they conduct research with Penn professors and work at NBC. Jacob Gardenswartz, C’18, LPS’18, describes his schedule on one primary Tuesday: “I had a midterm in the morning, then I went home, got dressed up, and took the train to New York,” says the San Diego, California native. “And whenever we go to NBC, it’s work, work, work from the get-go”—sometimes until after midnight. “When I tell people what I'm doing at PORES, they’re shocked that I’m an undergraduate student working at NBC’s election unit,” says Alisha Chowdhury, C’18, of New Orleans, Louisiana. “I feel blessed to be a part of this program. We’re fact-checking the numbers they’re putting out to millions of people.” Chowdhury applied to be a PORES fellow as a freshman interested in criminal justice studies. She spent the summer working with Marc Meredith, associate professor of political science, on election studies of felon disenfranchisement laws in the U.S. “It gives me a different perspective on things, especially race relations, when we’re analyzing the polling data.” Ten PORES fellowships each year are made possible by a gift from Robert A. Fox, C’52, and Penny Grossman Fox,

ED’53, through the Fox Leadership Program. The fellows are also investigating new and innovative ways to do public opinion research, such as using social media, as well as studying policy positions and how people perceive whether government is working. Penn Arts and Sciences has created a survey research and data analytics minor for students who want to complement their primary area of study with an interdisciplinary focus on using data and survey research to better analyze politics and public policy. “PORES will put Penn into the national conversation in a significant way,” Lapinski says. “We’ll be disseminating our research for the larger public debate. It’s a way to influence things, and because of our link with NBC, no other university has this opportunity.” The fellows’ career plans range from criminal justice to an advanced degree in political economics to journalism, but the skills they’re learning will benefit them whoever they go. And, as students at a school located just 30 blocks from where the Constitution was signed, they’re seeing the U.S. system in a different way. “It’s definitely given me a new perspective on democracy, because I’m watching it in action every night,” says Iman Charania, C’17, from Houston, Texas. “It’s just fascinating that the things I learn in class are happening in the real world. I get to see not just how people vote or why they vote, but what happens when you don’t vote.” “We’re becoming able to find the humanity in the numbers,” says Gardenswartz, who is also earning his master’s degree at Fels Institute of Government. “In the abstract it might look like a lot of dots on a plane. But in the PORES context it means thinking about who those people are and what they’re saying and who they want to be their leader.”

OMNIA

(INS)OMNIA

SUMMER READING LIST

TUKUFU ZUBERI

GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW

My summer reading focuses on the visual culture and spaces generated by the enslavement and freedom of descendants of Africa. The visual culture generated in Latin America has been overlooked as much as the history of African descendants in the United States has been distorted. Hopefully these readings well help me tease out that which is both distinctive and mutually enriching about the visual culture and the institutions responsible for memorializing the national narratives of Blackness in the ancient powerful racial systems in the world.

Honestly, it is hard for me to say what is driving my listâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is pretty disparate. But during the school year I have so little time to read anything that I am not teaching. So, the summer is about reading what I want.

The Intimacies of Four Continents Lisa Lowe, 2015

A Breath of Snow and Ashes Diana Gabaldon, 2008

Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America Marcus Wood, 2013

The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics Aviva Chomsky and Barry Carr, 2004

The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade Gerald Home, 2007

How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2016

Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations

Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora Michelle M. Wright, 2003 ChangĂł, the Biggest Badass Manuel Zapata Olivella, 2010

Associate Professor of History of Art

The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World Anthony M. Amore, 2015 Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power Susan E. Cahan, 2015

VIJAY BALASUBRAMANIAN

Cathy and Mark Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy My summer reading list includes five favorite books that I intend to reread. The first three books, by Borges, Lem, and Clark, construct alternate realities that explore deep philosophical and conceptual issues. All three are masterworks of their type. The last two books, by Wodehouse and Durrell, are wonderful for their gentle humor and their kindly view towards the foibles and quirks of all the creatures of the animal kingdom (humans included). Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges, 1962 The Cyberiad Stanislaw Lem, 1965 Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell Susanna Clarke, 2004 Brinkley Manor P.G. Wodehouse, 1962 The Bafut Beagles Gerald Durrell, 1950

(INS)OMNIA

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

OFFICE ARTIFACTS WITH RALPH ROSEN, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanites

Brooke Sietinsons

“This is an unusual but much treasured gift from a former graduate student (now distinguished classicist) whose dissertation I directed in the early 2000s. It really was a stroke of brilliance on her part in that it captured our mutual interests in the quirkiness of the natural world. I believe they were cast by a taxidermist in Greenwich Village, and she and her father mounted them on the piece of wood you see in the picture.”

“My longstanding obsession with all things coffee: This is my vintage 1987 Swiss-made Olympia Cremina espresso machine, which I found in the early days of eBay. And of course, you can’t pull a good shot of espresso without a good grinder, which stands next to the espresso machine in the picture.”

“This is a painting by a New York-based artist named Paul Fabozzi, who did a series during a residency in Rome in which he would overlay archaeological site-plans with geometrical forms. I’m always interested in the ways contemporary artists interact with the classical tradition, and I love the way Fabozzi here brings to life something as static as an architectural plan with the interplay of line and color.”

“I have studied the Roman satirist Juvenal (1st-2nd century) for many years—a Roman version of a Jon Stewart or John Oliver— and am also interested in the way earlier centuries thought about him. This frontispiece of a late 17thcentury edition of Juvenal says much about how readers then conceptualized him as a poet of many comic, often mischievous masks.”

(INS)OMNIA

OMNIA

THREE QUESTIONS: ISLAM IN THE MODERN WORLD FEATURING: JAMAL J. ELIAS

WHAT DEFINES “MODERN” SOCIETY AS FAR AS HOW RELIGION FITS IN?

Mir Elias

At a basic level, “modern” refers to the time in which we live and to the past couple of centuries that made us arrive at our present. There is no one way of being modern, so it makes more sense to speak of multiple modernities rather than one way of being a modern person or modern society. As far as religion is concerned, “modern” simply refers to the way religion functions in society today. As we see from the U.S. alone, there are many different faces to religion in the contemporary world. The same holds true in all other societies, so it is incorrect (and prejudiced) to juxtapose “modern” to “backward” or “primitive” when looking at other religions and cultures.

CAN A RELIGION THAT REQUIRES PRACTICES THAT SEEM ARCHAIC TO WESTERN EYES, SUCH AS WEARING THE HIJAB, BE CONSIDERED MODERN? First of all, Islam doesn’t “require” hijab or too many other things. There is enormous diversity in Muslim belief and practice, such that any statement that begins with “Islam requires” or “Muslims believe” is bound to be false because of the many exceptions to it one would find in the numerous Muslim societies and communities around the world. Sticking to the example of hijab, the term covers a variety of forms of dress as well as a range of attitudes toward identity and sexuality which underlie these dress choices. Just because in some societies or families there is coercion regarding dress and behavior, doesn’t mean that all women who choose to wear hijab are coerced. As is true of women in all societies, there is no necessary connection

between the coercion faced by some women and the behaviorial choices made by others. Many women who cover their heads (that is, wear hijab) adopt the practice out of conscious choices regarding their identities in the world. For them, it is an act of empowerment, and is definitely not archaic. One should be concerned more with the existence of oppression and coercion and with the opportunities afforded to female members of society than with what choices women make about how they dress. Hijab is simply not a good indicator of whether or not girls and women are empowered, just as dress or eating habits tell one nothing about whether someone is “modern” or not.

IS TECHNOLOGY CHANGING ISLAM? Religions are always evolving in response to social, political, environmental and other changes. Changes in technology are but one such factor. Technological changes have always been there—it’s just that they seem so much more pervasive and dynamic today than in the past. Probably the biggest technological impact on religion over the last two decades has been the dramatic growth in mass communication. It enables ideas and information to be exchanged across societies and languages much more readily, and it also leads to the democratization of authority and knowledge. Jamal J. Elias is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and professor of religious studies. He is an expert on Islamic thought and society with a focus on Western and South Asia, and his many works have been translated into numerous languages.

LAST LOOK

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