Pickering and the Female Computers. In 1881, Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory, became so impatient with a male lab assistant’s work that he famously declared his maid could do a better job. Rather than take offense, his 24-year-old maid, Williamina Fleming, instead took him up on the offer. She ended up working at the Observatory for the next 30 years, supervising the tedious work of cataloging photographic plates, but also discovering variable stars and novae, helping to develop a classification system—and, perhaps even more importantly, hiring nearly 40 female assistants, many of whom went on to have distinguished scientific careers.
posted on Sep 20, 2008 - View this thread

John H. Summers taught at Harvard. He didn't like the students much. And said so. Lots of Harvard students respond. Let the Wild Rumpus Start! (via AL Daily)
posted on Aug 5, 2008 - View this thread

Medpedia is coming. "In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, the Medpedia community seeks to create the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world." Apply to contribute content.
posted on Jul 25, 2008 - View this thread

William Deresiewicz examines the pitfalls of an Ivy League education Apparently, the Ivies prepare you for... mediocrity.
posted on Jun 18, 2008 - View this thread

Pay to play. The children of big-donor Harvard alums are systematically given preference over legacy offspring of lesser means. Additionally David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr, concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their admissions advantage if they apply for financial aid.
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread

Clay Shirky, professor at ITP - NYU, often linked to at MeFi, presents at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the ideas in his new book on organizing without organizations.
posted on Mar 25, 2008 - View this thread

Free math courses online, from very basic to brainiac.
posted on Feb 26, 2008 - View this thread

Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously last week to mandate "Open Access" to published articles - a first at a U.S. university, though the dean will apparently grant a waiver to anyone who wants to opt out. More to follow? Peter Suber's Open Access News is tracking reactions.
posted on Feb 17, 2008 - View this thread

Brainbow. Using some very cool genetic tricks, Harvard scientists have found a way to make transgenic mice that express various mixtures of different coloured fluorescent proteins in their neurons. The result, individual brain cells with up to 90 distinct colours. Not surprisingly, this visually impressive work is in this month's issue of Nature.
posted on Nov 1, 2007 - View this thread

John Stilgoe is a professor at Harvard who teaches his students how to, among other things, mindfully observe the urban and suburban environments they inhabit.
posted on Oct 11, 2007 - View this thread

It's not often one gets one's bong in the scientific literature, let alone one designed to allow you to smoke weed inside an MRI scanner...
posted on Oct 2, 2007 - View this thread

Riemann's Curve , Airfoils, Complex Roots, More.
posted on Dec 14, 2006 - View this thread

Harvard Economists design a recruitment video. It is unintentionally funny. Students make it even funnier.
posted on Dec 14, 2006 - View this thread

A Conversation With Steven Colbert [video]: Covering issues from truthiness to anti-Semitism in comedy to boxers vs. briefs, Colbert spent over an hour on Friday answering questions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
posted on Dec 4, 2006 - View this thread

The Harvard University Worklife Wizard , created by an international team of journalists, economists, and statisticians, is Barbara Ehrenreich's wet dream. It's also a fantastic resource that has flown pretty much under everyone's radar. The Worklife Survey drives the constantly-revised, constantly-refined Salary Comparison Tool, which is always hungry for more data about employment from around the world. And when they say they want data from everyone, they mean it-- there's even a VIP Salary Checker that pits the wages of the Yankees against those of the Red Sox. (Plus if you take the survey, you can apparently earn a chance to win a trip to South Africa). Personally, I love the Workplace Horror Stories (and there's a competition there too). I can't look at a nail clipper the same way now.
posted on Nov 20, 2006 - View this thread

Check out this map of The Simpson's hometown of Springfield. We may never know what state the town is located in, and yes, the show has sucked for at least six years now (if not more) but this map was considered to be so good, it was, apparently, added to the Harvard Map collection. Comic Book Guy would be proud.
posted on Jul 20, 2006 - View this thread

Seth MacFarlane's Harvard Speech (as himself, Peter, Stewie and Quagmire).
posted on Jun 10, 2006 - View this thread

Stephen Colbert's Knox College Commencement Speech. In a similar vein to Jon Stewart's William and Mary speech and Conan O'Brien's Harvard speech.
posted on Jun 5, 2006 - View this thread

Camille Paglia: WHAT went wrong at Harvard? "Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions."
posted on Mar 6, 2006 - View this thread

No stranger to controversy, Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers steps down from Harvard. Somewhere, the world's smallest violin is playing...
posted on Feb 21, 2006 - View this thread

If last night's speech didn't satisfy your thirst for politicians in front of audiences, head over the the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, where the video archives of every taped JFK Jr. Forum are now available for free. Hours of fun reflecting on past mistakes with Robert McNamara, worrying about WMDs with William Perry, thinking about peace with Shimon Peres or giggling with Jon Stewart. Delve into the past, watching John Perry Barlow talking about the internet and elections in 1996, or compare Bill Clinton before and after. George W. Bush hasn't spoken there, but both his parents have, as well as a 2008 hopeful or two. (all embedded realvideo).
posted on Feb 1, 2006 - View this thread

“In 2002… [Harvard student Amit Paley]…came across a restricted archive labeled 'Secret Court Files, 1920.' The mystery he uncovered involved a tragic scandal in which Harvard University secretly put a dozen students on trial for homosexuality and then systematically and persistently tried to ruin their lives. ^[1]

“The pages that file contained, first reported [by Paley] in a[n]…edition of the Harvard Crimson's weekend magazine, describe Harvard's desperate attempts 80 years ago to hide from public view a secret gay subculture on campus.” ^[2]

“The article prompted an apology from University President Lawrence H. Summers to the men and their families; led to a campus-wide discussion about homophobia; and was even cited in Lawrence v. Texas, the historic Supreme Court case that struck down anti-sodomy laws.” ^[3]

Prolific biographer William Wright’s newly-published book, ‘Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals' digs deep into the shameful events of the early 20th century at one of the United States' leading universities.
posted on Sep 29, 2005 - View this thread

does he think we really care??
posted on May 3, 2005 - View this thread

Who do you unconciously hate? The Harvard University implicit bias tests allow you to discover your own implicit stereotypes: age, gender, religion, race -- even politics and presidents. Each test takes about ten minutes, and the results are sometimes surprising. Perhaps announcing your biases should this be the equivalent of the geek code for policy threads.
posted on Apr 2, 2005 - View this thread

Economics and Race: "Twenty-seven-year-old Harvard economist Roland Fryer grew up poor and black, in a family that was falling apart. His mother abandoned him. His father drank heavily and beat him. Fryer sold drugs and carried a gun. Then, at age 15, after he got pulled over by the police and then let go, he decided he wanted something different."
posted on Apr 1, 2005 - View this thread

"Hacker" discovers backdoor to Harvard Business School admissions decisions.
Harvard rejects all applicants who used the "hack."
posted on Mar 8, 2005 - View this thread

Harvard has finally released a transcript of Lawrence Summers' remarks at a conference about women in science and engineering. These remarks, which were made without members of the press present about a month ago, caused a lot of controversy. Now we can finally see what he actually said.
posted on Feb 17, 2005 - View this thread

The psychology of taboo. Commenting on the Harvard hullabaloo that took place a few weeks ago, linguist/cognitive scientist Steven Pinker offers his opinion, using ideas he previously presented in The Blank Slate (via AL Daily)
posted on Feb 8, 2005 - View this thread

Hypothesis as thought-crime ...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves... The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
posted on Jan 31, 2005 - View this thread

"In his talk... [Harvard President Larry] Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them 'daddy truck,' and one 'baby truck.'

"It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. 'It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way,' she said later in an interview." Summers then responded with the currently in vogue non-apology apology.
posted on Jan 18, 2005 - View this thread

Google to team up with the University of Michigan and Harvard University to make their extensive libraries available online. According to the agreement, Google will make available all books in the public domain; the universities can put the material to whatever use they see fit. Others have made attempts before, but none with the sheer might of Google. [via /.]
posted on Dec 14, 2004 - View this thread

Republican environmental politics as usual? While the president's policies seem to be standard for his party, Bill Moyers thinks there's more than meets the eye. On receiving Harvard medical school's Global Environment Citizen Award, Moyers posits that destruction of the environment isn't just good for big business, it's a self fulfilling prophecy of the apocalypse. Not just any old apocalypse, it's The Rapture, complete with plagues for the non-believers and immmediate ascension to the right hand of God Himself for the righteous.

Two days after Moyer's speech, Science magazine looks at the scientific consensus on global warming. If you're having a hard time explaining all this to your kids, don't worry, your tax dollars are hard at work.
posted on Dec 8, 2004 - View this thread

Sometimes you steal the goat, sometimes you hack the game. But you know you've accomplished something when you get the fans to heckle themselves. [last link QT video]
posted on Nov 28, 2004 - View this thread

"We have [a substance] that extends the life of every species it's given to. We're 50 years ahead of where I thought we would be 10 years ago." While Harvard Medical School rules prevent David Sinclair from recommending product, "I know a number of scientists who think [it] is their best shot. Others satisfy themselves with a glass of red wine," which contains the compound. Too good to be true?
posted on Oct 6, 2004 - View this thread

Harvard's Institute of Politics has created a short test to measure where your political beliefs fit with college students across the country. You better sit down for this one: I am a Traditonal Liberal !   From Secular Centrist Matthew Yglesias. Take the test and see where you fall on the brightly colored chart.
posted on Apr 16, 2004 - View this thread

The New Science Wars. When a leading psychologist like Harvard's Howard Gardner calls the president's science adviser a "prostitute," it's a safe bet that all is not well in the realm of government science policy. Indeed, in the past month, the United States has been engulfed by a kind of "science war," one pitting much of the nation's scientific community against the current administration. Led by twenty Nobel laureates, the scientists say Bush's government has systematically distorted and undermined scientific information in pursuit of political objectives.
posted on Mar 23, 2004 - View this thread

Harvard Eliminates Tuition for Some. Harvard will no longer be charging tuition for students whose families make less than $40,000 a year. I'm speechless.
posted on Mar 10, 2004 - View this thread

British bachelors beware. Rachel Greenwald knows how to find a husband using the techniques of Harvard Business School, and she's bringing her methods to the UK. But it's not easy: she advocates careful 'packaging', putting 10 to 20% of total income into a separate 'find a husband' bank account, cancelling newspaper subscriptions so they can be read in public and getting a third party to contact unsuccessful dates for feedback. There's one change for the UK though: here it's aimed at over-30s instead of the over-35s. I always thought "the Rules" were too spontaneous.
posted on Sep 30, 2003 - View this thread

Terrorist playground: How America created a terrorist haven in Iraq Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill" argues, in a New York Times op ed piece, that U.S. negligence has allowed Iraq to metastasize into a terrorist training camp to which Islamic militants from all over the Middle East are now flocking for a chance to attack American troops, and in which the Iraq/Al-Qaeda links alleged by the Bush Administration are becoming a reality. Listen to Jessica Stern on "On Point" tonight (a WBUR production and will be archived if you miss it).
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

The Harvard Brain Atlas has a veritable plethora of images of the brain, whether normal or diseased. Tours, 3-D Java exploration and a [very difficult] quiz are available. Plus: the top 100 brain structures!
posted on Aug 19, 2003 - View this thread

Will Ferrell's Harvard commencement speech quotes from the greatest -- "I believe it was Shakespeare who said it best when he said, 'Look yonder into the darkness for knowledge onto which I say go onto that which thou possess into thy night for thee have come with only a single sword and vanquished thee into darkness.'" - Some Sunday humor for MeFolk.
posted on Jul 13, 2003 - View this thread

Comeuppance is served: Blair Hornstine, the litigious valedictorian MeFi loves to hate, has been dropped from the Harvard class of '07 for her adventures in plagiarism. Quoting Nelson Munz here would be superfluous.
posted on Jul 11, 2003 - View this thread

Blair Hornstine makes Newsweek magazine. Just not in the way she would have liked, I'm sure. An impartial look at the situation, the day before her class graduation ceremonies proceed without her. Oh, and by the way, the salutatorian will speak, and the students are trying to stay positive and don't want the subject to come up tomorrow, thank you very much. So enjoy your day, kids.
posted on Jun 18, 2003 - View this thread

Is this excessive punishment? Some might think so . . . until they find out the crime is pedophilia. Or is it? Interesting excerpt:

According to the new book Remembering Trauma, by Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, which debunks the "traumatic amnesia" theories that have been bruited by some child protection workers, children may forget molestation simply because they were too young when it happened or because the abuse didn't feel weird or troublesome enough to remember for very long.

At what point does the zeal to persecute cause more harm (to the criminal and his victim both) than the crime itself? Of course, I fully expect that no clear thinking will prevail, since "OH MY GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"
posted on May 22, 2003 - View this thread

Did you hear the one about the Harvard girls and the large snow phallus? Oh, and here's the response featuring the memorable line: "it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not."
posted on Feb 23, 2003 - View this thread

The 'Corporate Reform' President? Harken Energy, when run by George W. Bush used the practice of shifting troubled assets and large debts on a seperate set of books (like the much beloved Enron). Harvardwatch has memos (1, 2) right from where Bush personally took part in meetings authorizing the deal. Its good to see those Ivy League dollars at work.
posted on Oct 9, 2002 - View this thread

Sign up to fight the filters. As filters get piled upon filters it gets difficult to tell whether the document requests fail due to technical problems or due to active denial. These folk are developing a distributed application which will use idle cycles to map out the boundaries of filter space and help fight the cantonization of the Net.
posted on Jul 24, 2002 - View this thread

Harvard Faculty Votes to Put the Excellence Back in the A (NY Times) Grade inflation is over at Harvard after almost 90 percent of '01 grads received some form of honors. What's worse, up until now students who completed a thesis were guaranteed honors by their department.
posted on May 22, 2002 - View this thread

The transcript of the forum on the press coverage of the current Middle East fighting was presented by a panel of veteran newsmen hosted by Harvard University and the Brookings Institution on April 24. The session, "Tinder Box: How the Press Covers the Middle East," featured former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb, Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post, Robin Wright of the Los Angeles Times, David Shipler of The New York Times, and Todd Purdum, the Chief Diplomatic Correspondent of the New York Times.
posted on May 16, 2002 - View this thread

Privacy in Cyberspace. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School is offering a free "lecture and discussion" series on Internet Privacy. The series began today and is comprised of six modules that are introduced weekly over six weeks. Registration is free and open to all.
posted on Mar 11, 2002 - View this thread