(10/10/12 9:14pm)
The Sept. 30 meeting of the Student Government Association (SGA) opened with a discussion led by President of the SGA Charlie Arnowitz ’13 on his proposed reformation of the SGA by-laws. Discussion and voting on the formation of a court and changes in the term lengths of junior senators was ultimately postponed until those aspects of the legislation can be more closely examined and fine-tuned. The discussion was short and the remainder of the bill passed unanimously.
Next, Arnowitz presented a piece of legislation that would reinstate an SGA Operating Account. This account is accessible by the sitting president and can be used for smaller purchases, such as office supplies, without the need to pass individual legislation for each purchase. Arnowitz’s proposal cut the account from the earlier precedent of $8,000 down to $2,000. The bill passed unanimously.
Arnowitz raised this legislation in part for the upcoming SGA summit. The summit is a meeting of student government presidents and senators for various NESCAC schools. Arnowitz hopes to attend this summit with two other senators and hopes to have this account active in time for the event.
During discussion, the question of the summit’s purpose was raised by a few of the senators. Arnowitz justified the summit as an educational opportunity.
“This is a great opportunity to share ideas with other schools and encourage discussion on how each school’s SGA addresses the various problems with which they are faced each year,” said Arnowitz.
Next, Kathryn Benson ’13 came before the SGA with legislation to continue the arts and crafts space in the McCullough Student Center. The new bill continues last year’s program and creates a manager position that will be in charge of regulating the center’s programming. The bill also reduced the budget for the program from $3,000 to $2,180. The bill passed with only one abstention.
The Oct. 7 meeting of the SGA opened with a presentation from the Dean of Library & Information Services (LIS) Michael Roy. Roy came before the SGA first to look for volunteers to serve on the Student LIS Advisory Committee, a committee which acts as liaison between LIS and the SGA.
Roy also raised the topic of the current state of Portal and the varying student opinions on the program.
Senator Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’15.5 spoke of an issue raised by a few of her constituents.
“Many students have come to me asking about getting access to all-student emails,” said Shireman-Grabowski. “They believe that asking them to communicate through Portal is a threat to student autonomy.”
In response, Roy said that LIS has no jurisdiction over all-student emails.
One idea that has been raised by some staff in LIS to facilitate inter-campus communication is the creation of a platform through which students could post information about events. Students could then subscribe to certain updates, ensuring that information only got to the people who were most interested.
Next, Addie Cunniff ’13 led a discussion on legislation to create an SGA Director of Student Health & Wellness. Cunniff’s hope in creating this position is to fill a void of student health and wellness leaders around campus.
“There are a lot of good programs around campus addressing problems of stress and mental health,” said Cunniff. “There’s a lot of wiggle room to expand these programs, which will be a top priority for this director.”
Arnowitz, the sponsor of this bill, added, “The main goal for me in writing this legislation is to demonstrate institutional support for these initiatives without putting excessive stress on the SGA budget.”
The bill passed and Cunniff was nominated and elected to this newly created position.
An ad-hoc committee was proposed to review the applications to fill the First-Year Committee Senator position that Danny Zhang ’15 and Rana Abdelhamid ’15 created last year. Five senators volunteered to fill the positions.
Finally, three senators filled positions on the Parking Ticket Appeals Committee, a committee that works with Public Safety to review parking ticket appeals, and one senator filled a position on the Housing Committee, a committee formed to reduce the workload of the Community Council during the housing process.
(10/03/12 9:45pm)
The scenes read in “The Incredible Dramatic Life of Science and Mathematics” opened windows of collaboration between theatre and mathematics, illustrating a relatively new tradition that has captivated audiences the world over.
In 1997, while directing a performance of “Arcadia,” Professor of Theater and Women and Gender Studies Cheryl Faraone contacted Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott to help her and her students through the math-heavy content of the play.
This collaboration blossomed first into a winter term course and quickly into regular term course on the interplay of science and mathematics that has begun to emerge in modern theater.
This past Sunday, the 30th, Abbott, Faraone and five of their past students presented readings of scenes from three plays that exemplify this new science theater, the first of which was “Arcadia,” a 1993 play by the playwright Tom Stoppard.
The performance had an informal tone, with question-and-answer and audience interaction, in between each of the scenes. Questions addressed both the artistic and the scientific, sometimes asking to elucidate a mathematical theory, other times addressing the underlying themes and tones of the pieces.
“Arcadia” takes place across two moments in time: a modern story of three researchers and the intersections of their research and a story set in 1809, centered around Thomasina, a teenage girl who proves to be much ahead of her time in the field of mathematics.
Stoppard beautifully interweaves these stories, set in the same house nearly 200 years apart.
The first scene read on Sunday took place in the past — an interaction between Thomasina and her tutor, Septimus Hodge.
As Thomasina challenges Hodge’s methods, she asks a question that hung over the rest of the performance, both of “Arcadia” and the two other plays.
“If there is an equation for a bell, should there be one for a blue bell? And what of a rose? Should we think nature is written in numbers?”
Thomasina is outlining a field of mathematics that would not come until over 100 years after her death and a field of particular interest of one of the modern characters in the play: chaos theory, the study of dynamical systems or the popular notion of the butterfly effect.
Abbott commented on the “nature” of chaos theory during the question and answer.
“... The endless lines in leaves and the fuzzy edges of clouds, there’s nothing in Euclid that will describe that for you,” said Abbott. “It’s the mathematics of fractals and chaos theory that unlock those pictures.”
In these two scenes, we see a strong overlap between the unfolding mathematics and the unfolding relationships between the characters, both past and present.
The second scene read on Sunday brought both time periods to the stage.
Orbiting the same table and the same notebook of Thomasina, the two points in time engage in a coincidental back-and-forth.
With the advantage of modern computers, the characters of the present are able to run Thomasina’s equations further than Thomasina ever could on paper, revealing the beauty of fractals and merging past and present both on stage and in metaphor.
Next, the performers took scenes from two other plays, Snoo Wilson’s “Love Song of the Electric Bear” and “A Disappearing Number,” a play devised by the Théatre de Complicité.
In “Love Song,” Parker Woodworth ’14 played the part of Alan Turing, commonly considered the father of the field of computer science.
A known eccentric, Turing often carried a teddy bear named Porgy who was anthropomorphized on stage in Wilson’s play.
Through the performance of Porgy, the audience is able to dive deeper into Turing’s troubled psyche as well as understand the inspiration for much of his work.
Though Turing did not design the first computer, his theoretical research was essential for its development. In the later part of his life, most of Turing’s time was spent researching and pondering artificial intelligence and its potential impact on technology and our humanity.
It is often said that it is his relationship with this bear that led him to consider what he called “artificial brains.”
“A Disappearing Mind” revolves around the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, two early 20th century mathematicians.
“It is not really a biographical play,” Faraone said at its opening. “It was written and performed by a physical theater company, as it is as much about the motion of the characters as it is about the text.”
“A mathematician,” one of the characters says in the first scene, “like a painter, or poet, is a maker of patterns.”
It was the patterns of motion that pulled the audience into these scenes.
The second of three different scenes — which, like “Arcadia,” occurred across space and time — revolved around two other scenes, altering in their description of one of Ramanujan’s biggest mathematical achievements: the partition function.
In the final question and answer session, after scenes had finished, someone in the audience asked Abbott how, if at all, his work with the theater has influenced his work in mathematics.
“As an educator and an eternal student, interactions with any of the other concentrations opens up my education and how I educate others,” said Abbott.
“Whenever a mathematical concept is spoken about in a theatrical performance, this new angle of approach always deepens the mystery of these objects I thought I once understood deeply. Though, it hasn’t led me, yet, to proving any new theorems.”
The actors, too, had insight to bring after the performance.
Adam Milano ’15 made note of some of the emotions they try to bring to a monologue in which a character is explaining a concept in math.
“I have to ask myself what my character [is] trying to say with all of this and remember to use movement in my performance,” said Milano.
“Everything in theater, even material that may seem like dry mathematics, should have meaning,” he added.
“Most people don’t understand that there is a real creative side to mathematics, and often it is a point of creative insight during something like a proof that links a seemingly cold and rigid question to a similarly rigid answer,” said Woodworth. a math major.
(09/26/12 8:57pm)
The Student Government Association (SGA) held their first full meeting of the academic year on Sept. 23. SGA meetings are held in the Crest Room of the McCullough Student Center and are open to the student body. The Campus will provide bi-monthly updates on their proceedings.
SGA Launches Website
During the week of Sept. 3, one week before the start of classes, the SGA launched a new website. Past versions of the SGA website were updated infrequently and lacked up-to date information about members and initiatives. The new website, which can be found at sga.middlebury.edu, includes a brief bio of the president, cabinet members and senators, information from recent meetings as well as other information on the SGA.
Senate Hopes to Boost Portal Usage
The Sept. 23 meeting began with a reminder that representatives from Library and Information Services (LIS) will be coming to the Sept. 30 meeting of the SGA to brief the senators on LIS’ plans for the upcoming year.
Before the meeting, Senator Will Potter ’14.5 met with LIS to discuss their plans for the web service Portal. It has come to the attention of both LIS and the SGA that Portal is under-utilized by the College and Potter hoped to work with LIS to improve its image in the student body.
SGA and LIS are currently discussing plans to co-sponsor a contest open to all students to design a new college web service. The plan is still in preliminary stages.
However, many of the senators think that the issue with Portal goes beyond the design and questioned whether redesigning the site would in fact garner interest among students. Ryan Kim ’14, who attended the meeting, proposed that the lack of usage of Portal may be a publicity issue.
“How many of the problems Portal has been facing can be solved by a marketing push on the part of the SGA?” said Kim. Potter pointed out that LIS has conducted numerous student-wide polls on Portal and much of the comments they received indicated that students liked the content on Portal but were disinterested in the design.
SGA Ratifies SCOCC Candidates
Director of Membership Sydney Fuqua ’13 presented to the SGA the signatures collected by the prospective candidates for First-Year Senator and Student Co-Chair of Community Council. The candidates were ratified by the SGA with a unanimous vote.
Cabinet Seeks Ride Share Program
Chief of Staff Anna Esten ’13 then spoke about work that has been done to start a ride-share program at the College. The ride-share program would encourage car-pooling in the college community among students, faculty and staff. Various platforms are currently being researched. There was some interest in a format started by a student at Grove City College. The program would be free for the College and may change into a paid program, though the College could opt not to adopt it. The biggest issue with this program — a problem facing many ride-share programs, both ones that have been tried here at the College and around the country — is an issue of critical mass; the programs cannot seem to attract enough users to make the system effective.
Both LIS and Addison County Transit Resources (ACTR) have approached Esten about various ride-share programs. During discussions at the meeting, senators mentioned again that the failure of past programs was most likely an issue of marketing. The thought of starting an events program where shuttles or ride-shares are organized between Middlebury and Burlington on days when there are large events going on in Burlington was also discussed.
Arnowitz Floats Operational Account Bill, By-Laws Modification
President of the SGA Charlie Arnowitz ’13 polled the senators on their interest in reinstating an SGA Operational Account. The account would be accessible to Arnowitz when he needs to make SGA related purchases and would eliminate the need to pass legislation for each purchase. The straw poll received a positive response and Arnowitz will begin writing a bill to be presented to the Senate soon.
Discussion was started on Arnowitz’s plans to modify the SGA by-laws, but the discussion was ultimately tabled until next week’s meeting.