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sign up today—it's free! On This Day1863 — Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Class of 1852, is promoted to full colonel and takes command of the 20th Maine. StorePurchase Bowdoin merchandise online. |  Psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1889-1957) insisted, back before the idea was popular, that “loneliness [which she described as the 'want of intimacy'] lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness,” Judith Shulevitz writes in the New Republic. These days Fromm-Reichmann’s theory is gaining traction, backed by science. “Loneliness has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones,” according to Shulevitz, and it can hasten death as much as smoking.
While there is thought to be a genetic predisposition to loneliness, the world also contributes to this condition. People who feel discriminated against are more likely to feel lonely than those who don’t; African-Americans are lonelier than whites; the less educated are lonelier than the better educated; and the unemployed and retired are lonelier than those with jobs.  It’s Okay To Be Smart’s Joe Hanson provides his perspective on the linkages between emotion and music, discussing new neurological research showing that similar sounds evoke similar emotions despite cultural differences. The Smithsonian allows an alternative viewpoint, pointing to PBS Idea Channel’s Mike Rugnetta’s argument that the association between noise and emotion is merely due to socialization.
 The dedication of the R/V Laine For those passing through the northeast side of campus last Friday, it was hard to miss the 21-foot Seaway research vessel perched high and dry outside of Cleaveland House—the centerpiece of an event honoring Ed Laine, associate professor of Earth and Oceanographic Science, in recognition of his retirement to emeritus status. Colleagues, students, and friends of Laine gathered in the noon sun while the coastal motor vessel was christened the R/V Laine—a fitting tribute to a faculty member who has been introducing Bowdoin students to boat-based oceanographic research for years, among many other contributions to marine science at the college. Read more.  Port of St. George's, Grenada People living in eastern coastal Grenada have seen their shoreline gradually disappear into the sea, “a result of destructive practices such as the extraction of sand for construction and ferocious storm surges made worse by climate change,” the Associated Press reports. Farmers complain that crops are getting damaged by the intrusion of the salty water, and fishing families may have to relocate farther up the hillside, away from their source of livelihood. What is happening in Grenada is a small preview of what many fear could happen in the rest of the 15 nations that make up the Caribbean Community bloc. Rising sea levels and surge from more intense storms will bring enormous economic and social costs. “The tourism-dependent Caribbean is thought to be one of the globe’s most vulnerable regions,” the AP reports.  Ellis Ratner ’14 has won a Goldwater Scholarship Since arriving at Bowdoin in 2010, junior Ellis Ratner has dedicated himself to robots. And his commitment and accomplishments in the robotics field have been recognized by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program, which has given Ratner one of its 272 scholarships this year to talented students in the United States who are pursuing careers in math, science or engineering. Read the full story here.  Wikipedia is a bit of a boy’s club, according to some critics. “Around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows,” New Scientist pointed out recently. At the moment, there’s an uproar over a Wikipedia editor’s decision to move female novelists out of the category “American novelists” and into the category of “American women novelists.” Joyce Carol Oates for one was not amused. She tweeted, “Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer,” the New York Review of Books reports.
 Andy Palmer ’88 Andy Palmer, Class of 1988, has received the Angel Investor of the Year award from the New England Venture Capital Association’s first venture capital awards ceremony, the Boston Globe reports. Palmer is a serial entrepreneur who has helped start, fund or found more than 25 companies in technology, health care and the life sciences. Most recently, he founded Koa Lab, a shared workspace in Harvard Square for promising start-ups. He also co-founded Data Tamer with MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. Previously, Palmer was co-founder and founding CEO of Vertica Systems (acquired by Hewlett Packard), and before that was a member of the start-up team and the SVP and CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI). Andy earned his MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 1994 and his undergraduate degrees in English and history (with a computer science minor) from Bowdoin College in 1988.  Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic sheds light on the “Deciders,” as he calls them — the tech leaders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — who are crafting company policies for hate speech and censorship on the Internet.
The article profiles Dave Willner ’06, who leads Facebook’s six-person content policy team at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. Hundreds more staff, stationed in Austin, Denver and India, review the more than two million complaints that come in weekly about offensive material — nudity, porn, violence and hate speech. “At the time Willner joined Facebook’s content policy team, the company had no rules on the books for what speech violated its terms of service. So Willner decided to write them himself. He chose as his model university anti-harassment codes, since he himself had just graduated from college,” Rosen writes. Eventually, this policy evolved to Facebook’s current free-speech decision to ban attacks on groups, but not on institutions — empowering “the company to resist growing calls for the wholesale deletion of speech that foreign governments and their citizens consider blasphemous.”  David McCandless, who visualizes information, ideas, stories and data on his website, Information Is Beautiful, has created a “consensus cloud” of the “books everyone should read.” The consensus comes from the sources he mined — book polls, reader surveys, Pulitzer Prize winners, Oprah’s Bookclub list, etc. He used a frequency analysis to see which book titles were mentioned the most.
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Paul Miller, a writer for the technology website The Verge, unplugged from the internet a year ago to re-examine his “real” life. What he learned surprised him. | On This Day in Civil War History…Bowdoin Talks: Lectures, Discussions and Events |
