summary: United States human space exploration policy calls for a return to the Moon, followed by eventual exploration of Mars. Near Earth Objects (NEOs: principally asteroids and a few comets) offer an inviting, near-term option for strengthening this vision and increasing its practical and scientific benefits. NEOs are accessible using existing propulsion technology and planned spacecraft, such as Orion. They are scientifically rich and offer science returns that complement those from Moon and Mars exploration. NEOs are known to harbor valuable in-situ resources to lower the cost of space operations. Visiting a few NEOs with piloted expeditions will demonstrate the complex operations needed to deflect a rogue asteroid. NASA has studied concepts to use the Orion spacecraft to reach NEOs in favorable orbits, and found that a 3-4 month mission is technically feasible. Visiting NEOs as we test our deep space capabilities will make the U.S.-led exploration program more productive, and build and maintain the official and public interest fundamental to its long-term support.rn Thomas D. Jones, PhD is a veteran NASA astronaut, scientist, speaker, author, and consultant. He holds a doctorate in planetary sciences, and in more than eleven years with NASA, flew on four space shuttle missions to Earth orbit. In 2001, Dr. Jones led three spacewalks to install the centerpiece of the International Space Station, the American Destiny laboratory. He has been privileged to spend fifty-three days working and living in space. Tom is a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. He piloted B-52D strategic bombers, studied asteroids for NASA, engineered intelligence-gathering systems for the CIA, and helped develop advanced mission concepts to explore the solar system prior to joining NASA’s astronaut corps. Tom writes frequently about space exploration and aviation history in magazines such as Air and Space Smithsonian, Aerospace America, and Popular Mechanics. Tom’s current book is Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir, published in 2006 by Smithsonian Books-Collins. The Wall Street Journal selected Sky Walking as one of its "Five Best" books about space. Tom's newest title, Hell Hawks!, a true story of an aerial band of brothers in WWII, will be published by Zenith Press in May 2008. Dr. Jones’ awards include the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, four NASA Space Flight Medals, the NASA Exceptional Service Award, the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Air Force Commendation Medal. Tom is a member of the NASA Advisory Council, serves on the board of the Association of Space Explorers, and is a regular on-air contributor for Fox News Channel’s spaceflight coverage.

more info:
Event Website
Tom Jones' website
Rice Space Institute

Calvin is the author of a dozen books, most for general readers, about brains and evolution, including “A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond” and “A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change,” which won the 2002 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. His book with Derek Bickerton, “Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain,” traces the evolution of structured language. His next book, “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change,” will be out this coming February.

summary: In sharing the epic journey that thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States, Nazario explores the perils modern day immigrants face. With a reporter’s eye on the truth, she humanizes the issue, posing new perspectives that fall on both sides, while offering ways to change the national dialogue on the influx of immigrants and the effects they have on the state of the nation.

A projects reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Nazario has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues and garnering dozens of awards, including the George Polk Award for International Reporting and the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Tackling hot-button issues such as hunger, drug addiction and immigration, she combines sensitivity with a sensible viewpoint on the subject matter.

more info: President's Lecture Series - Sonia Nazario
Enrique's Journey

Dr. Klineberg, Professor of Sociology at Rice, has been recognized for his important study on public perceptions in Houston of racial, class, and religious diversity. His research on social change, public opinion and new ideas of race and class in the past two years in Houston, sheds light on transformations in this city since Katrina.
A folklorist and Martha Gano Houston Research Professor of English at the University of Houston, Dr. Lindahl directs the oral history project "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston" in partnership with Pat Jasper. A squad of volunteers, who are primarily survivors of both hurricanes, are trained to interview other survivors in order to create a comprehensive collection of narratives of those who sought shelter in Houston.

The Humanities Research Center at Rice University offers a public lecture series featuring speakers from a variety of academic and professional disciplines who have explored aspects of Katrina's impact on Houston. They will address the conflicts and changes in social, cultural, economic, judicial, and demographic circumstances in Houston, through an examination of oral histories, statistical data, legal cases, and historical trends. The lecture series is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder Foundation. For more details please visit http://www.publichumanities.org/Katrina1.html.

Biography of Glenda Harris:
Glenda Harris is a native of New Orleans and a lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth Ward. After many years as a community activist and neighborhood spokesperson, in 2004 she was appointed Director of the Advocacy Center for the Lower Ninth Ward. In January 2005, Ms. Harris participated in the first field school mounted by the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project. Currently, she is back in New Orleans as the Katrina Coordinator for the Children's Defense Fund.

summary: In an age where everyday appliances are loaded with gigabytes of storage, it seems we should be remembering everything. However, as we are collecting and storing vast amounts of information, we are selectively destroying an equal amount. I explore the ecology of remembering and forgetting, drawing examples from the sciences on the one hand and everyday life on the other

Biography of Geoffrey C. Bowker

sponsor: Center for the Study of the Environment and Society (CSES)

summary: The Center for the Study of the Environment and Society (CSES) invites you to attend the CO2 Forum and Sustainability Fair in the Rice Memorial Center on Thursday, January 31st.
The sustainability fair will be from 4:00 -7:00 PM in the RMC, and will feature approximately 20 environmental-themed booths hosted by student groups, campus departments, and selected outside guests. Learn more about the sustainable design features of our campus construction projects at the Facilities Engineering and Planning booth, estimate your CO2 footprint at the carbon calculator booth, watch student-made environmental short films at the environmental film booth... and much, much more.

At 7PM, the CO2 Forum in the Grand Hall of the Rice Memorial Center will feature a discussion of climate change solutions. Speakers include Rice President David Leebron, Houston Mayor Bill White, Shell Oil President John Hofmeister, IPCC Climatologist and Nobel Laureate Dominique Raynaud, and Rice professor and former Director of the National Science Foundation Neal Lane.

location: Duncan Hall, McMurtry
sponsor: Scientia Institute

summary: Remembering is an activity that we all recognize within ourselves. Memory, on the other hand, is an artificial construct meant to represent the act of remembering or how well someone remembers. In psychological terms, memory is divided with respect to time (immediate, recent, and remote) or modality (visual, verbal). By use of these parsing arrangements, we can quantify aspects of memory; define what is normal, superior or flawed; and apply technologies, such as neuroimaging techniques, to the study of remembering. By all definitions, dementia involves “loss of memory,” as if memory is a thing that can be misplaced. This tendency to think of your memory or of individual memories as objects with identity and constancy is part of Western philosophical tradition and the physicality of our theories about memory lead some to the conclusion that the theories must be wrong. Curiously, although all dementia patients have problems remembering, our current therapies do not often improve the measurable features ascribed to memory. Whether this observation represents a problem with the medications or with the concept of memory itself is an unresolved issue. Remediation of dementia, most especially Alzheimer’s disease, is a pressing, global concern. We are prepared to accept many outcomes, including delaying the onset of AD or slowing the cognitive losses associated with established disease in the absence of complete prevention or cure. We will accept these outcomes whether or not they are associated with improved remembering.

summary:
Paula Sanders, Associate Professor of History, and Dean of Graduate and Post Doctoral Studies of Rice University, discusses the question of Tolerance in the Medieval period. The event is co-sponsored by the H.H. Aga Khan Ismaili Council for the Southwestern U.S.A. at the Ismaili Jamatkhana and Center.

sponsor: Computer Science

summary:

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a DOE and NSF funded US national distributed computing facility that supports scientific computing via an open collaboration of researchers, software developers and computing, storage and network providers. The OSG Consortium is building and operating the OSG, bringing resources and researchers from universities and national laboratories together and cooperating with other national and international infrastructures to give scientists access to shared resources world-wide. The particular characteristics of the OSG are to: Provide guaranteed and opportunistic access to shared resources; operate a heterogeneous environment both in services available at any site and for any Virtual Organization, and multiple implementations behind common interfaces; Support multiple software releases at any one time; Interface to campus and regional grids; Federate with other national and international grids.

In the talk, we will present the principals that guided us for more than two decades in developing our distributed computing technologies and will provide an overview of these two cyber-infrastructures. Capabilities to “elevate” local GLOW jobs to the national OSG infrastructure will be discussed. These capabilities support a “bottom-up” approach to the construction and operation of large scale distributed/grid computing infrastructure that preserve local access and autonomy.

summary: In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research - from bio-informatics and earth systems science to social science and archaeology. There will also be an explosion in the amount of research data collected in the next decade - 100's of Terabytes will be common in many fields. These future research requirements constitute the 'e-Research' agenda. Powerful software services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to form the necessary 'Cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how not only scientists and engineers but also social science and humanities researchers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this Cyberinfrastructure. A key part of this Cyberinfrastructure will be services for accessing digital research repositories containing text, data and software. Open access in some form or other to such institutional research repositories is likely to become widespread in the near future. In addition the whole nature of a scholarly research paper will change dramatically as Web 2.0 and other technologies allow the creation of live documents linked to RSS feeds and data, supplemented by blogs and wikis. This talk will survey examples of e-Research and Scholarly Communication in this context and end with some speculations on the future of research libraries.

President David Leebron delivers his yearly State of the University Address to the Rice community.

summary:
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort. As an experiment, Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output. www.mylifebits.com has more information.

Abstract:rn(Co-Sponsors: Scientia Institute & Department of Anthropology, Rice University) - Event: Exhibiting "Lucy": Bones of contention at the Houston Museum of Natural Science - Panel Discussion (at Rice University): After years of storage in a vault in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the famous fossilized bones of the 3.2 million-year old hominid known as Lucy traveled to Houston in early August. They will be on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science from August 31 until April 2008, as part of an exhibition on Ethiopia's history. The transport of this rare and important fossil has raised considerable controversy. It has been denounced by the Smithsonian, which says it will not accept the exhibition that was originally due to travel to eleven U.S. museums. Fossil-hunter Richard Leakey decried the exhibition of the fossil as "a form of prostitution… (and) gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity" in a recent interview to The Associated Press. This discussion brings together several panelists with different interests in and approaches to the Ethiopia exhibit, with the aim exploring more fully the underlying issues from a diversity of viewpoints.

Biography of Michael O Emerson:
Dr. Michael Emerson is the director of CORRUL, the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. He is the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology. He was awarded the 2006 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Rice University. The recipient is chosen on the basis of survey responses from alumni who graduated two and five years ago. He teaches courses in race and ethnic relations, religion, urban sociology, statistics, and methods. His main research interests lie in these areas as well. Emerson has published extensively in the area of religion. His most recent published book is "People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States," (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is also the author of "Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2000), "United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race" (Oxford University Press, 2003), and "Against All Odds: The Struggle for Racial Integration in Religious Organizations" (New York University Press, 2005), and editor of the Sociology of Religion: A Reader (Prentice-Hall, 2001).

Original date: January 16, 2007
sponsor: SCIENTIA
summary:
This lecture will first discuss the recent debate over bioengineering and posthumanism. Then it will probe the place of aging in contemporary American culture—with emphasis on efforts to banish aging from human experience. Finally, it will speculate about issues of dementia, memory loss, and personhood.

summary:
Michael S. Turner, Rauner Distinguished Service Professor in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at The University of Chicago. He served as Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2006. His research pioneered the application of elementary-particle theory to cosmology and astrophysics.