Middle Eastern Ensemble Fall Concert

11.21.10

This past September, I was awarded a one year fellowship to study Greek. The fellowship is offered through the US Department of Education and specifically encourages students to learn uncommonly studied foreign languages (e.g. Turkish, Greek, Portuguese, etc.). As stipulated by the fellowship, I will take Greek language classes as well as related culture classes for the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 semesters. For my culture class this semester, I enrolled in a Mediterranean music ensemble. I had the opportunity to sing in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. The pictures below were taken at our end of the semester concert.

My fellow choir members: Rebecca, Amy, and Enrika

Practicing before the event starts. (Adem and our conductor Harold).

Adem and Tara

I wasn't expecting such a large crowd to turn up for this event. It made me so happy to see so many of my friends faces in the back of the Carriage House loft. I'm so grateful that you all came!

I really enjoyed singing with this group of talented musicians. I will most likely be continuing with the choir for the Spring 2011 semester and promise to inform you of my next performance.

Buffalo is great!

11.10.10

My neighbor, Margene Weiss, recently sent me a video highlighting the great things about Buffalo. Most people know about Buffalo because of its record snowfalls, but there is so much more to it then this. While the clip focuses mainly on architecture, it does pinpoint other historical and natural aspects of Buffalo. Buffalo was the first city to have electricity. It's about 20 minutes away from one of the oldest state parks in the nation, and besides Central Park in New York City, it has one of the most extensive Frederick Law Olmstead park systems in the nation.

So next time you hear someone say that Buffalo is "lame", you can send them this:

Buffalo, New York: This Place Matters

Poster Presentation for ACSF

10.29.10

Because our research project in Crete was funded in part by Cornell's Atkins Center for Sustainable Futures (ACSF), my group was asked to design a poster highlighting our findings thus far. We knew most of the audience would be administrative staff and alumni so in addition to our poster, we created a game to teach people them about water use in Crete, Greece. Basically, they would roll a die and the number they rolled would determine how much rain fell in a given year. Rain/water was symbolized by little silver buckets. For example, if they rolled a 1, they would get 16 buckets (400 mm of cumulative rainfall in a year), versus if they rolled a 6, they would get 36 buckets (900 mm of cumulative rainfall in a year). They would then allocate these water resources to different uses. Some were mandatory (e.g. domestic use) but most were optional and had a monetary value associated with them. For example, if you decided to plant one hectare of rain-fed olive trees then you would use 4 buckets of water and make $3 million dollars that year. Once they allocated their buckets they would have to roll a pair of dice and rearrange their water resources.

In the end we wanted to show that the crop that was least taxing on water resources was the rain-fed olives. The citrus on the other hand might give more money but they take a considerable amount of water to grow successfully; nearly twice as much was as is required by the rain-fed olive trees. If leaders in the municipality can promote the maintenance of rain-fed olives this would be best for conserving water supply for future generations.

This is the poster I made with the help of Margaret (a student in Natural Resources), Michael (a student in the law school), Gail (the director of the Mediterranean Studies program), and Tammo (my advisor).

This is the poster for our game. The finished product had bright green foam letters spelling out the title: 'Tipping Points: A Race to Sustainable Water Resources'.

All my heard work on the game paid off when we were awarded 3rd place (and an $1000 prize to go towards our research) in the poster competition.