lecture series – The Transcript

Apiary coming to OWU, bees welcome

Monnett Garden. Image courtesy of owu.edu

Anna L. Davies, Transcript Correspondent

In a partnership with Stratford Ecological Center, Ohio Wesleyan University’s Monnett Garden will get a honey producing and observation apiary on April 22 for students of all majors to use.

The apiary is financed by an approximately $1,000 Theory-to-Practice grant written by junior zoology and nonfiction writing double major Meg Deeter. The grant Deeter received will cover the costs of beekeeping equipment and a stipend for a current lecture series about beekeeping by Stratford apiarist Dave Noble.

Noble’s last two lectures have been about the pollination industry and the honey bee genus Apis, respectively. Stratford will be providing the hives for no charge and will act as the main apiary caretaker and owner. “It’s a growing trend for campuses to have apiaries, and I wanted to bring that here,” Deeter said.

“I’m hoping for a foundation for students like me. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I want it to be something that stays when I’m gone.” “My main goal is to have a hands-on experience for parasitology and entomology students,” Deeter said.

Deeter said the apiary would still be open to students of any major. “I emphasized in my grant that this project would be interdisciplinary,” she said. “I don’t like the sciences and the arts being separated.”

Deeter said she was inspired to start the apiary over the summer while interning at a fish and wildlife center and watching her boss breed honeybees. While staying late in parasitology lab last semester, Deeter also overheard OWU professor of zoology Ramon A. Carreno mention wanting an observation hive.

“I also want an outreach for kids. Dave Noble helps with OWjL (Ohio Wesleyan Junior League) and wants to bring kids here to campus to study our apiary,” Deeter said.

Noble’s focus is getting young people interested in bees. “I came to bees when I was in college. My mentors started keeping bees when they were eight,” he said. “10,000 kids on average come to Stratford every year on field trips. I get to interact with all of them,” Noble said.

Like Deeter, Noble said he also wants science, humanities and social science college students to get involved. “I’m a huge proponent of the liberal arts because you have a specific major but get exposed to all these other things to create a wide foundation for life,” Noble said.

Noble’s next lecture is on March 28 and will be about threats to honeybees. The series continues with an April 11 lecture on honey bee genetics and an April 18 lecture on how to not get stung.

All lectures will take place at noon in Schimmel-Conrades Science Center room 163.

Lecture series covers the rise of ISIS

Liz Hardaway, Transcript Reporter

When the Taliban launched the 9/11 attacks, the United States’ main goal at the time was to eliminate al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

This tunnel vision prevented the recognition of an even more extremist jihadi group expanding in the shadows.

“We have just decided to go beyond crimes against humanity and label ISIS as genocidal,” said Michael Houlahan, a retired foreign services officer and the final lecturer at the Great Decisions lecture series held on March 18 in William Street United Methodist Church.

More than 75 community members gathered to discuss the origins and dynamics of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), with many wondering what the U.S. plans on doing to stop the violent group.

Houlahan emphasized that Arab countries need to put Muslim Arab troops on the ground, but if the U.S. pulled out altogether, ISIS could run rampant.

“There’s no clear road to … protect the country,” he said. “It is a patchwork.”

Due to the unsuccessful efforts of the Arab Spring (democratic uprisings that took place in several Arab nations in 2011), the appeal to join ISIS has grown.

Many longtime rulers were removed from power, such as leaders in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, and citizens were hoping this would lead to improvement.

As time passed and violence increased, however, citizens have become increasingly drawn to the idealistic Islamic State that ISIS promises them.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi formed the first of many militant groups called Army of al-Sham in the late 1980s under the vision that ISIS has today, according to Houlahan.

The group was disbanded and Zarqawi was imprisoned in 1992, where he began attracting and leading other inmates.

When Zarqawi was pardoned, he came into contact with al-Qaida, which was initially wary and distrustful of Zarqawi. But the two cooperated so Zarqawi could form a training camp in Afghanistan to recruit new members.

Upon establishing a second group, Zarqawi ordered the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad as well as a dual car bombing outside of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, sparking a civil war between the country’s Shia and Sunni populations.

Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006, but his vision remained very much alive, Houlahan said. As the new commander, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi announced the establishment of an Islamic State.

Followers wanted to establish the state because they believed the apocalypse was imminent, but both Baghdadi and his head of state Hamid al-Zawi were killed in 2010.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who claims to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad became the new head of the Islamic State and continues to lead ISIS today.

“It is true that we have to finish off ISIS,” said Hatim Taj, a Shiite man who attended the lecture. “They won’t listen … but after that … you have to find people who are willing to sit down and have a political discussion or it will just get worse.”

Ideas, insight and imagination in three minutes

Sara Hollabaugh, Arts &Entertainment Editor

If lectures were only three minutes, would phones be checked or the internet surfed?

Ohio Wesleyan will hold a three-minute lecture series event on Feb. 3 called I³ (I-cubed), which stands for ideas, insight and imagination.

At the event, 10 professors will give lectures for three minutes each.

The idea for I³ was developed by OWU’s communications office.

Will Kopp, chief communications officer, said there was a branding initiative to create a new event to market what OWU has to offer.

“We have the OWU Connection and [we were seeking] how to display that.”

Kopp added one-third of OWU students have double majors with interests across the academic spectrum.

“They are not always things that may seem to go together,” Kopp said. “It might be physics and art, but there’s a wide variety.”

The communications office considered student interests and what was most important about OWU in order to decide what really defines the campus.

Cubes hang in the Hamilton-Williams Campus Center to advertise the series. Photo courtesy of Sara Hollabaugh.

The office decided it was great teaching.

Kopp said the event then came all together and they searched for 10 of the student’s favorite faculty members.

“We have several students working in the communications office and had them survey students,” Kopp said. “Narrowing down to just 10 was difficult, [but] every single professor said yes.”

“If we keep it the length of a pop song and really interesting, I think [people] will watch them all,” Kopp said. “[Three minutes] really makes you focus.”

Kopp added that each topic needs to be interesting because even though each lecture is three minutes, the whole series will last 30 minutes.

According to the event’s online description, the lectures “will exemplify the power of combining the traditional liberal arts with practical experience, which is the hallmark of the OWU Connection.”

“Each person has to walk out of there learning something,” Kopp said. “[The faculty] must teach the audience something new. This event is strictly ours, unique to OWU. I hope it could become a tradition here.”

Melanie Henderson, assistant professor of psychology, is giving her lecture on interviewing.

“The title of my presentation is ‘Interviewing 101: Who is That Chameleon in the Mirror?’” Henderson said. “I will present research findings on the topic of “mirroring,” a process relevant to the psychology of interviewing and the role of self-presentation in interview outcomes.”

“My objective is to provide students in the audience with a simple insight on the interviewing process and a strategy for applying this knowledge to future interview experiences,” Henderson said.

Jennifer Jolley, assistant professor of music, will be teaching a music lecture.

Jolley admitted that her lecture will be a challenge because the audience will need time to hear the music.

“In other creative fields, time is not fixed (the amount of time it takes to look at a piece of art or read a short story varies),” Jolley said. “But in my field, you cannot speed-listen to a piece of music.”

“My lecture will have to include ridiculously short excerpts of music, but hopefully that will inspire my audience to listen to the featured works when the event is over,” Jolley added.

Other professors selected to participate in the lectures are Sally Livingston, Jenny Holland, Bob Harmon, David Eastman, Paul Dean, Laurie Anderson, Zack Long and Goran Skosples.

For more information, visit here.

Lecture series hosts speaker on digital privacy

Kirk Herath. Photo courtesy of LinkedIn.

The latest Great Decisions Community Discussion Series drew a crowd of 60 Delaware residents to the basement of the William Street United Methodist Church Friday, Feb. 13. There, Nationwide Insurance vice president, assistant general counsel and chief privacy officer Kirk Herath spoke about data privacy and security.

Herath opened “Privacy in the Digital Age” by saying, “In my talk today I really may be somewhat of an alarmist at times, but I’m trying to be informative.”

He said more security techniques are continuously being developed “to combat the bad guys” and a lack of privacy can result in a variety of issues, including unfair discrimination.

As an example, Herath said if he were to purchase Jack Daniel’s every day with a credit card and insurance companies were able to access that information, they might deny him insurance. He would be “toast.”

Herath said using technology is a trade-off between protecting our information and accessing data and services.

The cover of the Great Decisions 2015 booklet. Photo courtesy of Connect2OWU.

“We’re currently building the largest data center in the world in Utah that the National Security Agency is going to use to collect all this data they apparently don’t have,” Herath said, causing the audience to chuckle.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s like an 18 football field-sized data server farm out there and it’s guarded like Fort Knox.”

Herath also said many companies use encryption to protect privacy, but it is complex.

“Encrypted data is perfectly secure,” Herath said. “It’s also garbage if you can’t un-encrypt it, and that’s the fundamental problem we’re all facing. To encrypt Nationwide [Insurance data] universally, it would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars because it would require us to update dozens and dozens of systems. We’d basically have to start all over again.”

To better protect privacy and data, Herath suggested using complex passwords, not oversharing on social media, enabling anti-virus software updates on all technology and avoiding public wireless networks for sensitive digital transactions.

Alice Frazier, a Delaware resident, said she attended the event because she was interested in the topic and always tries to come to the Great Decisions lectures.

“It was a good talk, but I guess it was a little more technical than I was expecting,” said Frazier. “There’s a lot about it I don’t understand, but I thought he did a good job.”

Cory Barringer, another Delaware resident, said the topic was relevant and something she pays attention to.

“It’s pretty clear that you’re not going to be able to totally protect yourself,” Barringer said. “That’s probably my biggest takeaway. The next step is to learn how to deal with it and really pay attention to passwords and make them strong.”

The next Great Decisions Community Discussion lecture is titled “Brazil’s Metamorphosis” and will be given by the chair of Ohio Wesleyan University’s politics and government department, James Franklin. It is scheduled for Feb. 20 at 12 p.m.