KATE COHEN

Stars on snow

KATE COHEN — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:57:18 GMT

Some of the world’s best skiers and snowboarders got their starts on the mountains of New England
Anyone who’s spent a day skidding along the ice-plagued trails of a New England ski resort knows that the snow around here can be hard to love.

Anyone who’s spent a day skidding along the ice-plagued trails of a New England ski resort knows that the snow around here can be hard to love. Yet some of the world’s finest pro skiers and snowboarders — athletes who regularly populate the winners’ podium — grew up traversing the very same slopes. Clearly there is something to be said about learning how to ski and ride on a sometimes-unpredictable New England mountain.

Does the magic lie in, say, Hannah Teter’s family recipe for maple syrup? Or does our snow, a far cry from the perfect daily powder out West, offer the tough love necessary to churn out top-tier athletes?

“If you can ride the East you can ride almost anywhere,” says veteran half-pipe champ Ross Powers. And Powers is just one of several Olympians who paid their dues on local mountains before hitting the world stage.

Kelly Clark

CLARK: Higher and tighter.

Clark may have narrowly missed an Olympic medal at the Torino games in 2006, but her undoing on her final half-pipe run was emblematic of her stature as one of the most talented female snowboarders on the pro circuit. The trick in question was a 900 degree spin, which she completed before faltering on the landing. Teammates and fellow New Englanders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler took gold and silver, respectively, but Clark remains one of the sport’s great talents.

Half-pipe riders can often seem indistinguishable in their baggy pants and jackets, but spectators typically know when they are seeing a Kelly Clark run. She’s literally head and shoulders above the rest, flying higher and turning tighter tricks. Born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1983, Clark grew up near Mount Snow, Vermont, where she was riding a snowboard at eight.

Growing up there, she says via e-mail, “was great. They take great care of their terrain.” She attended Mount Snow Academy, a small private school where the academic schedule is tailored to students who train on the nearby slopes. Although Mount Snow keeps close tabs on Clark and has devoted a section of its town Web site to her successes, Clark has lived in California since 2001.

Right-click to learn

KATE COHEN — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:04:10 GMT

Second Life offers students a virtually real education
As membership grows exponentially on Second Life , the academic world’s forward-thinking minds are seeing new opportunities for the virtual campus.

Harvard in Second Life

As membership grows exponentially on Second Life — the online 3-D metaverse where users can shop, socialize, and even blow their brains out — the academic world’s forward-thinking minds are seeing new opportunities for the virtual campus. With undergrads already dedicating a lot of their online time to chatting with friends or gaming, instructors are discovering that their pupils are ideal guinea pigs for a new frontier in learning online. Desks might be a thing of the past, rules like “don’t come to class naked” might seriously apply, and a professor’s tweed blazer could be replaced by a robot chassis or butterﬂy wings, or both. But the possibilities for learning are nearly endless.

Second Life (SL) is an online Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) where users are represented on screen (or “in-world”) by animated “avatars” who can walk, ﬂy, and talk with each other in 3-D environments designed and inhabited by fellow users, known as “residents.” SL residents can buy SL virtual real estate — usually in the form of a private island — from Linden Labs, the San Francisco –based company behind Second Life. Using graphics tools provided by SL, island-owners can develop their land any way they like — by building a mansion or a dungeon, say, or creating a forest or a snow-swept steppe. Residents also get to design their own avatars, often idealized human forms, who then function, on command, in any in-world environment. (To access Second Life, you need to download proprietary SL browser protocols and sign up for membership.)

Although Second Life is not the ﬁrst MUVE to gain a foothold on the Internet, the academic world is taking to its flexibility and advanced options. Linden Labs Community Manager John Lester, known as Pathﬁnder Linden in-world, is facilitating SL’s partnership with educators by connecting them with the tools they’ll need. Lester helped create a Campus Island, virtual real estate where educators can use an acre of land free of charge for the duration of a class.

But the Linden vision is really to let the educators run with it. “We would love to see Second Life be used for things we haven’t dreamed of,” he says, “for instructors to use it to teach things that could not possibly be taught in the physical world.” Many instructors who started with Campus Island have returned to build their own islands. Lester estimates that more than 50 universities now have representation in-world, and about 400 members have joined his educators’ mailing list. “It’s a community that’s growing on its own at this point.”

Pluots

KATE COHEN — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 21:19:51 GMT

Good breeding
Although fruit breeding is nothing new — clementines date back to 1902, and grapes are routinely bred for wine varieties — summer fruits have only lately been the beneficiaries of clever fruit geneticists.

Geek in the woods

KATE COHEN — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 22:08:29 GMT

Roughing it for urban gadget fiends
For city dwellers accustomed to living with iPods, cell phones, and steady wi-fi, a weekend spent camping can send well-adapted urbanites into temporary panic.

For city dwellers accustomed to living with iPods, cell phones, and steady wi-fi (not to mention indoor plumbing), a weekend spent camping — or even more extreme, hiking and camping — can send well-adapted urbanites into temporary panic as they recall well-buried memories of a family outing gone terribly wrong when a certain someone mistook an anthill for a sandbox.