University Trustee Vincent Argiro to Give Commencement Address
University Trustee Dr. Vincent Argiro, who together with his wife Dr. Maggie Argiro donated $2 million to help fund the Argiro Student Center, will give the 2009 commencement address at graduation ceremonies on June 27.
In addition, Father Gabriel Mejilla, a Catholic priest who directs rehabilitation centers for juvenile offenders in Colombia, will receive an honorary doctorate degree.
Dr. Vincent Argiro received his B.A. degree at Yale and his Ph.D. in neural sciences from Washington University. He joined Maharishi University of Management faculty in 1986 to teach neuroscience, cell biology, and developmental biology, as well as to do research. Under federal and state grants, Dr. Argiro developed 3-D imaging software to facilitate research on brain development. He founded Vital Images, Inc., in 1988, and eventually shifted his full-time focus to the company, retiring in 2006.
The publicly held company employs over 300 people, and is a major supplier of 3-D visualization and analysis software used in conjunction with CT, MR, and PET image data for diagnosing medical situations and planning treatment. In 2005 he won an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Reverend Mejilla is a Catholic missionary who directs 47 shelters for homeless children and youth offenders in Colombia. Thanks in part to generous support from the David Lynch Foundation, over 3,600 young people at these shelters have learned the Transcendental Meditation® technique.
Graduation ceremonies will be held Saturday, June 27, at 1:00 p.m. in the Maharishi Patanjali Golden Dome.
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Student Feature Film Wins Top Award at Film Festival
Wormtooth Nation, a feature film by students Geoff Boothby and Cullen Thomas that was done in 2008 as their senior project, has been winning recognition and awards, including the top award -- a Gold Eddy -- in the Student Long-Form category at the 2009 Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival.
The film, which was originally released serially online, also received two nominations for Webby Awards, the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.
And at the recent annual Iowa Motion Pictures Awards, the film won three top awards, often called "Iowa Oscars": Screenplay-Produced; Directing-Long Form; and Original Music Score. It also received three Awards of Achievement for being nominated in the categories Entertainment-Long Form; Lighting Design; and Editing.
The film is also an official selection of the Iowa Independent Film Festival, which will take place in July.
Wormtooth Nation is a 90-minute film that tells the story of people living in an underground city, searching for the surface but continually losing their memories. It features a large and talented cast, authentic locations suited to the "steampunk" genre, an intriguing plot, and a memorable score.
The Cedar Rapids festival showcased the work of filmmakers from across the state and around the country, all with strong connections to Iowa. Of the 70 films submitted for consideration, 31 were selected by a panel of judges to compete for Gold and Silver Eddy Awards and the Audience Choice and Iowa Connection Eddys.
In the Online Film & Video portion of the Webby Awards, Wormtooth Nation was nominated in the categories Best Sound Design and Student.
The Webby Awards receive over 10,000 entries in over 100 categories, and the entries go through with two levels of judging to be nominated, with only five entries nominated in each category.
"It's a big accomplishment to be nominated in two categories," Mr. Boothby said.
Mr. Boothby and Mr. Thomas are now employed by DLF.tv, a new website from the David Lynch Foundation that features documentaries which showcase the effects of the Transcendental Meditation program in the lives of students, artists, and others.
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Eco-Fair June 5-7 to Focus on Green Transportation
By Lee Leffler
Transportation will be the focus of the 2009 Maharishi University of Management Eco-Fair. Vehicles powered by alternative energy, including pterosail, electricity, and even horses, will visit campus June 5-7.
"We need to design our lives so we aren't dependent on oil," said Elizabet Humble, a senior in the Sustainable Living Program and one of the organizers.
The Eco-Fair will also feature speakers, community-planning sessions on transportation (including bicycling tourism and wilderness appreciation), films, live music, and vendors.
Also being planned is the EcoJam fashion show, which will feature organic clothing and clothing fashioned by students from recycled materials-- complete with catwalk and music.
Volunteers are needed to organize and assist. Eco-friendly food and non-food vendors are wanted. Students can donate new or used clothing for the EcoJam fashion show that are 100% organic, alternate source, or recycled. To get involved, call 641-919-0201. Or e-mail dyepez@mum.edu.
Note: The dates of the Eco-Fair were changed to June 5-7. Please update your calendar.
Students first organized an Eco-Fair in 2000, and it has since become an annual tradition, often bringing in leading experts in a range of areas. The Eco-Fairs have been a major impetus for the transformation of campus toward a focus on sustainability.
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$12,000 Grant Supports Campus Recycling
A recent $12,000 grant from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources is supporting the construction of more recycling sheds on campus, the construction of mobile recycling stations in the dorms, and an awareness campaign to increase the amount of recycling on campus.
"We want to greatly reduce the amount of stuff we're sending to the landfill," says Mark Stimson, campus sustainability coordinator. "It's kind of shocking, actually, how much trash we produce."
After surveying the content of the dumpsters, Mr. Stimson estimates that 60-80% of it could be recycled. And the grant will make that easier.
Five new recycling sheds are being built to add to the seven already located around campus. "We want to have more so that people don't have to walk as far to get to a recycling station," Mr. Stimson said.
The sheds have bins for plastic, clear glass, colored glass, aluminum, white paper, colored paper, newspaper, and glossy paper, as well as an area for cardboard.
The mobile stations for dorms will be dollies with recycling bins stacked three high. When they're full, residents will be able to simply wheel them out of the building for pickup.
The educational campaign will cover the value of recycling -- for the environment and for saving the University a large amount of money.
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Grant Supports Computer Scanning of Sanskrit Texts
Adjunct faculty member Peter Scharf has received a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to scan Sanskrit manuscripts from the libraries at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania.
The project will scan 162 manuscripts of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana and integrate the image files with machine-readable texts, lexical resources, and linguistic software. This integrated manuscript research environment will then be made universally available in The Sanskrit Library, an online digital library launched by Dr. Scharf 10 years ago.
The scans of the manuscripts are not searchable by existing technology because optical character recognition (OCR) software, on which searching depends, is not able to read handwritten Indic scripts. Integrating the scans with text files, which a computer can easily search, will give Sanskrit scholars a convenient way to search the images for particular passages. In addition, the text files will be linked with lexical and linguistic resources, so that information related to specific words or passages can be explored, and systematic searches based on linguistic or lexical criteria can locate all relevant passages. The project will also develop word-spotting technology to allow specific passages sought to be highlighted in the manuscript images.
"The idea is to provide people immediate focused access to the original manuscript materials that are the foundation of the edited text as well as to put additional linguistic and lexical resources at their fingertips," Dr. Scharf said.
The grant, awarded to Brown University, where Dr. Scharf teaches Sanskrit and Indian literature, includes a sub-award to Maharishi University of Management to contract professor Ralph Bunker to develop software for the project.
Online Sanskrit Library
Dr. Scharf characterizes The Sanskrit Library as a digital library that integrates Sanskrit texts, tools, and lexical resources in order to facilitate research and education in Sanskrit. He began the project after working with Dr. Bunker to develop the web-based display of his analysis and translation of the Ramopakhyana along with a digital index. The Ramopakhyana project has served as the prototype for the more expanded scope of The Sanskrit Library.
Powerful Linguistic Tools
That greater scope includes some powerful linguistic tools. Under a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Scharf and his colleagues at Brown developed linguistic software that parses Sanskrit nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The Brown team also collaborated with other scholars to enrich the utility of the digital edition of Monier-Williams' Sanskrit-English Dictionary, which will feed the project's software to generate all the inflected forms of Sanskrit words. The digital texts used in the project are from the TITUS Sanskrit text archive.
The texts, linguistic software, and dictionary are being knit together in a system that allows readers to move from the text to the dictionary and back seamlessly, and allows researchers to locate words or all instances of specific grammatical categories of words in the texts.
Dr. Scharf is spending the winter and spring at M.U.M. as an adjunct faculty member in Maharishi Vedic Science, and recently taught a popular course on the Ramopakhyana: The Story of Rama in the Mahabharata. He is also conducting a seminar in Shiksha for graduate students in Maharishi Vedic Science.
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School Student's Photo to Hang in Nation's Capitol
Maharishi School student Pearl Sawhney will have a photo on display for a year in the U.S. Capitol Building as a result of winning the grand prize in the 2009 Congressional Art Contest. She and her parents will receive free airfare to attend a formal reception in Washington, D.C., on June 24 honoring the winning artists from each of the 435 congressional districts.
The contest was open to all high school students in the eastern and southeastern-area based second congressional district of Iowa. The competition was created to recognize the creative talents among the youth in all 435 congressional districts across the nation.
In the second congressional district, seven of the 12 overall works of art recognized came from Maharishi School. In addition to Ms. Sawhney's award, Sokhara Shreck received a third-place award. Her photo will be on display in Congressman Dave Loebsack's Washington, D.C., office.
A special mention honor went to Mary Henderson, and four students earned honorable mention: Avery Mullenneaux, Mollie Cutler, Chosie Titus, and Gabrielle Hathaway. These students will have the option of having their pieces hung in one of Congressman Loebsack's two district offices in Iowa.
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