“Call me Peggy,” she says, and doctor and patient adjourn to a small, unremarkable office looking out on a leafy stretch of Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, Mass.

Duggan (CAS’86, MED’90), a surgeon and clinical director of the hospital’s Breast Centre, encourages patients diagnosed with cancer to bring someone along—a friend, her spouse, her mother. Sometimes they do.

“I once had six people in here,” says Duggan, who earned a bachelor of arts and a medical degree at Boston University and did surgical training at Boston Medical Center, then Boston City Hospital. Sometimes it helps.

“The real problem,” says Duggan, “is once they hear the word ‘cancer,’ they don’t hear anything else.”

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Joan Swartz Siff (LAW’91, COM’92), president of WATCH (World Against Toys Causing Harm) will be taking your questions. The views expressed by the participants in the live chat are the participants' and do not necessarily reflect the views of Boston University.

Join the live chat after the jump...

So this week, “YouSpeak” asks: “What is your reaction to RateBU.com?”

Watch the video after the jump...

So what’s “in” at the moment? UGG boots, beanies (you know, those cool knit caps with flaps), and jeggings (denim leggings). And what’s a great outfit without a pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses (retail value a mere $189) to pull it all together?

Whether you consider yourself fashionista or hipster, sneakerhead or preppy, chances are you’ve got strong opinions about what to wear and what to, er, definitely not wear. Leggings as pants? Denim on denim? The return of plaid shirts?

To find out what BU students think is hot—and not—we ask in our weekly feature, “YouSpeak”: “Is there a BU ‘look’ when it comes to fashion?”

Watch the video after the jump...

Hamersley whipped up those three dishes one fall morning in his restaurant’s open kitchen. As 45-gallon pots of veal and chicken stock simmered on the burners, the chef sliced the top off a small, perfectly round sugar pumpkin, cut the orb in half, and scooped out the seeds and string.

“Getting a pumpkin to do what you want is somewhat labor-intensive,” says Hamersley (CGS’71, SED’74), “but it’s not rocket science. If anything, pumpkin wrestling is what it’s all about. You’ve got to be a little bit careful how you go about using your knife. But generally speaking, it’s pretty easy.”

Sugar pumpkins, small and round, are high in sugar content and are especially good for cooking. Hamersley says the pumpkin varieties he likes include the Pik-a-Pie, a standard sugar pumpkin that’s small and easy to carve and cook, One Too Many, “the orange and white one that looks so pretty,” and the Racer, “which is larger, has a good strong stem, and cooks well.”

“We, as cooks, at Hamersley’s anyway, celebrate those things that define our area—pumpkins, for sure, but not just your average New England sugar pumpkin,” says Hamersley. “There are lots of varieties of squashes, and they all are edible, they all are beautiful, and the things you can do with them are not limited to pie.”

Watch Chef Hamersley prepare the dishes and download the recipes at Bostonia Online...

I’m working on a book about the Great Migration of black Americans to the North and West, and looking for people who moved up from the South to escape Jim Crow, to follow a factory job, to chase a better life for their families. They must have stories and be willing to tell them.

A decade and a half later, Wilkerson recalls the bottom-up search for history that led her to conversations with more than 1,200 African Americans who made the journey from the South. That day in Chicago, she remembers, a woman stepped forward and told her that she just had to meet her mother.

See the full article at Bostonia Online...

In the years leading up to his death, Grimsley had changed. He became forgetful and scattered, quick to anger, flying into a rage over household garbage, certainly not the man Virginia Grimsley had married. When he forgot about the engagement party for his son and future daughter-in-law, Virginia knew something was gravely wrong. “We’d been talking about the party every day for the past week,” she said at the time. “I was shocked.”

See the full article at Bostonia Online...

In Streeter’s 12-week study, a group of 34 randomly selected physically and psychologically healthy young men and women were divided into two groups, one that walked for an hour three times a week and one that practiced Iyengar yoga for the same amount of time. At four-week intervals, Streeter used a technique known as magnetic resonance spectroscopy to monitor subjects’ levels of a brain chemical called gamma-amino butyric acid, or GABA, elevated levels of which are associated with improved mood and decreased anxiety. She found that the yoga group reported a greater boost in mood than the walking group, with GABA levels matching those improvements. Although the role of GABA still isn’t completely understood, her study is the first to demonstrate the GABA-mood-yoga connection by looking at actual changes in the brain. Bostonia spoke with Streeter about the implications of the study and the future of yoga as a way of treating mood disorders.

Bostonia: What is the main implication of this study?
Streeter: This is the first study when we’re able to measure GABA’s relation to yoga. GABA is an important neurotransmitter, which is decreased in depressed people and increased in people who take so-called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), like Prozac, and it’s also implicated in anxiety disorders. It’s been reported for years that yoga helps people with depression and anxiety, but in this study we took people who didn’t have any experience with yoga and found that mood scales were higher in the yoga group, and so were GABA levels.

Why did you choose Iyengar yoga?
The beauty of Iyengar is that it’s been around for a long time and it’s pretty rigorous, with really well defined postures. And when you say it’s an Iyengar intervention, people know what you mean. There are variations in it, but as far as yoga goes, it’s as consistent as you can get. The other thing is, when people say “yoga,” it could be breathing, postures, meditation, or all of those things. But I had the subjects do mainly postures because I could see them actually doing it.

Do you think yoga alone could be a viable treatment for anxiety or depression?
It’s been suggested. But I would say it’s not a substitute, but rather an adjunct to treatment. It’s an exciting behavioral intervention, but the results here are associative, not causal. That’s a problem, expanding these results to say that doing yoga as a substitute for one’s meds is a good idea. It’s not. And doing yoga without proper training or supervision is not advised.

How does the use of magnetic resonance spectroscopy change the nature of mood studies?
It’s really exciting. The scan, which we use in conjunction with McLean Hospital, is really cutting-edge technology. Now we can measure what has historically been hypothesized. It used to be that if you could cut the brain, that was how you saw that these abnormalities were organic—it was not, so to speak, in the person’s head. But with functional imaging we have this picture that shows, gosh, here’s the brain of a depressed person before and after. It’s a much harder science.

Why did you decide to compare yoga to walking?
You really do need a control group. There have been a number of studies comparing aerobic and nonaerobic exercise that show exercise helps ease depression and anxiety. In this study, the walking group clearly had more exercise, and they were very active people. But the yoga group had more improvement in their mood than the walking group.

Could yoga be used to treat bipolar disease and thought disorders as well as depression and anxiety?
Yoga is probably always a good thing, more helpful than harmful. But some breathing exercises are not good for people who are manic or psychotic. They can trigger a psychotic episode.

Is mainstream psychiatry becoming more receptive to yoga as a treatment tool?
Doctors aren’t necessarily trained to prescribe it. But there was a study of using yoga to help treat epileptics. And we’re getting to the point when we’re actually getting good data. Yoga research is increasing exponentially.

How did you get interested in this research?
I’ve been interested in yoga since I was in the seventh grade. I loved the mind-body interface, and yoga is a very interesting mind-body subject. It helps people deal with all kinds of problems.

Do you practice yoga?
Oh yes. I’ve done a lot of different types—ashtanga, power yoga, Iyengar.

People might misinterpret these results to mean that yoga is better than walking. Can you clarify the comparision?
In this study, in this population, walking didn’t prove to be as beneficial to mood as yoga. It doesn’t mean that yoga is better than walking in other populations and other situations.

See the full article at Bostonia Online...

Marrinan (CFA’95) breathes a well-earned sigh of relief as she relates the story.

“I remember there were lot of tropical fish in the story, and there were blood transfusions and cocaine,” says Marrinan, now two years into her writer’s job. “We draw a lot of inspiration from the insane things that happen every day, and there is no lack of hellacious crime out there.”

In another role, Marrinan draws enormous personal inspiration from real-world events that have nothing to do with crime. She is the winner of an Oscar for her 2005 documentary A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, about Corwin’s radio masterpiece marking the end of World War II in Europe. An earlier documentary she coproduced, On Tiptoe: Gentle Steps to Freedom, a profile of the South African male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was also nominated for an Oscar.

Read more & watch a video about Corinne Marrinan at Bostonia Online...

Though struck down just as he was taking flight, Harry Agganis (SED’54) fulfilled that destiny and then some: dead 55 years, his spirit still soars, his name gracing a foundation, a street, and an arena. The bronze demigod presides over Comm Ave, poised to launch a pigskin above the T tracks and into forever.

“He was incredibly gifted,” says Tom Demakis, a lawyer and chairman of the Agganis Foundation, which provides college scholarships to student athletes from Boston and the North Shore. “In high school, the coach at Notre Dame said Harry was the finest prospect he’d ever seen. Warren McGuirk, the head coach and athletic director at U Mass, said, ‘This boy is ready for the NFL right now.’”

The son of Greek immigrants, Agganis was born Aristotle George Agganis in 1929 in Lynn, Mass. Equally masterful swinging a bat and fielding grounders, he left his mark all over the playing fields of Lynn Classical High School, and fans soon referred to him as the “Golden Greek.”

Read more & watch a video about Agganis at Bostonia Online...

1. The psychology text for CAS PS101 retails new for $147. Students who buy it through the bookstore’s used-books program pay $110; it will rent for $66.

2. The calculus textbook for CAS MA123 sells new for $226. It costs $169.50 used and $101 to rent.

3. And the microeconomics text for GRS EC701 retails for $129 new and $96.75 used. Renting it will cost $58.

Factoring in the store’s existing discount programs (selling used texts and buying back new texts from students at semester’s end), and assuming students rent rather than buy all the available rental texts, students collectively could save $2.6 million in the coming academic year, according to Smokowski.

The rentals, good for the duration of the semester, permit students to mark the books, just as they would if they bought them and resold them to the store under its resale program. Rented books will be due back at the store within 10 days of the end of finals. Students can rent the books using any tender accepted by the store, including financial aid and campus debit cards, but they must also show a valid credit card for security purposes.

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It’s a tough question even for Charles Glenn, a School of Education professor of educational leadership and development and a 21-year veteran of the state Department of Education. He’s conflicted about the national standards, which were adopted by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and have left experts divided.

The standards dictate what students in every grade should learn about English and math. Massachusetts officials preside over the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, which has been denounced by some but generally is considered among the nation’s best school standards. Commonwealth officials helped devise the national standards with the nation’s governors and state education leaders. President Obama and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation back the effort.

Jim Stergios, executive director of Boston’s free-market-leaning Pioneer Institute, warns that the national vocabulary and algebra standards are weaker than the Commonwealth’s. Tom Birmingham, the former Democratic state senator who authored the state’s landmark education standards bill, and Bill Weld, the former Republican governor who signed it, oppose national standards. But several analyst groups countered that the national standards were either comparable, better, or, in the words of one, “too close to call.” the Boston Globe editorialized that national standards would build on Massachusetts’s; for example, while exposing younger students to less literature, the national standards would increase science and history readings. The state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education endorsed the new standards.

If wisdom resides in crowds, it’s worth noting that 28 states have now adopted the national standards. Of course, in this weak economy, one motivator may be money: Signing on is one way states can earn brownie points in the contest for a share of Obama’s $3.4 billion Race to the Top pot.

Bostonia asked Glenn to parse the pros and cons of adopting national education standards.

Read more at Bostonia Online...

“This is financial reform. It is not meaningful financial reform,” says Williams (GSM’93), a School of Management executive in residence and master lecturer in finance. Had the bill been law two years ago, we still would have had the banking crisis and recession, Williams argues. Still, there are provisions to be applauded. High-flying “banksters” put us in this soup with their daredevil risk-taking, Williams says, and the bill, in his words, puts more regulatory cops on the corner to watch them.

Williams is the author of Uncontrolled Risk, about the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Bostonia spoke with him about the reform bill’s pluses and minuses.

Bostonia: When he signed the bill, President Obama said, “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.” Do you believe him?
Williams: It’s a great sound bite, but it’s not true. There’s one provision that FDIC insurance has permanently increased from $100,000 to $250,000 per account. Taxpayers are on the hook. If a bank goes belly-up, an account is insured for $250,000. It helps very large depositors; the average American would love $250,000 in an account. Banks fund themselves through deposits, so the banks can use that money to lend. Every time the government decides to insure more, the government is putting taxpayer money at risk.

Investment banks had said, For us to compete with commercial banks—which had a cheap form of funding, because they were FDIC-insured—we have to grow our balance sheets. Investment banks took on more debt. Leverage ratios got high. It was a financial Star Wars.

Read more at Bostonia Online...

Tom Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication, says the move is a reminder of how far we’ve come from the world of the Pentagon Papers, which the Times and other papers made public in 1971.

Bostonia spoke with Fiedler (COM’71), a former editor of the Miami Herald, about the ethical implications of the increasing ease and speed of publishing sensitive material.

Bostonia: The government says WikiLeaks endangered lives with its disclosures. Do you believe the government?
Fiedler: I don’t disbelieve the government. The fact of the matter is you don’t know if you are going to endanger lives when you do something like this. You’re trying to weigh, sitting in the editor’s chair, the public interest versus the government’s interest. All you can do is try to exercise due diligence. I applaud the steps the New York Times has taken. They did not name names, beyond the Pakistani retired general who has been the subject of public discussion—

In terms of whether he’s colluding with Al Qaeda?
That’s right. They also took steps to not publish documents that would compromise intelligence gathering. There’s a lot of stuff in that raw data that the Times apparently chose not to run. There could be information that compromises U.S. servicemen, intelligence.

Read more at Bostonia Online...

The Collyer brothers, whose home held more than 130 tons of waste, are one of the most extreme examples of hoarding on record, but the compulsion is believed to affect up to 4 percent of the population.

Gail Steketee, a professor and dean of the School of Social Work, has been studying hoarding for fifteen years and is the coauthor of three books on the subject. Her most recent, written with Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College, is Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Bostonia talked with Steketee about hoarding.

Watch the video and read the interview at Bostonia Online...

Boston Police spokesperson Jill Flynn says officers arrived at the scene at 9:35 a.m. The death has been ruled “noncriminal” by the Boston department. “It is not a homicide,” Flynn says.

Scott Pare, Boston University deputy director of public safety, says BU Police are working with Boston Police in investigating the death.

President Robert A. Brown says Cerrina will be sorely missed. “Although he had only been with us for less than two years,” Brown says, “Franco had already distinguished himself by his intellect, leadership, and warmth to all who had the chance to know him.”

Kenneth Lutchen, dean of ENG, says that Cerrina was the kind of person who would help to build his department and his college. “I feel very sad for him and for his family,” says Lutchen. “I also feel sad for the faculty and the entire department.

“There is no evidence that this death had anything to do with safety issues with his lab or this building.”

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The scientists, lead by Paola Sebastiani at the School of Public Health and Thomas Perls at the School of Medicine, have found 150 genetic markers that predict with 77 percent accuracy whether people will live extremely long lives, which they defined as late 90s or older. In the United States, where the average life expectancy is 78, only one in 6,000 people make it to 100.

Despite the newfound genetic evidence, the researchers hastened to endorse exercise and a good diet as important extenders of life.

“Genetic data can indeed predict exceptional longevity without knowledge of any other risk factor,” the researchers wrote in the July issue of the journal Science. “This prediction is not perfect, however, and although it may improve with better knowledge of the variations in the human genome, its limitations confirm that environmental factors (e.g., lifestyle) also contribute in important ways to the ability of humans to survive to very old ages.”

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Both psychoanalyst Birnbach and conflict management consultant, coauthor, and spouse Beverly Hyman were divorced when they met. That is perhaps one of the reasons they take the refreshingly realistic view that while marriages require hard work, divorce happens — and is sometimes the best option for all concerned, including the children. Adhering to the usual self-help format of alternating advice, personal anecdotes, quizzes, and handy lists, the authors offer explicit circumstances under which a couple may be better off apart. They list and periodically refer back to nine areas in which spouses must work out agreements, including the usual suspects — sex, money, and parenting — and more intractable differences, such as those involving substance abuse and religion.

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Richard Goldstein’s office in the Medical Campus’s pristine BioSquare complex appears to have fallen victim to its own private earthquake. A listing tower of cardboard boxes threatens the last navigable floor space near the biologist’s desk, which is buried under an avalanche of hemorrhaging manila folders.

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In summer 2007, Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and eleven other books, was researching a story for the New York Times Magazine about a math whiz who applied his genius to the relatively new business of buying and selling catastrophe bonds, basically betting on the likelihood of a natural disaster wiping billions of dollars worth of homes and businesses off the map. Lewis’s subject, John Seo, was a compelling character. Brilliant and successful, Seo was also modest enough to tell Lewis that if he wanted to write about someone who had radically changed the business of catastrophic risk assessment, he should track down a woman named Karen Clark.

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In the video above, Clif Garboden (CAS’70) and Esther Wineburgh Rothkopf (SED’70) discuss the political turmoil at BU in the spring of 1970, the Kent State shootings, and what it means to finally graduate.

They returned. And they were still marching. But this time, the Boston University Class of 1970 walked in a Commencement ceremony that replicated the one that was canceled 40 years ago, when political turmoil rocked the campus.

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In the video above, join Morteza Lahijanian at his Persian New Year’s celebration in Somerville, Mass., visit his BU lab, and hear his thoughts about being here, and being Iranian, during a time of turmoil in his homeland.

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For years, students living on East Campus have been keenly aware of the distance to amenities on West Campus — things like FitRec and the StuVi twins, as well as Central Campus niceties like the George Sherman Union. Easterners, it seemed, had no social center of gravity. That will soon change.

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It’s Boston University Alumni Association’s inaugural Global Day of Service. The association, along with individual alumni and the BU Community Service Center, has been organizing community service opportunities from Boston to San Francisco, Sydney to Shanghai. So far, there are approximately 50 sites, among them the Greater Boston Food Bank, the Franklin Park Zoo, in Dorchester, Mass., the Downtown Women’s Center, in Los Angeles, Calif., and Blackwattle Bay, in Sydney, Australia.

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To paraphrase Joe Biden, just how big a @#%ing deal is the new health law President Obama signed last week?

Hard to say in a quick phrase, says Alan Sager, a professor of health policy and management at the School of Public Health; the law tackles the problem of the uninsured but does almost nothing about health care’s ruinous cost.

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Graduating seniors who assume they can impress prospective employers by relying on their instincts are making their first bad career decision, says interview training coach Claudyne Wilder. She encourages everyone looking for a job in this market to videotape themselves and take a good critical look at their performance.

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After more than 25 years — at least 10 in planning and 16 in construction — plus one failed attempt, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator hit pay dirt when two super-energized particle beams collided, releasing an extremely short-lived plasma that scientists believe approximates the origin of all matter.

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Journalist Kristen Lombardi has shed light on some very dark places. It was Lombardi, writing in the Boston Phoenix in 2001, who broke the horrific story of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, hidden for decades by the Boston archdiocese. The response, especially from now-adult victims of the abuse, was so powerful that the thirty-one-year-old College of Communication graduate came away convinced her reporting could change people’s lives for the better. The story also lit a fire under competing newspapers: the Boston Globe’s investigative team picked up the story, winning a 2003 Pulitzer for its coverage. Lombardi (COM’95) would eventually write more than a dozen articles on the topic, winning recognition from the Poynter Institute and Columbia Journalism Review.

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Tea pluckers, scores of them, are working the fields atop the high rolling hills of rural western Kenya, in the heart of African tea country.

A muzungu, Swahili for “white guy” — not a derogatory term, just a statement of fact — watches the pluckers, marveling at their speed and care. Speed because they are paid by weight, care because if the fresh leaves are bruised or crushed, they fetch a lower price.

Jonathon Simon is a long way from his third-floor corner office on Massachusetts Avenue at the Boston University Medical Campus, but he seems at ease, if a little awed, to be standing with his feet in African dirt. As founding director of BU’s Center for Global Health and Development, Simon sometimes jokes that if his center is doing its job right, his Univer­sity digs should be little more than a post office box, his team’s focus being far-flung, aimed at places just like this.

Since 2001, BU researchers have been working with tea pluckers and with the plantation owners who hire them. What started as an effort to measure the devastating impact of AIDS on African workers has evolved into something much more hopeful: an attempt to prove that HIV-infected workers, given the same antiretroviral drugs readily available in developed countries, will return to near full productivity, benefiting their employ­ers as well as their families.

It’s an argument that Simon, a School of Public Health professor and chair of the department of inter­national health, now believes can be applied to many parts of the African, and the world’s, economy — to miners, coffee and cotton pickers, any laborers at work in the fields.

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In a decision likely to have profound political consequences, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the government cannot limit spending by corporations or unions in political elections. The response to the verdict was immediate and noisy. President Obama said it “strikes at our democracy itself.”

“The last thing we need to do,” said the president, “is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the change in policy a “monumental decision” that would “restore the First Amendment rights of [corporations and unions] by ruling that the Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until election day.”

Who’s right? Who’s wrong?

Bostonia asked two political experts to share their views on camera. Bob Zelnick, a College of Communication professor of journalism and national security affairs, supports the court’s decision; Graham Wilson, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of political science, isn’t so sure.

Watch the debate here...

Port-au-Prince, Haiti - Haitian President René Préval met Friday, January 22 with a team of faculty, graduate students, and graduates from Boston University, who used maps and satellite photos depicting the destruction of Port-au-Prince block by block and house by house to demonstrate how immediate decisions on rebuilding the city will affect the long-term future of the country.

“This is the kind of thinking we definitely need, so we can prepare for future catastrophes,” Préval told the group after its 45-minute presentation. The meeting took place in makeshift national government headquarters on the outskirts of town, a former police station near the international airport. Nearly every public office building in Port-au-Prince, including the national palace, has been badly damaged, if not reduced to rubble. In fact, the BU team, which hopes to contribute to long-term as well as immediate reconstruction efforts, found the country so devastated that planning for the future seemed at times surreal.

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Call it the Battle of the Behemoths: the most populous country in the world versus the most influential company in the world. Ever since it set up shop in China in 2006, Google has been publicly unhappy with China’s practice of censoring the Internet. Earlier this month, after finding evidence that cyberattacks on its system had originated in China and appeared to be aimed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, the big company threw a small fit. It threatened to pull out of China, effectively abandoning a consumer market that is coveted by companies around the globe. Last week, Google postponed the release of two of its Android phones there, a move that was interpreted as an exclamation mark on Google’s willingness to let go of China.

As the battle rages, Bostonia spoke with Joseph Fewsmith III, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of international relations and political science and the author of four books about Chinese politics and history, including China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (2001) and Elite Politics in Contemporary China (2001).

Bostonia: Google, which has been operating in China for several years, is threatening to shut down its search engine there unless it can run uncensored. Why is it making this threat now?
Fewsmith: When Google went into China in 2006, its decision was controversial both within the company and throughout the human rights community. Despite its slogan “Do No Evil,” Google agreed to build a search engine for the Chinese market that would censor search results, in compliance with China’s policy and laws. Google’s argument was that being in China and providing better search results to the Chinese people was better than not being there. This was, I think, a reasonable argument, and indeed Google searches in China return more results than the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu.

If Google was always uncomfortable with censoring its search results in China, what made the situation intolerable from its point of view was a series of highly sophisticated cyberattacks on the company in December. These attacks targeted the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists, essentially using Google’s servers as a library through which the activities and contacts of Chinese activists could be traced. Google was not the only company hit in this period; apparently over 30 U.S. companies were hit with similar attacks. In response, Google announced that it would discuss with the Chinese government operating a search engine without censoring results, and if that was not possible, it would withdraw from the Chinese market.

So there were two separate issues — censorship and cybersecurity — involved, but it was the latter issue that prompted Google’s announcement.

What’s at stake? How much business or money does Google stand to lose?
The stakes for Google are not large. Baidu and Google earn about $1 billion a year, with Google earning only about a third of that. Given the size of Google’s earnings elsewhere, $300 million a year is not much. This has led some people to argue that Google was making a business decision to exit the Chinese market rather than protesting either censorship or cyberspying. Given the potential growth of China’s Internet market, that seems overly cynical.

Do we know who hacked Google?
No. Google has been very careful not to accuse the Chinese government of doing the hacking. Part of the problem is that it is very difficult in cyberattacks to know who has launched the attack — spoofing is too easy. Because these attacks were apparently very sophisticated, much suspicion has focused on the Chinese government. But there are many hackers in China, sometimes “patriot hackers,” or “red hackers,” who launch attacks on entities they think are critical of China. Sometimes these hackers can work closely with the Chinese government, but sometimes they do not.

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Sunday afternoons have felt different for football fans lately, thanks in no small part to researchers at BU.

A dramatic shift has altered the NFL culture over the past few months: rule changes, TV commentators pointing out dangerous hits, public service announcements about concussions, and star quarterbacks ordered to sit out important games after blows to the head. This stunning mid-season transformation has evolved from research at BU’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) linking concussions to later-life brain disease.

In the past, the league cast doubt on CSTE’s claims and insisted it would conduct its own studies. But in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, U.S. congressional hearings last October, and a slew of bad press, the NFL last month offered $1 million — or more — to fund CSTE’s work.

Bostonia caught up with CSTE codirector Robert Stern, a School of Medicine associate professor of neurology and codirector of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center’s Clinical and Research Program, to ask about the ethical considerations of taking money from the NFL to study what has become its gravest liability in terms of athletes’ health, as well as public relations: head trauma.

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In the weeks since the CIA suffered several high-profile setbacks — one of them the tragic deaths of seven operatives — the agency has come under fire from the press, from Congress, even from a top military intelligence official. No CIA or government official can deny that the December 30 suicide bombing by a Jordanian operative that claimed the agents’ lives was a failure of both intelligence-gathering and field procedure. But according to Arthur S. Hulnick, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of international relations, with a long career in the CIA and military intelligence, the ensuing criticism of the agency is unfair, misinformed, and politically motivated. Bostonia spoke with Hulnick about the CIA’s image and the challenge of gathering intelligence in a war against a far-reaching, fanatical, and often elusive enemy.

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Thousands of alums returned to campus last month for Alumni Weekend, to lunch with old friends, tour the changing campus, sit in on classes led by star faculty members, and watch the Terrier icemen topple Michigan, 3-2.

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It won’t cover tuition, but the winnings will allow for a bit of fun.

Two months ago, Kaelin Merrihew competed on Wheel of Fortune, her “childhood guilty pleasure,” and luck was with her — she beat the other contestants to win $7,200 in cash and a Mexican cruise worth $5,000. The episode was taped on September 4, but contestants and audience members were sworn to secrecy until the show aired on November 9.

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Good Morning America producer Brandon Bodow (COM’06) takes viewers behind the scenes as he produces a segment with musical guest Ingrid Michaelson, who is currently on tour with her band promoting her newest album, Everybody.

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Bill O’Reilly isn’t usually on the receiving end of an interview. But there he was on Friday evening, lounging in a third-floor room of the George Sherman Union fielding questions minutes before taking the stage for what promised to be a raucous night before an overflow crowd at the start of Alumni Weekend.

O’Reilly (COM’75) called journalists over individually, like a doctor summoning patients into a makeshift office. Compared with his sharp, confrontational television tone, his manner was avuncular.

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Boston University has been ranked positively by several publications in the past few months, on both a national and an international scale.

Times Higher Education, a British publication that ranks schools globally, recently published “Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings,” and BU was ranked 54th out of 200 universities, 20th in the United States.

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With the Tsai Performance Center filled to its 500-seat capacity, many in the audience remembered when that hall was named Hayden, the University was in turmoil, and Howard Zinn was both lightning rod and radical catalyst.

Much has changed. The Howard Zinn Lecture Series, kicking off Alumni Weekend on October 22, now celebrates Boston University’s distinguished professor emeritus of political science. As Virginia Sapiro, dean of Arts & Sciences, welcomed all and introduced three intriguing writers gathered around the man of the night, cordiality rather than conflict ruled.

“To have a kindly relationship between us and the BU administration,” said Zinn, his nod to Sapiro drawing swells of laughter, “well, we’re still trying to get used to it.”

Yet some things haven’t changed. The topic was The Promise of Change: Vision and Realty in Obama’s Presidency. And the analysis came hard from the left, with Zinn staking out the far post.

Just as intriguing were the positions of his fellow panelists, each nuanced, each approaching Obama at least a little more sympathetically. They were:

James Carroll, a National Book Award winner and Boston Globe columnist, who first met Zinn during his years as Catholic chaplain at Boston University, from 1969 to 1974, before he left the priesthood.

Watch a video of Howard Zinn answering a question from the audience: what would he urge Barack Obama to do? Photo above by Frank Curran

Providing a synopsis of each of eight major world religions in Twitter-speak takes creative condensation. On Stephen Prothero’s feed, an “Ahh!” at the end indicates that a religious philosophy includes a final payoff. The eightfold path in Buddhism becomes “Path=let go(d),” and his shorthand for atheism is “There is no uknowwho but Freud & Marx is his prophet,” because the words “delusional” and “oppressive” are too long.

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In the video: Nick Mills and Andrew Bacevich discuss the obstacles to a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Watch the video.