Author and neighborhood organizer Mike Lanza spoke at the first Harker Speaker Series event of the year on Sept. 14 to share his insights into how neighborhoods can be great places for children to grow up and lead fun, fulfilling lives.
Beginning with some of the problems currently facing children, Lanza made the point that many kids spend too much time in front of screens, be they television, sets, laptops or tablets. On average, he noted, kids spend about eight hours each day consuming visual media.
Their lives are also highly scheduled, with sporting events, lessons and other activities. “They have no time on their own in the world to do things,” Lanza said.
Lack of unstructured play time leads to several problems, he said, among them obesity, depression and lack of creativity. He added, however, that taking away screen time and sending kids off into their neighborhoods won’t work on its own, because many neighborhoods are “boring.”
To remedy this problem in his Menlo Park neighborhood, Lanza got active and began making changes to his home to make it into a place where neighborhood children could play whenever they wanted. Among the modifications made to his home were a driveway that could be drawn on (it now contains a mural representing different parts of the neighborhood), a picnic table in the front yard, a whiteboard fixed to a fence and a play house where kids have been encouraged to write on the walls.
“We’re defacing everything we can,” Lanza said. “We want this place to look like kids live here. We want them to feel like they own this place.”
He and his family also visited homes throughout the neighborhood and encouraged other families to use the various amenities he had installed, even when no one was home. As a result, children regularly engage with one another in outdoor activities and neighborhood families have come to know one another much better.
Lanza also touched on other examples of American neighborhoods that were transformed to provide their children with meaningful play lives, such as Lyman Place, located in the South Bronx of New York City, normally an area associated with drug problems and high crime rates. In the 1970s, Lyman Place resident Hetty Fox led an effort to designate the area as a traffic-free spot from the morning until the late afternoon during the summer months. For more than 35 years, Fox has helped maintain the neighborhood as a place where kids of all ages can play safely in the street, and hires youth workers as assistants.
Another case study was a spot in Portland, Ore., where an architect had the street in his neighborhood painted with intricate designs and placed installations on every corner, including a clubhouse with toys for kids, a book exchange station and a solar-powered tea stand that is refilled by residents of the neighborhood.
Lanza finished the talk by providing advice to the audience about what they could do to change the atmosphere of their neighborhoods to accommodate kids at play. When moving, he said, parents should think about what’s in their children’s interests besides schools and housing amenities. “Are we really moving for our kids? Do they want this high-pressure school district you’re moving them to? Do they want the extra bedroom?” he asked. “Kids would love to double up in bedrooms if they have a neighborhood that’s thriving, that’s really happening.”
He also urged parents to make a neighborhood hangout, a place where kids could be certain something was happening a good portion of the time. “Kids are not going to go outside if there’ s nothing going on,” he said. “The best way to assure that something’s going on is if there’s a place where people can go where there’s something happening.”
Another important task, he said, is to “make the place you live into a close, communal village, where you know people, where they know you, where they know your kids, where you know their kids. If you can make that into a nice, comfortable place then you’ll comfortable letting your kids go. And other kids will show up at your door because they’re comfortable with you.”
This story was originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of Harker Quarterly
Lawyer and author Joel Bakan appeared at Harker’s upper school campus on Jan. 22 to discuss the topic of his latest book, “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children.” The book details the many increasingly insidious ways in which children are targeted by marketers, especially with the advent of the Internet and social media.
Concerned about the “increasingly brazen” tactics marketers use to target children, Bakan interviewed several leading marketers for the book and found them to be candid about their goals, proclaiming that their mission is “to uncover and then manipulate kids’ emotional hot buttons and desires” in order to sell their products.
Bakan also talked about how pharmaceutical companies have marketed more and more toward children in the last 30 years. “What I do think is happening is that there is a trend of overmedication,” which he partially attributed to those companies’ marketing tactics.
Fortunately, in recent years key laws have been passed that make it easier for consumers to know the risks in using prescribed pharmaceuticals. One law passed just this year requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose any payments they have made to doctors greater than $10, so that patients can find out if a doctor’s prescription of a certain drug is suspect.
“Being a good parent today requires more, as if it isn’t enough, than making good choices as individual parents,” he said. “I think we also have to work to change the conditions under which we and other parents are making those choices, and we also have to become active in demanding public measures that protect children from harm.”
The Harker Concert Series season came to a close on March 17 with a distinguished string quartet, who ran a master class with orchestra students and then performed to a full house in Nichols Hall auditorium.
The Afiara String Quartet is a Canadian group with impressive résumés: the foursome have degrees from Juilliard, Peabody, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory and Mannes College among them, and are clearly each highly accomplished musicians. Put them together, and the result is a tightly knit, focused yet relaxed ensemble that interprets music as though it were coming from just one bow.
Beethoven’s “String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95” was the first piece, a work historians place as the last of his “middle” period before he embarked upon the last works he would write, the Late Quartets. In the hands of the Afiara Quartet, this piece was aggressive, passionate and full of extremes, just as one wants Beethoven to be. Violist David Samuel and cellist Adrian Fung had a chance to show off the rich sonorities they coaxed from their instruments in some melodic interplay, and the group bobbed and swayed in perfect physical harmony as they dug into the dramatic piece, executing flawless transitions between tempi and movements.
The quartet’s second piece was a commissioned work by Samuel’s Juilliard buddy Brett Abigaña, a 32-year-old rising star in the classical world. This “String Quartet No. 2” was written in 2010, and seemed perfectly designed to highlight each member of the quartet’s musicianship and virtuosity. The piece appeared built around ostinato figures – accompaniment lines that repeated over and over while others built melodies around them. The first movement, “Psalm,” was hauntingly beautiful, with the dissonant ostinato provided by the two violinists, Valerie Li and Yuri Cho. Two of the movements ended with just a single player fading away into nothingness, leaving the audience spellbound and silent, waiting for the next movements to begin. The piece ended in a flurry of scalar passages, performed absolutely in sync and with clarity and precision that were truly spectacular. This piece was a wonderful mixture of modern atonality and lush melodies, and it was a treat to have such a positive glimpse of classical music’s future.
After an intermission, which included green food in honor of St. Patrick’s Day provided by Harker’s catering team, the group performed a string quartet of Dvořák’s. The Bohemian composer is known for infusing his work with nationalistic folk songs, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear such themes here. Interestingly, it was the first quartet Dvořák composed after returning from a trip to the United States; one wonders how much American influence found its way into this lovely piece. The third distinct genre of the evening, this piece received the same flawless interpretation as the others, showing Afiara’s comfort with various styles.
It is truly a learning experience for students and the community alike to witness such a seamless meeting of the minds amongst members of a small ensemble like the Afiara String Quartet. Kudos to Harker music teachers Chris Florio and Dave Hart, co-directors of the Harker Concert Series, for bringing a professional quartet of such remarkable skill to play in our own house.
Lawyer and author Joel Bakan appeared at Harker’s upper school campus as part of the Harker Speaker Series on Jan. 22 to discuss the topic of his latest book, “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children.” The book details the many increasingly insidious ways in which children are targeted by marketers, especially with the advent of the Internet and social media.
Bakan, who also authored “The Corporation,” which was made into an acclaimed documentary, was spurred to research the topic after experiencing two “pivotal moments,” as he called them. The first was hearing the famous quote by Nelson Mandela, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
“[Children] are the most tangible representatives of what the future society is, and will be,” Bakan said.
The second came when he saw his 11-year-old son huddled around a computer with his friends, and felt compelled to ask him what they were doing. His son then directed him to a website containing a wide variety of games, many of them with shocking or violent subject matter.
“It’s important to note that these games are not in some dark corner of the Web,” he said. They are, in fact, offered by Nickelodeon, a leading provider of children’s entertainment.
Concerned about the “increasingly brazen” tactics marketers use to target children, Bakan interviewed several leading marketers for the book, and found them to be candid about their goals, proclaiming that their mission is “to uncover and then manipulate kids’ emotional hot buttons and desires” in order to sell their products. Companies on average pay marketers $15 billion each year for these kinds of services.
These hot buttons include obsession with sugary foods, a fascination with violence, their preoccupation with what their peers think and their desire to appear older than they are.
“These tendencies and predilections, which for us as parents are things we want to protect our kids from, for marketers are resources to be mined for profit,” he said.
He cited another example, a Facebook application called “Honesty Box,” which allows users to anonymously gossip about their friends. Adolescent obsession with peer approval, Bakan said, has made Honesty Box very popular, and creates possibilities for online bullying. When Bakan suggested to his daughter that she stop using Honesty Box, “She said, ‘I can’t, because then I won’t know what people are saying about me.’”
Bakan also talked about how pharmaceutical companies have marketed more and more toward children in the last 30 years. While he does not believe that children should never be prescribed medication or psychotropic drugs, “what I do think is happening is that there is a trend of overmedication,” which he partially attributes to marketing tactics used by pharmaceutical companies.
He cited the tragic story of Caitlin McIntosh, who committed suicide at the age of 12 after being prescribed Zoloft by a doctor. It was later found out that Pfizer, the company that makes Zoloft, had known that the drug could induce suicidal thoughts but chose not to reveal that information. Because the Food and Drug Administration did not require private companies to disclose the negative results of their own tests, Pfizer was able to keep these and other findings from the public.
Fortunately, in recent years key laws have been passed that make it easier for consumers to know the risks in using prescribed pharmaceuticals. One of them, passed in 2007, requires companies to disclose the details of their clinical trials to a public registry maintained by the FDA. Although this can be a valuable resource, Bakan said, it unfortunately is bogged down with jargon not understandable by much of the public. Another law passed just this year requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose any payments they have made to doctors greater than $10, so that patients can find out if a doctor’s prescription of a certain drug is suspect.
Bakan concluded by saying that even though parents now have less control over how their children are marketed to, it is nonetheless important for parents to speak up at the government level to make sure companies are required to conduct ethical business practices.
“Being a good parent today requires more, as if it isn’t enough, than making good choices as individual parents,” he said. “I think we also have to work to change the conditions under which we and other parents are making those choices, and we also have to become active in demanding public measures that protect children from harm.”
Harker’s chapter of the Cum Laude Society brought poet Robin Ekiss to the Nichols Hall auditorium on Feb. 2 to discuss her collection of poetry, “The Mansion of Happiness,” and share the life experiences that have inspired her work.
Sitting at the edge of the stage, Ekiss, who received a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers, explained that the title of her book was inspired by an 1800s board game of the same name. The daughter of a miniaturist, Ekiss was constantly surrounded by dolls, dollhouses and dollhouse furniture as a child, and dollhouses occupied every room in her childhood home. “When you’re a little girl, that’s kind of a super cool thing,” she said, “but when you’re an adult, you realize how incredibly creepy that is.”
Several of the poems in her book use toys and their histories as metaphor, such as “Preface,” containing the lines, “Imagine: a dollhouse in every room/In every room, another room/In every girl, another girl.”
Another poem, “Edison in Love,“ was inspired by the story of Thomas Edison’s dream of creating and mass-producing a doll that could walk and talk, which failed spectacularly. “I wondered what it would take for someone like Thomas Edison, who was so passionate and inventive and interesting, to create something that failed so miserably but still want to do it regardless,” she said.
The Harker Speaker Series is pleased to announce that author Joel Bakan will be the next speaker for the 2011-12 season, appearing at 7 p.m. at Nichols Hall on the upper school campus on Feb. 22.
Bakan is the internationally bestselling author of “The Corporation,” which inspired the acclaimed documentary of the same name. His newest book is titled “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Businesses Target Children,” also currently being adapted into a documentary. Focusing on the United States in particular, Bakan demonstrates how marketers target children, and rips the cover off the industry known as “kid marketing,” something he notes was a $50 billion industry 20 years ago, and is now a $1 trillion dollar industry. “As governments retreat from their previous roles of protecting children from harm at the hands of corporations,” Bakan writes, “we, as a society, increasingly neglect children’s needs, expose them to exploitation, and thus betray what we, as individuals, cherish most in our lives.”
Bakan is a Rhodes Scholar, with degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie and Harvard. Now a professor of law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Bakan also serves as a frequent media commentator. His public speaking is popular in the United States and abroad, and Harker looks forward to hosting him.
From the moment you wake up in the morning until you drift off to sleep at night, you’ll face about 26 adversities, ranging from petty annoyances to major setbacks, according to Dr. Paul Stoltz, president and CEO of Peak Learning Inc., who recently visited The Harker School as part of the Common Ground Speaker Series. Witty and engaging, Stoltz captivated the audience gathered at Nichols Hall with examples of resilience to adversities in his personal life.
A decade ago, Stoltz coined the term “Adversity Quotient,” or AQ, to describe the science of human resilience. To have a successful AQ is to perform optimally in the face of adversity. A person with low AQ, on the other hand, would be the first to burn out. Adversity, Stoltz said, “both destroys and elevates, strangles and sparks life.” Some people with high AQ can actually cause more adversity than they harness. Stoltz believes many are afraid of failures because their parents have been so lovingly protective and have done their best in removing every fathomable adversity.
Stoltz went on to identify the three types of AQ people: climbers, quitters and campers. High AQ climbers seek challenge, low AQ quitters flee from it and moderate AQ campers, which Stoltz said make up about 80 percent of the work force, are content and happy, stuck in the status quo.
Going hand-in-hand with AQ is Response Ability. This term for the response when adversity strikes is the key to building and developing resilience. When employers worldwide were asked which they would prefer, a person with great talent but low resilience, or a person with exceptional resilience but low talent, almost 90 percent picked resilience. This is because they believe “highly resilient people will find a way to figure out how to learn to do what they have to do whereas those lacking resilience will join the throngs of great talent gone to waste,” Stoltz explained.
For those of us who are concerned with our response when faced with adversity, it is comforting to know that people can improve their resilience and, in turn, improve their performance.
Stoltz said that if we think of any person we consider great, that person has overcome adversity along the way – we can’t unleash the greatness in ourselves without adversity. We are all “hardwired” to react differently to adversity, but unlike IQ, it’s possible to improve AQ.
Stoltz then talked about the importance of developing what he calls the 3G mindset, which is broken into, “global, good and grit.” Global he defines as an openness and connectivity to the greater world; good, as may be expected, refers to integrity and kindness; and grit relates to toughness and tenacity.
“You can’t necessarily control what happens but if you can master how you respond to what happens, you can craft your destiny. So if adversity is harnessed with superior resilience, it could be the fuel cell of your success,” said Stoltz.
Video of this event is available on The Harker School’s YouTube channel: Part 1, Part 2
Right on the heels of astronaut Greg Chamitoff’s appearance, the Harker Speaker Series hosted another fascinating space-themed talk by Dr. Jill Tarter, director of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. A well-known figure in the search for life on other worlds, Tarter’s research formed the basis for Jodie Foster’s character in the popular science fiction film “Contact.”
After introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Harker student Govi Dasu, grade 12, an astrophysics enthusiast, Tarter jumped right into her presentation, titled, “Citizen Science and the Search for E.T.”
She explained that she and her team use radio telescopes to search for evidence of extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence, juxtaposing a photo of herself at a computer with a photo of Jodie Foster in “Contact” listening for signals with a pair of headphones. “I’m the one that doesn’t wear headphones,” Tarter quipped.
Tarter’s entire career as a scientist has been spent on SETI research, having served as a SETI project scientist with NASA, and then becoming the first employee at SETI when it incorporated in 1984. “I’ve only actually had two jobs in my life,” she said. Her current project is being the self-described “chief cheerleader” of setiQuest, an effort to engage the open community in SETI’s mission.
“We’re all transitioning,” said Tarter
. “At my ripe old age, I’m trying to learn how to do my business in a different way.” She used the language of the open-source computing community in saying that SETI was “moving away from the cathedral” of doing research on their own using large instruments, and moving toward “the bazaar,” a rich source of ideas and innovation.
“But it’s a little bit rough and tumble, too,” she explained. “You’ve got to have some sharp elbows and a thick skin to do well in this environment, and that’s what we’re trying to learn how to do, because we realize that not all smart people who are interested and passionate about SETI actually work for the SETI Institute, and they can help us to improve the search.”
Tarter then moved on to the greater topic of SETI research. “There are answers to questions about what is, what ought to be, who are we, why are we, and of course, who else might be out there,” she began. “Along that journey, we’ve discovered that our universe is vast, that our sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.” As massive as that sounds, the Milky Way is only one of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which itself only makes up four percent of the universe’s mass energy density. The rest she said, is made up of “dark matter, dark energy. ‘Dark’ is just an astronomical word for ‘we don’t know.’”
She pointed out that SETI research hasn’t set out to prove the assumed existence of sentient extraterrestrial life. “We just note the possibility, probably even the probability, given the size and the uniformity of the universe we find ourselves in,” she said.
Since 1995, about 550 planets have been found by watching stars that wobble as their planets orbit around them. The Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, has been searching for Earth-sized planets in orbit around stars similar to the sun, which may be the right temperature to contain liquid water necessary for life. Using its 95-megapixel camera to detect dips in the brightness of stars caused by their planets’ orbits, Kepler identified 1,235 exoplanet (the term for planets existing outside the solar system) candidates by staring at a tiny patch of the Milky Way between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. Of those, Tarter said, 60 may be situated in the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” orbiting just the right distance from their stars to house the right temperature for liquid water.
That data, released in February, was followed up in September by another large set of data, which doubled the number of exoplanet candidates. One of Kepler’s most fascinating discoveries from that set was Kepler 16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars.
Although Kepler 16b is likely too cold to be habitable, “it shows us that it’s possible to have planets in stable orbits around binary stars, and since most stars out there are binaries, this is a whole lot more real estate that we know is out there, and some of it might be habitable,” Tarter said. Using statistical math, Tarter estimated that “maybe 500 million” planets in our galaxy are habitable.
In addition to people who search for life, Tarter said the SETI institute also employs astrobiologists who study the “origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.” In order to understand what types of planets may be able to sustain life, they study life forms that are able to withstand extreme conditions here on Earth. “My colleagues are trying to find the answer to the question of what constitutes a biosignature,” she said. The presence of methane in our atmosphere caused by everything from termites to what Tarter termed “bovine flatulence,” for example, is one clue of the biological happenings on the surface. “Biology is leaving an imprint on our atmosphere, and perhaps we can find something like that in the atmospheres of other planets, but it’s very tricky to be able to say with absolute confidence that that particular chemical signature cannot be produced abiotically,” she said.
The presence of technology on other worlds is also a concern for SETI research, which also looks for so-called “technosignatures” from extrasolar planets. While earthly technologies could be detected by an advanced civilization, receiving their communications is another matter. “Our own technologies are in fact visible at interstellar distances by an advanced technology,” Tarter said, “and perhaps their technology could be detected by us at radio or optical or some other wavelength, if we only had a determined search to systematically look for it.”
SETI’s success is not only dependent upon whether or not other civilizations exist, but also whether or not their technology lasts long enough on a cosmic time scale. “We are a very young technology, 100 years, in a very old galaxy, whose age is 10 billion years,” she said. “Can we become an old technology? Is technology on average a stabilizing influence, and do technologies last for a long time?”
Tarter wrapped up her presentation with a summary of how the SETI Institute has been trying to build a worldwide community to assist in their research. Their primary audience, she said, is college students. “They’re going to be responsible for our technological longevity. They’re going to solve the technical challenges that we’ve presented to them from technologies we’ve previously produced and not used wisely.” One way they have engaged this audience is to publish their code as open source so that it can be improved.
To involve the community beyond universities, SETI Institute is working on a “citizen science” application that will hopefully enable people to find what SETI researchers may have missed by “allowing humans to do what they do best, which is pattern recognition,” Tarter said.
In building the setiQuest community, the institute has also received help from Google, Dell, Intel and Amazon. The setiQuest explorer application is now available as a Web browser app and is also available for free on Android smartphones and tablets. Tarter admitted that the application needs improvement. However, the data they are receiving from the application will eventually allow them to start a new citizen science project with the help of Galaxy Zoo, an organization that allows website visitors to help classify galaxies. This project will feed users data from telescopes in real time to help SETI researchers sift through particularly crowded bands, “where there are so many signals and we can’t figure out where they are,” Tarter said.
During a brief question and answer session following the presentation, Tarter answered a question from an audience member that dealt with what to do in the event of being contacted by another world. In such a scenario, she explained, the first step would be to tell the world what has happened. There is also a piece known as Article 8, which states that Earth will not respond to the message until a global consensus is reached on what the response will be.
She said she was confident, however, that any such correspondence would not be hostile, as any civilization advanced enough to send a message over such a great length, would probably have been around long enough to be peaceful. “I’m a bit of a Polyanna,” she joked.
The second speaker for this season of the Harker Speaker Series will be Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the Center for Search for Extraterrestrial Institute (SETI) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Tarter will appear on Oct. 14 at 7 p.m., at Nichols Hall on the upper school campus, and will give a talk titled, “Citizen Science and the Search for ET.”
A distinguished graduate of Cornell University with a degree in engineering physics, Tarter received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of her work in the search for extraterrestrial life helped inspire Jodie Foster’s character in the 1997 film “Contact.”
Tarter later went to work for NASA’s SETI program, and worked as a project scientist on the High Resolution Microwave Survey. She continued her work searching for extraterrestrial life after the NASA SETI program ended in 1993, working to build funding from private sources so that the research could continue.
Today, Tarter is a member of the management board for the Allen Telescope Array. This joint project between SETI and U.C. Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory will search the radio universe for astrophysical emissions and greatly expedite the search for radio emissions from distant technologies.
A well-known figure in the scientific community, Tarter has earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, two public service medals from NASA, the Chabot Observatory’s Person of the Year Award and more. In 2002, she became an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004.
In addition to her scientific research, Tarter has also been involved in several key educational projects, including the “Life in the Universe” series for grades 3-9 and “Voyages through Time,” a high school science series focusing on the theme of evolution.
Hundreds arrived at the upper school campus on Sept. 26 to see decorated astronaut Dr. Gregory Chamitoff kick off the 2011-12 season of the Harker Speaker Series with an in-depth talk about his inspiring life. His appearance was spurred by his visit to his alma mater, Blackford High School, now the site of Harker’s middle school campus. Prior to his speech, Chamitoff spent nearly an hour talking to Winged Post and Talon staffers. Once at the podium, after introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Paul West, grade 12, Chamitoff began by recognizing some of the teachers who inspired him during his days at Blackford High, and by introducing his family, who were in attendance, as well as some Blackford High alumni. He briefly recapped his years as a high school student, struggling to find the right crowd in which to belong. “It felt to me like in high school, who you were was defined by where you had lunch,” he joked. He found that he was most comfortable among science students. He reminisced about the pranks he and his friends would organize, including one where they built a flying saucer to frighten the neighborhood. For this particular project, the young Chamitoff wrote to NASA to ask how to make it fly. To his delight, a NASA engineer wrote back with an explanation. “I still have this letter from a long time ago, explaining exactly how the lift would work on this flying saucer,” he said. This inspired him to pursue his dream of being an astronaut. Before continuing, Chamitoff touched on the topic of fulfilling one’s dreams. “You have to set your own standards in your work, and the standards that you set are really for you and based on what you can do and what you want to do,” he said. “You can’t compare yourself to the people sitting next to you.” Having many different interests is also an asset, citing the complaint that many high school students have about learning things in school that do not interest them. “It turns out those subjects later on in life could be very important to you,” he said. “The other thing is skills; sports, hobbies, whether it’s music or dancing or anything you’re interested in doing, these are things that you love to do, you have a passion for, and things you have a passion for are things that end up defining you, things that build character and make you who you are,” he added. Teachers also play an important role, he said, explaining that, “in my job right now, everybody is my teacher.” He said he often finds himself in the role of the student. “You can learn something from everybody,” he said. Chamitoff’s most recent mission was as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle “Endeavour” on its final voyage earlier this year. In 2008, he spent six months aboard the international space station (ISS) as a flight engineer and science officer. He fondly recalled the camaraderie among his crewmates, who gave one another amusing nicknames. During the Q&A session following his presentation, Chamitoff revealed that his nickname was “Taz,” after the popular Looney Tunes character, because of the sounds he would make while eating. He told most of his story through photos, taking the audience from the launch of “Endeavour,” which included one striking image of the shuttle bursting through a cloud bank, a thick column of exhaust casting its shadow across the top of the clouds. The object of that particular mission was to complete the construction of the ISS. As “Endeavour” approached, what originally started out as a “dot on the horizon” eventually became a structure the size of two football fields. The “Endeavor” crew was actually delivering two key items to the ISS. One was a palette of spare equipment that would be used to sustain the station through 2020. A photo showed the palette being transferred from the shuttle’s robotic arm to a robotic arm attached to the space station, a job Chamitoff said was similar to a video game, “but if you look out the window, it’s real stuff, and it’s big stuff that you’re moving around.” The other piece being delivered was an alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion piece of equipment made to look for “dark matter” that may explain why stars rotate at certain speeds around galaxies. It is also designed to look for anti-matter created by the Big Bang. “If they discover an anti-matter galaxy with this, that will be a fundamental breakthrough,” Chamitoff said. Chamitoff took the audience through more amazing photos of him and his crewmates at work on the space station. One wide-angle shot, taken at the end of the final spacewalk, was taken at the highest spot on the ISS, showing it complete after 12 years of construction, which required 36 shuttle flights. “During this spacewalk, we hit the 1,000th hour of spacewalking time,” Chamitoff said. “We were able to announce, ‘space station assembly is complete,’ after all this work by 15 countries for all this time.” The final photograph of the presentation showed the view from the window where Chamitoff slept during his stay at the ISS. “I’ve taken about 22,000 pictures in space, and this is my favorite one, and I took it during this mission,” he said. Upon arriving at the space station, he put his sleeping bag next to his favorite view from the space station. “Every night I would get into my sleeping bag, and I would open up a shutter, and I would look at this view and I would just stare at it until I was forced to go to sleep,” he said. In it, the earth and its glowing atmosphere float below the space station, with thousands of stars visible in the distance. “You feel like you can reach the future from here; you feel like you’re already part of the future, and all you need to do is go a little faster,” he said, “and this space station, which is really comfortable to live on for six months, could take you all the way to Mars.” Chamitoff’s presentation was followed by a video showing highlights from the mission, including several impressive first-person views from the spacewalks, and amusing footage of the astronauts maneuvering about the space station and catching floating pieces of candy and droplets of water with their mouths. Following the short film, Chamitoff took questions from the audience. In response to a question about floating debris inside the space station, he explained that spacecraft have advanced filtration and ventilation systems that keep the surroundings clear. Another audience member asked about the continued delay of a new space vehicle after the space shuttle had been retired. “It’s very disappointing,” he said, saying he thought the space shuttle was retired too soon. “There was this path of retiring the space shuttle, and there was this path of building the next vehicle, and those two paths should have been connected by milestones,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to retire the shuttle until the next thing is sitting on the launchpad.” He estimated that the next vehicle could be ready in five or six years. Until then, American astronauts will have to acquire seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. Responding to a question about physical changes in space, Chamitoff explained that he actually lost 10 percent of the bone mass in his hips and pelvic area during his time in space, and adjustment to life back on earth was difficult as a result. “Gravity feels really strong when you come back,” he said. “You feel like gravity’s not happy unless you’re flat on the ground and every part of you is squished on the floor.” It was several months before he could move normally as before, but his bone mass eventually returned. Chamitoff said he knew from age 6 he wanted to be an astronaut and one particular step in the realization of that dream stood out for him. On his first space walk, as he hung by a hand rail from the very bottom hatch of the space station, the Earth 200 miles beneath him, he paused for a moment at the thought of trusting his life to the tether that held him to the space station, the Earth and his family. “You have to convince yourself that it’s OK to let go,” he said. “Because you have work to do.”