Green Articles
Two seminars to focus on building green housing
Sessions to be held at UNO, Loyola
By John Pope : Times-Picayune : February 25, 2008
"Sustainable construction," a buzzword for sturdy, eco-friendly building practices, has become big news since Hurricane Katrina -- so big that two local universities are offering seminars on the subject.
The first will be tonight at 6 in Room 122 of Kirschman Hall at the University of New Orleans. The second session will be held March 13 at 12:30 p.m. in Loyola University's Roussel Hall.
Ed Blakely, New Orleans' recovery czar, and Charles Allen III, assistant director of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, will be at tonight's forum, along with Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia.
This meeting, the second annual forum on the topic, will be free and open to the public.
The Loyola symposium will feature panel discussions, a performance of an original composition by the ensemble from the university's Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and a field trip to a house in the Holy Cross neighborhood that exemplifies sustainable construction.
Admission is free to Loyola students, faculty and staff and members of AIGA, a sponsor of the event. Admission for anyone else is $20 for the entire session or $10 for the panel discussions.
Dillard choir to perform
Dillard University's Concert Choir starts its spring tour Tuesday in Los Angeles with a medley of pop and folk songs, classical works and spirituals.
The choir, directed by S. Carver Davenport, usually does a multicity tour, but this year's trip, which will run through March 4, will be exclusively in the Los Angeles area.
More information on the tour is available at www.dillard.edu.
Law professor to lecture
Arthur Miller, a New York University law professor who is an expert on copyright and privacy law and civil procedure, will deliver this year's Gauthier Lecture Tuesday at 5 p.m. in Room 110 of Tulane University's Weinmann Hall, 6329 Freret St., which houses the law school.
The topic of his lecture, which will be free and open to the public, is "The Litigation Explosion -- Myth or Reality?" Miller had taught at Harvard Law School from 1971 until he moved to NYU last year. He also has taught at the University of Michigan and he is the former legal editor of "Good Morning, America."
Slave trade discussed
A daylong workshop about the British slave trade will be held Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Room 128 of UNO's Bicentennial Education Center.
Participants include Wolfgang Zach, Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Cynthia Rauth of the University of Innsbruck; Rosanne Adderley of Vanderbilt University; and Mary Niall Mitchell, Raphael Cassimere Jr. and Joe Louis Caldwell of UNO.
The free symposium is presented by UNO's CenterAustria.
Genocide lecture at UNO
The Armenian Genocide, in which about 1.5 million people were killed during and shortly after World War I, will be the subject of a lecture Wednesday at 1 p.m. at UNO.
Taner Alçam, a historian who is a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, will speak in Room 407, the Douglas Hitt Room, of the Earl K. Long Library.
The massacre happened in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, the successor state of the empire, has refused to use the term genocide in referring to the event. Alçam, the author of "The Armenian Matter Has Been Handled," has been described as the first Turkish scholar to use the word.
Political pollster
A political pollster and analyst, Silas Lee, will discuss the 2008 presidential election and its possible effects Thursday at 6 p.m. at Xavier University.
Lee, who also is a sociology professor at Xavier, will speak in Room 105 of the NCF Science Complex. His lecture will be free and open to the public.
In the interest of full disclosure, Lee is working on Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
For more information, call the Sociology Department, (504) 520-5423.
Focus on Caribbean culture
A three-day conference on Caribbean culture that will embrace such topics as music, food and religion will start Thursday.
The meeting is sponsored by Tulane's Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute. Most events will be at the Homewood Suites Hotel, 901 Poydras St., but a Friday night performance by Alina Troyano, a performance artist also known as Carmelita Tropicana, will be at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, 400a Julia St.
Admission is $65 for graduate students and $125 for everyone else. People may register by visiting cuba.tulane.edu and clicking "Events."
A risky business
Ian Bremmer, a political risk consultant, will speak Friday at Tulane on "Global Political Risk: The United States and the World in 2008."
Bremmer, who has focused his research on emerging markets, will speak at 7 p.m. in Cudd Hall.
His speech, which will be free and open to the public, is on the last day of Political Science Week, a series of discussions and talks starting Tuesday. More information is available at www.tulane.edu/(DIAMOND)polisci.