Thursday, February 28, 2008

Back to the grind

This was the view from our room last week while on a family vacation in Cancun, Mexico. Nice, 'eh?! However, we were thrown back into reality this week with work and a dusting of snow!

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Upcoming performances!

Finding the way into a new professional network is always a challenge, but the Boston music community has been very generous so far. I'm very happy to be able to share all of these upcoming performance dates for the Boston area (plus a little bonus for the summer back in Charlottesville, Virginia!).

LOVE SONGS with Mass Theatrica
Saturday, February 9 at 7:00 p.m.
LynnArts
I’ll be singing excerpts from Puccini’s La Bohème and a song by Richard Rodgers

Songs of Kurt Weill, George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg
Sunday, February 17 at 1:30 p.m.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
I’m singing some really challenging cabaret songs by Schoenberg and duets by Weill from Street Scene and Threepenny Opera

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Songs of Teresienstadt
A touring production of songs whose texts, music (or both) were composed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Click here to find out more about Terezin.
Ongoing in March/April/May
Various locations throughout the Boston area

Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem
Friday, March 14 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, March 16 at 3 p.m.
The Cantata Singers at Jordan Hall

In Berlin, on Broadway: A Kurt Weill Cabaret
Sunday, April 6 at 3 p.m.
Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, Newton
I’m singing a piece from Der Silbersee

Kurt Weill: Symphony No. 2
Charles Fussell: High Bridge —A Choral Symphony After Poems of Hart Crane
Friday, May 9 at 8 p.m.
The Cantata Singers at Jordan Hall

Bizet: Carmen
Lerner & Loewe: My Fair Lady
July 5 – August 10 (dates/times vary)
The Ash Lawn Opera Festival
Charlottesville, Virginia
I’ll be singing the role of Frasquita and covering the role of Micaela in Carmen and singing in the ensemble of My Fair Lady.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

VOTE!

Gastric Banding and Synthetic Life

from Mike

I wanted to reflect on two noteworthy science stories from the past couple of weeks.

First, a study in JAMA found that adjustable gastric banding (essentially having surgery to put a tight belt around your stomach) decreased Type II diabetes in obese patients more than diet and exercise. The take home message that is being sold by the media to the American public is that gastric banding is better than living a healthy lifestyle. This is a tough story to swallow. While the data are convincing, they most certainly do not apply to all individuals (the study only consisted of 60 people). Moreover, I just think that this is the wrong message to be sending to the public. How is it that we, particularly in the US, are always looking for a quick medical fix to our problems? While there are always special cases, it comes across that we do not have to be accountable for how we treat our bodies and that the medical community will figure out how to solve our problems.

Second, The J. Craig Venter Institute reported in the journal of Science that they have completed building the first bacterial synthetic genome. In a demonstration of sheer brute force, they were able to stitch together the genome of a 582,000 base genome (the human genome has more than 3.2 billion bases). This story is so notable because it has numerous potential implications for creating synthetic life (inserting a synthetic genome into a host organism and getting it to 'boot up') for useful purposes (e.g. ethanol production). Despite the potential implications, all they have shown so far, as my current advisor puts it, is that “ they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together”. The work supposedly cost upwards of 10 million dollars. Incredible. Even though this was extremely expensive, I do appreciate the significance of a landmark report that pushes the frontiers of the field.

Friday, February 1, 2008