As the calendar flips to March, Sonoma State University celebrates women throughout history who have stood up to make a difference. There are several events around campus this month that offer exciting opportunities to learn about and experience some of the obstacles women face throughout their lives both historically and currently.
Sonoma Film Institute Celebrates Women Directors
When compiling the list of films to be shown for the spring semester, the Sonoma Film Institute noted that its strongest films shared something in common: women were calling the shots. The timing coincided well with upcoming women's history month in March.
"I am especially excited about 'Que Caramba es la Vida,"' says SFI director Eleanor Nichols. "It is such a joyfully exuberant crowd-pleaser that I am completely baffled that no other theater in the county has chosen to show it."
The Sonoma Film Institute celebrates women filmmakers in March with screenings of two current international features, Doris Dörrie's "Que Caramba es la Vida" and Talya Lavie's "Zero Motivation." All screenings are in Warren Auditorium, Ives Hall, on the Sonoma State University campus, $5-$7 (SSU students free). For more information, or to receive a complete schedule of SFI events, visit www.sonoma.edu/sfi or call (707) 664-2606.
March 6 at 7 p.m., March 8 at 4 p.m.: "Que Caramba es la Vida"
"Que Caramba es la Vida" is a lively documentary on the female mariachi singers of Mexico City who are breaking down barriers to follow their passion. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles.This screening is co-sponsored by the United Nations Association, Sonoma County Chapter.
March 13 at 7 p.m., March 15 at 4 p.m.: "Zero Motivation"
Winner of the top prize for narrative world cinema at the Tribeca Film Festival, "Zero Motivation" (2014) is a dark comedy portraying the power struggles of three female conscripts at a remote army base in the Israeli desert. The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.
March 2: SPOKE! Intersectional Feminism Panel and Poetry Program
The panel's discussion will center on what it means to embody multiple, intersecting identities. Panelists will also discuss self-care's relationship to activism and ideas for navigating a world shaped by privilege and power. An open mic for poetry and music will followed, emceed by community poet, feminist and activist Tatyana Brown. The program begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Erin Fischer room on the second floor of the Student Center next to the HUB.
March 3: Reading Abigail Adams's Mail
The department of History and the School of Social Sciences are pleased to announce a women's history month lecture by Edith Gelles, a senior scholar for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Gelles is the author of "Abigail and John: Portrait of Marriage" which was shortlisted for the George Washington prize. She is currently editing a volume of "Abigail Adams's Letters" for the Library of America. The reading takes place Tuesday, March 3, 3-5 p.m. in Darwin 102.
March 5-7: The Vagina Monologues
This show includes multiple pieces touching on a variety of women's lived experiences. The Vagina Monologues is funny, heartbreaking, and eye-opening, and each piece is different and unique. All proceeds from the Vagina Monologues benefit the V-Day Campaign, aimed at ending violence against women and young girls, and Verity, Sonoma County's rape crisis center. Performances are March 5-7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Cooperage at Sonoma State University. Tickets are $5-$15.
March 9: Queer Lecture Series with Daisy Hernandez
Raised in the Catholic church and in a family of immigrant Catholics, Daisy Hernández writes and speaks about the intersections of faith, feminism and progressive politics. Hernández is the coeditor of the anthology, "Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism," and is the author of the memoir "A Cup of Water Under My Bed." She is the former editor of ColorLines, a newsmagazine on race, politics and the arts, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Ms. magazine, the National Catholic Reporter and more. The lecture is March 9, noon-1p.m. in Ives 101.
February 10March 10: Dr. Raquell Holmes
Dr. Raquell Holmes is a cell biologist working in the fields of high performance computing and computational sciences. As the founder of Improvscience, she helps fellow computing and science professionals work better together. Dr. Holmes is also a research assistant professor at the Center for Computational Science at Boston University. This talk is co-sponsored by the Hub at SSU and takes place in Ballroom D in the Student Center Salazar 2020. Please note the date and location of this talk has been changed.
March 23: Dr. Lena McQuade-Medicalizing women's reproductive bodies
Professor Lena McQuade from Sonoma State University's women's and gender studies department will provide background on the concept of medicalization from feminist perspectives. She presents some of her research on the history of medicalizing women's reproductive bodies along the U.S. Mexico border in the 1930s, paying attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, language and social class shaped women's access to medical care. Drawing on her experience studying histories of reproduction and feminist analyses of medicalization, professor McQuade will share how this knowledge shaped her own thinking and decisions regarding the birth of her daughter. The lecture is March 23, noon-1p.m. in the HUB, the second floor of the Student Center.
Every Thursday: Women of Color Collective
Every Thursday, a large and diverse group of women of color students come together for engaging conversation about how multicultural identities impact their lives. Everyone is welcome. The group meets from noon-1p.m. every week in the HUB.
Science and Technology Lectures
Several Departments in the School of Science and Technology are sponsoring talks featuring women in science during women's history month. All are free to the public, although there are parking fees. Contact Cory Oates for additional information at cory.oates@sonoma.edu or 707.664.2171.
March 4: Elizabeth Gross--Computational Neural Algebra
In 2014, two teams of researchers won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering place cells, neurons that fire when an animal enters a particular region in their
environment. These regions are called place fields and are experimentally known to be convex, which raises interesting mathematical questions. For example,
we can ask whether a set of neuron firing patterns could have resulted from a collection of convex place fields. In this talk, we introduce place fields and give a
partial answer to this question using computational algebra. Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium, 4 p.m., Darwin 103, Coffee at 3:30 p.m.
March 5: Cynthia Thompson--Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis
Targeted sentiment analysis expands on document or sentence-level polarity classification by identifying the sentiment expressed towards specific entities in
a span of text. The task is challenging due to the large variety of such entities and to the fact that not all entities are relevant to sentiment analysis. I will
describe our work applying supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques to performing fine-grained sentiment analysis. Computer Science Colloquium, noon to 1 p.m., Salazar 2016.
March 11: Fu Liu-- Introduction to Ehrhart Polynomials
The A polytope is a higher-dimensional generalization of polygons. We say a polytope is integral if all of its vertices have integer coordinates. Given an integral
polytope P, for any positive integer m, we denote by i(P ,m) the number of lattice points inside the mth dilation of mP of P. Eugene Ehrhart discovered in 1960s that i(P ,m)is a polynomial in m of degree dim(P). So we often call i(P ,m) the Ehrhart polynomial of P. In this talk, I will first survey some well-known results related to Ehrhart polynomials, and then discuss some of my own results on this subject. No previous knowledge on this topic is required. Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium, 4 p.m., Darwin 103; Coffee, Tea, and Cookies at 3:45 p.m.
March 12: Heidi Barnes--What is Signal and Power Integrity in Digital Systems and How is it Changing Our World
This presentation will describe the latest challenges in transmitting electronic information at ever faster speeds while at the same time reducing the power consumed. This exciting new area of engineering is called Signal Integrity and Power Integrity. Signal Integrity enables today's computers to send trillions of ones and zeroes in a matter of seconds along a physical channel to a receiver. Power Integrity ensures that no matter how fast and how many ones and zeroes are switching they will all get enough power to switch states. A final example will show how this new area of engineering could have prevented the failure of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1865 and how far we have come since then. Engineering Science Lecture Series, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Salazar 2009; Reception & Refreshments 4-4:30 p.m.
March 23: Dr. Vera Lüth--Strangeness, Charm, and Beauty in Particle Physics
Dr. Vera Lüth of Stanford University will reflect on her career in particle physics, discussing Charge-Parity Violation, detector innovations and B decays. What Physicists Do series, 4 p.m., Darwin 103; Coffee, Tea, and Cookies at 3:30 pm
March 25: Math 470 student advisor--Martha Shott, Predicting Rainfall at Fairfield Osborn Preserve from Measurements at Bodega Marine Lab
The current drought--and historical local flooding--mean that officials, farmers, and researchers are interested in better methods for predicting precipitation.
The Fall 2014 Mathematical and Statistical Modeling class partnered with Dr. Christopher Halle, collaborator on a new weather station at SSU's Fairfield Osborn
Preserve (FOP). They used historical precipitation data to determine whether measurements at Bodega Marine Lab could reliably predict rainfall in the Rohnert
Park area (specifically, at FOP)--and thus hopefully increase the lead time for flood preparation. Student groups will present their models, which draw on topics
from calculus and statistics. Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium, 4 p.m., Darwin 103; Coffee, Tea, and Cookies at 3:45 pm
April 6: Dr. Norna Robertson--Advanced Ligo and the Search for Gravitational Waves
Dr. Norna Robertson (Caltech and the University of Glasgow) will review the search for gravitational waves, and in particular discuss the Advanced LIGO detectors
which are expected to carry out their first observational run during 2015. What Physicists Do series, 4 p.m., Darwin 103; Coffee, Tea, and Cookies at 3:30 pm
April 9: Kim Zetter, Stuxnet and the Age of Digital Warfare
In June 2010, a small security firm in Belarus discovered a computer worm that had infected computers in Iran and was causing them to crash. The worm used an ingenious zero-day exploit to spread, but other than this it appeared to be generic malware designed for corporate espionage. But as digital detectives dug through the code and began to reverse-engineer its commands, they discovered it was much more sophisticated than previously believed and had a much more insidious goal--to physically sabotage equipment used in Iran's nuclear program. Stuxnet, as the malicious program was dubbed, was a landmark attack since it was the first cyberweapon ever discovered in the wild and was the first digital code to jump the gap from the digital world to the real world to cause physical destruction. This presentation focuses on how the brilliant attack was designed and unleashed on computers in Iran--being targeted against five companies in Iran who could help the attackers reach their target--how researchers discovered and deciphered it and how its discovery led them to uncover an arsenal of espionage tools that were also created and unleashed by the same attackers. It will also examine how Stuxnet launched a new era of warfare and how critical infrastructure systems in the U.S. and elsewhere are now at risk of 'blowback' and copycat attacks thanks to the authors of Stuxnet. Computer Science Colloquium, noon to 1 p.m., Salazar 2016
April 13: Dr. Frances A. Houle--Making Fuels from Sunlight, Water, and Air
Dr. Frances A. Houle, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will discuss her work on Artificial Photosynthesis.This has implications for team training and assessment. What Physicists Do series, 4 p.m., Darwin 103; Coffee, Tea, and Cookies at 3:30 p.m.
April 16: Kimberly Cupps--High Performance Computing (HPC) and the Sequoia Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has fielded high performance computers to solve problems of national interest for over 50 years. Sequoia is an IBM Blue Gene Q supercomputer capable of 20 petaFLOPs of peak performance sited at LLNL. It is the third fastest computer in the world and is built upon massive numbers of low power cores. In this talk I will touch on HPC applications at LLNL and key components of Sequoia. I will also comment on future challenges facing Exascale computers, expected in the early 2020s. Computer Science Colloquium, noon to 1 p.m., Salazar 2016.