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"If you give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime." The proverb is familiar to many, but for social entrepreneurs, fishing lessons are still inadequate. According to Bill Drayton, founder of the Ashoka organization, "Social entrepreneurs are not content with providing a fish or teaching how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry." Social entrepreneurs use commercial principles to organize and run ventures that work for social change.

In his third consecutive year competing in the National Poetry Championshp in Madison, Wisc., Daniel José Custódio '00 has won first place in the individual Slam Master Championship, followed by a second place finish in the Group Piece Championship with his newly founded team, Slam Nahuatl.  Both first and second place presentations, each of which received near perfect scores of 29.9 and 29.6 out of a possible 30 points respectively, featured poems written by Custódio. 

Hong Gang Jin, the William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and director of Hamilton's Associated Colleges in China program, was interviewed on local NBC affiliate WKTV about the Olympics currently taking place in Beijing. "We've seen so many changes over the past 30 years, I feel this year we've seen the most,"  said Jin, who recently returned from Beijing.  

Crain's New York Business magazine has honored Daniel R. Garcia '84 with a 2008 Small Business Award. The award recognizes the runaway success of Salsa Caterers & Special Events, the catering and event-planning company Garcia founded in 1990. Since then, Bronx-based Salsa Caterers has emerged as New York City's premier caterer of authentic Hispanic cuisine and culture, whether South American, Latin American, Caribbean Latin, or Spanish. Garcia is among six New York City entrepreneurs who received the award.

Dealing with the ins and outs of a new job, a new country and new language at the same time isn't easy. For Brendan Carroll' 10 (Saxtons River, Vt.), however, the chance to learn on so many levels at once was the perfect work opportunity. Carroll is spending the summer working for El Instituto para el Desarrollo Humano (IDH), an NGO (non-governmental organization) based in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The organization focuses on a variety of issues including human rights, social and preventative medicine, gender equality, and environmental protection, as well as conducting cultural, socio-political and economic research.

For Matthew Arnold '09, the experience of studying abroad is something he just can't leave behind. "I wouldn't be doing this research at all if I didn't go to India," says the rising senior from Cazenovia, N.Y., who is using the summer to research how globalization has affected Indian education and social freedoms. After spending fall 2007 in India and writing a research paper at the end of the semester, Arnold says that he wanted to continue the research he conducted there "in any way possible." His summer project, on which he collaborates with Assistant Professor of Anthropology Chaise LaDousa, is funded by the Research Fellows Program run by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center. Arnold plans to incorporate parts of his project into his senior thesis in history, and hopes to attend graduate school to continue learning about the topic.

Maurice Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History, participated in a 45-minute discussion and call-in show with former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett on Bennett's nationally syndicated radio program, Morning in America, on Friday, August 15. Bennett contacted Isserman after reading Isserman's op-ed that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, August 10, in which he compared the recent avalanche on the Himalayan mountain K2 with a similar accident that occurred in 1953.

Assistant Professor of English Katherine H. Terrell has published a chapter in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for Palgrave Macmillan's series "The New Middle Ages." Terrell's chapter, "Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography," examines medieval Scottish historiographical responses to Geoffrey of Monmouth's origin myth of Brutus, finding that even as Scottish chroniclers challenge this myth and the English claims of hegemony that it comes to represent, their persistently dialogic engagement with Geoffrey's text reveals the hybridity underlying their constructions of identity.

Although school is out for the summer, Hai Lin '10 is still keeping busy on campus. The rising junior is working on two separate projects in the math department, one with Professor of Mathematics Larry Knop studying regression towards the mean, and another investigating preferential recruiting with Associate Professors of Mathematics Sally Cockburn and Timothy Kelly.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article, "Automorphisms and Distinguishing Numbers of Geometric Cliques," in Discrete and Computational Geometry with co-author Michael Albertson. In this paper Boutin and her co-author give conditions under which the symmetries of a maximally connected geometric network can be removed by labeling its vertices using only two labels.