Posted on Aug 8, 2002

SEXISM 101: Conjure up an image of the woman who is construction honcho at the first major rebuilding effort at ground zero. Wears that hard hat, yes? Chain-smokes Camels? Swears a blue streak? Screams a lot? Downs boilermakers while she issues arm-wrestling challenges to the guys?

O.K., Sabrina Kanner does wear the hard hat. That's about it.

Ms. Kanner is overseeing the $50 million reconstruction of the 10-story Winter Garden atrium at the World Financial Center, which suffered severe damage on Sept. 11. Her title is vice president for design and construction at Brookfield Properties, which, true to its name, owns 50 properties worth $8 billion in the United States and Canada, including the World Financial Center.

Willowy and 44, she is regularly reminded of her resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow and Audrey Hepburn. “Sabrina is altogether ladylike,” said Jim White, the on-site manager for Turner Construction, chief contractor at the Winter Garden. “She's not one of the guys, but she knows just as much as they do.”

Her role as Brookfield's boss on the 11-month-old project requires equal measures of diplomacy and desk-pounding. Drawing on two decades of knockabout experience with construction crews, she hand-picked the contractors on the job and is goading them to meet their looming deadline: Sept. 11, 2002.

“There is one beauty problem I don't share with my friends: hard-hat hair,” she said.

Ric Clark, president and chief executive of Brookfield, said: “It is rare to have a woman in her job in this profession, which is dominated by a rough-and-tumble boys' network. But usually she's the smartest one in the room.”

Her opinion? “Being a woman worked in my favor,” Ms. Kanner said, “because I am the unexpected. That puts people off balance. In this business they test you – and maybe more so when you're a woman. But when they find out you have the goods, they accept you.”

She hasn't opted for the high-decibel approach in going nose to nose with the most formidable contractors and construction unions in New York. “People think the secret to being a construction boss is screaming and yelling,” she said, “but the real power is the checkbook. I tell them if they don't do the job, they don't get paid. Then they listen.”

These days as Lower Manhattan languishes in the summer sun, it isn't all that easy to recapture the funereal desperation of last fall. Ms. Kanner, though, is unable to forget. “It was so grim,” she said on a recent afternoon in the Winter Garden.

Early on, “it was a war zone,” she recalled, her gaze very far away. “You'd find yourself having your lunch next to where the morgue was.” She sighed. “Anyone down here was grateful to have something to do. To make it whole again. To make things normal.”

Normality is still a long way off, but “the task never seemed insurmountable, because we knew what we had to do,” she said. “Enclose the buildings with plywood. Get power and water going. Then start cleaning up. And cleaning. And cleaning.”

After tons of steel, glass and marble began arriving, “it was hair-raising at times, to do so many seat-of-the-pants things,” Ms. Kanner said. “But everyone has done what they needed to do.”

THE oldest of seven children who grew up in Haworth, N.J., she was ever accustomed to presiding at tables full of large, vocal groups. Later, as an English major at Union College in Schenectady, she took business courses “so I could get through the door,” Ms. Kanner said. The door in question happened to be that of a paint contractor (she did estimates and financial reports), and soon she was hired to put together estimates for construction jobs for Olympia & York, the company that later built the World Financial Center and was ultimately succeeded by Brookfield.

“Once I got into general construction I fell in love with it,” she said. “I was desperate to build. It is so tangible. So I kept begging to be a project manager.” Her first project, in 1983, was a bank in 245 Park Avenue, “strictly sink or swim.”

She swam so well that, two years later, she was entrusted with the construction of the 10-floor trading center at Merrill Lynch in the World Financial Center. By 1986 she was heading all building renovation, managing a company within a company.

“It's tough to be in the construction business now, but back in the 80's it was the Wild West,” Mr. Clark said. “And there was Sabrina, in her 20's, running the interior construction business for Olympia & York.” She became a vice president in 1989.

Curiously, not that long before Sept. 11, Ms. Kanner had returned to her first building, 245 Park Avenue, to supervise the reconstruction of the space now occupied by the brasserie Django. Since the attack on the trade center, though, her office has been ground zero.

Somehow Ms. Kanner managed to find time for a family. “I used to drive around the city with my kids till they were sick of it, telling them, `See, I did this building, I did that lobby,' ” she said of Michael, now 12, and Hayley, now 9.

After Sept. 11, “I'd find myself talking about what I was doing with them,” she said. “I think it was a point of pride to them, that I was down here helping to put things right. I hope it made up for those days when I couldn't get home on time.”

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Posted on Aug 1, 2002

My summer jaunt this year was to Greenland, which-despite its name-proudly offers, as its website says, “adventures of ice and snow like nowhere else on the planet.”

I had to wonder, of course, about the early visitors who gave this northern island a name that we would charitably call imaginative. Rumor has it that the Vikings, wanting to keep others away from Iceland, named the island in such a way to draw people away from Iceland and to Greenland.

Of course, since Union is never off my mind, I started thinking about the College. Its name is, to me, an accurate guide to what Union is all about.

Take, for example, our recent cooperative efforts with the larger community around us. Most of you know the story of our founding-how some 975 residents of this area came together in the first popular effort to found a college in America. Despite that early cooperation, the relationship between town and gown has hardly been a uniformly smooth one in the intervening two centuries. For every effort at cooperation-the community involvement in raising the money to build Memorial Chapel, for example-there have been times of indifference and even antipathy. Now, with efforts that range from our first-year students' involvement in community clean-up efforts, to the Kenney Community Center, to our College Park neighborhood investment, I think it's fair to say that town and gown are increasingly on the same page. To my mind, we are closer to that initial spirit of cooperation than we have been in many years-or perhaps than we have ever been.

Or take our new venture, the House System. Every student will be a member of a house, and every house will be many things-a focal point for social and intellectual activities, a vehicle for community service, a welcoming place for making new friends or simply hanging out. Add the fact that every faculty member will be affiliated with one of the houses, and the fact that every student will also be able to join a fraternity, sorority, or a Theme House, and you have a an initiative that will offer wonderful opportunities for enhancing the campus's sense of union.

The spirit of union is also showing up in our academic program. The early Union College did pioneering work in the sciences (thanks largely to President Eliphalet Nott), and its nature changed considerably in the mid-nineteenth century, when we became the first liberal arts college to teach engineering.

On the whole, Union and its students have benefited from the unusual breadth of our curriculum. Yet there have been times when our attempts to bring a better sense of unity to the curriculum have not worked as well as we would wish (one of my predecessors, Dixon Ryan Fox, once wrote in some exasperation that the problem of integrating the liberal arts and engineering was insoluble).

Now, we are optimistic that our work in converging technologies will prove him wrong. Recognizing that many recent technological advances have taken place where the liberal arts and engineering have come together, we are developing four key areas-bioengineering, mechatronics, nanotechnology, and pervasive computing. Each will reach broadly across our curriculum-again, enlarging our concept of “union.”

So, as I mused about the misleading nature of the name “Greenland,” I was reassured that the name Union an accurate one for what we are. In our relationship with the larger community around us, in our sense of community on campus, in our initiatives in our curriculum, we continue to build strengths that truly reflect the name the founders so wisely chose more than two centuries ago.

Roger H. Hull

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Posted on Aug 1, 2002

In Davide Cervone's math course for nonmajors, he introduces the idea of a fourth spatial dimension, asking his students to try to imagine what it would look like.

“It takes ten weeks,” he laughs.

Do they really get it?

“On some level. It's never going to be as visceral as your understanding of three dimensions, but you can see that the right things are happening. It's a tool that people have known about for over one hundred years.”

For those of us who want to think about this, the way to do so is not through four dimensions at all but through two dimensions. “Consider a world that's flat-and what the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world would understand about our three-dimensional world,” he says.

Students spend the first two or three weeks of the course talking about this flat world because it's counterintuitive. Cervone starts by asking students to come to the board and draw pictures-a person and a house, mountains, a lake, the sun. Then he asks them questions-for example, can the person in the picture see the sun? “Yes, of course he can” is a typical response, to which Cervone replies, “'Well, let's find out.

“Remember, the entire world is on the surface of the board,” he explains. “Here's a ray of light coming from the sun, and the first thing it hits is the mountain. So no, the person in the picture can't see the sun, because the mountain is in the way. But even if the mountain weren't there, he still wouldn't see the sun, because the light would hit the side of his head, and his eyes are inside his head. He can't see anything 'out there.' He can see his skull, he can see his mouth-that's it.

“Everything in this world
is in the plane of the board. Nothing is 'in front of' or 'behind' anything else,” he continues. “The man in the drawing is actually in the mountain, and the lake is an underground lake.”

Then Cervone asks the
students to see if they can move the poor fellow's eyes
so he can see the sun.

“They'd have to put them on the edge of his head. And his mouth would have to be on the edge, too. But then where would the mouth lead to?”

They draw a throat and a stomach, and so on.

“But this is a problem,” says Cervone, “because it would split him in half. The digestive system-in effect, the idea of a tube-is a purely three-dimensional idea that does not exist in two dimensions. In a 2D world, you can't have a hole that goes through something without splitting it up.”

By now, the students are getting a sense of what 2D people would see and not see, know and not know. And they are beginning to understand that, as 3D beings, we see every point in the two-dimensional world-to us, nothing is hidden. But in Flatland there are no layers.

This is unlike a photo, because what we see in a photo is a 2D projection of something that's 3D. “Our photos are shadows of the real world,” says Cervone. “We're so used to interpreting them, we do it without even thinking how we use notions of forward and backward, and decreasing sizes, and so forth, to represent the missing dimensions.”

He then takes the students' imaginings to the next step: “How do I explain 3D stuff to a guy with this 2D sense of reality? How do I explain a cube to this poor fellow?

“Well, I could unfold the cube and lay it out flat in his 2D world, where he could see all of its parts. It's made out of six squares, and I could give him instructions for gluing them together. But, he would object, 'There's no way I could glue these pieces together without destroying the squares-I'd have to stretch and bend them, or rip or distort them.' And I would counter, 'Ah, but I have a third dimension in which I can do this!'

“To which he would say, 'You're full of beans! There's no way this can happen!' So I would show him shadows of this happening: I'd take my cube and lay it flat, unfolding it above him, under a light source that would project a shadow onto his 2D world.” *

As Cervone folds up the squares, some edges move closer to the light source, so their shadows get bigger. The shadows no longer appear as squares, but as trapezoids. As the sides of the cube come together in 3D, the trapezoids seem to meet in the 2D shadow. In the world of the Flatlanders, the picture looks like a little square inside a bigger square. We recognize this as looking down into a box, but the 2D man would see trapezoid shapes.

“Pointing to one of these, he might say, 'That's not a square! That doesn't have right angles.' You'd reply, 'I know that. But it's a shadow of one that does, and it's tilted in another dimension. Things closer to the light source have bigger shadows.'

“When the cube is completed, you'd say, 'See? There are all six squares, and they all fit together perfectly.' And he'd say, '(grumble, grumble) All right….' He wouldn't be as happy about it as he is about squares in his Flatland, but it would be one way for him to make sense of a cube.”

Cervone moves on to the next dimension: “Imagine we are like this poor flat guy, but in a 3D place, and there's a fourth dimension above us, where every point in our 3D space is available to it. Now, imagine that somebody up there has a hypercube, and it's been unfolded, and he tells us how many cubes there should be (eight) and how they should be glued together. We would see 3D shadows of this 4D thing as he folds it together.

“We have to build into our heads ways of doing that with 4D stuff-the shadows we'd see would not be flat but 3D. Because three dimensions are flat in 4D space, in the same way that a piece of paper is flat to us.”

Does Cervone believe that a fourth dimension actually exists? “Is there a physical one that we can get our hands on? Probably not. But do the concepts make sense? Absolutely. Is it valuable to think about? Yes, because it sheds light on our perceptions, on what we understand about our own dimension. We never would have thought about a tube being a three-dimensional idea otherwise.”

Understanding the workings of unfamiliar things can help us better understand the things we can actually get our hands on-such as taking a foreign language to understand English better. Or going to Mars to understand the Earth better.

The other reason to study the unfamiliar fourth dimension, says Cervone, is that you can represent three-dimensional things, and actions
particularly, in four dimensions as long as you have
four measurements.

Physicists, for example, use time as a fourth dimension, to describe an event happening at a particular position (three dimensions) and a particular time (fourth dimension); they hook together these coordinates and figure out how they relate to each other. This has to do with what they call spacetime-looking at points in a four-dimensional space, with time as one of the coordinates.

“Very beautiful and interesting things happen when they do that,” Cervone says.

The fourth dimension he talks about in his class, though, is a spatial dimension.

The course Cervone teaches is designed for students who are afraid of math. “They are adventurous enough to want to try something different,
but were probably afraid of taking calculus. So this is an alternative to fulfill their
math requirement.

“They're a little fragile, and I have to treat them carefully. They also have their preconceived ideas that they're reluctant to give up. But they tend to like the course and eventually get the concepts. At the end, I ask them, 'Remember the first two weeks, when you fought me tooth and nail about whether the beach ball was two-dimensional or three-dimensional? How hard that was? Think about it now-you understand it immediately!' So I can really say they learned something, their ideas have changed.”

Cervone believes that “you have to shake them up-kick the cobwebs out of what they think. But that's what we're here for.”

After all, math is about solving problems you've never been able to solve before. “It's not really about the answer, or about calculations-it's about what are the right questions to ask, no matter the topic. It's about taking something you know and using it in a situation you've never before faced.

“Most students have never been asked to do math this way before. I'm interested in their understanding of the questions, not so much in the answer. Looking in the back of the book for answers is training your self to fail in the future. In life, there is no back of the book!”

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Posted on Aug 1, 2002

Davide Cervone does art
for art's sake as well as to illustrate math.

“When I was a kid, I had to decide between math and art, and I decided I wasn't going to decide. Actually, I decided in favor of math, but I still got to do both.”

As a young boy, he idolized Leonardo da Vinci. And just like the Renaissance artist-engineer, Cervone carefully recorded his observations in a series of notebooks. As a teenager, he was captivated by Star Wars. But while his contemporaries gazed in awe as X-wing fighters zoomed around the Death Star, Cervone wondered about the math that made those scenes possible. The movie inspired him to work out a method of drawing that he used to graph a three-dimensional picture of his family's living room.

Years later at Brown University, Cervone's mentor and Ph.D. adviser, Tom Banchoff, asked him to write a polyhedral modeling program. Cervone was able to use the ideas he'd worked out in high school. He has since developed software that makes it possible for the user to create three-dimensional mathematical imagery fairly easily. In other words, the user doesn't have to program. His software is interactive, making it easy to rotate geometric objects and manipulate them in other ways. His own animations show phenomena such as the folding of a hypercube.

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Posted on Aug 1, 2002

Davide Cervone is the artist-mathematician behind a number of intriguing and colorful images that have appeared as cover art in several mathematical journals and books (as well as in this magazine). All are based on mathematical equations, many depicting four-dimensional objects in various ways.

Computer-generated artwork that he created, in collaboration with Tom Banchoff and student associates at Brown, appeared in a 1996 art exhibit entitled “Surfaces Beyond the Third Dimension.” These works use computer graphics and mathematics to form images both pleasing to the eye and challenging to the mind. Each piece depicts surfaces built in four-dimensional space and displayed in ways that suggest the kinds of transformations that appear when such an object is rotated in that space.

After the original exhibit was transformed into a virtual exhibit, José Francisco Rodrigues, of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), saw it on the Internet, and helped transform it again into another physical exhibit, this time adding qualities of the virtual and ideas from the website.

This newest exhibit, which has toured thirteen cities in Portugal and Brazil since October 2000, includes computers on which participants can watch movie clips and interact directly with the objects. It also has its own website, and a CD-ROM that includes the complete website, so people can take the show home with them. But anyone can explore the show, and the math behind it, through the media of hypertext, interactive graphics, and electronic movies. See it for yourself at
www.math.union.edu/locate/Cervone/professional/projects.html.

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Posted on Aug 1, 2002

Participants in a two-day conference at the College this spring agreed that collaboration among government, business, and academia is essential to promoting economic development in upstate New York.

And President Roger Hull, following up on that consensus, put together a consortium to continue the theme (see “Upstate Partners Roundtable Starts” for more information).

Collaboration as a key to upstate growth was a theme touched on by nearly every speaker at the Union conference, from the opening remarks of John Kelly III '76, senior vice president and group executive, technology group, at IBM, to the closing remarks of New York Secretary of State Randy Daniels.

“The vast intellectual resources of our colleges and universities will be the economic engine of upstate New York,” said Daniels to the 130 business, government, and academic leaders who attended. “Too often in the past there has been a disconnect between the campus and the community.”

With 262 colleges and universities, New York State is attractive to high-tech businesses that look for “intellectual capital” when they choose a new location, said Mark Little, vice president of GE Power Systems.

The challenge is to link commencement day with a line-up of attractive options in the job market. Bela Musits, managing director of High Peaks Venture Partners, said that New York State's smaller cities historically have been one-company towns.

“Places that are experiencing growth have a more diverse economic base, and achieving that takes strong collaboration between government, private enterprise, and colleges and universities,” he said. “And you also need a balance between attracting businesses from elsewhere and helping home businesses grow.”

New York cannot afford to fail, said Daniels. “We were late to the idea of Silicon Valley, and we can't make that mistake again,” said Daniels. “Twenty years from today, small towns like Schenectady and Troy will become increasingly attractive, if they're not in isolation.”

Several panelists pointed to the renovation of Seward Place, just west of the campus, as an outstanding example of the power of partnership. The College renovated some forty houses to provide apartment-style housing for more than 150 students, and the city of Schenectady spruced up the streets and sidewalks.

Other panelists noted that colleges are already involved in community improvement efforts through tutoring programs and college teacher training programs. “The biggest thing is to make a commitment to help local schools through all the person power we can muster,” said Kenneth Shaw, chancellor of Syracuse University. Each year, Syracuse students log 20,000 hours of one-on-one tutoring in local schools, and the university contributes 500,000 hours of community service.

President Hull said that the people represented at the conference have the ability to effect change, but that, “We need to determine what change we'd like to effect. The potential we have, if we work together, is unlimited; the obligation we have is a very important one. I look forward to continuing the conversation.”

Catch the waves
In his opening remarks to the conference on upstate partnerships, John E. Kelly III '76 of IBM said the goal of economic development “is to catch the waves of change.”

“The upstate New York economy has caught many waves, with IBM, Kodak, Corning, General Electric, and others,” he said. “The current wave is information technology-and it's not over yet.”

He said that since the 1980s, high tech jobs have represented four percent of the country's jobs and generated about four percent of the gross national product. In coming years, the percentage of jobs is predicted to stay the same but the percentage of the GNP from high technology is expected to rise to twenty percent.

Kelly, senior vice president and group executive, technology group, at IBM, said that changes in four areas will transform every aspect of our lives:

Pervasive computing: “There will be a new level of influence of computers in our lives, with microprocessors in literally every object we interact with.”

Grid computing: “If you start with the premise that we are using only a fraction of our computers' abilities, then think of what we could do if our computers were connected, with shared software.”

Nanotechnology: “The federal government is pouring money into this new form of science and engineering at the atomic scale.”

Life sciences: “This goes beyond traditional medical science to understanding the genome and what influence we can have on life itself.”

A number of factors could prevent us from taking advantage of these waves of change, he said, with a lack of skills being a big one. Although New York State is generating the intellectual capital to catch these waves, its challenge is to retain top technical talent.

“There are going to be tens of thousands of job openings in information technology,” he said. “We must improve our core math and science programs, beginning in our elementary schools, and we must create the partnerships that can overcome the nationwide decline in electrical engineering programs.”

A conference sampler
Panelists at the College's two-day conference on the upstate economy represented cites and colleges both big and small. Here is a sampling of their comments:

Lois DeFleur, president,
State University of New York
at Binghamton:
Each of us, depending on the character of our schools, needs to find where we intersect with the needs of the surrounding area. The Southern Tier, for example, is making the transition to mid-sized and even smaller companies. Our university tries to provide the intellectual capital by training hundreds of mid-level managers at the entrepreneurial center in our school of management.

Christopher Dahl, president, State University College
at Geneseo:
I think we need to remember that economic development is not just catching the waves of technology, but also seeing what we can do to improve civic life in our communities. I think that means as educators we teach our students the pleasures of civic engagement, and as institutions we are available as partners to share our expertise.

Debbie Sydow, president, Onondaga Community
College, Syracuse:
When I was in Virginia and considering this job, I found the Syracuse website focusing on lousy weather and high taxes. That kind of inferiority complex by long-time residents is very discouraging
to outsiders.

Gerald Jennings, mayor,
city of Albany:
We need to put together a public school program that colleges and universities like. We want you involved in our public schools. I think you can use your expertise to evaluate what is being taught in our schools. We need to shift gears; we're throwing money at schools, and I don't see the improvements we need.

Roger Hull, president,
Union College:
I like to talk in terms of “yesable” propositions, and while I accept the proposition that we need well-prepared students, I wonder how “yesable” it is for us to try to affect that. Do we really think that colleges are going to change the economic outlook by changing the public schools? I don't think that's realistic. Colleges should not be trying to dictate, but should be working with others to find the “yesable” propositions.

Albert Simone, president, Rochester Institute
of Technology:
About half of our graduates find jobs outside New York State. One reason is a lack of awareness of the opportunities at small and medium-sized firms. To counter that, the placement directors at the twenty colleges in the Rochester area meet once a month with leaders of small and medium-sized companies. We're trying to create access for these companies, which can't afford to send teams of recruiters to college after college.

Kelly Lovell, president, the Center for Economic Growth
The quality of life argument appeals to married couples with children, not to young, single people. What's missing for them is the coolness factor. Young people want loft living, they want to walk to work, they want revitalized waterfronts. Look at all our coffee shops-they're to-go. There are no places to hang out.

Kenneth Shaw, chancellor, Syracuse University:
My experience is that when you really find a winner, a big component is finding something where everyone's self interest benefits.

Bela Musits, managing director, High Peaks Venture Partners:
This is a good area for starting companies; we have more than 300 software companies in the Capital Region alone. But early-stage companies are high maintenance, and we have a void of early-stage venture capital.

Upstate Partners Roundtable Starts

One of the first orders
of business after the
conclusion of the two-
day conference was to
create a group that will continue to look at ways of strengthening the
relationship among upstate colleges, communities, and businesses.

In addition to President Hull, the Upstate Partners Roundtable will include:

• Dean Fuleihan, secretary, Office of Assembly Ways and Means 

• Joel Giambra, county executive of Erie County (the Buffalo area) 
• Gerald Jennings, mayor of Albany 
• John E. Kelly III '76, senior vice president and technology group executive, IBM 
• Abraham Lackman, special advisor to the majority leader/secretary to the Senate Finance Committee 
• Mark Little, vice president energy products, GE Power Systems 
• Neil Murphy, president,
  SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry 
• Albert Simone, president, Rochester Institute of Technology

The group will examine such ideas as creating a public and private higher education Internet-accessible database.

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