Red Clay Ramblers release Old North State

Jack Betts likes the Red Clay Ramblers’ new CD, “Old North State” with our very own Creative Writing Professor Bland Simpson, alum Jack Herrick, and company. Learn more.

Offensive Play

Malcolm Gladwell compares dogfighting and football, and discusses UNC research findings on the health consequences of football concussions by Kevin Guskiewicz (Exercise and Sport Science). Read all about it in the new New Yorker.

UNC’s living laboratory in the Galapagos

UNC and partners at the University of San Francisco – Quito, Ecuador, are developing a living laboratory to prevent ecological damage in the fragile Galapagos Islands. Learn more.

Carolina’s liberal arts advantage, on UNC You Tube

Check out the UNC You Tube video of Karen Gil, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, expressing her perspective on the importance of a liberal arts education for leadership in a fast-changing world.

Biking for brotherly love

Summer is usually all about the outdoors: enjoying the summer weather, and maybe taking a nice bike ride or two. UNC-Chapel Hill senior Stephen Prince of Pinehurst, N.C., took that a bit further. Last summer he biked across the country, raising $34,000 for the Children’s Tumor Foundation.

Stephen did it for his older brother, Andrew, who was a math major at UNC-Charlotte. Andrew battled neurofibromatosis, a tumor-causing disease that affects the growth of brain tissue, for most of his life — until he lost his battle at 23, soon after Stephen graduated from high school.

Taking the 55-day ride from Lubec, Maine to Imperial Beach, Calif. (the easternmost town of the country), gave Stephen the opportunity to grieve his brother’s death. It also helped raise awareness about neurofibromatosis and finding a cure. On his Web site, www.bikeforandrew.com, he said he “[hoped] that money raised by the ride will help researchers find a cure so that others won’t have to go through everything Andrew suffered.”

Stephen has a double major in history and peace, war and defense in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Read the original story in The Daily Tar Heel:

UNC women’s soccer documentary airs Sunday at 5

“Winning Isn’t Everything,” a documentary about the amazing UNC women’s soccer team, is scheduled to air on the Fox Soccer Channel Sunday Sept. 6 at 5 p.m. Produced by UNC communication studies professor Hap Kindmem, the film follows the 2007 team in their attempt to repeat as NCAA national champions. It also features two NCAA national championships for the women’s team, in 2006 and 2008.

The UNC women’s soccer dynasty has won 19 NCAA national championships in the last 27 years. One of the current players featured in the documentary is communication studies major Casey Nogueira, named the 2008-2009 ACC Female Athlete of the Year. She has also won multiple national player of the year honors.

Viewers will hear head coach Anson Dorrance’s pregame, halftime and sideline speeches to the 2007 team. Former stars Mia Hamm, Heather O’Reilly, Cindy Parlow, Carla Overbeck and Wendy Bebauer Palladino are also in the film.

Times food critic/alum Frank Bruni recalls bouts with bulimia

New York Times food critic Frank Bruni ’86 was slightly plump as a child and struggled with keeping his weight down throughout pre-adolescence, he recalls in a new memoir . He dieted and fasted. Then he discovered competitive swimming during his teens;  this way he could enjoy food and keep the weight off. Sometimes with the help of pale blue amphetamine pills.

When he arrived at Carolina on a four-year Morehead scholarship, Bruni decided to give up swimming, devoting spare time to writing for the Daily Tar Heel. Like many students, he craved extra helpings at the cafeteria. But without swimming to burn up the extra calories, and no more little blue pills, he needed a new plan for controlling his weight.

He thought he found the solution in furtive post-meal visits to a restroom at the rear of the student union convenient to both the cafeteria and the newspaper offices. He was aware of bulimia but concluded at the time that was not really what he was doing when he stuck his fingers at the top of his throat. He was, after all, in control, right? Then his friends called him on it.

Bruni graduated from UNC with a B.A. in English in 1986. His memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater, comes out next month. You can read an excerpt in the July 19 Sunday New York Times Magazine.

The College has a new dean

Karen M. Gil, the Lee G. Pedersen Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry, is the new Dean of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.  She took office July 1.

A UNC College faculty member since 1995, Dean Gil previously served as the senior associate dean for social sciences and international programs, the senior associate dean for undergraduate education, and chair of the department of psychology.

Learn more.

Research confirms the power of positive thinking

Barbara Fredrickson, UNC distinguished professor of psychology and author of the book Positivity, says positive thinking can make a significant difference in personal well being. In a public radio interview with Frank Stasio on WUNC-FM “State of Things,” she discusses her research on the power of positive emotions.

She emphasizes the difference between happiness and positivity. Happiness defines your overarching view of your life, she says, while positivity is about focusing on “micro emotions” such as joy, gratitude and awe, that may only be felt for a few seconds or a few minutes, but taken together lead to well being. It’s important to focus on the emotion and the moment to experience and appreciate these positive feelings, she says.

“Positive emotions expand our awareness and build our resources, and that makes life more fulfilling,” she says.

She also discusses her research on the Positivity Ratio, emphasizing the importance of balancing positive and negative emotions.

“Our emotions tend to obey a tipping point,” she says. Her research shows that tipping point or positivity ratio is 3 to 1. “We need three positive emotions to lift us up for every one negative emotion that brings us down. Eighty percent of Americans only have a 2-to-1 positivity ratio.”

To improve that ratio she says we need to focus more on the present and give ourselves time to do the things we enjoy the most, whether that’s a walk in the woods or a hobby.

“Resilient people manage adversity and handle unexpected things,” she says. It’s not just that they only experience positive emotions, but instead that they are able to cultivate more positive feelings. Resilient people don’t make social comparisons, ” she says. Instead they focus on what’s positive in their own lives.

“One of the most positive emotions to elicit is gratitude,” she says. ” If we see what we are going through as a gift or an opportunity it unlocks that positive emotion.”

Listen to the discussion.

Check out your Positivity Ratio and learn more.

Resume popper: A joint international degree from UNC and Singapore

UNC junior geography major David Crawford will have a distinctive credential at the top of his resume when he graduates: a joint international degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National University of Singapore, a leading international university considered one of the best in Asia.

Crawford, the first Carolina student to enroll in the innovative joint undergraduate degree program between UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences and its liberal arts counterpart at NUS, spent his sophomore year in Singapore. The program — the only one of its kind in the U.S. — is open to academic majors in economics, English literature, geography, history and political science. Eligible UNC and NUS students can take two to four semesters of classes at the partner university, culminating in a degree from both institutions at the end of four years.

“The NUS-UNC joint-degree program joins the strengths of two great universities and takes a cutting-edge approach to a traditional undergraduate education,” said Dan Gold, Asia programs director with UNC Study Abroad. “It allows students to experience greater academic depth than a regular study abroad semester could offer alone, while also providing the opportunity for young scholars at both institutions to explore new areas of the world.”

Crawford liked being able to spend two semesters abroad, having time to fully explore academics and culture, and to travel throughout Southeast Asia. The NUS academic environment is competitive, he said.

“There’s a word, kiasu, that means ‘to be afraid to lose,’ and that is Singaporean culture in a nutshell. That took awhile to get used to.”

He enjoyed the academic and cultural difference. “I think it’s really important for college students to immerse themselves in cultures so completely unlike their own because you get to think beyond the island of North America and see things from the Asian perspective, which is very different from most places,” Crawford said.

Being a NUS student also opened the doors to an internship with Transient Workers Count Too, a local NGO devoted to improving conditions of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. Crawford had worked with Burmese refugees while at UNC and was pleased to have this opportunity to pursue his interest in migrant rights.

“Working for an internationally-based organization was just such a great experience,” he said.

His participation in the joint-degree program was suppported by UNC’s Phillips Ambassadors Program, funded by a gift from former U.S. Ambassador Earl “Phil” Phillips.

“Moving to a foreign country and living there on your own for a length of time, having to adjust, has really prepared me for a lot of things after I graduate,” Crawford said. “It’s a global market for jobs and so it has allowed me to think more from a global perspective.”

– Excerpted from a story by Robyn Mitchell ’09 in UNC Global News, where you can also read about one of the NUS students who studied at UNC.