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President's Page President Walsh's bio, speeches, announcements. My fellow members of the class of , We.
We have all taken different paths to this common point, but we are all here, together, to celebrate this singular achievement. As citizens from a variety of nations, as mothers, as daughters, as sisters, as teachers, as students, we all come here today to commemorate the closure of our undergraduate experience at Wellesley, and to contemplate how this day serves as a point of departure for distinct adventures.
With the support of family, of incredible friends, of faculty, of administration, and of our wonderful class dean, Julie Donnelly, we have come to mark the end of our tenures at this institution. To all of those individuals who have helped us along the way, please grant me the honor of saying on behalf of the Class of We did not make it here alone. The significance of this day will evoke a multiplicity of emotions for all of us. I am sure that we all will feel an immense sense of pride for all that we and our peers have accomplished.
Many of us will be overcome by recollections of intense joy, togetherness, and growth that Wellesley has made possible through the dedication and vision of countless people. At the same time, many of us may experience legitimate feelings of resentment and disappointment for those times when as a college, as a class, as individuals, we betrayed the values and ideals of this amazing place.
Nevertheless, as we all come to sit in this place of celebration and reflection, I hope that we all take a moment to experience one shared feeling: We must occupy a moment of gratitude because though we came to Wellesley with varying degrees of privilege, and will leave with significant differences as well — we are all graduating from a college that has provided us with advantages that are incomprehensible to most people in this world. In every waking moment, Wellesley has been a place of revelation. We have revealed our constantly evolving selves to this community, and through our classes, our commitments, and our controversies, the complexities and richness of our common world have been revealed to us.
Most importantly, it has also been revealed to us just how much more we all have to learn and how dire is the imperative to fix the world we all currently inhabit. However, as we are sitting in this moment of appreciation, I would like to make a related, but somewhat unusual request for an audience of Wellesley women: Make a stink, stir up a commotion, rouse rabble.
This might seem like quite the challenge to some of us because to a certain extent -- we all got here because we were the girls who followed the rules, who almost always colored within the lines. Yet, as we are gathered here today to give thanks for all that we have acquired — it is necessary to question how much we are willing to sacrifice, how much trouble we are willing to make, in order to create enduring difference.
As the class of , we were faced with the previously unfathomable threat of terrorism within our first two weeks at Wellesley. The world has changed radically since that surreal day in September. As the cloud of this national threat has come over our nation, the dawning of a new age of political responsibility has emerged.
North Atlantic right whales for example are different — their calls have actually been rising in tone over time. Nobody knows why whales change their calls like this. In , Hildebrand and his colleague Mark McDonald suggested that blue whales were deepening their calls to make them stand out against shipping noise, which threatens to drown them out.
But that looks wrong, says Hildebrand. View image of A seismic exploration ship Credit: Whales respond to man-made noise in an unpredictable way, says Clark. He has watched what happens when an oil and gas exploration ship approaches singing whales and sets off explosives to discover fossil fuel deposits beneath the seabed.
Darcy Cooper rated it it was amazing Apr 22, But no — we must not be sad! Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another. He made recordings of the 52Hz whale in and says it's not quite as anomalous as it might seem. Two women from distinctly different social classes meet when Olive is hired to take care of Regina, who suffers from epilepsy or "fits" as they call it in the book. His findings would be discussed for years to come.
Sometimes the whales' response is dramatic. Maybe the whales are changing their songs for another reason entirely. Hildebrand suggests that blue whales are competing with each other to be deeper, season after season. Every season they listen to each other and synchronise their songs. That raises another question. If whales prefer to sing similar songs, what would make one of them sing at a completely different pitch? View image of Species like fin whales must now coexist with ships Credit: The leading hypothesis is that the 52Hz whale is a hybrid, the offspring of two whales of different species.
Such a whale would have an unusual body, and that might well affect its song. Hybrids of fin whales and blue whales are well-documented and can be identified, according to John Calambokidis of the non-profit organisation Cascadia Research in Olympia, Washington. For instance, their body shape is often similar to that of a fin whale, but with a larger snout and flippers like a blue whale. Certainly the 52Hz whale behaves a lot like a blue whale, says Kate Stafford of the University of Washington in Seattle.
But we cannot yet be sure. Nobody has managed to record a hybrid whale's calls — even Calambokidis, who got close enough to document their unique appearances. Getting them on tape will be crucial. View image of Fin whales are smaller than blue whales Credit: Calambokidis is one of several scientists now working on ways to make it easier to study the calls of individual whales.
One of the biggest problems has been figuring out which whale is calling when. Scientists often fit whales with microphones to record their calls. But these sometimes pick up the calls of nearby whales as well. So Calambokidis and his colleagues have added accelerometers, just like the ones your smartphone uses to detect motion, to the microphones.
And over at WHOI, where Watkins once worked, marine biologist Mark Baumgartner has helped to oversee the development of a listening system which can automatically analyse and digitally publish marine mammal sounds in near real-time.
View image of Whales are inherently social animals Credit: The apparatus includes a moored buoy off the coast of Massachusetts. An underwater microphone listens out for marine mammal calls and on-board software written by Baumgartner classifies the calls by species. The signals are then transmitted via satellite to computers at WHOI, which quickly process the data and publish it on the web.
In theory, detection methods like this could pinpoint specific animals, if their call is distinctive enough. However, it would have to be installed where the mysterious whale has been detected in the past, such as off the west coast of the United States.
What they can't tell us is what is going on inside the whale's head. The 52Hz whale may feel lonely, as Zeman suggests, but it's equally possible that it doesn't. There's certainly no reason to assume it does. The fact is, people often like to imagine that animals experience the same emotions we do. Whales are complex and mysterious creatures.
The idea that one might be out there, experiencing something as quintessentially human as loneliness, makes the animal seem somehow closer to us. But it remains a fantasy until there is evidence for it. That evidence will only turn up if we can find the 52Hz whale again. But his team has recently been on the case.
In , sensors off the coast of California picked up whale calls with the same pattern as Watkins' recordings. The recordings were discovered by an intern, after Hildebrand suggested they look for evidence of the 52Hz whale. However, Hildebrand's data suggests there is now more than one animal singing at this unusually high pitch. Conceivably Hildebrand's team has found a group of hybrid whales, all singing at the same special pitch. The 52Hz whale may be a member of this group that sometimes wanders off on its own.
If that's true, there is a happy ending to this story: Finding concrete evidence won't be easy.
But many, from filmmakers to whale researchers, are now on the lookout.