Without the strictures of cinq-sept-cinq, I am still used to writing within the lines. Developing agendas, writing art reviews, outlining collaborative projects that meet space requirements, and drafting press releases: I haven’t done it all, but I’m willing to try.

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Heart of a Champion.
Published in the April 2009 issue of Carnegie Mellon Today.

At Kappa Sigma’s 2008 holiday party, Dan Hefley glides to the front of the room in his wheelchair to receive a gag gift from his new fraternity brothers. The present he unwraps is a Skip-It, the kind of ankle jump rope that youngsters hop over repeatedly to earn ever-higher scores.

The freshman engineering major just laughs as he holds the toy in his hands—his strong, broad shoulders shaking with mirth and his eyes shining playfully behind his glasses. Unless he adds a little bounce to his wheelchair or gets a lift from a few Kap Sigs, he will not be counting skips anytime soon. Hefley has spina bifida, a congenital spine defect that has left the lower half of his body paralyzed and limits his mobility to a wheelchair or crutches.

“My friends know I’m the one who jokes about it the most,” he says, referring to his disability. “To everyone else, I know it’s part of my identity. I don’t think I’m any different because of it.”

That has been his attitude for quite a while. Born and raised just outside of Pittsburgh, Hefley started playing sled hockey with the Pittsburgh Mighty Penguins in seventh grade, encouraged by a family doctor who noticed his athleticism. Sled hockey is much like regular ice hockey except that players sit in plastic seats on skate blades from which they maneuver the ice using two sticks, their blades uniquely curved for shooting and outfitted with metal picks to shunt across the ice.

Hefley has been chosen twice for the U.S. National Under-20 Sled Hockey Team—as a goaltender—most recently for the 2008-2009 lineup. The team represents the nation in the Western Sled Hockey League and at the National Disabled Hockey Festival.

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Mock Press Release, written in a course on Marketing, PR, and Corporate Communications.

For Immediate Release —

AMERICAN WIRELESS INTRODUCES CELL PHONE CAR STARTER
CarStart Technology and Wireless Service Will Provide Joint Service

Pittsburgh, Pa., Mar. 3, 2010 – American Wireless today unveiled SmartStart™, a new product linking cell phone service with remote CarStart technology.

All American Wireless customers with internet service plans can subscribe to SmartStart™, using their cell phones to start their cars from anywhere within 2000 feet.

SmartStart™ is not the only remote car starter, but it is the first to incorporate the market success and high usability of cell phones.

“SmartStart™ mixes modern technologies, reflecting our ability at American Wireless to move into the future and meet needs the customer doesn’t know he has,” said American Wireless CEO C.L. Ular at an early morning press conference. “I don’t want to go outside to start my car in two feet of snow, and I know my customer doesn’t, either.”

Over the past two years, American Wireless has more than doubled its size and consumer reach in the Pittsburgh area. After acquiring CarStart, creator of the remote car-starting device behind SmartStart™, American Wireless announced an expected 25% sales increase over the next four months.

“With SmartStart™, you’re going to have more technology without more gadgets. You don’t need a new phone to get new services,” said Mr. Ular.

Beginning March 2010, SmartStart™ will be available to all American Wireless customers for $9.99 per month, with a minimum 2-year service agreement. Cell phones must be equipped with an internet service plan in order to use SmartStart™.

SmartStart™ serves as a complement to other PDA features offered by American Wireless, including “Find-It-Now” GPS tracking technology, mobile music recognition, and visual voicemail. These services are part of American Wireless’ niche products, which help the company compete against major cell phone providers like Verizon and AT&T.

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One-page document summarizing a cultural collaboration between the Teen Arts Council of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Distributed to project coordinators in both parties in June 2010.

Project Proposal: Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center with Teen Arts Council.

The Teen Arts Council (TAC) is a leadership development program sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), that welcome youth perspectives to the Museum. The Summer 2010 TAC will work with Laura Weinstein, Assistant Curator of South Asian Art at the MFA, to view Islamic art and gain insight into the Muslim world. Together with Laura, the TAC will pair up with teenagers from the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC), cultivating a more acute awareness of the roles tradition and modernity play in our daily lives. This pairing will consist of two phases:

Phase I: TAC Tour and Islamic Art Introduction with Laura Weinstein at the MFA
TAC members will guide ~10 teens from the ISBCC on a tour through the Museum, taking ownership of their position. Laura will provide her knowledge and guidance for all of the teenagers within the Islamic art galleries.

Phase II: ISBCC Introduction
ISB teens will guide TAC members through their cultural center, showing how the Qur’an is used, how script appears, and what links can be drawn between the art at the Museum and the architectural/decorative features of the ISBCC. When we talk about tradition and modernity, what are some living traditions? As the TAC members did in Phase I, the ISBCC teenagers can serve as proud ambassadors to their community.

Phase III: ISBCC and TAC teens hang out
One goal of this collaboration is for the two groups to see their similarities and be comfortable learning about their differences. Hanging out for a meal or a snack in the ISBCC café would provide an easy transition between the formal programming and more informal socializing.

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Cardboard Caves and Tin Men
Published in The Tartan on October 27, 2008.

At the Carnegie Art Museum, the corner wing on the second floor is sterile, a dead end. White walls rise to an impossibly high white ceiling, which hums with the fluorescent lights so often used in Wal-Mart warehouses. Walking into the space, I half expected to see shopping carts standing at the ready.

Instead, there is a gaping hole in the rearmost wall, a hole just large enough for a Steelers linebacker. Adhered to the edges of the gap is a starburst of brown packaging tape, a stark contrast to the whiteness in the rest of the gallery. This hole, according to a plaque near the opening, is Cavemanman, a work by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn.

“Parents and teachers may wish to preview content of this artwork before entering with children,” the sign warns.

I walk in.

Cavemanman is a sprawling construction of cardboard and packaging tape, a dull brown series of five caves linked by rambling passageways. The dropped ceiling curves and rises as if it were shaped, like the Grand Canyon, by moving water. Bumps protrude from the chamber walls as tumors might, emerging at angles and disrupting the flatness of the space. Underfoot, the cardboard floor undulates and creaks like salt-soaked wood on a sailing ship.

In the largest room, large printouts of clocks are pasted on the wall, each reading 10:10:30. Black graffiti over the clocks identifies each city in the impossible time zone: Oran, Montevideo, Lubumbashi, Kandahar, Brisbane, Phnom Penh, Toronto, and others. The timepieces do not tick.

Instead, silence is only punctured by the rustling of tin foil statues standing guard in the rooms. When I move, the shaking characters provide an accompaniment to the moaning floors and buzzing lights. Of the twenty or so aluminum figures in the first room, some are just torsos; others are the size and shape of small children. The rooms, which form a sort of underground cave system, are large but crowded: Two other caves house several more of the foil bodies, each of which is attached, by wire and sturdy red electrical tape, to a stockpile of explosives. I must ignore the ancient metaphor of the caves; this exhibit is apocalyptic.

Imagine walking into an abandoned shrine or, perhaps, discovering a hoarder’s secret storage room. Pages from Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality form a horizontal line the hallways like a row of polished white teeth. Books, stacked haphazardly, lean menacingly towards me as I pass: A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King Jr., Class Warfare by Noam Chomsky. The tones of social revolution are overwhelming.

But then there is the room where posters of Amy Winehouse, Napoleon Dynamite, The Breakfast Club, and The Goonies function as wallpaper and a cardboard bed sits surrounded by books. In this part of the cave, as in others, videos of Lascaux II, a prehistoric cave site in southern France, play like a silent station signal. Perhaps I happened upon a teenage boy’s primitive hideaway.

Piles of soda cans litter the walkways and spill out of sparkling gold containers. If Cavemanman were an apartment, the janitor must be negligent in his duties. And yet there is nothing unclean about the caves. The graffiti is stylized, clearly the work of one hand. Red fire extinguishers are placed throughout the caverns, a tangible, unexpected token of reality in the echoing space.

Behind me, the floor squeaks in protest as an older, heavyset woman enters the second room. She plants her feet far apart and turns up towards the posters on the ceiling. The colors of her sweater, a muted pink and green, remind me of the Navajo. Quietly, she marvels at Marilyn Monroe and Dale Earnhardt, who look down on her like constellations in the sky of posters.

“Huh,” she says.

Cavemanman is part of an exhibition called “Life on Mars,” the Carnegie Art Museum’s 55th Carnegie International.” A mixture of installation art, video, sculpture, photography, and painting, the show questions the strangeness of our life on Earth: “Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?” Don’t miss “I Wish Your Wish,” a wall of ribbons printed with the wishes of people around the world. You can make a wish and take a ribbon, too.

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A 500-word adaptation intended to inform the average college reader about new scientific research.

“Protect your skin this spring break: Get a tan!”

Looking to get some color but can’t make it to Florida for spring break? If new research into sunless tanning proves successful, you won’t need to. What’s more, you could even protect yourself from skin cancer in the process.

That’s right, you can forget what your mother told you all those days at the beach; while sunscreen does shield you from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation (or UV rays), it will not protect you from melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer. Instead, scientists now argue, our best protection against skin cancer may be the very thing we were taught to avoid: a dark tan.

But wait, don’t slather on that tanning oil just yet! Exposing unprotected skin to UV rays is still dangerous, especially if you have fair skin. Even dark-skinned people, who are nearly 500 times less likely to get melanoma and other skin cancers than those with lighter skin, are still at risk of contracting skin cancer.

So if tanning has benefits, what are they? DNA repair mechanisms have been shown to double or triple for tanned skin, restoring damaged skin cells. For this reason, pigment cell researchers hope to develop artificial tanning mechanisms that do not rely on the sun; such processes would darken the skin while promoting DNA repair and protecting against cancer-causing UV rays.

To harness the benefits of sunless tanning, researchers will rely on one protein, the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R), whose different forms produce shade variations in skin and hair color. MC1R can be found on the surface of the skin’s melanocytes, pigment producing cells which play a key role in tanning. When the skin is exposed to UV rays, cells in the skin’s outer layer, called keratinocytes, release the melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH), which triggers MC1R to produce melanin. Like dye on fabric, melanin colors the keratinocytes and tans the skin.

To study MC1R’s role in the tanning process, researchers at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute treated lab mice with different skin colors to artificial tans worthy of Paris Hilton. For dark-skinned mice with the proper copies of MC1R, the sunless tanning treatment increased the presence of DNA repair proteins. For pink-skinned mice, whose defective copies of MC1R do not promote DNA repair, the treatment reduced the frequency of UV-induced tumors. As David Fisher, one of the Institute’s lead researchers, explained, these results suggest that artificial tanning could help fair-skinned individuals just as traditional tanning benefits those with darker skin.

If artificial tanning really is the answer, there are several ways to go about attaining one. One tanning method, dubbed the Clinuvel treatment, would require invasive drug injections every two months. For that reason, researchers are placing more emphasis on promising topical treatments. If used in sunscreens, lotions such as T-oligos and Dimericine would trigger DNA repair while protecting the skin against UV rays.

Just imagine: this March, you could tan in the comfort of your own dorm room. With some artificial color, you might even forget you had to stay in snowy Pittsburgh over break.
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