The Essentials

Starting today, you can vote for the image you think best represents Cornell. Go to the College of Arts and Sciences’ Facebook page, Instagram, Tumblr or Twitter to participate in “battles” as photos move through brackets in four categories: events, buildings, icons and nature.

Early this semester, Cornell launched the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education (SHARE) website. It’s an information resource for all members of the Cornell community about issues related to sexual violence and other sexual misconduct. The SHARE site was developed to provide a one-stop access to services that offer support for victims and survivors, facilitate reporting, increase awareness, promote safety, and highlight prevention, compliance and advocacy initiatives. A collaboration between the divisions of Human Resources and Safety Services, Student and Academic Services and University Communications, the site reflects input from individuals and organizations who stepped forward to address issues raised by campus events during 2012.

The Lab of Ornithology’s birds of paradise website features HD videos, images, sounds, interactive features and classroom tools for teachers.

And it’s given an infographic treatment by Big Red Love Stories.

Catch Daniel Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English, on the BBC Radio 4 documentary ”Blind Date with Runyon” Feb. 14.

A New York City writer of humorous, sentimental short stories, Damon Runyon‘s colorful character types – Nathan Detroit, Good Time Charley, The Seldom Seen Kid - and slangy, “Runyonese” dialogue became the basis for the Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls,” among other adaptations.

Schwarz is author of “Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture”; he also edited Penguin Classics’s “Guys and Dolls and Other Writings.”

What happens when Sarah Abadhi, an infertile workaholic New York City attorney with no expectation of marriage or babies, hooks up for five months with a driven pediatric ICU doctor who’s allergic to commitment and inexplicably becomes pregnant? Find out in the new e-novel “Fertility” by Denise Gelberg ’72, Ph.D. ’93, a former teacher and ILR School visiting fellow. The characters part company, but the unexpected pregnancy drives them to cultivate the barren landscapes of their interior lives.

A short documentary on how Cornell’s AguaClara engineering research team is bringing clean water to Honduras was commissioned by AguaClara’s Honduran partner, the nonprofit Agua Para El Pueblo. The 9-minute video, with English subtitles, describes AguaClara’s impact on rural communities that now have access to safe, clean drinking water.

Watch chemistry professor David Collum – an expert on finance – give his annual financial year in review Dec. 21. Among other things, Collum covers the Mayan calendar, broken markets and broke students saddled with ever-increasing debt.

Cornell historian Barry Strauss draws parallels between former CIA director David Petraeus’ affair with his ambitious biographer, Paula Broadwell, and scandals among such classical Greek and Roman power couples as Pericles of Athens and his mistress Aspasia, and Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who “had a thing for men in uniform.”

Strauss writes on the History News Network website: “Just imagine what email between Caesar and Cleopatra would have looked like! What’s new is that there are no secrets anymore. There’s no hope of confidentiality because everything is traceable. The stone trail became a paper trail and now a cyber trail – and that’s impossible to lose.”

Move over, turkeys: Mann Library has launched a new online exhibition about the recent resurgence of interest in small-scale poultry-keeping.

“Backyard Revival: American Heritage Poultry” delves into the history of raising chickens everywhere from private backyards to huge industrial operations. Individual breeds are pictured and catalogued, and digitized photographs, feed catalogs, book covers and more tell the story of the transformation. The exhibition also includes items from the Rice Poultry Collection, which is a major repository of information on current and historical poultry science.

Funding from the Mary A. Morrison Public Education Endowment made the exhibition possible; the original “Backyard Revival” exhibition, installed in November 2009, was funded through the Bondareff Family Fund for Mann Library.