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August 07, 2008 8:11 PM |
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UM Wins International Robot Competition UM's Fall Semester to Focus on All Aspects Of War Anthrax /Bio-Chem Attacks Rare, Records Show 1925 Recording Makes National Archives Registry |
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Highlighted News Items, August 7
Building a More Responsible B-School
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Maryland Moments, April, 2005
University Initiatives
(Honors, New Programs, Rankings)
Honors
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Economics Professor & Sergy Brin Join American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Guillermo Calvo, distinguished university professor of economics and director of the Center for International Economics, and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google who majored in mathematicsa and computer science at Maryland, are selected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. -
Guggenheim Foundation Announces Fellows for 2005
The Guggenheim Foundation announces its list of winners. The citation for a UM recipient: "Sally M. Promey, Professor of Art History, University of Maryland, College Park: The public display of religion in the United States." Promey is the author of Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion, which received an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence. Professor Promey is in the department of art history and archaeology. -
Popper Wins National Environmental Award
Biology professor Arthur Popper wins a 2005 national award from the U.S. Department of Transportation for excellence in environmental preservation and protection. Popper's award came as a member of a research team and was given for surpassing environmental compliance guidelines to achieve noteworthy natural resource preservation goals. -
Jeong Kim to Head Storied Bell Labs
Jeong Kim, professor of practice at the Clark School of Engineering, is named president of the Bell Labs at Lucent Technologies. Kim, who earned a Ph.D. in reliability engineering at the Clark School, is the principal donor making possible the Kim Engineering Building, a $50 million, 140,000 square-foot addition to the Clark School. It will be dedicated in September. -
UM Student Honored for Commitment to Environment
The Morris K. Udall Foundation awards junior Amalia Pleake-Tamm one of 81 national Udall Undergraduate Scholarships for her accomplishments in aiding the environment. Pleake-Tamm is an environmental science and policy and English language and literature double major. She is also a graduate of the College Park Scholars Environmental Studies program and currently serves as the president of the student organization College Park Environmental Group. -
UM Celebrates Top Standings in the Goldwater Scholarship Competition
Maryland students win four awards for the school's four entrants in the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. It is the best showing in this national competition in the past five years. Of the 1,091 total applicants from across the country, 320 students were awarded scholarships for the 2005-06 academic year -
UM Student Awarded for Ugandan Relief Efforts
Senior Josh Goldstein saw a lesson in the 9/11 tragedy and determined it is up to his generation to make a difference in the world. Goldstein went on a fact-finding trip to Uganda, planned a day to celebrate global citizenship and helped create a mission for civic engagement and leadership on campus. He is currently working to improve living conditions for displaced refugees in Uganda. He receives the national Howard R. Swearer Humanitarian Award from Campus Compact and the John A. Cade Scholarship for Public Leadership presented by the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership. -
TEDCO Award for Software Research Goes to Clark School Faculty Member
Mark Shayman, professor of electrical and computer engineering, receives $50,000 to commercialize software that can detect and eliminate "denial of software" attacks on Internet sites from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation. -
President Bush Selects Griffin as NASA Head
Michael Griffith, who earned his doctorate in aerospace engineering at the Clark School of Engineering, is named new NASA administrator. Griffith was also an adjunct professor at UM.
UM is selected to establish the Sloan Biotechnology Industry Center that will be home for high-impact research on the forces driving the competitiveness of the nation's biotechnology industry. A start-up grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funds the work. The center, which is part of the School of Public Policy, joins an elite group of university-based Sloan research facilities, each focusing on the critical U.S. industrial sector. It is believed to be the first research center in the nation to focus solely on competitiveness in biotechnology.
That is how the Washington Post headlined its preview of this year's Maryland Day, when the university opened it doors wide and invited the public to "Explore Our World." Despite heavy rains and clouds for much of the day, an estimated 60,000 came out to see the celebration, which featured 425 events and a campus staff of 7,500 as hosts.
UM's new Center for Health Information and Decision Systems will research how to improve patient health by improving information technology in the health care industry. The research and development center will analyze what is - and is not - working in the medical community in regards to IT. It will also host programs to inform physicians and others in the health industry about what technologies are available.
The Robert H. Smith School of Business moves to make it easier to recruit and hire foreign graduates. Smith combines with Reed Smith LLP, one of the nation's largest law firms and known for a leading immigration practice, to give employers free access to Reed's immigration lawyers for legal advice and consulting services. Employers will benefit from the innovative program, which in keeping with the Smith Office of Career Management's goal of employer-focused customer service.
With the release of the 2006 graduate school rankings, UM moves into new territories of excellence, recording consistent high benchmarks for the university. A comparison of this year with last underlines the point.
Each of the 2006 totals are records:
Top 10s--31; Top 15s--52; Top 20s--68; Top 25s--76
In 2005, UM recorded:
Top 10s--23; Top 15s--45; Top 20s--60; Top 25s--70
Contributing to the record 31 Top 10s:
- English: the African American literature specialty ranked 9th
- Criminology ranked 1st in the nation
- Political Science: the industrial organization/psychology specialty ranked 9th
- Sociology: the sex and gender specialty ranked 8th
- Business: the information systems specialty ranked 5th
- the part-time MBA ranked 10th
- Education: the counseling and personnel services specialty ranked 1st in the nation.
- the education policy specialty ranked 9th
- the education psychology specialty ranked 9th
- the elementary education specialty ranked 10th
- the higher education administration specialty ranked 9th
- the special education specialty ranked 8th
- Engineering: the aerospace engineering specialty ranked 9th
- Public Affairs: the economics-public finance specialty ranked 10th
The Business Gazette: "A new report that analyzes information technology throughout the Washington, D.C., region gives somewhat short shrift to Maryland, but officials and industry insiders say IT has grown strongly on both sides of the Potomac River. The Greater Washington Initiative, an affiliate of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, focused exclusively on the information technology, communications and new media industries in its analysis, and excluded biotechnology, a traditional Maryland strength. In the Washington area, information technology has been most closely associated with Northern Virginia. But those in Maryland see things differently.... 'There's no doubt IT is an important technology enterprise in Maryland,' said Clayton D. Mote Jr., president of the University of Maryland, College Park."
The Washington Post: "The Iranian American Technical Council, a group created last year to help preserve Persian culture and to celebrate the accomplishments of Iranian Americans, hosted its second annual spring gala in Washington last Friday on Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The evening was dedicated to raising funds for the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and to honor seven people -- authors and academics, and pioneers in technology and aspiring students in that field." Founder of the council, Frank Korangy, announced $400,000 had been raised for the Persian studies center. "The president of the University of Maryland, College Park, C.D. Mote Jr., said the center's mission was to enhance understanding. He said the time had come for 'examining cultures on their own terms.' "
Society & Culture
Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, participates in a three day U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. Lebanon Star: "University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami perhaps best summed up the tenor of the gathering with his comment that, 'Arabs and Muslims remain widely skeptical of America's intent and commitment to promoting democracy, but it is clear that the rhetoric on democracy has now overshadowed the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations. Arabs and Muslims are now framed as a normal part of the world that can be free and democratic like all other parts of the world.' "
The unreliability of statistics clouds the answer to the question of how serious the divorce problem is in the U.S. Experts bemoan the lack of a clear benchmark. The New York Times relates a newly found trend for consideration. "Researchers say that the small drop in the overall divorce rate is caused by a steep decline in the rate among college graduates. As a result, a 'divorce divide' has opened up between those with and without college degrees, said Dr. Steven Martin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. 'Families with highly educated mothers and families with less educated mothers are clearly moving in opposite directions,' Dr. Martin wrote in a paper that has not yet been published but has been presented and widely discussed at scientific meetings."
Though interracial couples have a higher divorce rate than same-race couples, they typically say race is not a problem in the marriage. But new research directed by Leigh Leslie, professor of family studies, shows racial issues can have an impact on the success of a marriage between black and white spouses. The study also shows that for African Americans, racial identity is a strong contributor to marital quality, stronger than it is for white partners.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company joins forces with UM's Theater Department to stage Curse of the Starving Class, playwright Sam Shepard's dark comedy about a struggling farm family whose members scheme to escape one another. The show is the first project in a partnership between the two institutions.
English Faculty Member Helps Lead Fitzgerald Society Celebration
Jackson Bryer, professor of English, is president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. The festival named for the 1920s author draws academics and fans from around the world and took place, fittingly, on Long Island this year. The event drew the New York Times and Newsday to both recall the author's influence on another age and remark on the author's present popularity, 80 years after the publication of the Long Island-based The Great Gatsby.
Science Magazine reviews Harriet Presser's book, Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families. "A prominent image of American life still has parents or partners coming home in the evenings and on weekends--perhaps exhausted and anxious, but nonetheless spending these hours at (or at least near) their homes. From Presser's Working in a 24/7 Economy, however, we learn that only a small and shrinking majority (54%) of U.S. citizens work a fixed daytime Monday-to-Friday schedule; a majority of two-wage earner couples include at least one spouse who works weekends. Relying on large national surveys, Presser... shows that a growing number of people work nonstandard schedules that include evening, night, or weekend hours. The term 'nonstandard schedules' is fast becoming a misnomer, with so-called 'standard' schedules increasingly a style of life reserved for a shrinking pool of privileged U.S. families." Harriet Presser is a distinguished university professor of sociology.
Europe's star is rising in the world while the U.S.'s get dimmer is the message of a Program on International Policy Attitudes Poll released in London. PIPA conducted the poll, which canvassed 23 countries in conjunction with GlobeScan for the BBC. BBC News: "The results show trade to be an effective tool of influence, said Steven Kull, a director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which conducted the poll. 'What is notable here is that Europe and China, which have engaged the world primarily through economic relations - or soft power - are widely seen as having a positive influence,' he said. However, 'countries that have very large militaries and have recently used them in a prominent way - the US and Russia - are more often seen as having a negative influence,' he said."
Science & Technology
For the first time, the Deep Impact spacecraft see its target, Comet Tempel 1, as it travels towards its July 4 collision, the first ever with a comet. The BBC: " 'It is great to get a first glimpse [of] the comet from our spacecraft,' said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr Michael A'Hearn, of the University of Maryland, US. 'With daily observations beginning in May, Tempel 1 will become noticeably more impressive as we continue to close the gap between spacecraft and comet. What is now little more than a few pixels across will evolve by 4 July into the best, most detailed images of a comet ever taken.' " NASA: "Sixty-nine days before it gets up-close-and-personal with a comet, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, comet Tempel 1, from a distance of 64 million kilometers (39.7 million miles). The image, the first of many comet portraits it will take over the next 10 weeks, will aid Deep Impact's navigators, engineers and scientists as they plot their final trajectory toward an Independence Day encounter."
Margaret Palmer, professor of biology, leads an interdisciplinary team of scientists in compiling the first-ever comprehensive database of more than 37,000 stream and restoration projects nationwide. Palmer: "Given the rapid rate of global degradation of fresh waters, and the fact that river and stream restoration has become a booming ($1 billion) enterprise, it is time to agree on what constitutes successful river and stream restoration.... Advancing the field requires rigorous analysis of restoration projects, and that requires basic information on the goals and outcomes."
As part of National Geographic's Pulse of the Planet series, David Inouye, professor of biology, explains about the crisis facing marmots and birds as they encounter an earlier warmth of spring, but without the vegetation that allows them to eat—it is buried under the snow. The change goes beyond global warming. "I think what we were maybe seeing during the first couple of (recent) decades was the effect of global warming, and it now seems to be swamped by the effect of regional climate change," Inouye said.
Philip Tarnoff, director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the Clark School of Engineering, contributes to an influential report on the inefficiency of the nation's traffic light system. The Institute of Transportation Engineer research and Tarnoff's own work earn wide media attention. USA Today: "A study by a Maryland researcher last year found that 35% of the nation's traffic agencies had not retimed their traffic signals in 10 years. That means they haven't responded to business and residential growth that affects traffic patterns, says Philip Tarnoff.... 'The costs (of traffic signal management) compared to building a highway are trivial.' he says. 'The question is why isn't it being done more often?' "
Maryland researchers Amy Karlson, research graduate assistant at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Benjamin Bederson, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, combine with Microsoft scientists to design two interfaces to support easier use of PDAs and cellphones. The interfaces allow users to operate the devices using a thumb on one hand. Microsoft: "The AppLens interface uses a tabular fish-eye approach to provide integrated access to and notification for nine applications. The second, called LaunchTile, uses pure zooming within a landscape of 36 applications to accomplish the same goals."
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Information provided by the Office of University Communications