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Maryland Moments, February 2006 University Initiatives (Honors, New Programs) President C.D. Mote Jr. served on the National Academy of Sciences committee that recently offered an action plan, 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm,' which would insure the U.S. remain globally competitive in science and technology. President Bush, in his State of the Union address, then said it was critical for education to supply the base for continued scientific success. After the President's speech, Mote was on C-Span's Washington Journal and MSNBC, lobbying for science and mathematics. He then was among the 140 business, political, and educational leaders who signed an advertisement in The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal urging readers to "help keep America the driving force in innovation." In the same week, Mote was invited back by The Washington Post to again serve on a panel of regional leaders that predicts economic performance for the coming year. Later in February, C.D. Mote Jr. visited National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation's Science Friday for a roundtable discussion on U.S. science and technology. Appearing with him were Ralph Wyndrum, Jr, president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Patricia Welesko Garland, manager of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Mote: "I think that the whole thing comes down to opportunity. Young people will respond to opportunity. You know, we've been here before. When Sputnik came up so long ago, 1957, the country surged towards science and technology. There was federal resources. There was a national need. There was a space program. We could go to the moon by 1970 and so on. So, the opportunity was there and people went for it. I think the problem today is that there's been such a walk-away from science and technology. And the opportunity people, young people, see, they see it in professional sports, they see it in other things. And I think we need to create opportunity." UM claims three of the top 60 individual donors to U.S. campuses last year. UM is featured in Chronicle coverage: "The University of Maryland, College Park received three $30-million pledges last year — from three of its alumni, Robert E. Fischell (No. 32), Robert H. Smith (No. 34), and A. James Clark (tied for No. 36). 'State funding for public higher education is on the decline,' says Brodie Remington, Maryland's vice president for university relations. 'If we are to be a top-quality university, which is absolutely our goal, and continue to have affordable access, the difference is going to be philanthropic support.' The gifts will help form a new bioengineering department and augment several existing programs." The proposed Federal budget gives $19.3 million to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Weather and Climate Prediction at the university's M Square research park. The NOAA Center will house about 800 federal employees, scientists and contractors, and will replace the National Weather Service's World Weather Center located in Camp Springs. President C.D. Mote Jr.: "The National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction will add to the wealth of advantages and disciplines available through the university's research park." Mote futher said the center would "have huge impacts on almost every aspect of life, science and the economy." The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reorders its rankings of doctorate granting institutions by categorizing research universities in three ways: Research Universities (very high research activity), Research Universities (high research activity), and Doctor/Research Universities. UM is in the highest category. Other Mid-Atlantic (Del., Md., Va.) schools ranked "very high in research activity": Johns Hopkins, Delaware, Virginia and Virginia Tech. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, George Mason, Georgetown and George Washington are listed under "high research activity." UM, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Montgomery College form a regional research park industry association, called Research Parks Maryland. "The one segment of [Maryland's] innovation infrastructure that didn't have any formal communication vehicle was research parks," said Brian Darmody, assistant vice president for research and economic development at the University of Maryland, College Park." The umbrella organization will be based in College Park. UM sets up two centers--The Center for Integrated Security and Logistics (CISL) and the Center for Automatic Identification Research (CAIR)--that will develop technologies to enhance security at U.S. ports, including the Port of Baltimore. Engineers and public policy experts will use sensors, identification devices, wireless personal digital assistants and other technologies to track shipments and detect tampering. The tracking system would also sense dangerous contraband and transmit information in real time to authorities and feed that information into a database. Asia Pulse: "The University of Maryland plans to set up a branch of its product reliability center... to improve the ability of local companies to determine the quality of their products.... The unprecedented decision to build the computer-aided life cycle engineering center (CALCE) at Seoul's Hanyang University will give the country an edge in analyzing product durability, defect rates and overall customer satisfaction, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.... The U.S. university announced its decision at an international academic forum held at Hanyang University." CALCE is the Computer-Aided Life-Cycle Engineering center located in the A. James Clark School of Engineering. UM alumnus Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, gets a visit from his dad, faculty member Michael, in a Time magazine feature. "Brin, 32, has also been precocious all his life. Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Brin fled Russia with his parents amid rising anti-Semitism in the late 1970s and settled in the U.S. Brin's father Michael teaches applied probability and statistics at the University of Maryland; his mother works at NASA. Brin from an early age was fascinated with numbers; his father gave him his first computer, a Commodore 64, when he turned 9. Brin's other love is gymnastics, and he studied flying trapeze at a circus school in San Francisco. He has lately taken up springboard diving. Michael Brin recently visited the West Coast to check in on his son, the billionaire. 'Sergey was a good boy,' Michael wisecracks, 'when he was asleep.' " Chronicle of Higher Education: The National Academy of Engineering announces "the election of 76 new members and nine new foreign associates, bringing its total membership in the United States to 2,216 and the number of foreign associates to 186. Membership in the academy is awarded to engineers who have made significant contributions to engineering research, practice, or education." Admitted is "Gregory B. Baecher... for the development, explication, and implementation of probabilistic- and reliability-based approaches to geotechnical and water-resources engineering." Science & Technology
NASA and UM grab headlines as results of Deep Impact's July 4 collision with the Comet Tempel 1 are announced. Researchers reveal the comet has three patches of ice on its surface, but most of the frozen water probably lurks deeper inside. This marks the first time ice has been detected on the nucleus, or solid body, of any comet, researchers reported in the online version of the journal Science. The three small patches of ice on Tempel 1's surface are not enough to account for the water vapor in the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet's nucleus. "These new findings are significant because they show that our technique is effective in finding ice when it is on the surface and that we can therefore firmly conclude that most of the water vapor that escapes from comets is contained in ice particles found below the surface,' said UM's Michael A'Hearn, the project's principal investigator." In the world of microtechnology, entire "machines," so tiny the naked eye can't see them, can be manufactured to create things like sensors that deploy car air bags. But conventional micromachine fabrication technologies have been based on silicon, limiting them when it comes to making complex, three-dimensional structures. Now, a team of researchers, led by Chemical & Life Sciences' John Fourkas, has developed a technique for creating microscopic structures from multiple materials, paving the way for the creation of entirely new types of micromachines. Two Faculty Members Receive NASA Grants for a Mission to Mars and Beyond James Drake, a professor of physics affilated with the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and Mikhail Sitnov, an associate research scientist at the Institute for Electronics & Applied Physics, are selected to advance the U.S. space mission to Mars. Drake receives $357,985 for his research on the explosions that occur when the sun's magnetic field slams into the earth's field. The explosions give off dangerous radiation that can harm both machines and people. Siitkov receives $299,049 for his work on magnetic fields and energy currents. In Pile of Waste, UM Scientists Dig Up a Response to Bird Flu Nathaniel Tablante, associate professor of veterinary medicine, earns a headline in The Washington Post for his idea that would make flu-infected chickens compost. " 'It's as much of an art as science,' said Nathaniel Tablante.... Tablante has spent the past three years studying the possibilities of recycling chickens. His office in College Park is overflowing with chicken paraphernalia: clocks, paintings, cartoons, even a little chicken statue made by his daughter after she learned about his job. But Tablante said he has no sentimental feelings for chickens. After all, he explained, he mostly deals with dead ones." Gerald Galloway, research professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Ed Link, senior fellow, civil and environmental engineering, are experts on making New Orleans' levees safe. Galloway, a former Army Corps of Engineer General in charge of Mississippi River levees, was interviewed extensively in mid-February on the reconstruction as hurricane season would begin in four months. His opinions were heard around the world via the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence-France Presse and MSNBC. New Orleans' WSDU-TV inteviewed Link, also formerly of the Army Corps of Engineers: "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is building a model of the 17th Street Canal to figure out what caused the levee breach. 'Our job No. 1 is to feed back to the people doing the design and the repairs everything we are learning in real time,' said Dr. Lewis 'Ed' Link of the University of Maryland. Lewis heads up the Inter-Agency Performance Evaluation Task Force, the long name for the group who must figure out what went wrong during Katrina and how to stop it from happening again." Maryland Daily Record: "With the threat of bioterrorism hanging over American heads, many of the nation's preparedness efforts have focused on developing effective and safe vaccines for deadly diseases such as smallpox. But a Maryland company is working on a therapy for smallpox, an agent classified as Category A pathogen by the federal government, meaning it poses the 'greatest potential threat for harming public health,' according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BioFactura Inc., based at the Maryland Technology Development Center incubator in Rockville and staffed by four former colleagues from Human Genome Sciences Inc., is developing a monoclonal antibody intended to cure the disease. The 2-year-old firm announced yesterday that some time this year it would begin using the Bioprocess Scale-Up Facility (Clark School of Engineering) at the University of Maryland, College Park to develop a large-scale manufacturing technique for its antibody or antibody cocktail." Society & Culture
The Chronicle of Higher Education: "A Bolivian scholar hired by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has been unable to take up his post because the federal government has withheld his visa. The case has again raised concern over what critics have described as the arbitrary use of government power to keep foreign academics out of the United States.... Barbara Weinstein, a history professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, called the situation 'very disturbing.' Ms. Weinstein is president-elect of the American Historical Association, which has spoken out on behalf of Mr. Ari." Charles Wellford, professor of criminology and criminal justice, receives $340,000 from the state to conduct an audit of Maryland crime statistics. The Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention commissions the study. The media questioned the timing of the audit as it is an election year. But Wellford's credentials are impeccable. The Baltimore Sun: "The University of Maryland professor who will conduct the study said yesterday that officials in the governor's crime control office approached him with the idea, (and) recommended the timetable... Wellford said that if there is a political motive behind the project, he is not aware of it.... 'It's certainly not my motive, and certainly not the intent,' Wellford said. 'It's not unusual for us to get called in to try to be an objective voice on what crime data are saying.' " The Jerusalem Post: "A series of major archeological finds in Caesarea have heightened tensions in an ongoing dispute over the future of the city. The Association for Caesarea, a citizens' advocacy group, has alleged that the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which has jurisdiction over the finds, has been pressured by the Caesarea Development Company to forfeit its control so that controversial development plans can continue." Kenneth Holum, a professor of history, writes a letter to the Association for Caesarea, saying that development within the ancient settlement zones should be discouraged. UM and the University of Haifa sponsor the archaeological project. The BBC releases results of a poll done by UM's Program on International Policy Attitudes and the polling firm GlobeScan. "Is the Bush administration winning or losing what it calls the global war on terror? That is a question more for military analysts and security experts. But if the findings of a new opinion poll for the BBC are anything to go by, it certainly seems to be losing the battle for global public opinion. The poll was carried out by the international opinion research firm GlobeScan, together with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland in the US. 'Though the Bush administration has framed the intervention in Iraq as a means of fighting terrorism, all around the world - including in the US - most people view it as having increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks,' Pipa director Steven Kull notes. 'The near-unanimity of this assessment among countries is remarkable in global public opinion polling.' " Earlier in the month, the PIPA/BBC/GlobeScan poll released findings from another side of world opinion. Among the findings that appeared in the world press: "Iran is the country most widely viewed as having a negative influence in the world, with the US in second place.... The survey for the BBC World Service asked how 39,435 people in 33 nations across the globe saw various nations." Growing up in an orphanage can substantially stunt early cognitive and physical development — but being placed in foster care may reverse this to some degree, a study of abandoned Romanian children suggests. However, UM's Nathan Fox and colleagues from Harvard and Minnesota observe that boys do not show the same initial improvements as girls when placed in foster care: 'The girls placed in foster care do much better in terms of their IQ scores compared with boys,' says Fox, professor of human development. The study involved comprehensive assessments of 136 children placed in institutional care as part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, answers anxious questions as the Middle East boils over. He comments on controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed and the bombing of a sacred Shiite mosque; appears on the CBS Evening News, with anchor Bob Schieffer, and ABC's Nightline; attends a Doha, Qatar conference where he releases a poll on Arab feelings toward the U.S.; and authors a widely-read op/ed for The Washington Post on the Palestinian elections. From the latter: "The reality shown by Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections is this: If fully free elections were held today in the rest of the Arab world, Islamist parties would win in most states. Even with intensive international efforts to support 'civil society' and nongovernmental organizations, elections in five years would probably yield the same results. The notion, popular in Washington over the past few years, that American programs and efforts can help build a third alternative to both current governments and Islamists is simply a delusion." Gerrit Knaap, director of UM's National Center for Smart Growth, is one of three organizers of a unique way to combat sprawl in Maryland. The Baltlimore Sun: "Can a thousand or so adult Marylanders playing with Legos save the state from more suburban sprawl? With a recent poll showing many residents upset about the pace of growth in their communities, sprawl critics are joining with their frequent foes, developers, and with University of Maryland researchers for a bit of game-playing aimed at turning public discontent into a broad consensus on how - and where - the state should grow over the next 25 years. Public officials, home builders, merchants and civic activists will be invited to participate in one of four 'visioning' exercises to be held around the state in May and June." Equiano, the African, Biography of a Self-Made Man, authored by Vincent Carretta, professor of English, is reviewed for The Washington Post by Mary Frances Berry, formerly chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Berry praises the work, and at one point, writes: "Carretta reminds us that every autobiography is an act of re-creation and that a manumitted slave had a necessarily broad opportunity for redefinition. However, after meticulously researching the voyages of ships, the dates of writings and other materials, Carretta confirms the fundamental historical accuracy of Equiano's story. He explores whether Equiano made a few mistakes -- including his birthplace, which was either West Africa or South Carolina -- only to conclude that the evidence is 'conflicting.' Carretta also worries inordinately over whether Equiano secretly believed that particular misfortunes he suffered stemmed from racism. But his biography of the era's most important African in the English-speaking world should delight readers." The long-awaited report by UM and University of Maryland, Baltimore County researchers on the feasibility of creating a paper trail in 2006 for voters with the state's Diebold voting machines, and the user-friendliness of those machines if a paper trail is incorporated, was given before a panel of disappointed legislators. UM's Paul Herrnson, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship, researched the usability factor, which was found wanting. Donald Norris of UMBC said it's not possible before the November elections to create a system so voters "can confirm that their ballot was recorded accurately." The two spoke before the House Ways & Means Committee. A stay of execution is issued by the state Court of Appeals for convicted murderer Vernon Evans Jr., who used the report on the fairness of the death penalty in Maryland by Ray Paternoster, professor of criminology and criminal justice, as a basis of his appeal.  Fall '05 :
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