This newsletter, prepared monthly, provides highlights of the Performance Plan Updates developed by H&SS Department Heads for the monthly reports to President Jackson. Represented here are works accomplished: grant awards, program and curricular initiatives, appointments, publications, performances, conference papers, and the like. 

AWARDS

Ron Eglash, Assoc. Prof. of STS, participated in a National Science Foundation grant award of $531,549, with $319,196 to RPI and $212,353 to collaborators at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Texas A&M University for their project,  "Collaborative Research: BPC-DP: Improving Minority Student Participation in the Computing Career Pipeline with Culturally Situated Design Tools," with Co-PI Mukkai S. Krishnamoorthy.

Linda Layne, Prof. of STS, was the 2006 Winner of the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction "enduring influence" book prize for Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture; and she also won the Davey Award 2006 for "Protecting the Environment/Preventing Pregnancy Loss: A Conversation with Lois Gibbs, Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice." 

APPOINTMENTS

David Hess, Prof. of STS, was appointed program chair, Society for Social Studies of Science 2007 meeting.

PUBLICATIONS, PERFORMANCE, & EXHIBITIONS

James D. Adams, Prof. and Head of Economics, along with Albert J. Summell and Paula E. Stephan, "Capturing Knowledge: The Location Decision of New PhDs Working in Industry" has been accepted.  It is forthcoming in The Science and Engineering Labor Force in the United States, a volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research, University of Chicago Press in 2007.

Sharon Anderson-Gold, Prof. and Head of STS, submitted her invited contribution on Kant and Herder to be published in the Blackwell Companion to History and Historiography.

Audrey Bennett, Associate Professor of LL&C, delivered a refereed paper titled The Literacy Family and Other Legible Relatives at TypeCon 2006: The Boston T Party, Aug. 9-13, 2006, presented by The Society of Typographic Aficionados, MassArt, and The Museum of Printing.

Jun H. Choi, James H. Watt, and Michael Lynch, faculty in LL&C, published “Perceptions of News Credibility About the War in Iraq : Why War Opponents Perceived the Internet as the Most Credible Medium” (2006) in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(1), article 11.

Ron Eglash, Assoc. Prof. of STS, will publish "History of the Phrase 'Master-Slave' in Engineering Terminology" in Technology and Culture.

John Gowdy, Prof. of Economics, published "Evolutionary Theory and Economic Policy with Reference to Sustainability” Journal of  Bioeconomics 8, 2006, 1-19; “Environmental Awareness and Happiness” Ecological Economics 60, 509-516, 2007, with Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell;  and “Avoiding Self-Organized Extinction: Toward a Co-Evolutionary Economics of Sustainability” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 14, 1-10, 2007 (invited paper).  He also published book reviews including  Nature's Magic, by Peter Corning, In Journal of Bioeconomics 8, 2006, 189-191, and The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure and Darwinism in American Institutionalism by Geoffrey Hodgson, In the Journal of Economic Issues, Dec. 2006, 1169-1174.

Pauline Oliveros, Distinguished Prof. in Arts, received commissions for Blue Heron: In Memory of James Tenney  from Basso Moderne Duo, premiere Nov. 2, 2006 at The Woman's Club of Arlington in Arlington VA and “One Hundred Meeting Places: In Memory of Ron George (1937-2006)” from Erik Carlson, premiere Nov. 30, 2006 by the Miniaturists Society , Lincoln Center, New York NY;  and she was profiled in “Pauline Oliveros: Music to Tune the Soul in Women Dreaming Into”  in Art: Seven Artists Who Create from Dreams by Patician Ariadne, Ph.D.,  Galde Press 2006, and in the Journal: GCMR: Contemporary Music Review: “Interview with Pauline Oliveros - Improvising with the Sonosphere 2006;” and she recorded “Lion's Eye/Lion's Tale” for Gamelan and Gamelan Samples, performed by the Berkeley Gamelan, Commissioned by Barbary Benary for Gamelan Son of Lion, and Neil Rolnick for iEAR 1987,  Deep Listening (DL CD 2006).

Sal Restivo, Prof. of STS, published "Theory of Mind, Social Science, and Mathematical Practice," in Perspectives on Mathematical Practices, edited by Bart van Kerkhove and Jean Paul van Bendegem, Springer 2007.

Neil Rolnick, Prof. in Arts, saw his work, Digits, performed at Musica Acoustica 2006 at the Central Conservatoryu of Music In Bejing, China on Oct. 28, 2006 whle the chamber group, Ethel, played his Shadow Quartet in Melbourne, Australia on Oct. 14, 2006; and violinist Ana Milosovjevic peformed Fiddle Faddle at the International Review of Composers - Medjunarodna Tribinia Kompositora in Belgrade, Serbia on Nov. 19, 2006 and the next day at the Sala Prve gimnazije Kraguvejac, Serbia.

Ron Sun, Prof. in Cognitive Science, and X. Zhang, published Accounting for a Variety of Reasoning Data within a Cognitive Architecture” in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol.18, No. 2, pp.169 -191. 2006.

 

LECTURES & PANELS

James D. Adams, Prof. & Head of Economics, was a discussant at a National Science Foundation/Stanford Research International Conference on "Publication Trends in Science," held in Arlington, Virginia on Nov. 7, 2006; presented a paper, "Recent Trends in U.S. Science and Engineering," at a RAND Corporation/Department of Defense Conference on "The Gathering Storm and Its Implications for National Security," held in Arlington, Virginia on Nov. 8, 2006; presented a paper, "Industrial Scientific Discovery," at the Economics Seminar, the University at Albany, on Nov. 27, 2006.

Ron Eglash, Assoc. Prof. of STS, presented: "Risk and Recursion: Characterizing Self-organization Patterns Across IT, BT and NT for Social Analysis." At the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

John Gowdy, Prof. of Economics, was an invited member of a plenary session panel at the meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics celebrating the centennial of the birth of the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. New Delhi, India, December 18, 2006, and gave the keynote address to the Association for Social Economics at the American Economic Association meetings in Chicago, Jan. 4, 2006.

David Hess, Prof. of STS, presented "Object Conflicts and Environmental Justice in the U.S. ,"   at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association; and "Just Sustainability and Localism: A Technology Studies Perspective," at the Society for Social Studies of Science. He was a discussant on "Theoretical Practice/Practical Theories: Technologies of Change," at the American Anthropological Association; and a panel discussant on "Undone Science," at the Society for Social Studies of Science.  He was also a Co-organizer of the panel on "What's to be Done with Undone Science?" and organizer of the panel on "STS Perspectives on Justice and Sustainability" at the Society for Social Studies of Science, the Co-organizer of the panel on "Knowledge, the Environment, and Social Movements: Critical Intersections" at the American Anthropological Association; and was the organizer of a First-Year Studies Lecture (RPI) b Michael Shuman on the "Small Mart Revolution."

Linda Layne, Prof. of STS, gave the Grand Rounds Presentation to the ob/gyn residents at Beth Israel in NYC, she organized and presented on the panel "Making Loss Visible Through Fiction, First-Person Accounts, the News,  and  Legal Testimony" at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in NYC, and she gave the preview of "Protecting the Environment/Preventing Pregnancy Loss: A Conversation with Lois Gibbs, Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice" at the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Sal Restivo, Prof. of STS, gave the plenary "Fireside Chat: 1976 and all that..." lecture on "The Elusive Sociological Imagination and the Pursuit of the Hard Case," reflections at the Society for Social Studies of Science (session co-organized with co-presenters Harry Collins and Karin Knorr-Cetina).

Ron Sun, Prof. in Cognitive Science, was an Invited speaker, at the Workshop on Model Comparison and Model Validation, Syracuse, NY.  He presented a talk on Validation of cognitive architectures; and he served as a member of the program committee, Agent-Based Computing Workshop III (ABC 2006).  Orlando, Florida. Nov. 6-10, 2006.

James P. Zappen, Prof. in LL&C, delivered "'Why Not Change the World?': Developing and Sustaining Technical Communication Research and Graduate Programs in a Technological University," Plenary Session, Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, 33rd Annual Conference, San Francisco, California, Oct. 12-14, 2006, and also "The Many Rhetorics of Plato's Gorgias," American Society for the History of Rhetoric, 2006 Conference, San Antonio, Texas, Nov. 15, 2006.