Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Thomas C. Werner,
Florence B. Sherwood Professor of
Physical Sciences, Department of Chemistry, presented a talk in August on his
research with undergraduates at a symposium at Vanderbilt
University honoring the 70th
birthday of his Ph.D. advisor, David Hercules. In June he attended the Council
on Undergraduate Research Conference at Connecticut
College, where he organized and
chaired a session on the NCUR/Lancy Initiative.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Christina Sorum, dean of faculty and professor of classics, was a
featured scholar in a History Channel program titled “Gods and Goddesses” which
aired recently. “I think it says something very interesting about a culture
whether it considers its formative moments to be ones of conflict or ones of … peaceful
production,” she said during one of her dozen segments in the two-hour special.
“I am overwhelmed each time I study or teach a course that deals with Greek
mythology how persistent these conflicts are.” In another segment, she said, “Hope is … an evil, which is, I think,
fascinating … Hope allows you to act with a sense that you can control the
future and … that is a very dangerous thing to do. You can't control the
future.”

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

David
Hannay, professor
of computer science, is to publish a paper, “Interactive Theory,” in
the December issue of Inroads-The SIGCSE
Bulletin, (Vol. 34 No.4) the Computer Science Education journal of the
Association for Computing Machinery. The web-based simulations encompass the
six core abstract models of computation: finite-state, pushdown and Turing
machines as well as regular expressions, context-free grammars, and recursive
functions. All six simulations come packaged with predefined
machines/expressions/grammars/functions. Users can also create
machines/expressions/grammars/functions from scratch. Each of the machine
simulations traces arbitrary input as processed by the machine. The regular
expression simulator tests if an entered list of words are part of the language
of a regular expression, and generates random words represented by an
expression. The context-free grammar simulator also generates words in the
corresponding language. Finally, the evaluation of functions can be traced to a
user-specified depth of recursion. The simulators can be accessed at http://cs.union.edu/~hannayd/csc140/simulators.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Ilene M. Kaplan,
professor of sociology, has been invited to work with the National Marine
Fisheries Service to study tradition and changing marine policy in the Honolulu
Seafood Auction. She will focus on changes in marketing practices in the South
Pacific and the impact of technology on auction procedures. She also was asked
to participate in a Fishing Communities Workshop in April in Washington,
D.C., to advise staff at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the development of new marine
policies; and on a Washington, D.C.,
task force on Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management. She published an invited
article on safety at sea that was part of a government series on safety.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Wilfried Wilms, assistant professor of German, presented a paper “Colonizing
Cologne – Life in the Ruins in Heinrich Böll's The Silent Angel at the
17th annual, international, multidisciplinary conference on World War II at Siena
College. The paper explored W.G.
Sebald's book Air War and Literature, specifically his 'repression
hypothesis' concerning the inability (or unwillingness) of German writers to address
the destruction of German cities during the bombing war. Wilms also is author
of two essays, “Im Griff des Politischen – Odoardo
Galotti's Ermächtigung zur Konfliktfähigkeit,” which was published in March
in Germany's Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte, vol. 76/1 (2002): 50-73, and “The Universalist Spirit of
Conflict – Lessing's Political Enlightenment,” which appears in the September issue
of Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, vol. 94.3 (2002).