David Hemmendinger, associate professor of
computer science, has written two long articles for Encyclopedia Britannica.
“Programming Languages” and “Computers,” the lead article on its topic, will
appear in both the online and printed versions of the encyclopedia. He also has
contributed three shorter articles to the encyclopedia-“Data Compression,”
“Computer Graphics,” and “Computer Memory”-and has been commissioned to write
five more entries.
David C. Ogawa
, assistant professor of visual
arts, presented a lecture on “Modernism and Memory:
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and the Transformation of the Viewer” at the fall lecture
series at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y. George
Butterstein, the Florence B. Sherwood Professor of Life Sciences, gave a paper
titled “The influence of the number of fetal/placental units on maternal hormone leptin in
the pregnant rat,” at the annual meeting
of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in Baltimore.
He also gave a seminar on “Hormones, Adiposity, and
Reproduction,” at the Center for the Reproduction of
Endangered Species (CRES) at the San Diego Zoo, where he is
a visiting research scientist.
David Hannay, professor of computer science, is
the author of a paper, “Interactive Theory,” in the December issue of
Inroads-The SIGCSE Bulletin, the computer science education journal of the
Association for Computing Machinery. The web-based simulations encom- pass 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 is 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.
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.
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.”
Wilfried Wilms, assistant professor of German,
presented a paper titled “Colonizing Cologne -Life in the Ruins in Heinrich
Böll's The Silent Angel” at the seventeenth 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).