Posted on May 18, 2008

A family of seven from Schenectady has a new home, thanks to the College and the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Michael and Kelly Harris, and their five children – Sujea, 12, Sabrina, 9, Michael, Jr., 8, Isaiah, 8, and Samone, 3 – were surrounded by dozens of well-wishers Sunday as the house at 1124 Barrett Street was officially dedicated.

"I just want to say thank you to everyone," an emotional Kelly Harris said, standing in the middle of her crowded new kitchen. "I love all the volunteers so much. They worked really hard. They're just wonderful people." 

The College donated the house to the local Habitat chapter and the campus community has worked since last fall to help refurbish it.

 President Stephen C. Ainlay said the genesis for the project sprang from students inspired by their trip to New Orleans to assist with rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

"They approached me about doing something to help someone in Schenectady," Ainlay said.

Ainlay challenged the campus community to help restore the home as a way to re-cultivate its sense of social-connectedness and civic commitment.

Hundreds of volunteers, including members of athletic teams, Greek organizations, student groups, faculty, staff and administrators pitched in to renovate the house, built in 1910.

Kelly Harris was moved by the College's response.

"I'm so thankful for Union College. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them," she said, clutching Samone.

The family had to complete 400 hours of “sweat equity” and a financial background check before they could buy the home, which is just blocks from campus. Minor work on the house still needs to be completed, but the family should be in their new digs after the closing in a few weeks.

Habitat for Humanity International is a nonprofit, nondenominational housing organization. Since 1976, Habitat has built more than 200,000 houses around the world, providing more than 1 million people in some 3,000 communities with safe, decent, affordable shelter.

Posted on May 16, 2008

Lewis Davis, assistant professor of Economics, has published an article on “Scale Effects in Growth: A Role for Institutions” in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. The article suggests a role for legal and physical infrastructure in determining the demand for new ideas. 

Research by Psychology Professor George Bizer was featured in a recent issue of New Scientist magazine dedicated to the art of persuasion. Bizer discusses the framing technique, a key tactic in election campaigns.

Mechanical Engineering major Joseph Martel ’08 is one of 35 students nationwide to win a prestigious Tau Beta Pi Graduate Fellowship. The award from the national engineering honor society assists students in their first year of graduate study. Martel will be pursuing his Ph.D. in engineering at Harvard University. 

Posted on May 16, 2008

Union’s own Chester A. Arthur, the country’s 21^st president, is featured in a new documentary airing on WMHT.

“Presidents in Our Backyard.” which debuted Thursday and will be rebroadcast Saturday, May 17, at midnight and Sunday, May 18, at 7 p.m., examines the life of eight U.S. presidents with close ties to New York state.

For a preview of the Arthur segment, click here.

Arthur, Class of 1848, is prominently featured in the one-hour program hosted by Matt Ryan of WMHT. Ryan visited the campus in March, examining artifacts and other memorabilia from Arthur’s days as a student, along with items acquired by the College, including a walnut and leather writing desk (rumored to have a secret liquor cabinet) currently used by President Stephen C. Ainlay.

Rachel Seligman, director of the Mandeville Gallery and curator of the Permanent Collection, and James Underwood, the Chauncey H. Winters Research Professor of Political Science, are interviewed in the program, which also includes scenes of campus and the Chester Arthur statue, which stands outside the gate of Jackson’s Garden.

Local politicians were enlisted to read from letters or speeches of the presidents, with State Sen. Hugh Farley, R-Schenectady, providing the voice of Arthur.

The son of a Baptist minister, Arthur grew up in Union Village, N.Y. (Greenwich, N.Y.) In 1845 he entered Union College, where he was a member of Psi Upsilon and the Delphian Institute debating society. He was elected into Phi Beta Kappa his senior year.

A Republican, Arthur held several positions in New York state government and was nominated to be James Garfield’s vice president in 1880. He was sworn in as president on Sept. 20, 1881, a day after Garfield died from a gunshot wound.

Known as the “The Gentleman Boss” and the “Dude President” for his sense of style, Arthur died from a kidney ailment on Nov. 18, 1886, a year-and-a-half after leaving office, at his home in New York City. He is buried near his wife in the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, N.Y., some 20 miles from his alma mater.

In addition to Arthur, other U.S. presidents featured in the WMHT special are Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Millard Fillmore, Martin Van Buren, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley.

Posted on May 16, 2008

Posted on May 16, 2008

Frances Allen, one of the most successful women in the computing field, will speak on “High Performance Computers and Compilers: A Personal Perspective,” Wednesday, May 21 at 4:30 p.m. in F.W. Olin Center Auditorium. Her talk will be preceded by a reception in the Olin Atrium at 3:45 p.m.

Allen is an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T. J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and the first female recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award.

She also played an instrumental role in the highly secret intelligence work of the precursor to the U.S. National Security Agency in its code-breaking activities during the Cold War.

Allen received a degree in education from Albany State Teacher’s College, now the University at Albany, in the early 1950s. She taught high school math for two years before earning a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, where she was enticed by an IBM recruitment brochure titled “My Fair Ladies,” targeted to campus women technologists. She took a job as a programmer at IBM to pay off her college debt – and stayed. 

Allen spent most of her 45-year career at IBM working on how to enable both programmer productivity and program performance in the development of computer applications. She is widely recognized for her work on the theory of program optimization and of leading PTRAN (Parallel Translations) project, as well as for making possible computing techniques that are central to business and technology today.

She was the first woman to be named an IBM fellow, the company’s highest technical honor, in 1989.

As the 2006 Turing Award recipient, Allen was recognized for “pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.”

Widely considered the Nobel Prize in computing, the Turing is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing.

Allen is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineers and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE and the Computer History Museum. She holds several honorary doctorate degrees and has served on numerous national technology boards.

Her Union talk is sponsored by the Computer Science Department.