Kaitlyn O'Brien ’11 traveled with her advisor, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Rebecca Koopmann, to the second annual NSF-sponsored ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA) Undergraduate Team Workshop at Arecibo Observatory recently. The observatory, located in Puerto Rico, is home to the 305-meter diameter Arecibo telescope, the largest telescope in the world. O’Brien joined 18 undergraduate students from 14 colleges and universities across the United States to learn about radio astronomy, observing at Arecibo Observatory, and applications to the study of other galaxies.
The multi-year ALFALFA project is a survey of a large area of the sky at radio wavelengths appropriate for the detection of neutral hydrogen gas in other galaxies. For her sophomore project, O’Brien is researching a concentration of galaxies within the ALFALFA survey area to determine which galaxies are gravitationally associated and how their proximity has influenced their evolution. The team workshop, made possible by an NSF grant to Union, was organized by Koopmann and collaborators.
Hilary Tann, the John Howard Payne Professor of Music, was a featured guest of the Harvard Festival of Women’s Choirs last weekend. Her composition, “That Jewel-Spirit,” was performed by the Radcliffe Choral Society, conducted by Jameson Marvin. The festival featured 12 choirs singing in three concerts, and included seminars for students, conductors, publishers and composers. In addition, the Harvard University Choir gave the U.S. premiere performance of “Paradise,” a setting of George Herbert’s poem first performed by the internationally known choir, Tenebrae, at the Gregynog Festivalin Wales. Two of Tann’s instrumental compositions have been released on a new CD from Beauport Classical, titled “Metamorphosis.” The CD features Tann’s “Like Lightnings” for oboe solo and “Kilvert’s Hills” for bassoon solo. Tann’s compositions have been selected for preview by NetMusicWorks (www.netmusicworks.com). She was composer of the month on Welsh Music Information Center’s Web site in February.
Megan Ferry, director of East Asian Studies and associate professor of Chinese and East Asian Studies, gave a talk at an interdisciplinary conference, "The Status of Theory in Contemporary Chinese Film and Visual Culture," at University of Maryland-College Park. Ferry’s paper is titled, "Between Realism and Romanticism: Queering Gender Representation in Cui Zi'en's Night Scene."
George Bizer, assistant professor of psychology, has been awarded a grant from the Marketing Sciences Institute to apply his research on the valence-framing effect to the business world. Bizer has been studying how negative conceptualization of political attitudes enhances the relative strength of those attitudes, leading to greater certainty, resistance to persuasion and behavioral intention. His new research will assess whether the impact of such framing attitudes can be generalized in a marketing context, using competing brands rather than competing candidates.