Geology majors Lenny Ancuta ’10 and Matthew Kissane ’10 presented their research at the 23rd annual Keck Symposium in Houston recently.
The Geology Department is a member of the prestigious Keck Geology Consortium, a group of 18 small liberal arts colleges focused on developing and maintaining a research-rich teaching and learning environment.
More than 50 geology students, their advisors and project directors came together at the three-day conference.
Ancuta gave an oral presentation on his work in Southeast Alaska using fission track dating of zircons, key in understanding the tectonic evolution in the region. Working with his advisor, professor John Garver, he yielded several new research questions for future Union students to tackle.
Kissane gave an oral presentation on the chemical breakdown and weathering of volcanic rocks in central Oregon and how they affect watershed chemistry. His advisor was professor Holli Frey, who plans to continue the research this summer.
Matthew Kissane 10 – Keck Geology Symposium
With one of the most distinguished track records of research in an undergraduate setting, the consortium repeatedly has been funded by Keck, U.S. National Science Foundation and, most recently, ExxonMobil. During the first day of the symposium, students learned about the oil and gas industry and toured research labs of ExxonMobil geoscientists.
Each student spent four weeks doing summer field research as a basis for a senior thesis or research project. During the academic year, they worked with their advisors to analyze and interpret data.
Before arriving in Houston, they summarized their findings in an extended abstract, archived online.
"Reibo,” a large orchestral work by Hilary Tann, the John Howard Payne Professor of Music, will be premiered May 15 by the Community Women's Orchestra in Oakland, Calif., conducted by Kathleen McGuire. The piece was commissioned for the orchestra’s 25th anniversary concert, which features four female composers and four female conductors. Tann's involvement with the women-in-music movement dates to the early 1980s, when she was editor of the Newsletter of the International League of Women Composers, a quarterly journal printed by Joyce Chabot at the Union College Printing Shop for many years. In the past 25 years, the 16-page newsletter has grown into the 60-page Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and the women-in-music movement has made significant inroads into mainstream concert-making. In writing "Reibo," Tann reconnected with fellow campaigners to celebrate the presence of women performers, composers and conductors on the concert stage. The Oakland concert will be recorded for CD and includes works by Gwyneth Walker, Dame Ethel Smyth and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.
Andrew Rapoff, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of bioengineering, assisted by anthropologists Scott McGraw of Ohio State University and David Daegling of the University of Florida, recently presented research titled "Torsion and Bending Resistance Provided by the Mesial Groove of Maxillary Canines in Cercopithecoid Monkeys" at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, N.M. Rapoff presented evidence that a relatively large groove that extends the length of the canine tooth of the upper jaw functions to alleviate the additional stress from the tooth twisting when it is simultaneously subjected to bending loads that arise during observed feeding and mating behaviors. This work was supported by NSF grants to Rapoff and his colleagues.
Kristin Fox, associate professor of chemistry, recently was featured on a WRBG (Ch. 6) report on the viability of using hair to help control the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Fox conducted an experiment in her lab showing how the process would work. Click here to see the video clip.
The Schenectady County Legislature at its meeting Tuesday, May 11, honored the College for its sustainability efforts and its recent inclusion in The Princeton Review’s first “Guide to Green Colleges.”
The free guide, produced in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council, includes schools that have “demonstrated an above average commitment to sustainability in terms of campus infrastructure, activities and initiatives.”
The guide is based on a survey of hundreds of colleges nationwide. Data examined include institutional commitment to LEED building certification, environmental literacy programs, formal sustainability committees, use of renewable energy resources, recycling and conservation programs, and more.
On hand at the county meeting to accept the honor was assistant biology professor Jeff Corbin, assistant chemistry professor Laura MacManus-Spencer, Erin Delman ’12, Jill Falchi ’10, Meghan Haley-Quigley ’11, Shabana Hoosein ’11, and Terry Miltner and Fred Puliafico from Facilities.
The resolution reads:
A RESOLUTION HONORING UNION COLLEGE FOR ITS LISTING AS ONE OF THE “GREENEST COLLEGES" IN THE UNITED STATES
WHEREAS, Union College has been listed by The Princeton Review’s first “Guide to Green Colleges” as among the country’s most environmentally responsible colleges; and
WHEREAS, the Guide is based on a survey of hundreds of colleges nationwide and their commitment to environmental concerns; and
WHEREAS, Union College was selected for the work of its U Sustain Committee, made up of about 70 environmentally and socially concerned students, faculty and staff who guide the College’s sustainability initiatives; and
WHEREAS, among its efforts are the College’s Presidential Green Grants, Octupus’s Garden, Union’s organic community garden; and the school’s commitment to wind power; and
WHEREAS, in 2007, President Stephen Ainlay was among the first to sign the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, pledging to formally work on reducing and eventually eliminating, campus global warming emissions; now therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Schenectady County Legislature acknowledges the honor bestowed on Union College for being listed as one of the "Greenest Colleges” in the United States.
The 2010 Union College Senior Invitational Exhibition will open Thursday,May 20, at the Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial. It runs through June 13, with a closing reception and awards slated for Saturday, June 12, 2-4 p.m. Participating artists include Emily Burgess, Elizabeth Culp, Allison Cuozzo, Bianca Germain, Lindsey Goldberg, Alex M. Handin, Carley Jacobson, Sara Katherine Jacobson, Rebecca Lee, James Burleigh Morton, Lauren Muske and David Sayles.
Are you a good judge of character? Are you observant? Perceptive? Knowledgeable? Do you have an excellent memory? Are you an accomplished multi-tasker?
Christopher Chabris
According to “The Invisible Gorilla, And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” a new book co-authored by Assistant Psychology Professor Christopher Chabris, in these and other skills you’re almost certainly not as good as you think you are.
Published by Crown, the book tackles “six everyday illusions that profoundly influence our lives,” the authors write: “the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential.”
The book, to be released Tuesday, May 18, is already generating positive reviews. The latest issue of Psychology Today states, “If the authors make you second-guess yourself 10 times today, they've done their job.”
And Kirkus Book Reviews calls it “A fascinating look at little-known illusions that greatly affect our daily lives … Their readable book offers surprising insights into just how clueless we are about how our minds work and how we experience the world … Bound to have wide popular appeal.”
Chabris and co-author Daniel Simons, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, study visual cognition, which explores the brain mechanisms that govern visual attention. They are fascinated by how what we see (or don’t see) influences our perceptions of ourselves and of the world.
A central character is the gorilla of the title, which first “appeared” in an experiment conducted in the late 1990s by the authors while Simons was on the faculty at Harvard University and Chabris was a graduate student there.
This now-famous experiment (Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in The New Yorker) asked subjects to watch a video of people passing basketballs back and forth. Their task: to count passes between people dressed in white and to ignore the passes of those in black. Midway through the clip, a person in a gorilla suit strolled into the middle of the action. The gorilla stopped, faced the camera, beat on its chest and then casually sauntered out of view.
Nearly half of the study participants who viewed the video didn’t see the gorilla at all, an example of “inattentional blindness,” or the failure to see something obvious because one’s mental resources are devoted to something else. The book offers many real-world examples of inattentional blindness, some of which have had dire, even fatal, consequences.
“The real problem is that you don’t notice what you don’t notice,” said Chabris, who joined the Union faculty in 2007. “So you never get any personal feedback about the things you never see, and therefore you think you are seeing much more than you are. This illusion can lead people to do dangerous things with a false sense of security, such as talk or text on a cell phone while driving.”
“The Invisible Gorilla, And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” a new book co-authored by Assistant Psychology Professor Christopher Chabris.
The book also explores the unreliability of memory; the unconscious – and often misplaced – faith we have in confident people; our near-hallucinatory belief in our own understanding of the world; our tendency to see patterns linking unrelated events; and the almost superstitious faith that we have vast, untapped abilities.
“We tend to think our intuitions are fantastic, but they’re drastically off in some cases—and that has consequences,” said Chabris, who is also an adjunct assistant professor of neurology at Albany Medical Center and a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
One example in the book illustrates how people can be swayed by expressions of confidence. It involves the 1985 rape conviction of a North Carolina man, Ronald Cotton. The victim had gone to great lengths to memorize what her attacker looked like, and picked Cotton out of a police lineup. At trial, she was a supremely confident witness, expressing “no doubt” that he was her attacker. Based largely on her testimony, a jury convicted Cotton after only four hours of deliberation. Ten years later, DNA evidence exonerated Cotton; another man had committed the rape.
“The Invisible Gorilla” also challenges other popular books that give the impression that our gut instincts and intuitions are profoundly reliable. But in many cases one’s intuitions are actually the result of years of study or experience in a given field, Chabris said.
“If I ask a chess grandmaster to glance at a board and give me a gut reaction, it’s going to be good,” he said. “But it’s not because the grandmaster’s raw intuition is good. It’s because of years of dedicated practice and study that have automated complex judgments.”
Chabris and Simons, who in 2004 were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” will soon embark on a nationwide book tour.
Chabris hopes the book will offer solace to those who doubt the exaggerated claims of much of the self-help movement.
“There are no simple ways to overcome the limitations on our own minds,” he says, “but we can make better decisions by learning to keep an eye out for invisible gorillas in our own thoughts and in the world around us.”
