Posted on May 5, 2010

Steinmetz Symposium is filled with the creative and scholarly work of students, and this includes their music. Come hear for yourself.

On Friday, May 7, at 8 p.m. in the Memorial Chapel, the Steinmetz Concert will feature the talents of two student soloists.

Rachel Gray ’10 will serve as soloist in the Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra in D by the Baroque composer Tomasso Albinoni, and Elana Korn ’12 will be featured in the Concerto for Contrabass and Orchestra by Serge Koussevitsky.

Both soloists are principal players in the Union College and Community Orchestra, conducted by Professor Victor Klimash of the Music Department.

The orchestra also will play an Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven, Die Geschoepfe des Prometheus and two Dances from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera, Orfeo.

An added feature will be a performance of The Camerata Singers, a student Chamber Choir. They will sing two Renaissance motets: Exultate Deo by Alessandro Scarlatti and Ego sum panis vivus by Giovanni  Pierluigi da Palestrina.

The concert is free and open to the public.
 

Posted on May 5, 2010

A luncheon workshop featuring Noam Zohar, author, ethicist and professor of philosophy at Bar Ilan University, will be held Tuesday, May 11, 12:50-1:50 p.m. in Everest Lounge, Hale House.

He will speak on “Ethics in Warfare: Israeli and American Perspectives and the Just War Tradition.”

Zohar is director of the Graduate Program in Bioethics at Bar Ilan and senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He teaches rabbinics, philosophy of halakhah, and moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on applied ethics, particularly bioethics and ethics of warfare.

He has been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a faculty fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics and its Center for Jewish Studies.

The author of numerous books and essays and co-editor of “The Jewish Political Tradition” series (Yale University Press), Zohar has served on various committees and national commissions, advising on issues of ethics in healthcare. He also has been involved in revising the code of conduct for the Israeli Defense Forces.

Tuesday's event is sponsored by the Michael S. Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative. Those interested in attending should RSVP to Amy Bloom, blooma@union.edu, ext. 8386.

Posted on May 4, 2010

Posted on May 4, 2010

There’s always plenty to do at Union, and now it should be easier than ever to learn about events and activities.

The Office of Communications has introduced a new central online calendar, designed to be a one-stop resource for the campus community and a user-friendly way to highlight the wide array of activities – from academic to recreational – going on throughout the year.

The new calendar is available at calendar.union.edu and currently feeds the latest 10 events into the OnCampus gateway.

Among the features:
·   view and search events by different categories
·   see events and deadlines by day, week or month
·   download events to your personal calendar
·   subscribe to events in a particular category of interest
·   view Athletics events, which now feed automatically from the Athletics calendar

And, using the “submit event” form, anyone on campus can easily add their information.  

“This is a great tool,” said Jill Hungsberg, senior director of Marketing and Communications. “Now that we’ve consolidated all campus calendars into this single source, we hope it will reduce our community’s reliance on broadcast e-mail as a major means of publicizing events.”

Jason Slater, Web manager, spearheaded the calendar project, which included months of research, evaluating vendors and overseeing the technical implementation and launch.

Feedback? Questions? Send to calendar@union.edu.

Posted on May 4, 2010

Biology professor Jeffrey Corbin recently published two papers describing the impacts of invasive species on native species. “Not novel, just better: Competition between native and non-native plants that share species traits,” published in Plant Ecology, details the degree to which a group of invasive grasses in California reduces growth of native grassland species. “Scale, disturbance, and productivity control the native-exotic richness relationship,” was published in Oikos and co-authored by Brody Sandel of UC-Berkeley. The second paper used an experimental system to test the correlation between the number of native species and the number of exotic species. On sabbatical during the 2009-2010 academic year, Corbin is a visiting research scientist at the Eastern New York Chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

Stephanie Silvestre, visiting assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies with a scholarly specialty in Caribbean studies, recently was invited to appear in a new public affairs program, Pulse, on WPBT2, the PBS affiliate in South Florida (serving Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties). Pulse focuses on the Caribbean and the Caribbean-American experience in South Florida. Silvestre discussed the pros and cons of being a European territory in the Caribbean. Several Caribbean islands are still territories of their former colonial rulers, such as Aruba, which is Dutch, and Martinique and Guadeloupe, which are French. The program aired April 18 and April 22. To watch, click here. Go to: “Pulse: Former Colonies in the Caribbean.” 

Helen Hanson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, had a paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The title is “Effects of Obstruent Consonants on Fundamental Frequency at Vowel Onset in English.” The paper provides evidence that a well-known phonetic effect in speech production, called "pitch skip," has a physiological basis, although speakers may learn to exaggerate it to make more salient the contrast between certain voiced and unvoiced consonants. In addition, it shows that this effect interacts with intonation. This research supports a theory of speech production and perception that posits that the linguistic representation of words in our brains is made up of discrete segments, which in turn are bundles of binary features.

In April, Hanson presented a poster co-authored with Angela McLelland ’11 of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Baltimore. “Prosodic Analysis of Subglottal Pressure Contours” described their research on the control of lung pressure during speech production. The work included research done by McLelland at Union last summer. In addition, Hanson and Palma Catravas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, participated in an outreach program at the conference.  In "Listen Up and Get Involved," area Girl Scouts took part in more than 22 hands-on demonstrations. The session included a live Web broadcast from two female researchers doing research in underwater acoustics on a ship in the Philippine Sea.

The Citizen of Laconia, N.H. recently profiled Chris Sheridan ’89, a writer and character voice for “Family Guy.” Sheridan graduated from nearby Gilford High School. To read the story, click here.
 

Kevin Donovan '09 was named a finalist for the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) 2009 Outstanding ECE Student Award. Eta Kappa Nu honors students with an interest and marked ability in electrical engineering who show exemplary scholarship, leadership and character. In addition, for the second straight year, the Phi Chapter of Etta Kappa Nu received an outstanding chapter award for 2008-2009. Chapters are judged on their activities of service to others.