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In the news …
November 20, 2007
Arizona State University Ignites China's Youth for Mars Exploration
Forty highly energized Chinese high school students, racing a deadline, used bagfuls of everyday materials from the dollar store to build models of the first human outpost on Mars.
The students, who came from all over China, were competing in the final round of the China Youth Space Academy, an academic challenge joint partnership with Arizona State University, the Chinese government-run Web site, China.com.cn, and Beijing's Flying Spirit advertising agency.
The China Youth Space Academy aims to excite high school students about space science and engineering – a major focus for ASU – and to create a communication channel for students from the United States and China to understand and respect each other’s culture.
The 15 students who scored highest among the 40 finalists will travel to ASU at the end of January. They will join a group of high school students from Nogales, Ariz., for a 10-day hands-on space exploration experience. Together, the American and Chinese students will work on space exploration projects at ASU's Mars Space Flight Facility in the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
Looking for top science talent
During the two-day national competition, held Nov. 17 and 18, in Beijing, student competitors were interviewed, in English, about their interests, capabilities and long-term goals. The students also competed in a Jeopardy-style question-and-answer contest with tough questions drawn from a variety of subject areas.
Then came a "talent show" – an opportunity for each student to demonstrate proficiency in some area. Students chose fields ranging from singing, folk dance and musical instruments (both Western and classical Chinese) to artistic paper cutting and calligraphy.
The toughest part of the competition, however, was designing a viable outpost that could support a six-person crew on Mars for 15 months with no supplies from Earth.
Students, who were divided into eight teams of five members each, were armed with a list of scientific data about the harsh Martian environment and basic human survival necessities, such as daily quantities of food, water, air and power. The teams had to decide where their outpost would be located, what its scientific purpose would be, and what skills the crew would have. Then they had to design an outpost habitat and build a model of it using ordinary materials such as paper cups, Styrofoam balls, CDs and plastic tubing.
The deadline was 8 a.m. on the second day, when each team had 10 minutes to describe their model's details as the judges looked on and assessed how carefully thought-out each plan was. Questions from the judges probed the students' reasons for choosing various aspects of their design.
Among the judges were ASU faculty and staff, and others from prestigious Chinese institutions, including Tsinghua University and the Beijing Planetarium. The entire two days of the final competition was videotaped by China Central Television and is being edited into a show to be broadcast throughout China.
Showcasing ASU strengths
Co-sponsoring the competition was a natural step for Arizona State University, says R.F. “Rick” Shangraw Jr., ASU’s vice president of research and economic affairs and one of the judges. "Other universities talk about their connections to China," he says. "We're actually there."
“In fact,” he adds, "we are so much involved that we have this television show promoting ASU's science and engineering research across all of China."
Shangraw led the ASU delegation that served on the final competition panel of judges. Joining Shangraw was Jennie Si, professor of electrical engineering in ASU's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. Other ASU judges included Philip Christensen, Regents' Professor of geological sciences and director of ASU’s Mars Space Flight Facility, and Sheri Klug, director of the ASU Mars Education Program.
"ASU is the first educational institution outside of China to co-host such a large-scale Chinese national event," says Si, who also is director of ASU's China initiatives and special projects in the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs.
ASU was involved from the beginning. The 40 finalists were selected from more than 12,000 students who registered to take an online test in the first round. Staff at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration developed the online test, which evaluated students' knowledge of the solar system and space exploration. Similarly, the Mars outpost project was chosen to reflect the combined science and engineering focus of the school, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The China Youth Space Academy has an important part in helping to advance one of the university's strategic goals.
"For ASU to be involved in this competition gives us access to China's top high school students," says Si.
Looking ahead, she says, "This was a highly successful event for all three partners. Everybody's looking forward to continuing and creating an even bigger success next year."
Source: Arizona State University
November 6, 2007
Elizabethtown College Musicians to Present Chamber Concert
Elizabethtown College musicians will present a concert of chamber music at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 19, in Zug Recital Hall. The event is open to the public free of charge.
Chamber music is written for combinations of instruments smaller than an orchestra or band that can present a wide variety of tone colors and musical styles. The Elizabethtown concert will feature student performers in selections for flute choir, piano quartet, clarinet quintet, French horn quintet, string quartet, low brass ensemble, and Afro-Caribbean hand drums. Composers range from Bach, Vivaldi, and Mozart in the 18th century to Irving Berlin in the 20th century.
Located in southeastern Pennsylvania, Elizabethtown offers its 1900 students more than 50 academic programs in the liberal arts, sciences and professional studies. Driven by its motto to “Educate for Service,” Elizabethtown centers learning in strong relationships, links classroom instruction with experiential learning, emphasizes international and cross-cultural perspectives and nurtures the capacity for lives of purpose.
Source: Elizabethtown College, Pennsylavania
November 4, 2007
Washington College's Olsen Presents 'Literature Before the Book'
What was literary culture like before the printing press, and how does it relate to the literary culture of today? Join Corey Olsen, Assistant Professor of English at Washington College, when he presents "Breaking the Silence: Literature Before the Book," at the Rose O'Neill Literary House on Tuesday, November 6, at 11:30 a.m.
Olsen will be talking about what kinds of things (punctuation, for instance) people take for granted today that did not exist in a primarily oral community. Medieval manuscript images will be presented to the audience and Olsen will discuss the transition of literary art from the spoken word to the printed page.
Olsen taught at Temple University, Columbia University and Nyack College before coming to WC in the fall of 2004. He is the treasurer for the WC Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, faculty advisor for Sigma Tau Delta and the Writer's Union, and humanities editor for the Washington College Review.
He is involved in the scholarly recording of medieval texts and is at work on an interactive web project. "The Medieval Reading Experience" will be a web site, based on the Winchester manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory, designed to introduce modern readers to reading medieval texts in their original forms.
Admission to "Breaking the Silence: Literature Before the Book" is free and open to the public.
Source: Washington College, Maryland
November 1, 2007
Honors Program of Pace University's Lubin School Receives $25,000 Grant from Goldman Sachs Foundation
The chamber musicians of the Shanghai Quartet spoke and performed last year for undergraduates in the honors program at Pace University's Lubin School of Business.
Their appearance typified the program's unusually-broad range of high-powered presenters that also included more familiar business luminaries like Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School and Joel Birnbaum, the special technical advisor to the chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
The program's enhancements will expand still further this year, thanks to a $25,000 grant from the Goldman Sachs Foundation to support skills training workshops on topics like leadership development, communication, and team building.
The practical touch. "These funds let us enrich the down-to-earth, practical emphasis that's a Pace hallmark," said Eric Kessler, Ph.D., the professor of management who has directed the program since its establishment in 2002.
Added Joseph Baczko, the former president of Blockbuster Entertainment and Toys "R" Us International who is dean of the Lubin school, "The Goldman Sachs grant will enable us to expose our students to some of the leading-edge concepts in leadership development and provide them with the opportunity to experience their applications first-hand."
This year alone, the firm hired 18 Pace students for internships and full-time positions. Approximately 240 Pace University alumni are employees. Pace's downtown Manhattan campus is just blocks from Goldman Sachs headquarters.
Hot-button seminars. The Pace business honors program takes special advantage of the University's prime locations amid the executive suites of New York City and Westchester County.
Recent US field visits and seminars have taken place at PricewaterhouseCoopers' corporate headquarters, a Kraft Foods pilot plant, the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, City Hall, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
International field studies explore hot-button topics and locations - high technology in Japan two years ago and economic and financial development in India last year. Next stop: Brazil this spring to study sustainable enterprises.
Fraud, Kathmandu. Honors participants must prepare a senior thesis. Last year one student co-authored a paper on nanotechnology that appeared in a refereed scholarly journal; others found ways to motivate inner city students, documented the effects of beverage packaging on consumer attitudes and looked at the role of stock options in producing fraud.
Yet another of last year's participants is researching the alleviation of poverty in Nepal through the use of microcredit, supported by a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship. Raj Shrestha is studying the socio-economic impact of the Nepalese private banking system's partnerships with rural cooperatives and cottage industries to provide microcredit to poor communities in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. While there, he is also taking graduate courses at Kathmandu University and interning at Everest Bank.
The business honors program typically enrolls about 150 students on the University's campuses in downtown New York City and Pleasantville, in Westchester County, New York. Focused mainly on the junior and senior years and known as the Lubin Leaders and Scholars Program, it also includes advanced sections of core courses and generates strong group camaraderie.
Professor Kessler, an expert on the management of innovation and former President of the Eastern Academy of Management, is attuned to hot topics himself. His most recent work has involved co-editing the new "Handbook of Organizational and Managerial Wisdom" (Sage), the first comprehensive effort to apply to business some of the rapidly-developing social scientific research on the elusive topic of wisdom.
The Goldman-Sachs Foundation's funding adds to Pace's just-announced, $100 million capital campaign - the most ambitious in the University's 100 year history - which already has raised more than $70 million and is set to run through 2010.
Double accreditation. Pace's Lubin School of Business holds an elite distinction shared by fewer than three percent of business schools worldwide - accreditation for both business and accounting by AACSB International. Approximately 4,000 students are enrolled in the school's undergraduate and graduate programs in Downtown and Midtown New York City and Pleasantville and White Plains in Westchester County, New York. www.pace.edu/lubin.
The private metropolitan university of which Lubin is part, Pace University enrolls more than 13,500 students in bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, Lienhard School of Nursing, Lubin School of Business, School of Education, School of Law, and Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems. www.pace.edu.
Source: Pace University, New York
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