H&SS eNews, July 2007

Greetings from H&SS.

The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. The eNews is compiled and edited by Kelli McElhinny, director of media relations for H&SS. She can be reached at 412-268-6094 or kellim@andrew.cmu.edu. Contact Kelli to submit news about yourself and your fellow alumni, and to sign up for our newsletters.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

For news about the entire university, be sure to check out the university’s home page or the Carnegie Mellon Today website.

Alumni News

--Peter C. Fusaro (B.A. History, 1972) is leading a seminar July 17 in San Francisco on carbon market trading titled "Carbon is the Missing Link in Cleantech Investing." Fusaro is the chairman of Global Change Associates in New York City. He is a pioneer in the field of green trading, in which corporations buy and sell emissions allowances and renewable energy credits.

--Shaun Kurtz (B.A. Information and Decision Systems, 1987) was the executive producer of "Chill", which won the Gold Remi Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fantasy and Horror at the 40th WorldFest Houston International Film Festival. The film also received a Gold Remi Award for Best Special Make-Up Effects. Kurtz resides in Los Angeles. For more information, go to http://www.chillmovie.com/.

--Alan Schultz (B.S. Information Systems, 2002) appeared in "Nintendo Office", a short film written and directed by his friend, Christopher Preskta, which was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Schultz, who works at Batpack Studios in Cranberry, Pa., also served as the film's cinematographer, and he assisted in post-production.

Student News

--Robin Reames, doctoral student in rhetoric in the Department of English, gave the opening plenary lecture "Meaning, Use, Grammar: A Wittgensteinian Approach" at the conference "Naming, Referring and Usage in Linguistics" at the University of Reims, Champagne, France, on May 24th.

--Daniel Schultz, a junior Information Systems major, has received a $15,000 News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation to blog for a year about his idea for a repository of user-created news and media. For information go to http://www.newschallenge.org/winners/schultz.

--Seven H&SS students received Cynthia and Milton Friedman fellowships to fund their internships this summer in Washington, D.C. They are: Alan Wesley Eaton, a senior ethics, history and public policy major; Robert Kaminiski, a senior policy and management major; Louisa Kinoshi, a senior professional writing and international relations major; Daniel Olsher, a language technologies and international relations major; Andrew Peters, a junior ethics, history and public policy major; Vivake Prasad, a junior policy and management and political science major; and Victoria See, a junior bachelor of humanities and arts major. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/June/june12_friedmanfellows.shtml

CORRECTION-Last month, we linked to a list of winners of the Adamson Awards that excluded the winners in the category of nonfiction for popular journals. They are: third place, "On Leaving and Coming Back", Zach Harris; second place, "Mirror, Mirror", Alayna Frankenberry; first place, "The Kansas of My Childhood", Brad Porter. We apologize to the winners.

College/Faculty News

--Carnegie Mellon's French Online course, which is part of the university's Open Learning Initiative, has been given the 2007 Access to Language Education Award, which is given annually by the Esperantic Studies Foundation and CALICO (the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) to the best publicly available website for language instruction. Named in the award are project director and co-author Christopher Jones, co-authors Sophie Queuniet and Bonnie Youngs, and technical lead Marc Siskin, all in the Department of Modern Languages. The course also is supported by the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. The public version of this highly interactive, video-based course for beginning students of French can be reached through the Open Learning Initiative portal at http://www.cmu.edu/oli/.

--The Center for Behavioral Decision Research has unveiled its new "Data Truck," a 36-foot mobile social science lab that will allow the university to conduct research involving groups of people, such as senior citizens, who cannot readily come to campus. The truck's trailer includes a waiting area and eight workstations, where research participants can answer surveys, work on computers or test new products and technologies. The truck will be a major asset for Carnegie Mellon's Quality of Life Technologies Initiative, which aims to help seniors and people with disabilities lead more independent lives. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/June/june20_datatruck.shtml.

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