H&SS eNews, January 2008

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.

For more H&SS news, go to our Web site, http://www.hss.cmu.edu/. For other Carnegie Mellon news, be sure to check out http://www.cmu.edu and http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/index.shtml.

This edition of the eNews was edited and compiled by Anne Jackson. You can email Anne at annej@cmu.edu.

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

Alumni News

--Karen Rigby (BA in Creative Writing with an additional major in English, 2001) has poems forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, and Phoebe: a Journal of Literature and Art. http://www.karenrigby.com/

--Deborah (Brannick) Lafky (B.S. History, 1977) has received a doctorate in Management Information Systems from Claremont Graduate University's School of Information Systems and Technology. At Claremont, she was a research associate with the Kay Center for E-Health Research. Her dissertation, entitled "Personal Health Records: An Empirical Taxonomy," used both qualitative and quantitative analysis to study user behaviors, how they are affected by health status, and the implications for personal health information systems design. Dr. Lafky is an analyst with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in Washington, DC.

-- David Wolpert (B.S. Applied History, 1994) is the author of " Sales and Marketing Careers in the Tech Sector." The book discusses common sales and marketing roles in tech companies, what individuals in each of these roles do day-to-day, the most important skills for each position, typical career paths for each role, the hierarchy of job titles, and factors to consider in choosing a tech company to join. You can learn more about the book and Wolpert at http://techjobsbook.com/.

Student News

--First-year H&SS student Spencer C. Huff recently completed his Eagle Scout project by interviewing 17 U.S. veterans, from World War II through the Iraq War, and collecting their experiences in a video and audio montage that was submitted to the Library of Congress. Among the veterans Huff interviewed were two Bataan Death March survivors, a veteran of Iwo Jima, a Navajo code talker, and the last living Buffalo Soldier--a nickname given to soldiers in the Army's all-black regiments, which were formed in the 19th century and served through World War II, after which the Army was desegregated. Huff plans to major in Creative Writing.

--Deborah (Brannick) Lafky (B.S. History, 1977) has received a doctorate in Management Information Systems from Claremont Graduate University's School of Information Systems and Technology. At Claremont, she was a research associate with the Kay Center for E-Health Research. Her dissertation, entitled "Personal Health Records: An Empirical Taxonomy," used both qualitative and quantitative analysis to study user behaviors, how they are affected by health status, and the implications for personal health information systems design. Dr. Lafky is an analyst with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in Washington, DC. --Practice makes perfect - or at least that's what we're told as we struggle through endless rounds of multiplication tables, goal kicks and piano scales - and it seems, based on the personal experience of many, to be true. That's why neuroscientists have been perplexed by data showing that at the level of individual synapses, or connections between neurons, increased, repetitive stimulation might actually reverse early gains in synaptic strength. Now, neuroscientists from Carnegie Mellon University and the Max Planck Institute have discovered the mechanism that resolves this apparent paradox. The findings are published in the Jan. 4 issue of Science. Roger L. Clem, a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon, was a co-author of this study. http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan3_barthscience.shtml

College/Faculty News

--Steve Awodey, an associate professor of philosophy, and John Soluri, an associate professor of history, have received prestigious Fulbright Scholarships. Awodey is among a group of scholars collaborating to produce German and English versions of the collected works of German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Awodey is among the editors of the English text, and he is spending five months at the Institute for Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena in Jena, Germany, coordinating the production of the texts. His scholarship began in September and runs through February. Soluri will teach and do research from August to December 2008 at the University of Chile in Santiago. His research will focus broadly on the environmental history of southern Chile and Argentina, focusing particularly on human-animal relations over a two hundred year period.

--Brooke Feeney has been named the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Psychology, which is one of two McCandless professorships given every three years to promising young faculty members at Carnegie Mellon. The other, the Anna Loomis McCandless Professorship, was given to Bahar Biller, an assistant professor of manufacturing and operations management in the Tepper School of Business. The McCandless professorships were established by the late Anna Loomis McCandless; the Estella Loomis McCandless professorship was named for her mother. Anna Loomis McCandless was a 1919 graduate of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. She became the first female member of the Board of Trustees in 1967 and was named a life trustee in 1973. She was the longest serving female trustee, having served on the board for 29 years. In 1963, McCandless received Carnegie Mellon's Alumni Service Award. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/December/dec5_mccandless.shtml

--Cleotilde Gonzalez, director of the university's Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, is using the PeaceMaker video game -- which calls on players to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- to study how a person's background and knowledge of the conflict influences how they negotiate a solution. Gonzalez wants to know how students sympathetic to one side or another play the game differently, and how students' strategies change as they learn more about the conflict. Gonzalez is conducting her research at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon in Qatar and through the Peres Center for Peace in Israel, where as many as 10,000 Israeli and Palestinian youth will participate in the study. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/November/nov12_peacemaker.shtml

--Researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, have for the first time described a mechanism called "dynamic connectivity," in which neuronal circuits are rewired "on the fly" allowing stimuli to be more keenly sensed. The process is described in a paper in the January 2008 issue of Nature Neuroscience, and available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn2030.

--A team of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists, combining methods of machine learning and brain imaging, have found a way to identify where people's thoughts and perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain by identifying the patterns of brain activity associated with the objects. An article in the Jan. 2 issue of PLoS One discusses this new method, which was developed over two years under the leadership of neuroscientist Professor Marcel Just and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell. http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan3_justmitchell.shtml

--Professor Barbara Johnstone, English, was featured on WDUQ's December 17 edition "Pittsburgh's First 250" series for her work on Pittsburghese, titled "Changing Pittsburghese." http://www.wduq.org/news/pgh250/audiopage.html

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