H&SS eNews, July 2005

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

--Tim Bomba (B.A. Communication Processes, 1973) was the music supervisor for the independent film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, which stars Academy Award-winning actress Marlee Matlin and has shipped more than 1 million copies on DVD. He also recently completed his first Half Ironman Triathalon.

--Shannon Gibney (B.A. Creative Writing and Spanish, 1997) has received a 2005 Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship. Gibney will receive $44,000, spread out over two years, to support her work as a creative writer. (For more information, go to http://www.bushfoundation.org/News/05152005_BAF.htm)

--Daniel Gilman (B.S. Ethics, History and Public Policy, 2004) has been elected to Carnegie Mellon's Alumni Association Board of Directors. Gilman is a legislative assistant for Pittsburgh City Councilman Bill Peduto.

--College Prowler (http://www.collegeprowler.com), a Pittsburgh-based publisher of college guidebooks, is featured in the July issue of Entrepreneur magazine. Four of the company's five co-founders are Carnegie Mellon alumni, including H&SS alumna Christina Koshzow (B.A. Professional Writing, 2002; M.S. Public Policy and Management, 2003). The other Carnegie Mellon alumni at CollegeProwler are Luke Skurman (B.S. Business Administration, 2002; M.S. Public Policy and Management, 2004); Joey Rahimi (B.S. Business Administration, 2001); and Christopher Mason (B.S. B.S. Economics and Business Administration, 2001).

College / Faculty News

-- Carnegie Mellon has named William L. Alba to be the first director of the university's Science and Humanities Scholars Program, which is run jointly by H&SS and the Mellon College of Science. The Science and Humanities Scholars Program (SHS) is a multidisciplinary program which enables talented students to develop an undergraduate curricular program that builds upon their interests and achievements in the humanities, natural sciences, mathematics or social sciences. Students can choose a major from either college. For the past two years, Alba has been the associate dean of studies at Bard High School Early College in New York City, a cutting-edge institution that allows high school students to complete two years of college while they earn their high school diploma. (For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050705_shs.html)

--Silvia Borzutzky, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the Heinz School, recently met with Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and with members of the House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee to talk about the findings contained in her book, Vital Connections: Politics, Social Security and Inequality in Chile. The meetings included a discussion of what Congress should be cognizant of with regard to Chile's experience in moving to a private social security system in 1980. She will continue to serve as a resource to policy makers as they move forward with developing related legislative measures.

-- Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology, has received a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his cutting-edge research into the connection between physical health and social factors, such as relationships and family upbringing. Cohen is one of the world's leading health psychologists and one of the architects of Carnegie Mellon's highly regarded health psychology program. In 1997, he published a groundbreaking article in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that people with diverse social networks and greater sociability have better health practices and increased resistance to disease. (For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050706_psychologist.html)

--H&SS has named Tim Haggerty (M.A. History, 1990; Ph.D. History, 1995) the director of the Humanities Scholars Program, a rigorous, four-year interdisciplinary program open by invitation to H&SS applicants. The program was launched in 2003, and 40 students currently are enrolled, including 17 incoming freshmen. During the 2003-04 academic year, the Humanities Scholars Program was led by Michael West, a teaching professor of French, whose leadership was critical in shepherding the program through its inaugural year. Haggerty has been the associate director of the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon since 2000. (For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050707_haggerty.html)

--On August 1 the International Society for Bayesian Analysis will begin publishing its new electronic journal Bayesian Analysis at http://ba.stat.cmu.edu. Statistics Professor Rob Kass is its editor-in-chief. Bayesian methods have been used for many years by Carnegie Mellon researchers in diverse disciplines. An indication of their current popularity is that the Institute for Scientific Information's list of the 10 most highly cited researchers in the mathematical sciences during the past decade contains four whose work focuses on Bayesian statistics, including Kass who ranks third on the list. The manuscript-handling and publication software for the journal, which will be made publicly available, was written by former Carnegie Mellon student Adrian Rollett (B.F.A. Music, 2001) with guidance from Statistics Professor Pantelis Vlachos.

--Economics and Psychology Professor George Loewenstein, a member of the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, has co-authored a study in which researchers found that people who have brain damage which impairs their emotional responses can, in certain situations, make better investment decisions than normal people. The paper was published in the June issue of Psychological Science and was co-authored by faculty at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. This study is part of the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which investigates the mental and neural processes that drive economic decision-making. Based on previous studies, the researchers concluded that the emotionally impaired participants were less averse to risk, and thus were more willing to take gambles that had a high payoff. Emotions lead people to avoid risks even when the potential benefits far outweigh the losses, a phenomenon known as myopic loss aversion that scholars have concluded can explain, for example, why people prefer to invest in bonds over historically higher-performing stocks.

--In a June 5 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette listing the region's top 50 creative forces, two Carnegie Mellon professors were honored: Elizabeth Bradley, head of drama and artistic director, Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, was ranked 9th and English Professor Hilary Masters was 15th. Master's citation noted that "in a career spanning 50 years, Hilary Masters has been a press agent, newspaper editor, novelist, memoirist, essayist and teacher. The 76-year-old Carnegie Mellon English professor published two books in less than a year: the reprint of his memoir, Last Stands, in fall 2004, and last month, Shadows on a Wall: Juan O'Gorman and the Mural at Patzcuaro." (See the article at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05156/514812.stm)

--The Fourth International Symposium on imprecise probabilities and their applications will be hosted at Carnegie Mellon from July 20-23. Teddy Seidenfield, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics, is on the steering committee and serves as the conference secretariat.

--Sarah Shomstein, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology, co-authored a study that was published in The Journal of Neuroscience which found that talking on a cell phone impairs a person's ability to drive because they cannot focus simultaneously on the visual task of driving and the auditory task of listening to a conversation. The findings support previous research on the perils of talking on a mobile phone while driving, including a seminal study by Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon. (For more information, go to http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home05/jun05/yantis.html)

--Dick Tucker, head of the Department of Modern Languages, and Rick Donato with the Department of Instruction and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh have received a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to continue their research into how school-aged children learn foreign languages. Specifically, Tucker and Donato will study how children learn cognate (Spanish) and non-cognate (Japanese) languages, develop literacy skills, progress in proficiency across grade levels, and make the transition from elementary school to middle school. Cognate languages are those, like Spanish and English, which share the same writing system, while non-cognate languages are those that have totally different writing systems, such as Japanese and English. The grant is worth $292,000. Tucker is the Paul Mellon Professor of Applied Linguistics.

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