H&SS eNews, March 2006

Greetings from H&SS.

Whether you are a member of the media looking for a faculty expert on deadline, a student who wants to learn about the latest H&SS events, or an alumni who wants to catch up on campus news, this is a one-stop shop for H&SS news and events.

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

--Amy Berger (B.A. Creative Writing and Spanish, 2000) graduated in December from the U.S. Defense Language Institute with an associate’s degree in Korean. She received the highest possible reading and listening scores on the Defense Language Proficiency Test. Berger, an airman first class in the U.S. Air Force, is currently in cryptology/intelligence training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. She recently won second place (a $1,000 prize) in an enlisted essay contest sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute, and her essay was published in the February issue of the institute’s magazine, Proceedings.

--Renee Cardelli (B.A. Professional Writing, 1997) has taken a position with Cox Broadcasting Inc. as executive web producer. She oversees the editorial content for three Cox Television websites: KFOX (El Paso, Texas.), WTOV (Steubenville, Ohio), and WJAC (Johnstown, Pa.).

College/Faculty News

--H&SS has named Scott Sandage, associate professor of history, the winner of the 2005-06 Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service, which is given annually by the college to honor excellent undergraduate teaching. Sandage is a social and cultural historian who has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1996. He is highly regarded both for his first-rate scholarship as well as his excellence as a teacher, and he receives consistently high ratings by students on faculty course evaluations. Sandage is the author of the critically acclaimed 2005 book “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America”, which received the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press. The award is given every year to a first-time author whose book is deemed outstanding in content, style and presentation.

--Researchers at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition have discovered that our ears use the most efficient way to process the sounds we hear, from babbling brooks to wailing babies. These results represent a significant advance in understanding how sound is encoded for transmission to the brain, according to the authors, whose work was published in the Feb. 23 issue of Nature. The research provides a new mathematical framework for understanding sound processing and suggests that our hearing is highly optimized in terms of signal for the range of sounds we experience. The same work also has far-reaching, long-term technological implications, such as providing a predictive model to vastly improve signal processing for better-quality compressed digital audio files and designing brain-like codes for cochlear implants, which restore hearing to the deaf. The paper was authored by Michael Lewicki, associate professor of computer science, and Evan Smith, a graduate student in psychology. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060223_sound.html.

--Carnegie Mellon recently hosted its second annual Model United Nations Conference, which took place on campus March 3 -6. More than 200 high school students participated in the event, in which they took on the roles of journalists, UN delegates and other world leaders in order to foster discussion on international affairs. The Carnegie Mellon Model UN was organized by the university's International Relations Organization and Model United Nations club. The event was supported in part by the Student Senate, the Division of Student Affairs and the departments of History, Modern Languages and Social and Decision Sciences. For more information, go to http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/iro/.

--The Center for the Arts in Society has awarded grants to faculty in the Colleges of Fine Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences to fund interdisciplinary research. Projects reflect the mission of the center to bring artists and humanists together to inquire into the role of the arts in societies, to examine the impact of arts on social change as well as the importance of historical events for the evolution of the arts, and to create new work, through practice, publications, exhibitions, performances, and projects. Grants of about $1,000 each went to Omer Akin, Professor of Architecture; Robert Cavalier, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Kenya C. Dworkin, Associate Professor of Spanish; Clayton Merrell, Associate Professor of Art; Suzie Silver, Associate Professor of Art; Christopher Sperandio, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art; Fabian Winkler, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, with Shannon McMullen, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

Events

--Michael Roth, president of the California College of the Arts, will speak at 5:30 p.m. March 20 as part of the "Aesthetics out of Bounds" arts histories lecture series, sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. Roth will speak in McConomy Auditorium in the University Center. For more information, go to http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mwitmore/aesthetics/speakers/march20.html.

--“Culture through the Ages”, the third annual international film festival from the Department of Modern Languages, kicked off earlier this month and runs through April 19. The next film in the series, “Sharaku” (Japanese) will be screened at 5 p.m. March 22 in McConomy Auditorium in the University Center. The original version of each film will be shown with English subtitles. The films are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060223_iff.html.

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