H&SS eNews, February 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

--The Social and Decision Science Student Advisory Council (SDS SAC) will be hosting a networking event for current SDS students with SDS alumni from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday, February 8, in the H&SS Coffee Lounge on the ground floor of Baker Hall.

The SDS SAC surveyed students at the beginning of the semester and the top event that students were interested in was a networking event with alumni. Because half of the current SDS students took this survey, we think we will get a great student turnout for this event. We would love it if you could attend this event. We're interested in hearing about your experience, what can be done with an SDS major, and what you've done so far.

If you would like to know more about the event or if you would be willing to attend, please contact Liz Mullen at emullen@andrew.cmu.edu.

College/Faculty News

--Carnegie Mellon faculty rank first in the country in cognitive science, third in general psychology, and seventh in linguistics and statistics—all H&SS disciplines—according to the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. Produced by Academic Analytics, the index rates the productivity of faculty at more than 7,000 doctoral programs in the nation according to the number of published books and journal articles, journal citations, awards, honors and grants received. Carnegie Mellon also ranked third in information science, fourth in computer engineering, fifth in civil and environmental engineering, sixth in computer science and ninth in applied mathematics. Academic Analytics, founded in 2005 by faculty and researchers at Stony Brook University and Educational Directories Unlimited, Inc., provides data collection and reporting for the higher education industry.

-- For the first time, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine what parts of the brain are active when people consider whether to purchase a product and to predict whether or not they ultimately choose to buy the product. The study appears in the journal Neuron and was co-authored by George Loewenstein and Scott Rick in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and scientists at Stanford University and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Twenty-six adults participated in the study, in which they were given $20 to spend on a series of products that would be shipped to them. If they made no purchases, they kept the money. The products and their prices appeared on a computer screen that the participants viewed while lying in an fMRI scanner, and the researchers noted which parts of the subjects’ brain were active when they viewed the products and prices. By studying which regions were activated, the authors were able to successfully predict whether the study participants would decide to purchase each item. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/January/jan3_brainscans.shtml

--Scott Sandage, associate professor of history, has received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research his upcoming book, “Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, 1804-1941.” The book will focus on southeast Nebraska’s “half-breed” Indian reservation and the French-Omaha folk hero Antoine Barada, who was at the center of a legal battle over whether biology or culture determines a person’s race. Sandage is the author of “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.” For more information, go to http://www.thetartan.org/2007/1/22/news/sandage.

--Joe Trotter, the Mellon Professor of History, has been appointed to a second five-year term as head of the Department of History. Trotter has been on the university’s faculty since 1985, and has been head of the History Department since 2001. During that time, the department housed the internationally renowned journal Social Science History and added six full-time faculty members. History faculty published 10 books, edited or co-edited 16 collections and scores of scholarly articles and essays during Trotter’s first term as department head. Since 1995, Trotter has been the director of the department’s Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/January/jan29_trotter.shtml.

Events

--The CAUSE Speaker Series will featureWallace D. Best, an assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School, at 5 p.m. Feb. 16 in the Erwin Steinberg Auditorium (Baker Hall A53). His talk is titled “The South and the City: Migration and Sacred Space in an Urban Black Metropolis.” The event is free and open to the public.

--Gerry Mackie, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 20 in Baker Hall 154R as part the Humanities Center lecture series, Liberalisms. His talk, “Democracy Defended”, will address long-standing doubts about democratic governance.

--Moustafa Bayoumi will appear at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 22, in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall as part of the Perspective on the Arts in Society Series, sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the co-editor of “The Edward Said Reader” and has published articles in The Nation, The London Review of Books and The Village Voice, among others. His talk, titled “Disco Infernos: Music and Torture in the ‘war on terror,’” will explore the implications of the use of music as a means of torture. The talk is co-sponsored by the Humanities Center, and it is free and open to the public.

--For a complete list of upcoming alumni events, go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/.

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