H&SS eNews, August 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/.

This edition of the eNews was edited and compiled by Kelli McElhinny. You can email Kelli at kellim@andrew.cmu.edu.

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

Alumni News

-- Susan Harkness Regli (Ph.D., Rhetoric, 2000) received an Award of Distinction, the highest award granted for superior performance, from Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill, N.J. The award recognized Regli's outstanding technical development and leadership in user interfaces bridging from internal research innovation to a multi-year contract award with the Office of Naval Research. Regli lives in Philadelphia with her husband William and their children Dominique and Anthony.

-- Susan Steele, (B.A., Professional Writing, French and Administration Management and Science, 1980) has been named Head of Leadership and Professional Development for Deloitte. Her new role, based in New York, has triggered her return to the U.S. from London, where she has been based for more than 20 years. In Steele's new role, she will have responsibility for the curriculum of the new corporate university, Deloitte University, that the company is building near Dallas. Steele would welcome hearing from New York-based H&SS alumni and can be reached via her email address: SusanASteele@aol.com.

College/Faculty News

--The Information Systems program recently wrapped up its six-week Information Systems in the Community 2008 summer program, in which eight students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) worked on an IS project for a local nonprofit organization. This year’s program participants included Genelle Howell from Florida Memorial University; Derwin Emmanuel from Grambling State University; Nicole Fitzhugh and Cherie Frazier from Hampton University; Alimou Bah, Kevin Walton and Thomas Zgambo from Morehouse College; and Elita Green from Oakwood University.

--IS Teaching Professor Larry Heimann and adjunct summer faculty member Jennifer Foster were the program’s instructors, teaching students technical subjects such as programming for the web, as well as  principles of teamwork, project management and professional communications. The students gained valuable hands-on experience as they collaborated to develop a Web site for the Western Pennsylvania Diversity Initiative (WPDI). At the conclusion of the six weeks, the students made a final presentation to members of WPDI’s board and faculty and staff from IS and other departments within H&SS. The program is underwritten by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In Other H&SS News...

Interdepartmental

-- "A Response Time Model for Bottom-Out Hints as Worked Examples," co-authored by Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research student Benjamin Shih; Psychology Professor Kenneth Koedinger and Richard Scheines, head of the Department of Philosophy, was selected as the best paper at the first annual Educational Datamining Conference, which was held in Montreal.

Department of English

-- Thomas Stockham Professor of English Jim Daniels recently won awards for two of his books that were published last year. "Mr. Pleasant" received the Gold Medal Award for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and "In Line for the Exterminator" won the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence presented by the Paterson Poetry Center.

-- Kristina Straub, professor of literary and cultural studies in the English Department and H&SS associate dean for academic affairs, gave a keynote address at Queer People: The Whole History of Sexuality held July 9-12 at Christ's College, Cambridge. Her talk, entitled " 'More Friendship than Honesty': The Dangerous Intimacy of Amy and Roxana," explored early modern British concerns over relationships between women servants and their female employers in Daniel Defoe's novel, Roxana and placed those concerns within a history of the modern family and sexuality.

Department of Philosophy

-- "When is a Brain Like the Planet" published last year in Philosophy of Science, written by Clark Glymour, Alumni University Professor of Philosophy, was chosen by the Philosoper's Annual 2008 as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2007.

-- Early-stage clinical trial research conducted on subjects from developing nations requires careful ethical consideration, according to an article co-authored by Associate Professor Alex John London that was published in the July 5 issue of The Lancet. London and his co-author, Jonathan Kimmelman, an assistant professor in McGill University's Biomedical Ethics Unit, urge organizations that sponsor research in low- and middle-income countries to ensure that they are addressing the most pressing health needs of those nations. The article also notes that any interventions developed as a result of such research should be affordable and easily implemented in those countries' health care systems.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/July/july8_genetherapylondon.shtml

-- Assistant Professor Nicole Hassoun's article "World Poverty and Individual Freedom" was published in the July issue of the journal American Philosophical Quarterly. The article explores the conflict between the societal obligation to provide aid to the global poor and an individual's right to live a life of his or her choosing. Hassoun argues that the global institutional system - the set of rules and institutions governing individuals' basic life prospects - must ensure that each person living under such a system is able to participate in it, and consequently to meet all of his or her basic needs.

Department of Psychology

-- A new study led by D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology Marcel Just sheds light on the neural mechanisms that are responsible for social difficulties in autism, and on the workings of these social brain mechanisms in all of us. According to the study, which is available on the Web site of the journal Social Neuroscience, inefficient pathways for transmitting information between certain brain regions are to blame. The research implicates abnormalities in the brain's inter-regional communication system, which connects the gray matter's computing centers. The study is the first to measure the synchronization between the brain areas that make up the Theory of Mind (ToM) network, which is responsible for processing the intentions and thoughts of others. It is the first to provide such concrete evidence of faulty social network connections.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/July/july23_autismsocial.shtml

-- As discussed in an article published July 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, a team of researchers including Assistant Professor Charles Kemp has developed an algorithm that can discover the underlying structure of a data set. The human mind is able to organize objects and concepts into various kinds of representations, including hierarchies, cluster structures, and Mendeleev's periodic table, but most popular structure-learning algorithms are able only to learn representations of a single kind. The new work may lead to computer models of learning and discovery that come closer to human abilities.

Department of Social and Decision Sciences

-- A study co-authored by Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology George Loewenstein found that leading people to perceive that they are poor prompts them to buy lottery tickets. The research provides insights on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns. In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor by ranking their incomes on a scale that began at "$100,000 or less" bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. A second experiment reported in the paper found that indirectly reminding participants that, while different income groups face unequal outcomes in education, jobs and housing, everyone has equal chances of winning the lottery induced an increase in the number of lottery tickets purchased. The group given this reminder purchased 1.31 tickets, compared with 0.54 for the group not given such a reminder.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/July/july24_lottery.shtml

Events

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

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