Spectrum - Volume 19 Issue 08 October 17, 1996 - Achievers

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including The Conductor , a special section of the Spectrum printed 4 times a year

Achievers

Spectrum Volume 19 Issue 08 - October 17, 1996

Jurgen Koenemann, the CISE postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Computer Science, presented an invited talk to the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The title of his talk was "Supporting Interactive Information Retrieval Through Relevance Feedback." Koenemann recently received a Ph.D. from Rutgers.

James D. Arthur of the Department of Computer Science attended the Eighteenth Minnowbrook Workshop on Software Engineering at Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y. The workshop was sponsored by Syracuse University. At the workshop, Arthur presented two papers, "Reducing the Mean Time to Remove Faults Through Early Error Detection: An Experiment in Independent Verification and Validation," and "Defining Software Quality Measures: A Systematic Approach Embedded in the Objectives, Principles, Attributes Framework." In addition, he presented a tutorial on "A Framework for Implementing a Software Quality Assessment Program."

James Craig , professor of geological sciences, has had a new, much- revised, and enlarged edition of his textbook Resources of the Earth: Origin, Use and Environmental Impact published by Prentice Hall. The co-authors are David Vaughan of the University of Manchester in England and Brian Skinner or Yale; Craig is the senior author.

Edward Fox of the Department of Computer Science hosted a group of researchers from NASA to discuss Digital Libraries, the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation project, and the Educational Infrastructure project. Attendees included Manjula Ambur, acting branch head of the Technical Library Branch, and Kennie Jones, assistant branch head of the Scientific Applications Branch of NASA. The NASA representatives met with members of the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Text and Editorial Studies of Newman Library.

Fox attended the 19th Annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Zurich, Switzerland. At the meeting, Fox led a tutorial on Building and Applying Digital Libraries and gave the opening speech at the conference banquet memorializing Professor Gerald Salton of Cornell University. He also led a workshop on Courseware, Training and Curriculum in Information Retrieval. Fox is a member of the Education and Electronic Publishing Committees of ACM SIGIR.

Layne Watson of the Department of Computer Science was the invited speaker at the Approximation Workshop held at NASA Langley in Hampton. The topic of his presentation was "Multidisciplinary design optimization for aircraft design."

Maj. Wayne Hacker , USMC, assistant professor of naval science, was selected as the Naval Reserve Officers' Corps first-place winner of the Col. Leo A. Codd Memorial Award by the American Defense Preparedness Association. The award is given each year to the outstanding ROTC instructor of each service for their dedication and accomplishments while preparing young future officers for careers in the armed forces.

James Arthur and Richard Nance of the Department of Computer Science were members of the organizing committee for the Workshop on Measurement in Software Product Engineering held at the Hotel Roanoke.

John C. Stubbs of the Department of English was accepted as a visiting scholar to the American Academy of Rome for the spring semester of 1997. Stubbs will work at the academy, which is a center for research in the visual arts, while on a research leave from Virginia Tech. He will gather material for a book on Depictions of WWII in Italian Films from 1945 to 1995. Some of the better known films on the subject include Open City , Two Women , Seven Beauties , Night of the Shooting Stars , and Mediterraneo .

Deborah Mayo , associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, gave three invited lectures to the London School of Economics: "Learning From Error," "Duhem's Problem, the Bayesian Way and Error Statistics," and "Models of Experimental Testing: the Cases of Jean Perrin and Brownian Motion."

Valerie Gray Hardcastle, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, had her article, "Philosophy of Psychology Meets the Semantic View," chosen as one of the 10 best philosophy articles of 1995. It will be reprinted in the Philosophy Annual.

Governing the White House: From Hoover Through LBJ by Charles E. Walcott and Karen M. Hult, associate professors of political science, has received the Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best book published on the U.S. presidency during 1995. The Neustadt Award is conferred by the Organized Section on Presidency Research of the American Political Science Association. The award was formally presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco.

Richard Rich of the Department of Political Science has just signed an agreement with the Wu-Nan Co. to publish a Chinese translation of the fourth edition of Empirical Political Analysis , which he co-authored with Jarol B. Manheim of George Washington University. This will be the first political-science research methods text published in Chinese, just as it was the first text of its kind translated into Russian and Arabic in earlier years.

Marc Abrams of the Department of Computer Science attended SIGCOMM'96, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Communications, Architectures and Protocols, in Stanford, Cal. SIGCOMM is the ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communication. At the conference, Abrams presented the paper "Removal Policies in Network Caches for World-Wide Web Documents." The paper was co-authored by Edward Fox , Stephen Williams , and Ghaleb Abdulla of the Department of Computer Science and Charles Standridge from Florida State University. The paper studies algorithms that could help users retrieve WWW pages faster, help conserve precious bandwidth in the Internet, and reduce the load on WWW servers world-wide.

J.A.N. Lee of the Department of Computer Science attended the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) World Congress in Canberra, Australia. Lee served on the program committee for the Pioneer Day section of the conference, which is a project of the IFIP History of Computing Committee that he chairs. He was the only person from the United States invited to participate in the Pioneer Day activities. The biannual meeting this year occurred on the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the ENIAC computer and on the 40th anniversary of the Australian Computer Society. At the meeting, Lee presented a paper on "The History and Future of Programming Languages" and gave an after-dinner talk on "Humor in the History of Computing."

Henry Bauer of the Center for the Study of Science in Society in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies gave two invited talks to groups of science writers: "Real Science Isn't News" at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory Summer Science Writers' Seminar in which, each summer, science journalists are invited for hands-on experience of doing science, plus seminars and invited speakers; and "The Myth of the Scientific Method" at the Third Annual Josephine L. Hopkins Foundation Workshop for Science Journalists at Cornell University, similar to the Woods Hole workshops, but organized by the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. One of the participants was Lee Edson, who spent several terms as science writer in residence at Virginia Tech some years ago.

Bauer also gave one of the Funsten Science Lecture Series at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond. His talk was titled "Science is As Science Does." Also, a just-published book, Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky: Essays in the Continuing Velikovsky Affair, by Charles Ginenthal et al , considered Bauer's analysis of the Velikovsky affair (in his book Beyond Velikovsky ) important enough to devote two of 14 chapters to Bauer's critique.

Linda Arnold , associate professor of history, recently published an analysis and transcription of a document about the fifth great granddaughter of the last Inca of Peru, who was living in Mexico during the late 18th century. Titled "In confirmation of faith: dona Maria Josefa Joaquina Paulina Uchu, Inca, Titu, Ypanqui, y Guanacapac ," this publication appeared in the Boletin Archivo General de la Nacion ( Journal of the Mexican National Archive ). Arnold also was invited to present a paper at a special conference on Justice in Latin America at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London. Arnold spoke on "Privileged Justice? The Military Jurisdiction in Early National Mexico." She also has been invited to serve on the international editorial board of Historia Mexican, ( Mexican History ), the premier history journal published in Latin America.

Beverly Bunch-Lyons, assistant professor of history, has had her article "The Migration of African-American Women to Cincinnati, Ohio: An Oral History" accepted for publication by the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History . Bunch-Lyons also has had entries accepted for publication by the Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery And The Chronology of World Slavery . The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America is publishing an article written by Bunch-Lyons on civil-rights activist Angela Davis.

Hayward Farrar, assistant professor of history, attended a military history seminar at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Joseph L. Wieczynski, professor of history, recently published The Gorbachev Bibliography: Books and Articles in English on the Years of Perestroika in the USSR, 1985-91. This work, produced by the Norman Ross Publishing Company of York City, lists 8,673 English-language works on all aspects of the reforms undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev and the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a companion volume to Wieczynski's Gorbachev Encyclopedia and Gorbachev Reader, published in 1993.

This summer, Carl Bean of the English department won a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction to the Sewanee Writers' Conference in Tennessee. The fellowship, from the estate of Tennessee Williams, gave Bean an opportunity to read from a new novel, study with Tim O'Brien and Amy Hempel, and interact with various major writers, publishers, and critics.

Joe Eska of the English department has had his article, "Further to the treatment of syllabic nasals in final position in proto-Celtic," published in Historische Sprachforschung ( Historical Linguistic Research ).

Paul Heilker of the English department is the co-editor and principal co-author of Keywords in Composition Studies , the first book of critical terminology in composition, which recently was published by Heinemann. Also, Heilker's essay "On Not Teaching (or True Confessions of a New Writing Program Administrator)," has been accepted for publication by Writing on the Edge (University of California, Davis).

Simone Poirier-Bures of the English department read from her work this summer at the Public Library in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While in Halifax she was interviewed on CBC Radio's "Weekend Morning" and taped an interview for the cable-television program "Choice Words." Also, two of her short stories appeared in Black Water Review and El Loco Foco .

Dan Mosser of the English department has had his work "Witness Descriptions" published by Cambridge University Press in The Wife of Bath's Prologue CD-ROM . The work contains descriptions of the 54 manuscripts and four pre-1500 printed editions of the "Wife of Bath's Prologue".

Bonnie Soniat of the English department has had her poems "The Landing," "The Beauties, " and "Naming It," published in MANOA A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

Dennis Welch of the English department has had his article "Christabel, King Lear, and the Cinderella Folktale" published in Papers on Language and Literature.

The Edwin Mellen Press has published Anne Cheney 's book The Life and Letters of Jesse Hill Ford, A Southern Writer and has nominated it for the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Cheney, of the English department, has had her poem "Solitude" accepted for the anthology Moonlight and Wishes , published by the National Library of Poetry.

Margaret Downs-Gamble of the English department has had her article "New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputation in Early Modern Manuscript Culture" published in Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature.

Jeff Mann of the English department has had his poem "Leaf Stains" published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

Joe Eska of the English department will have his description of "Continental Celtic" published in the Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages , to be published by Cambridge University Press. His reviews of Pierre-Yves Lambert's La langue gaulois ( The Gaulish Language ) (Paris 1994) and Francois Villar's A new interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) will be published in Studia Celtic.

Two short stories by Edward Falco , associate professor of English, have been published: "Monsters" in the fall 1996 issue of Glimmer Train and "Therapy" in the Summer 1996 issue of Notre Dame Review .

W. Wat Hopkins , associate professor of communication studies, has published three articles recently. "Justice Brennan, Justice Harlan and New York Times Co. v. Sullivan: A Case Study in Supreme Court Decision Making" was the lead article in the Autumn 1996 issue of Communication Law and Policy , a new law journal being published by the Law Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In addition, "Reconsidering the `Clear and Present Danger Test': Whence the `Marketplace of Ideas'?" was published in the Free Speech Yearbook , which has just been released; and "The Supreme Court Defines the Marketplace of Ideas" was published in the Spring 1996 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

During the past summer, Charles L. Taylor of the political-science department was in residence at the Berlin Science Center, where he is a recurring visiting research professor. He and a colleague there are collecting and documenting the original pre- and post-election voter surveys for the founding democratic elections in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe and are commissioning scholars in each of the countries to write papers on the political and economic transitions, the development of political parties, the political effects of the various electoral laws, electoral behavior, and government formation in their own political systems. The volume on Bulgaria was finished this summer, the volume on Hungary has been published, and one on the Czech Republic and Slovakia is in press. A comparative overview volume is planned.

Beth M. Waggenspack of the communication-studies department has had her essay "Marian Wright Edelman" published in African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook.

Women In Communication Inc., a student group at Virginia Tech, won the National Outstanding Special Project for a student chapter for 1995-96 for creation of a Web page.

Sam Riley and Scott Patterson of the communication-studies department participated in the meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Anaheim, Cal. Riley presented a workshop with past AEJMC president Maurine Beasley on The Art of the Conference Presentation. He also presented "Integrating Literary Techniques into the Teaching of Objective Writing." Patterson presented "Building Critical Mass in a Community Computer Initiative," co-written by Andrea Kavanaugh of the Blacksburg Electronic Village.

Stephen Prince of the communication-studies department has had his textbook, Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film , published by Allyn & Bacon.

Deborah Mayo of the philosophy department has had her book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge published by The University of Chicago Press. The book "proposes her error-statistical approach as a robust framework for solving some of the most persistent philosophical problems about objectivity and induction, and about progress and rationality," according to the cover comments. "In Mayo's view, we learn about the world by being shrewd inquisitors of error--by actively probing, manipulating, and simulating patterns of error, and by deliberately introducing known patterns of error into the collection and analysis of data....This book will be important for philosophers and methodologists of science as well as for researchers in the physical, biological, and social sciences."

Neil Castagnoli Jr., the Harvey W. Peters professor of chemistry, presented a paper on "Nicotine and other N-containing compounds" at the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Toxicology's first Symposium in "A Series of Four" at the meeting of the ACS meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Wayne Moore of the political-science department has had his book Constitutional Rights and Powers of the People published by Princeton University Press. The book examines principles and structures of American constitutionalism through analysis of competing conceptions of "the people" and their "rights" and "powers." For 1996-97, Moore is a visiting scholar at Harvard University's government department working on a book examining popular roles in amending and interpreting the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Jacqueline Bixler of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures presented three papers on Latin American theater: "Male-bashing and Beyond in Carballido's A Rose By Any Other Name and The Prisoner " at the Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures; "The Theatre of Sabina Berman and the Game of History" at the IV International Conference on Latin American Theatre in Puebla, Mexico; and "Sabina Berman and the Postmodernization of History" at the V International Congress on Iberoamerican and Argentine Theatre in Buenos Aires.

Donald J. Shoemaker of the sociology department has edited the book International Handbook on Juvenile Justice, published by Greenwood Press. The book is a collection of original essays on the juvenile-justice system in 19 countries, including the United States. Those countries represent all inhabitable continents. Shoemaker co-authored the chapter on the Philippines. The chapters are written in a standard format, which allows for comparative assessments, and there are separate chapters on China, England, and Hong Kong. Shoemaker and Peggy L. de Wolf presented "A Study of Time Use, Materialism and Mental Health Among Dutch Adolescents" at the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Society in Richmond.

Kay Kinoshita, professor of physics, has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, the main professional society of physicists in the United States. She will serve a three-year term.

Several members of the statistics department presented papers at the Virginia Academy of Science meetings in Richmond: Donald Jensen , "Exact Properties of Cook's D Statistics in Regression Diagnostics"; Chris Assaid and Jeffrey Birch , "On Robust Regression in the Presence of Model Misspecification"; Tim Robinson and Birch, "A Model Robust Dual Modeling Approach to Heterogeneity of Variance in a Regression Setting"; and David Lawrence and Birch, "Cluster-Based Bounded Influence Regression."

William Snizek of the sociology department has been nominated for membership at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, housed at Stanford University. The center was established in 1954 by the Ford Foundation and is supported by grants from such organizations as the Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Mellon Foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. Fellows in residence at the center work to increase "knowledge of the principles that govern human behavior."

Gretchen Adams-Shollenberger of Personnel Services has had an article, "A Comparison of Janitorial Workers with Mental Retardation and their Non-disabled Peers on Retention and Absenteeism," published in the July-September 1996 issue of the Journal of Rehabilitation ..