Spectrum - Volume 19 Issue 12 November 14, 1996 - Achievers

A non-profit publication of the Office of the University Relations of Virginia Tech,
including The Conductor , a special section of the Spectrum printed 4 times a year

Achievers

Spectrum Volume 19 Issue 12 - November 14, 1996

The Virginia Tech Admissions Viewbook, designed by Michele Moldenhauer , received an award of Excellent in the recent University and College Designers Association (UCDA) competition. Selected from more than 1,200 entries from all over the United States, the viewbook was exhibited at the UCDA Annual Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The publication was written by Kelly Queijo , edited by Richard Lovegrove , and included photography by Bob Veltri, Rick Griffiths and Gary Colbert , all of University Relations/Visual Communications. Richard Tsai , a Virginia Tech art student, assisted with design and production of the piece.

The 1996 VPW Distinguished Service Award has been presented to Susan Trulove , public relations coordinator for Research and Graduate Studies at Virginia Tech.

The award recognizes professional excellence and service to VPW. In announcing the award at the fall conference, Cynthia McMullen described Trulove as "someone who's quietly made things happen behind the scene for years in VPW.

"She made it known a long time ago that she hates meetings-especially long board meetings-so you won't find her in the line-up of officers, either outgoing or incoming, today," McMullen said. "But VPW many years ago discovered something that Virginia Tech obviously already knew: This woman is one of those crucial people behind the scenes who make things happen. She has a great gift for going right to the bottom line to determine what's really needed in every situation.

"As an example, for the past two years-and for the next two-she has volunteered to lay out the VPW newsletter, Galley Pruf . The bimonthly newsletter sometimes runs 12 to 16 pages, and those of us who have done any layout work on the computer know the amount of time, patience, and commitment it takes. She has never sought any recognition for her efforts. It has simply been her commitment that she easily dismisses by saying things like, `I love doing that stuff anyway."

Two Virginia Tech women have been elected as officers of Virginia Press Women. Lynn Nystrom , director of news and external relations, College of Engineering, was named president, and Mary Ann Johnson, public relations specialist, Extension communication, was elected treasurer.

Young-tsu Wong, professor of history, presented a paper entitled "Philosophical Hermeneutics and Political Reform: Kang Youwei's Use of Gongyang Confucianism" for the International Conference on the Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Culture at Rutgers University.

Burton Kaufman , head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, has had his book The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy published by Twayne Publishers and his book The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (second edition) published by McGraw Hill. His "Failed Presidents: Review Essay" was published in Reviews in American History . He also attended the annual conference of the American Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs in Whistler, Canada.

Brian Britt of the religious-studies program has a new book, Walter Benjamin and the Bible , coming out this month from Continuum.

Darleen Pryds of the humanities program has received grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research at the Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University during spring semester 1997. She will be completing research for her forthcoming book, The Liturgy of Power: Robert d'Anjou and the Politics of Preaching in Fourteenth-Century Europe, contracted by E.J. Brill, Leiden. Her "Women Who Preached: Proclaiming Sanctity through Proscribed Acts: The Case of Rose of Viterbo" will be published in Voices of the Spirit: Women Preachers and Prophets in Christianity from its Origins through the Twentieth Century from the University of California Press.

Michael Saffle of the music department presented a lecture entitled "Liszt at the Madonna del Rosario, 1863-1865" at the annual Festival of the American Liszt Society in Hamilton, Ontario.

At the same meeting, Saffle and James Deaville presented to prominent musicologist Alan Walker their " Festschrift " in honor of his 65th birthday; this volume contains 14 articles on Liszt's life, relationships, and music by performers and scholars from Hungary, Germany, France, England, Canada, and the United States. Saffle spent a week as visiting professor of music at the University of Calgary, lecturing to three classes and taking part in departmental activities.

Saffle gave a paper on 19th-century American symphonic poems at the II International meeting of the Franz Liszt Society of Hungary, held in Budapest; this paper will be published in next year's issue of the British Liszt Society Journal. Saffle also gave a paper on "Liszt and the Traditions of Keyboard Fantasy" at the International Liszt Congress in Stockholm; this paper will be published in the near future by the Swedish Academy of Sciences in the Conference Proceedings . A paper Saffle presented at the IV International Liszt Conference has just appeared in that meeting's Proceedings , published by the Burgenland Regional Museum. The study session Saffle chaired with Deaville at the XV Congress of the International Musicological Society meeting resulted in four papers published recently in Review of Musicology in Spain.

Jurgen Koenemann, a post-doctoral fellow with the computer science department, presented an invited talk on "Relevance Feedback: Use, Usability, Utility" at the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science in Baltimore, Md.

Rex Hartson of the computer science department gave a talk to the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The title of his presentation was "Putting More Into, and Getting More Out of, Usability Evaluation."

John Christman, associate professor of philosophy, recently gave a paper called "Citizen Autonomy, Social Justice, and the Restructuring of the Welfare State" at the 8th International Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in Geneva, Switzerland.

Roger Ariew, professor of philosophy, published a collection of essays by the turn-of-the-century French physicist Pierre Duhem, entitled Pierre Duhem: Essays in History and Philosophy of Science . Ariew edited and translated the material with Peter Barker. Ariew also has given several international lectures: "Descartes, Basso, and Post-Renaissance Scholastics: Three Kinds of Corpuscularians" at the International Research Conference on Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theory in St. Andrews, Scotland; "Scholastic Critics of Descartes: The Cogito" at the International Descartes Colloquium in Québec; and "The First Attempts at a Cartesian Scholasticism: Descartes's Correspondence with the Jesuits of la Flèche" at the Episodes in Descartes's Intellectual Biography from the Perspective of His Correspondence with Learned European Society, International Conference in Celebration of the Fourth Centenary of Rene Descartes's Birth.

Joseph C. Pitt, professor of philosophy, gave a lecture entitled "Science, Technology and Culture," followed by a day-long workshop for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy Institute on Science, Technology, and Society.

Mary Beth Rosson of the computer science department attended OOPSLA'96, the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, in San Jose, Cal. Rosson was on the program committee for the conference and chaired a session on visual systems.

Several members of the statistics department presented papers at the 156th Annual National Meetings of the American Statistical Association in Chicago: Chris Assaid and Jeffrey Birch , "Outlier Resistant Regression Robust to Model Misspecification"; Tim Robinson and Birch, "A Model Robust Dual Modeling Approach to Heterogeneity of Variance in a Regression Setting"; David Lawrence and Birch, "Cluster-Based Bounded Influence Regression"; Michael Beaghen , "Comparing the Maximum Likelihood and Least Squares Approaches to Common Principal Components"; KeyingYe , "Comparative Calibration Without A Gold Standard"; Matthew D. Rotelli and E.P. Smith , "Model Fusion: Combining Neural Networks With Linear Models"; and George R. Terrell , "Why are Math Stat Courses Often Bad Math and Bad Stat?" Raymond H. Myers was a discussant for the session entitled Nonparametric and Robust Response Surface Methods, and Ye and Smith organized and chaired the session on environmental and ecological statistics.

Marion Reynolds Jr. of the statistics department presented the invited paper "Control Charts for Monitoring Processes With Autocorrelated Data" at the Second World Congress of Nonlinear Analysts in Athens, Greece.

Klaus Hinkelmann of the statistics department presented a paper, "Randomization and Meta-analysis: Replicated Complete Block Designs," at the 18th International Biometric Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He also chaired a session on experimental design at that meeting.

Robert Foutz of the statistics department presented the invited paper "A Generalized Fourier Analysis of Time Series Data" at the First Northern Illinois University Symposium on Statistical Science in DeKalb, Ill.

Eric P. Smith of the statistics department presented the paper "Graphical Display of Community Metrics With Application to Environmental Monitoring" at the International Conference on Quantitative Methods for the Environmental Methods, held in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Smith was elected to a two-year position as secretary of The International Environmetric Society and re-appointed to a two-year term as an associate editor of the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics.

Larry Taylor of the chemistry department presented "New Horizons for Supercritical Fluid Chromatography" to the Washington Chromatography Discussion Group. He presented "New Developments in Supercritical Fluid Technology at Virginia Tech" to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. At the 23rd Annual Conference of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies in Kansas City, he presented "Supercritical Fluid Extraction/Chromatography Coupled with Infrared Analysis." He also participated in a Department of Chemistry seminar at the College of William and Mary.

W. Wat Hopkins of the communication-studies department has had three articles published: "Justice Brennan, Justice Harlan and New York Times v. Sullivan: A Case Study in Supreme Court Decision Making" was the lead article in the autumn issue of Communication Law and Policy , the new quarterly law journal published by the Law Division of the Association for Education and Journalism and Mass Communication. "Reconsidering the `Clear and Present Danger Test': Whence the `Marketplace of Ideas'?" was published in Free Speech Yearbook. "The Supreme Court Defines the Marketplace of Ideas" was published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

Robert Denton, head of the Leader Center at Virginia Tech and professor of communication studies, delivered the keynote address to the Virginia Mayor's Institute meeting in Roanoke.

At the same meeting, Rachel Holloway, communication studies, presented a speech on "Communication and Meeting Management Skills."

Kenneth Rystrom of the communication-studies department was recognized as a life member and former president at the 50th annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Baltimore. A commemorative edition of The Masthead, the quarterly publication of NCEW, which contained Rystrom's lengthy article retracing and reflecting on the 50-year history of the organization, was distributed.

Antonio A. Fernandez, associate professor of Spanish, has been elected to The Order of the Discoverers by the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society Sigma Delta Pi. The order was created to recognize exceptional and meritorious service in the fields of Hispanic scholarship, the teaching of Spanish, and the promotion of good relations between English- and Spanish-speaking countries. Fernandez, who came to Virginia Tech in 1979, is a member of the Academy of Teaching Excellence and the recipient of three Certificates of Teaching Excellence and the Wine Award for Excellence in Teaching. Besides his research in the area of Spanish-American literature, he has contributed extensively to curriculum and program development at Tech, including Latin American Studies and proficiency-based instruction. He is director of the Intensive Second Language Institute, a graduate-level immersion program in French and Spanish.

Anita Puckett of the Appalachian Studies program has received a Travel Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences to do research on her book in progress, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Speech Acts and Socioeconomic Relations in a Rural Eastern Kentucky Community , for Oxford University Press. Her article "Rights, Claims, Orders, and Imperatives in Rural Eastern Kentucky Task-Focused Discourse" will be published in More Than Class: Studying Power in U.S. Workplaces , in the Series in the Anthropology of Work by SUNY Press. Puckett's book reviews of The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches by Beverly Bush Patterson and Appalachian Religion by Deborah McCauley were published in the Text and Performance Quarterly . Puckett received a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to do research next year on the cultural impact of electronic networking on rural Appalachian communities.

Martha McCaughey, assistant professor of women's studies, was named the "Outstanding Woman Graduate of 1995" from the University of California, Santa Barbara. McCaughey is co-author with Laura Grindstaff of an article "Castration Anxiety, (Male) Hysteria, and the Phallus: Re-membering John Bobbitt," published in the book No Angels: Women Who Commit Violence , published by Pandora Press.

Terry Papillon of the humanities program in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies has had his article "Isocrates' Techne and Rhetorical Pedagogy" published in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly . His article "Isocrates on Gorgias and Helen: The Unity of the Helen" was published in Classical Journal .

Ann Kilkelly, head of the Women's Studies program, with Bob Leonard of theatre arts, initiated "Playing Community," an ongoing community performance project that now has partnerships with five different community organizations and has attracted 30 students, faculty and community members to it. It initiates "performances" that put a community's issues into a physicalized framework so that public "dialogue" (always performed, sometimes silent) can take place.

Gary Downey of the Center for the Study of Science in Society has had his article "Outside the Hotel: Theorizing Intervention" published in Anthropology Between Science and the Humanities by Altamira Press.

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

Paul K. Knox has been invited to join the editorial board of the Sage Urban Affairs Annual Review Series, Sage Publications, Inc. for a two-year period beginning January 1997. He will be actively involved in the production and promotion of the series as well as proposal submission and manuscript review.

Patrick Miller , head of the Department of Landscape Architecture, was made a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects at a investiture ceremony held at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 19, 1996. He was nominated by the Virginia chapter of the ASLA and selected in the professional school instruction category.

A number of architecture faculty members presented papers in the 84th ACSA Annual Meeting held in Boston, March 8-12. Presenters were Joe Mashburn , "4 Houses;" Bill Ruskins, "Road-architecture and the Object of Work;" Susan Piedmont-Paladino , "Design/Build in Context;" Frank Weiner , "Towards the Tectonic: A Critique of the Idea of Space in Architectural Education;" Paul Clark , "Urn and Chamber Pot;" and Mark Blizard and Steve Thompson , "(De)signing the Referent: An Act in Three Stories."

Scott Poole delivered a paper titled: "On the Coherence of Extremes: Lessons from Painting in a Room by Le Corbusier" at the ALSA European Conference, May 1996 in Copenhagen, Denmark. At this same conference he was moderator for the session Materiality and Representation. Scott received the Graham Foundation grant for publication of the proceedings of the Permanence Symposium.

Lee Skabelund co-authored an article "Visualization in Decision-Support Systems: A Proposal for the New River Gorge National River" for "The George Wright Forum: A Journal of Cultural and Natural Parks and Preserves." He also presented a paper at the Sixth Biennial International Linear Parks Conference entitled "Bridging the Gap Between Federal State and Local Land Management Agencies: The New River Parkway Land Management System."

Joseph A. Schetz, the J. Byron Maupin professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, has been selected by the American Institute Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) to receive the 1997 Pendray Aerospace Literature Award.

The AIAA is recognizing Schetz for "extensive, sustained, outstanding aerospace literature contributions, including many pioneering articles and conference preprints, a widely appreciated monograph, edited volumes and two successful textbooks."

The award, which will be presented to Schetz during the 35th Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Reno, Nevada, on Jan 7, 1997, honors G. Edward Pendray, founder and past president of the American Rocket Society, and is given annually for outstanding contributions to aeronautical and astronautical literature.

Schetz received his master's and doctoral degrees from Princeton University and joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1969. A prolific researcher and author in the aerospace field throughout his career, during the past five years he has written a textbook, edited another textbook, and authored or co-authored more than 30 professional papers.

Three representatives of Virginia Tech's Division of Continuing Education took part in the program of the Region III annual meeting of the University Continuing Education Association in Gatlinburg, Tenn., on October 17. Ted Settle , director, delivered a presentation, "The Academy in Change," on the status of outreach and lessons learned at Virginia Tech. David Waterman and J.C. Gordon , assistant and associate director for program development, respectively, convened a session, "Outreach Across the Seas: Joining Hands in the Global Community," which looked at a continuing education program with Russian students studying at Virginia Tech for a year.

Michael Hensley, director of the Economic Development Assistance Center in Virginia Tech's Public Service Programs, has been elected to the Policy Committee of the Technical Education Division, American Vocational Association. Hensley will serve a three-year term on the committee.

Boris Davidson , a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering's Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT), and Professor Charles Bostian , CWT director, presented a paper at the Wireless Technology '96 conference held in Providence, Rhode Island, October 7-11. The paper, "Survival of Messages Colliding in a One-Way Communication Environment," was co-authored by Andrew Harmon , who recently received his M.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech. The paper described the results of a spread-spectrum radio receiver processing messages that arrive simultaneously from different transmitters.

Three Extension home economists in P.D. 9 presented seminars at the National Association of Extension Family and Consumer Scientists (NAEFCS) in September in Providence, R.I. on "Transition From home to Work," a nine-lesson course on home management for participants enrolled in the welfare reform program in Virginia. At the request of the Department of Social Services in Culpeper County in July 1995, the home economists developed the curriculum and taught the classes to prepare social services' clients to re-enter the workforce. Brenda Olafsen , Northern District Office; Helen Smith, Extension agent, Rappahannock County; and Christine Kasten , Extension agent, Orange County, presented two seminars explaining the classes. Barbara Board, Extension specialist, 4-H state staff, conducted the evaluation of the classes.

Extension agents Athena Taylor , Culpeper, and Beverly Butterfield, Fauquier County, helped design and teach the classes.