Faculty/Staff News of Note
June 2004
Dr. Mary Ellen Bayuk, senior registrar, Dr. Amos Ong, lecturer in mathematics, and Carol Tobin, coordinator of college registration, attended the WEB2004 conference in University Park June 13-16.
Dr. Dawn Blasko, associate professor of psychology, gave two presentations at Mind, Language, and Metaphor: Euroconference on the Processing of Metaphor and Metonymy-From Computers to Neuropsychology in Granada, Spain, April 24-29. The first presentation was titled "What Can the Study of Event-Related Brain Potentials Tell us About the Understanding of Nonliteral Language?" and was based on her work with Dr. Victoria Kazmerski, associate professor of psychology. Blasko was also invited to participate in the closing symposium, 'Future Directions in Research on Metaphor: Brain and Behavior."
Ron DelPorto lecturer in computer science, attended the Visual Basic Class at Dayton University, Dayton, Ohio, June 16-19.
Carolyn Dudas, webmaster, Fred Fenstermaker, systems analyst, Jim Serafin, senior systems analyst, and Scott Smith, systems analyst, attended the Web 2004 conference and pre-conference tutorials on June 14-15 at University Park. They attended a number of sessions for web content management, standards, design, security, databases, scripting, and Penn State systems and services.
George Dudas, instructor in computer science, attended the Managing Persistent Data in the .Net Environment Chautauqua Course June 16-19 at the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio.
Dr. John Fizel, director of the Penn State iMBA, was an invited presenter at the recent annual conference of the Pennsylvania Economic Association, held in Pittsburgh June 11-12. Fizel's presentation was titled: "Comparing Decisions of Arbitrator Panels and Individual Arbitrators." He was also asked to review student research papers and provide a pedagogical discussion to help students develop their research ideas and methodology.
Fizel recently received a contract from M. E. Sharpe to publish the Handbook of Sports Economics. The book is expected to be released in the summer of 2005.
Tony Foyle, assistant professor of geology, has been selected by the Center for Teaching and Educational Technologies to attend a three-day workshop titled The Course in College Teaching at University Park in July. Also attending the workshop are Carla Torgerson and Stephanie Janson.
Andy George, lecturer in mathematics, served as a grader for the Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus reading sponsored by the College Board and held June 2-8 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. More than 600 mathematics faculty from across the country were invited to participate in the grading of 225,000 AP Calculus exams.
Dr. Clare Porac, professor of psychology, attended the meetings of the Canadian Psychological Association in St. John's Newfoundland, June 10-12. Porac presented a paper titled "The role of parental sinistrality in the maintenance of left-hand writing."
Porac also had been asked by the on-line editor of Scientific American to contribute an answer in their "Ask the Expert" on-line column. Porac's answer to the question "What causes some people to be left-handed, and why are fewer people left-handed than right-handed?" can be found at the following web address www.sciam.com/askexpert_directory.cfm. The answer was also featured for two weeks on the Scientific American homepage at www.sciam.com.
Michael Rutter, assistant professor of statistics, had three articles published in Journal of Great Lakes Research Volume 29, Supplement. The supplement, which was published in May, is titled "Sea Lamprey International Symposium (SLIS II)." Rutter was primary author on the paper "An improved method to estimate sea lamprey wounding rate on hosts with application to lake trout in Lake Huron." The co-author was Dr. James Bence of Michigan State University.
Rutter also co-authored the following papers, "Sea Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) Parasite-host Interactions in the Great Lakes" and "Recommendations for assessing sea lamprey damages: toward optimizing the control program in the Great Lakes."
On May 21, Rutter defended his Ph.D. dissertation, titled "A model of sea lamprey feeding with implications for lake trout dynamics in Lake Huron." Rutter will receive a Ph.D. in Fisheries from Michigan State University.
On June 9, Rutter gave a presentation titled "Applying Mathematics to Fisheries Science" to three groups of math students at Iroquois Jr./Sr. School.
Dr. Meng Su, assistant professor of computer science, gave a presentation titled "Illustrating the Curse of Dimensionality Numerically through Different Data Distribution Models" to the Third International Symposium on Information and Communication Technologies in Las Vegas, Nevada, June 16-18..
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