The
O'Shea Report: March 2004
At every monthly
faculty meeting during the school year, Dean of Faculty Donal
O'Shea presents brief overviews of recent publications and other
achievements by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from
his report for March 2004.
GRANTS
AND AWARDS
Darby
Dyar, associate professor of astronomy and geology, has
just received a three-year $195,000 award from NASA for her proposal
Hydrogen and Iron in Terrestrial Bodies. Darby will coordinate
and direct work by her students and investigators at the Lunar
and Planetary Institute, Brown, Rutgers, and NASA aimed at studying
the amounts of hydrogen in the interior of planets, notably Mars
and the moon. They do this by studying Martian and lunar meteorites,
as well as rocks brought back from the moon by the Apollo mission.
Darby will prepare and identify the samples, separating out the
minerals of interest. She and her colleagues will build on previous
work and study hydrogen and iron contents in the minute samples
Darby isolates using a whole range of techniques. The proposal
argues that the group's work will give insight into the geological
processes involved in the formation of Mars and the moon and will
ultimately illuminate surface processes as well as differences
between the core and the mantle of both Mars and the moon.
This work has become even more urgent with the recent discovery
of evidence for water in liquid form on Mars.
TEACHING
Science
faculty have been arguing for some time about how best to teach
science to students whose quantitative and algebraic skills are
not as sharp as they might be. One of the most promising experiments
happened last term when Donnie Cotter, associate professor
of chemistry, with enthusiastic support from the chemistry department,
offered a new course, Chemistry 100. The course was offered to
a self-selected group of students who felt they needed additional
problem-solving skills. The course met five days a week and the
students wound up in the same spot as the standard first-semester
inorganic chemistry course (Chemistry 101). The extra class time
was used to allow students to go into greater depth on algebraic
techniques and problem-solving strategies. The course evaluations
were excellent; however, the real test will be to see whether
such students perform as well in the second-semester inorganic
course as those who took Chemistry 101.
One of the
most difficult things in teaching writing is to find the time
to read and usefully comment on multiple student drafts of papers.
A collaboration between English professors and instructional technologists
has given rise to some really interesting experiments. Amy
Martin, assistant professor of English, for instance, has
been using WebCT in a novel way in English 101 and 200. For each
paper assignment, she divides students into groups of three or
four and asks them to copy the first draft of their paper onto
WebCT. She sets it up so that only members of a given group can
access each other's papers. Each student then reads the drafts
of the other two or three members of her group and comments on
them using the "comments" function available in Microsoft Word.
Amy gives the students guidelines for commenting productively
so that they are not lost and don't just praise each other's work.
The end result is that each student gets two or three sets of
comments from her peers. Amy also has her SAW mentor read and
comment upon all of the papers, so that every student has feedback
from her as well. The student uses all of that feedback to revise
the essay substantially. For the first paper early in the semester,
Amy grades the draft and then the revision so that she is part
of the whole process. This helps the students take the whole process
seriously. Later in the semester, it becomes less formal, and
she only looks at the final product that results from the online
peer review. The uniting of the commenting feature in Word with
WebCT was actually the idea of Aime DeGrenier, instructional
technology consultant at LITS. Its use in English classes mediated
by a SAW mentor was piloted by Peter Berek, professor of
English, SAW mentor Andrea LeClair '02, instructional services
coordinator Julie Boiselle, former reference librarian
Raven Fonfa, and, of course, Aime. Peter, too, now uses
it routinely, and the technique seems to be spreading. I haven't
been in the classroom in a while, but the technique seems potentially
very powerful--the students surely learn by commenting, under
supervision, on each other's papers. One could imagine adopting
the technique to math and physics by using Tex instead of Word.
And for those worried about investing so much time in the technology,
all reports have been that the LITS folks provide wonderful support,
technical and psychic. Aime DeGrenier gave a presentation on this
work at a meeting in Atlanta; her slides show what the interface
looks like from student and faculty points of view. They are really
neat. Best of all, they are online: check
them out.
PAPERS
Thank you
for the papers, and please keep sending them. I really enjoy them,
even when I don't know what is going on.
Danny
Czitrom, professor of history, published a very provocative
review of Scorsese's movie the Gangs of New York in the
latest issue of Labor History. Why, Danny wonders, has
"Scorsese, whose work has redefined the drama of ethnic experience,
so thoroughly internalized such an essentially anti-immigrant
(and anti-Catholic) vision of New York history?" His partial answer
is unsettling.
Since my
mother was diagnosed with dementia (which, sadly, is inexorably
erasing her memories and personality), I've been keeping an eye
out for papers related to Alzheimer's. In addition to the paper
by Sean Decatur, associate professor and chair of chemistry,
and several of his colleagues, which I described in my February
2004 report, Amy Hitchcock, visiting assistant professor
of biological sciences, has published a paper potentially relevant
to neurodegenerative disorders. It has just appeared in the very
prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The synthesis of proteins from their basic constituents (amino
acids) has been far better understood than how proteins are broken
down in the cell into amino acids. Twenty years ago, a small protein
named ubiquitin was implicated in this process, and lots of work
since then has gone on showing how this protein can bind to other
proteins as a precursor to dissolution. One of the richest sites
for synthesis and breakdown of proteins within the cell is the
internal membrane called the endoplasmic reticulum. Through a
range of techniques culminating in some heavy-duty data analysis
and matching to a big proteonome database, researchers actually
identify and classify 83 membrane proteins (of a total of 211
earlier possibilities they had identified) that could play a role
in membrane protein degradation pathways using ubiquitin.
Lowell
Gudmundson, professor of Latin American studies and history,
has what can only be described as a stealth article in the upcoming
issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review. At first
blush, it looks, and reads, like a whodunit. One hundred eleven
years ago, in the midst of Christmas Eve revelry in the Guatemalan
village of San Gerónimo, a 23-year-old English hacienda
owner and his 19-year-old English friend were beaten and left
unconscious in the middle of a main street. Or so it seemed. The
unlikely alibis of the accused became more believable as they
were challenged. Perhaps the defendants, blind drunk, ineptly
beat each other up? "What," asks Lowell, "are we to make of a
trial in which all appears lost, silence reigns, and oppression
wins?" Where losing is winning? And by the time you are asking
yourself this, you are in the midst of a highly entertaining,
highly sophisticated post-modern narrative in which race, gender,
class, and government regulation are nontrivial actors. Highly
recommended.
A fascinating
article by Michael Penn, assistant professor of religion,
appeared recently in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
Entitled "Ritual Kissing, Heresy, and the Emergence of Early Christian
Orthodoxy," the article shows how various church fathers (Ruffinius,
Jerome, and Augustine, among others) appropriated the ritual kiss,
then current in fourth- and fifth-century Christian worship as
a means of setting boundaries and distinguishing orthodox followers
from heretics.
Eva Paus,
professor of economics and director of global initiatives, has
just published a sweeping paper in the journal World Development
studying productivity gains in a number of Latin American economies.
She compares the economies and productivity within Latin America
and to other economies in Asia and eastern Europe. She analyzes
why the widespread implementation of free market reforms in the
last decade has not given rise to hoped for productivity gains.
Her findings suggest that Latin American countries need to couple
their neo-liberal policies with developing their human capital
base (i.e., secondary education) and technological infrastructure.
The new
journal Latino Studies features an open letter to university
presidents arguing for the necessity of Latino studies. That letter
cites the journal's section Pšinas Recuperadas, which attempts
to rescue and bring into the light lost moments, words, images,
and events in Latino and Latina experience in the United States,
and credits Roberto Marquez, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor
of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with the idea for the
section. The first appearance of the section recalls a couple
of key images of black-Latino collaboration.
Leo Kahane,
visiting associate professor of economics, is editor of the Journal
of Sports Economics and contributes an article on competitive
balance in baseball (actually, an article commenting on an article
on competitive balance). In fact, if you are a baseball fan, I
recommend the entire November 2003 issue of the journal. It is
a fascinating study of economics and labor relations in baseball.
TRUSTEES
Our trustees
are also writing. Go: An Airline Adventure by Barbara
Cassani '82 appeared late last year from Time-Warner books.
You can get it in Britain or Canada or from Amazon's UK Web site.
The book gallops along, full of life and impossible to put down.
Barbara tells the story of having been put in charge of setting
up a low-cost airline subsidiary of British Air. Starting with
a ridiculously small budget, she and her team literally built
an airline company from scratch, scrambling for market share and
personnel, leasing airplanes and airports, standing accepted wisdom
on its head, designing uniforms, selling really good coffee, and
inventing cheap frills. They triumphed over lawsuits and ad campaigns
from opposing carriers, co-opted unions, and turned a profit after
three years in the face of ferocious competition. When British
Airways' CEO and Barbara's mentor was fired after three years,
the company was sold and Barbara managed to engineer a management
buyout. When the investment company that backed them decided to
sell out to their arch-rival six months later at a profit close
to 400 percent, one understands Barbara's and her management team's
disappointment. In four years, they had parlayed 25 million pounds
into nearly 400 million and turned the airline business in the
UK upside down.
Barbara
is what most would call an A player. Trustee Tom DeLong,
a professor at the Harvard Business School, and a colleague contributed
an article to the Harvard Business Review entitled "Let's
Hear It for B Players." The article points out the huge role in
the success of corporations and companies played by individuals
with B-player temperaments: "Companies are routinely blinded to
the important role B players serve in saving organizations from
themselves." The defining characteristics of a B-player temperament
include an aversion to calling attention to oneself, making the
fewest demands on a CEO's time, and valuing work-life balance.
Tom analyzes the different roles played by B players and provides
a preliminary taxonomy of such individuals (recovered A players,
truth-tellers, go-to persons, and middlers).
--The February 2004
O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The October 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The September 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The May 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The April 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The February 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The October 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The September 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The May 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The April 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The March 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The February 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2001 O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2001 O'Shea Report more>
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