Category: Professional Notes

While some popular and academic discourses endow “green” technology with heroic powers to both rejuvenate our stagnating economy and bring about a more environmentally sustainable society, Eric Bonds and his University of Colorado co-author Liam Downey argue that it is important to place their development, fabrication, and use within a global context of inequitable relationships between nations.  The authors did just that by examining three cases of ecological modernization in the automobile industry in an article recently published in the Journal of World-Systems Research.  The cases reveal that “green” technologies instituted in wealthy nations are often composed of natural resources extracted from the Global South.  Consequently, such technologies have a real capacity to create environmental improvements in wealthy nations, but may also inadvertently increase environmental degradation and human rights abuses experienced by people living near natural resource extraction projects elsewhere on the globe.  The article, entitled “Green Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange,” can be downloaded at: www.jwsr.org.

Cassandra Good, assistant editor of the Papers of James Monroe, recently attended the National Historical and Public Records Commission’s Institute for Editing Historical Documents , where she received a certification in that field.

Professor of Mathematics Suzanne Sumner, together with Dr. Wyatt Mangum, adjunct faculty member, recently delivered the invited talk “Worker Bee Aggression towards a Foreign Queen: Modeling from Data” for the Progress on Difference Equations international conference hosted at Virginia Commonwealth University.  The talk addressed their continued research into the mathematical modeling associated with the behavior of bees.

Kelli Slunt, professor of chemistry, served as the head mentor for the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad team.  Twenty of the brightest high school chemistry students were trained by Slunt, three other mentors, and the faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado this June.  Slunt accompanied the top four students to compete at the International Chemistry Olympiad in Washington, D.C.   The team performed well, receiving one gold and three silver metals.  For more information, see http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/07/South-Korea-Dominates-Chemistry-Olympiad.html.

Professor of Mathematics Debra Hydorn and Professor of Biology Kathryn Loesser-Casey recently presented the poster “Tennis Balls Four Ways” at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego, Calif.  The poster described an activity on accuracy and precision in research from BIOL 260 The Reserach Process, a course jointly created and taught by Hydorn and Loesser-Casey.