Honors Space: What to Do When There Isn’t Any

I direct a small honors program from my faculty office in the English Department at Mount Mercy University, which is an institution that is outgrowing its tiny campus. It is an exciting time, with new graduate programs and athletic facilities being added. But there is not enough space. At the end of May 2013, a memo from Academic Affairs made this request: “please contact your students to pack up any personal items they have left in the Honors Lounge, as we need to repurpose that room over the summer.” I have received a memo like this about every year or two since I began directing the program in 2005. The university values the honors program, but multiple constituencies are vying for the same limited and precious spaces even as strategic priorities keep shifting over the years

Honors Space: What to Do When There Isn’t Any

I direct a small honors program from my faculty office in the English Department at Mount Mercy University, which is an institution that is outgrowing its tiny campus. It is an exciting time, with new graduate programs and athletic facilities being added. But there is not enough space. At the end of May 2013, a memo from Academic Affairs made this request: “please contact your students to pack up any personal items they have left in the Honors Lounge, as we need to repurpose that room over the summer.” I have received a memo like this about every year or two since I began directing the program in 2005. The university values the honors program, but multiple constituencies are vying for the same limited and precious spaces even as strategic priorities keep shifting over the years

TEEAL and AGORA: Off-and online access to the scientific literature of agriculture for the developing world

TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) and AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) are digital collections of scientific agricultural literature for the developing world. Through both, the agricultural research cycle in the developing world functions more effectively, including in areas where access to the internet is limited, slow, or unreliable, thanks to TEEAL's offline access. This paper discusses the programs' training, outreach, and usage and barriers to it, and the international partnerships that make them possible. Also profiled is the new AgriKnowledge database, which provides access to key unpublished agricultural content, including reports from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's programs and projects

Partners in the Parks: Field Guide to an Experiential Program in the National Parks (1st edition)

When Joan Digby first proposed taking collegiate honors students into our national parks, I jumped at the chance. Within minutes of reading her email, I not only responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” but went so far as to volunteer the resources of the Southern Utah University Honors Program to get things started. Nestled among 5 national parks in southwestern Utah, I felt our campus would be a natural focal point for the kind of program Joan envisioned. Within weeks we had laid the groundwork for a proof-of-concept pilot project at nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. Little did I know at the time, but I was taking the first steps on a nationwide journey that would introduce me to 11 amazing national parks, some 47 park rangers, and over 100 outstanding college students—with the prospect of these numbers growing annually. The aim of Partners in the Parks (PITP) from its inception has been to introduce, or reintroduce, collegiate honors students to this country: not the transformed environment that we have constructed on its surface but the bedrock world upon which it rests. Like de Toqueville, Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, and so many others, we recognized that the unique place that is America cannot be separated from the land upon which it was built. One valuable way to study and understand it, then, is to visit places where the bones of America lie exposed, often without the veneer of civilization, cultivation, or modernization: places protected by the people to preserve for this and future generations, original American landscapes, and important historical landmarks that illustrate and define what America was, is, and can be. PITP takes students deep into America’s national parks. PITP is a see-America-first program. While we recognize the importance of a global perspective in an overall honors education, our goal is to help students see and understand America before or in addition to going abroad. Indeed, for students without the desire or resources to leave the country, PITP offers many of the same kinds of personal development that make study abroad so valuable. In the Field Notes to Chapter 2, “Growing from Within,” Bill Atwill and Kathleen King, share their experience in Acadia National Park, observing how their students demonstrated valuable growth in the same four key areas that researchers of study abroad programs have identified in their alumni: personal discovery, academic commitment, cultural development, and career development. The student writings in this volume, such as Andy Grube’s “soul expanding” talk with Juste Gatari on the rocky coast of Mount Desert Island, aptly illustrate this important facet of the PITP experience. (See the Field Notes to Chapter 5, “Sitting There in Silence.”

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

“You’re Not Typical Professors, Are You?”: Reflections on the NCHC Faculty Institute in Miami and the Everglades

At the close of the NCHC Faculty Institute in Miami and the Everglades, our group went out for a celebratory dinner at a Cuban restaurant in Miami. Between the main course and the dessert, one of our group struck up a conversation with the young man selling flowers on the sidewalk outside. As we left the restaurant a short while later, knots of participants still locked in animated conversation, the flower vendor remarked, “You’re not typical professors, are you?

Emblems of the wounded heart in the drama of Beaumont and Fletcher.

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher use the emblem of the wounded heart to dramatize a penetrative mode of reading concerned with revealing hypocrisy, locating truth in the human body, and exposing dramatic artifice. Unlike the typically documented occurrence of emblem in early modern drama, their use of emblem is only partially iconographic, instead participating in a discourse which emphasizes the gap between surface appearance and underlying significance. Wounding the heart becomes their metaphor for negotiating that gap. Arguing against scholars who read the drama of Beaumont and Fletcher as absurd, sensationalistic, or lacking in artistic skill, I argue that their use of the emblematic marks them as highly skilled artificers whose artistic vision seeks to reshape the way the audience perceives dramatic spectacle. Examining emblems of the wounded heart in seven plays from the corpus of Beaumont and Fletcher, I analyze the drama in relation to emblematics, theories of the body, problems of genre, and the early modern concerns with hypocrisy. Chapter One introduces the study and situates it with respect to current criticism. Chapter Two reconsiders emblem theory and proposes a mode of reading which emphasizes the privileging of text over image. Chapter Three provides a case study of dramatized emblems in Philaster, demonstrating the dual functions of the image of the wounded heart in the dramatic plot and the emblematic tableau. Chapter Four traces the structural connections between emblems and the genre of tragicomedy in A King and No King, The Maid's Tragedy, and Love's Cure, and argues that emblem is used for polemicizing in these political tragicomedies. Chapter Five examines emblematic and literal readings of the wounded heart in three allegories of love: The Faithful Shepherdess and The Mad Lover by Fletcher, and The Two Noble Kinsmen by Fletcher and Shakespeare. Fletcher exposes the limitations of the emblem of the wounded heart by forcing the audience to read it literally. In all seven plays, emblem is employed as a mode of reading in order to revise the audience's perception of the dramatic scene.Ph.D.Communication and the ArtsEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128377/2/3029408.pd

Adapting Sufia for use in TEEAL-AgriKnowlege

USAIN 2016 Conference Presentation, Session: Lightning Talks (sponsored by Technology Trends IG), Moderators: Netta Cox, Luti SalisburyLightning Talk presentation on adapting the Sufia-Hydra repository stack for use with the AgriKnowledge projec

IAALD 2013 World Congress Paper Presentations, N-Z

IAALD 2013 World Congress Paper Presentations, first presenter last names N-