Students do the math and do the research, too
Terms like “Borda Count” and “eigenvectors” may not seem tangible to most people, but they do have real-world applications — which two Colgate mathematics students explored over the summer. Shujing Wang ’12 and Daniel Michev ’14 presented the results of their research projects to a classroom full of students in the fall.


Mathematics students present their research findings. (Photo by Ashlee Eve ’14)

    Michev collaborated on his project, which explored voting methods, with Elizabeth Wilcox, visiting assistant professor of mathematics. In his presentation, he first explained the concept of voting theory and said that the most common method — the plurality system (a candidate with the most votes wins, even without an absolute majority of votes) — is flawed.
    Michev came up with his own method that combines two voting systems in order to achieve what he says is maximum fairness. His formula — (W x n/2) + (U x 1/v) — represents a mixture of the method of pair-wise comparisons and the Borda Count, two of the most widely studied voting methods. His method is not perfect, Michev acknowledged, but, he said, with modifications, it could potentially improve the effectiveness and fairness of voting.
    It was Wilcox’s first time mentoring a student for a summer project, so she and Michev shared in the excitement of conducting research in a collaborative way. “This project bridged a few different topical areas, economics, voting methods, and math,” said Wilcox.
    Wang’s mentor for her project, titled “Eigenvectors of the Network Laplacian,” was Daniel A. Schult, professor of mathematics. Wang’s research focused on how to effectively synchronize networks of oscillators by changing the eigenvalues (measures of how well oscillators can synchronize) of the matrix representing that network. Each network serves as a representation of the way a “node” is connected via a matrix (the Network Laplacian). Adding or removing edges changes that matrix, increasing or decreasing its eigenvalues.
    Giving an example that non-math students could grasp, Wang said, “Imagine each node is a friend you have on Facebook. If you know that person personally, we would draw a line to connect you and that friend. If you don’t know them, though, there would be no line. That is how you create a network.”
    Both Michev and Wang agreed that, although research can be difficult, it is satisfying because of what it uncovers. “A lot of times you think your method will work, but it doesn’t,” said Wang. “Then you just try again and see what you discover.”
— Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14

Applying psychology know-how to Hamilton business
When a businessman in the village of Hamilton had a question about how best to gauge employees’ abilities, he turned to a Colgate faculty member for advice. That request has turned into an interesting collaborative project involving a student, a professor, and an innkeeper.

Zachary Lin Zhao ’12 and Professor Spencer Kelly develop employee personality tests for a Hamilton business owner. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

    Spencer Kelly, associate professor of psychology, and Zachary Lin Zhao ’12 have been working with Ben Eberhardt, general manager of the Colgate Inn, to create a personality questionnaire that measures the aptitude of current, and potential, inn employees.
    “Ben came to me, asking if I knew of any research that would help him better assess his current employees’ abilities, and his future applicants, in some sort of personality measure that could correlate to performance,” said Kelly.
    Kelly said this did not exactly fall under his area of expertise, but he thought Zhao — a psychology and mathematic economics double major — would be great for the project. He set up a meeting for the three of them to discuss it.
    Zhao researched various personality tests and combined them to make a questionnaire that best suited Eberhardt’s specific needs for current employees. From those results, Zhao was able to come up with an equation that enabled him to craft a second test for applicants.
    While the personality tests are tailored specifically for the Colgate Inn, Zhao and Kelly believe they can become valuable tools for other businesses, as well.
    “This is just one example of how the expertise on campus, from faculty members and students, can have a real, hands-on benefit for businesses in the village,” said Eberhardt. “I hope there will be even more connections between local business owners and students in the future.”
— Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14

Aveni to judge astronomical science competition
Professor Anthony Aveni has been selected as a judge for the YouTube Space Lab, a global science competition and ongoing education program. YouTube and Lenovo launched the program in conjunction with space agencies throughout the world, and the more than 35 judges are world-renowned scientists, astronauts, educators, and explorers.
    Aveni, the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies, will help select two science experiments designed by students between the ages of 14 and 18. The experiments will be conducted 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station and live streamed on YouTube this summer.
    At press time, more than 1 million people had visited the Space Lab channel since its launch on YouTube, to learn more about the competition and to participate. And, more than 5.7 million people worldwide had enjoyed the program’s introductory video.
    “These young people, who will someday change our world, may get the chance to see their work conducted beyond it — in space and in the ‘cloud,’” said Aveni.
    Aveni, who has taught at Colgate since 1963, helped pioneer the field of archaeoastronomy and is one of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy. A lecturer, speaker and editor/author of more than two dozen books on ancient astronomy, his most recent book is The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

Colgate ranks highly for Fulbright participation
With nine students having won Fulbright awards for 2011–2012, Colgate has been named one of the top producers of Fulbright students in its category. The university is ranked fourth among the bachelor’s institutions, according to the latest information supplied by Fulbright, which is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. The success of Colgate and other top-producing institutions was highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
    Colgate applicants have received a large number of grants the past two years, with nine Fulbright grantees and one French Ministry ETA recipient for 2011–2012 and seven Fulbright grantees for 2010–2011. Almost 1,700 American students, artists, and young professionals in more than 100 different fields of study have been offered Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English, and conduct research in more than 140 countries throughout the world beginning this past fall.

Cyber insecurity in war
What would prompt a college student to want to toss his cell phone in the trash? New research by Carolyn Nordstrom, known as a pioneer in the anthropology of war and peace, was powerful enough to do just that.
    Delivering Colgate’s third annual Schaehrer Memorial Lecture on October 13, Nordstrom addressed the role of technology in conflict from unexpected angles. Nordstrom has “an anthropologist’s sensitivity to the way that technical, moral, and existential perceptions combine to create a vision of the future,” said Nancy Ries, director of Colgate’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which sponsored the lecture. Nordstrom is a professor of anthropology at University of Notre Dame.
    P-CON major Dave Esber ’11 was moved by her talk. “We constantly celebrate new technology and cast to the side any qualms we have because it is so important to our daily lives,” he said, “but she gave us reason to question this. I know that after the lecture at least a few of us were tempted to toss our phones in the trash.”
    Nordstrom, who studies war, conflict, and transnational crime in Africa and South Asia, had much to talk about with President Jeffrey Herbst when the two met in Colgate’s studio to record a Conversation on World Affairs. The full conversation can be found on YouTube and on Colgate’s video console.    
    While on campus, Nordstrom met with students and faculty, as well as several of the alumni whose contributions established the Schaehrer lecture series in honor of the late Peter Schaehrer ’65. Over the past few years, these alumni have formed an increasingly close bond with Colgate over their intellectual interests and the memory of their former classmate, who was a career educator and champion of civil rights.
    The next day in Utica, Nordstrom delivered the keynote lecture at the inaugural UNSPOKEN Human Rights Conference, which featured panels on war, forced migration, refugee settlement, and community building. Faculty, students, and alumni participated along with many partners.
    Ries said, “Dr. Nordstrom provided the perfect bridge between our educational efforts at Colgate and the work at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, which sponsored UNSPOKEN.”

Opening doors, expanding study abroad
This fall, as alumni, faculty, and students celebrated the 50th anniversary of Colgate’s London Study Group, the Institute of International Education (IIE) released its 2009–2010 Open Doors data. Colgate appeared near the top of two lists for the number of students studying abroad. Colgate ranked No. 3 nationally among baccalaureate institutions in the number of students who participated in semester-long programs (360 students). And the university ranked No. 7 in the total number of students who studied abroad overall, including extended study trips (435 students).
    The IIE, an independent nonprofit resource on international higher education exchange activity into and out of the United States, also found that study abroad activity by U.S. college students was on the rise in 2010–2011 for the second year, after leveling off during the economic uncertainty that began in 2007.
    At Colgate, options for studying abroad are growing. Last spring, the faculty adopted a new portable aid policy that begins with the Class of 2016. Students will be able to carry over their financial aid when studying abroad on an approved non-Colgate program that better meets their academic interests than one of Colgate’s own faculty-led groups.
    An interim portable aid initiative — in effect for the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 academic years — is now in place to encourage students to choose approved non-Colgate programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and other non-traditional study abroad destinations, such as the Balkans or former Soviet states.
    “The main purpose of the program is to provide our aided students with the same opportunities for off-campus study as are available to full-pay students, particularly in destinations outside of Western Europe,” said President Jeffrey Herbst. “We believe so strongly in the importance of this that, rather than waiting two years for Colgate’s new policy on home school tuition/portable aid to go into effect, we are making funds available to make this happen now.”

Resourceful professors take students “Beyond Colgate”
Jessica Graybill, assistant professor of geography, needed to look no farther than Utica, N.Y., for students in her Urban Transformations seminar to find a place to experience the cultural, spatial, and environmental changes brought about by refugee migration. The city’s leaders openly welcome international newcomers — most recently from Bosnia, Belarus, and Vietnam — as a strategy for economic sustainability.

Through the Beyond Colgate program, Professor Catherine Cardelus took her students to Old Forge, N.Y., to measure the diameter of 3,000 trees and collect leaf litter in order to study forest health. (Photo by Catherine Cardelus)
    “The proximity of Utica and the richness of its immigrant history make it an ideal location for our work,” said Graybill, whose course spans the full spectrum of the research process, from project conceptualization through individual and team research components, and culminating in a final paper. But without a budget to visit, the 30-mile distance would be so close, yet so far.
    So, Graybill applied to the Beyond Colgate program for $975 — a reasonable amount that would cover a series of five field trips and research support for her nine students. The decade-old program supports some 35 to 40 trips each year, all organized by faculty members who are as frugal as they are creative. Each trip must meet a common objective: allow students to apply what they are learning in the classroom, while exploring the region.
    Elizabeth Fischer ’12 was part of the three-member team studying Beyond Greenspaces: Indicators of Sustainability and Well-being in Utica, N.Y. “We saw firsthand the decay and deterioration such as brown fields and vacant buildings that plague many parts of Utica,” she said, “but we were also able to speak with Planning Commissioner Brian Thomas about his sentiments on the sustainability of the city.”
    Mark Stern, visiting assistant professor of educational studies, also brought students on a trip “to speak to people in the thick of it all,” as he called it. With his $2,500 budget, he brought the 25 students in his Politics and Education class to New York City for an 18-hour, round-trip marathon. He planned bus transportation, meals, and meetings with professional friends and colleagues at the Promise Academy charter school and the American Federation of Teachers. The group also met with education reporter Dana Goldstein, whose stories appear in The Daily Beast, The Nation, and elsewhere.
    “I’ve been telling my students that if you really want to understand education policy, you need to understand everything other than education policy first — you need context, and you need a political reading of that context,” said Stern. “The value of the trip was to interact with people in order to try to make more sense of the increasingly messy and complicated landscape of education policy; to get through all the mire and muck and rhetoric surrounding education policy today and to just talk. We don’t do that enough.”

Learning chemistry piece by piece
“Hey, you get an oxygen double bond!” exclaimed a Hamilton Central School student to his friend while playing the board game Quest for the Cure: The Search for Nolenium. The game was created by and introduced to the high school regents chemistry classroom by Colgate students Griffin Bleecker ’15 and Alison Ball ’15. Bleecker and Ball are enrolled in Professor Ernie Nolen’s first-year seminar/core Scientific Perspectives course titled Molecules That Rock Your World.

Hamilton Central School chemistry students play a learning board game created by Colgate students. (Photo by Duy Trinh ’14)

    Elements, like iron, and alloys, like bronze, have entire “ages” named after them, but how did sugar change the course of history? In Quest for the Cure, players move around the board exploring the history of molecules around the world. For each correct answer, players receive a piece of the elusive molecule “Nolenium” — a nod to the game inventors’ professor — such as an oxygen double bond.
    “This exercise teaches through soft learning,” Nolen said of his teaching method of having the students create and design games, including writing up all the questions. Through the process, his students learn subconsciously — they don’t realize what they’ve retained until it “clicks” as they’re recalling the correct answers.
    As if to illustrate Nolen’s point, the eyes of Mikhaila Redovian ’15 lit up on the realization that she knew the answers to the clues being drawn during the game she made, called Overdose. Redovian and Zach Smith ’15 created the game, which is a kind of molecule Pictionary. Players pick a card, then draw clues for their partners to guess the answer.
    “The idea is to create games that make science fun,” said Hamilton Central School chemistry teacher Terry Monty, who added that she was excited to invite the Colgate students into her 10th- and 11th-grade classes.
    In another game, Moleclues, presented by Brian McCormick ’15 and Jack Metelski ’15, players guess a molecule based on a series of five clues — thus, the tongue-twister name. When players answer correctly, they receive a piece of a molecule.  
    The Hamilton Central students enjoyed getting a chance to play a game in chemistry class, even though they occasionally complained about the difficulty of the questions.
    “It will get easier,” Metelski informed the frustrated high school students in his group. Although he was referring to his game, his statement could have just as easily applied to understanding chemistry.
    For the Colgate students, a chance to go back to high school offered more than a memorable learning experience; it also showed them what they’ve learned this semester.




Syllabus

FSEM 125, Analysis of Health Issues: Cancer
MWF 9:20-10:10 a.m., Olin Hall 205A
Engda Hagos, assistant professor of biology

Course description: This course focuses on understanding the cell and molecular changes that lead to human cancer. It addresses the causes, how the disease progresses, current treatments, and novel and future treatment strategies.

On the reading list: Cancer: Basic Science and Clinical Aspects, Craig Almeida and Sheila Barry; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Key assignments/ activities: Discussion periods every other week, for which students will be asked to complete a written assignment on the topic. Group poster presentations. Small-group presentations on a subject that is related to cancer biology and has societal implications.

The professor says: “This is not a biology course but, instead, is a core Scientific Perspectives course. This course enables students to think about how scientists learn about cancer, analyze, and report findings; and how our understanding of cancer influences our view of societal issues.”

Student perspectives:
“Regardless of the dreary outlook many have on cancer, our class learned that not only is cancer preventable, but many types are highly treatable.”

“It was inspiring to read about the research process, which made me decide to do cancer research in my career.”

“This course helped prepare me for the rest of my college education. I learned how to plan ahead and balance my time. In addition, I believe I am on my way to becoming a better science writer.”

Live and learn



When the Capitol Steps came to perform at the Palace Theater in early November, Jim Andretta ’12, Dana Paolucci ’13, and I were lucky enough to interview them before the show. As someone who’s been involved in professional politics since high school, a history major and political science minor, and a member of Charred Goosebeak (Colgate’s improv group), I was excited to learn from the pros.
    Capitol Steps is a premier political satire group from Washington, D.C., claiming to “put the Mock in Democracy.” Formed at a Congressional Christmas party in 1981, the group pokes fun at politics. Their performance at the Palace was a mixture of stand-up comedy, musical theater, and political parody.
    From impersonating Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to poking fun at Justin Bieber, nothing in recent political or cultural memory was left untouched by the performers. For me, it was inspiring to see comedy and politics intermingling. Although separate disciplines, they can combine for a powerful effect.
    The interview was much like their show, often about serious subjects or directed by serious questions but always lighthearted. Starting off by asking questions like “How constructive is political satire?” we quickly moved on to “Who is your favorite terrorist?” and “When will Ronald Reagan rise from the dead to lead the Republican Party again?” By the end, even the camera crew was laughing out loud. It was refreshing to learn that even those involved in professional politics can be down-to-earth and find the humor in the sometimes-depressing rut that is politics.
    The cast of Capitol Steps views their job almost as therapy — distracting people from the apprehension caused by politics. I was reminded that, despite how grim and somber modern politics may seem, it’s still acceptable, and even necessary, to point out the humor in our own government. After all, as the Constitution proclaims, we are the People.

— Joseph Petracca ’13 (pictured above, left)