Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, has been named the next Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Boehling was appointed unanimously by the eleven-member state International Commission, which supervises the work of the ITS, at its annual meeting in Paris last week. She will take a leave of absence from UMBC and begin her directorship on January 1, 2013. "Strong academic and administrative leadership is required to ensure the continuing institutional transformation of the ITS into a centre for documentation, information and research of world importance. The ITS’s expanded mission is both challenging and fulfilling, and the International Commission is delighted to have secured the appointment of such an outstanding candidate," said Frédéric Baleine du Laurens, director of archives at the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and chairman of the International Commission. Boehling is an expert in the history of the Holocaust, World War II and the early postwar period in Germany. She served for several years on the Historical Advisory Panel to the U.S. Government’s Interagency Working Group for the Implementation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Federal Disclosure Act, tasked to declassify material related to WWII war crimes. “The treasure trove of documents in the ITS archives reveals new insights into the experience and the perspectives of the victims of Nazi persecution. It is very compelling material that we want to make more accessible for research and educational purposes by means of digitization and archival description,” she said. Boehling said that she hopes to develop internships and research opportunities for UMBC students, especially with the displaced persons files, which are mostly in English. Boehling has studied and researched in Germany for several years on various research projects, including in Kiel, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich, and had a research fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. In 1980 Boehling received her M.A. and in 1990 her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Central European History. Last year, she co-authored with Uta Larkey Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story based on the family letters of Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, professor of biology at UMBC. The present ITS Director and ICRC delegate, Jean-Luc Blondel, will return to Switzerland and continue to work for the ICRC. The ITS press release can be found here. About the International Tracing Service The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages. The ITS preserves these historical records and makes them available for research. The archive contains about 30 million documents relating to the persecution, forced labour and emigration that took place in the wake of the Second World War. The ITS is governed by the eleven member states (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, USA) of the International Commission. On behalf of the commission, the ITS is managed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) until the end of 2012. The German Federal Archives will become the new institutional partner for the ITS as of January 2013. For more information visit www.its-arolsen.org. Picture Download http://www.its-arolsen.org/index.php?id=80&L=0 http://www.its-arolsen.org/de/presse/fotodownload/index.html

NIST will hold a Big Data Workshop 13-14 June 2012 in Gaithersburg to explore key national priority topics in support of the White House Big Data Initiative. The workshop is being held in collaboration with the NSF sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, a collaboration between UMBC, Georgia Tech and UCSD.

This first workshop will discuss examples from science, health, disaster management, security, and finance as well as topics in emerging technology areas, including analytics and architectures. Two issues of special interest are identifying the core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share big data that could be standardized and developing measurements to ensure the accuracy and robustness of big data methods.

The workshop format will be a mixture of sessions, panels, and posters. Session speakers and panel members are by invitation only but all interested parties are encouraged to submit extended abstracts and/or posters.

The workshop is being held at NIST’s Gaithersburg facility and is free, although online pre-registration is required. A preliminary agenda is available which is subject to change as the workshop date approaches.

1 Peter 2:9-10

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Reflection:
Because of God’s mercy, we have been rescued and called God’s royal priesthood. It was because God in His mercy saw us and had compassion on us that we were saved. And the mercy we have received, we are to share and declare. God has called us to go and minister, and share His mercy and love with this generation.

Response:
Let’s ask God for His heart for our generation, that we would pray, love and share His mercy to those around us, and that we will be His royal priesthood to our generation.

We've increased the storage limits for iCloud Key Value Store so you can provide an even better experience in your app. Now, the total Key Value Storage limit is 1 MB per app, the single key limit is 1 MB, and the total key limit is 1024. Key Value Store also updates devices faster than ever. Learn how you can get started with iCloud.

We've increased the storage limits for iCloud Key Value Store so you can provide an even better experience in your app. Now, the total Key Value Storage limit is 1 MB per app, the single key limit is 1 MB, and the total key limit is 1024. Key Value Store also updates devices faster than ever. Learn how you can get started with iCloud.

A few weeks ago, AASHE Executive Director Paul Rowland and I were in the nation’s capital for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Symposium: Science, Innovation, and Partnerships for Sustainability Solutions, held in a glass-enclosed room of the Pew Convention Center.

The NSF is a renowned federal agency that funds research advancing scientific knowledge across the spectrum. NSF’s Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) program was established to specifically address issues of sustainability while encouraging interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

“Sustainability issues remain at the forefront and will into the foreseeable future; the solutions have to be based in basic scientific understanding,” remarked Tim Killeen, Assistant Director for Geosciences at NSF. Sound science is the nucleus, the common ground among all of the disciplines of sustainability. Whether we think of sustainability as three legs of a stool or four interconnected circles, whether we are researching sea level rises or population dynamics, science is the indispensable core.

But what about the anthropologists, historians, shortly put, social scientists? According to Killeen, “science is in all of those” disciplines too. It comes down to getting data that is usable and easily understood. There are “enormous challenges with mining the data, weaving it together while granting the public access to data.”

This theme of data collection, as well as the integrity of interdisciplinary research resonated throughout the day. Holm Tiessen, Director of the Inter-American Institute commented that interdisciplinarity is about “teaching scientists how to ask the right questions to fellow scientists.”
Chad Gaffield, President of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) offered a model for us to consider in relation to interdisciplinarity. His T-shaped model on an individual level aims to describe how interdisciplinarity should be approached: we should have depth as well as breadth. The issue with this approach, as other panelists pointed out, is that when it comes to constructing interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum we consistently run up against the question of what should be in the “vertical” and what can be dispersed into the “horizontal.”

I found it interesting the different prefixes of “-disciplinary” that were used, most significantly, “inter,” “cross,” and “trans.” The last one struck me the most because it is commonly used today in relation to transnationalism, the concept used to explain the exchange and flow of physical, human, and intellectual capital across geographical boundaries. And if we think about the global nature of interdisciplinary partnerships (i.e., Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability), “trans” seems to make even more sense as a way to describe sustainability curriculum development; it’s no longer just about crossing geographical boundaries, but national boundaries. Students and researchers of varying nationalities are partnering on research that is endemic to their country or world. What that means to sustainability, and specifically higher education sustainability, is that crossing disciplines is far from divorced from crossing cultures. So, thinking about ways in which we can marry those concepts when it comes to teaching and practicing sustainability on our campuses is important.

Perhaps as sustainability professionals we should be looking more closely at how we personally define interdisciplinary, and how it’s defined by the immediate and extensive communities in which we’re implicated. This would give us a better idea of what questions need to be asked among a given, self-proclaimed interdisciplinary group in order to not just create a conversation amongst individuals from varying disciplines but create a permeable boundary – one that allows a constant and consistent exchange of information and knowledge.

Paul presented on the second day about the role of higher education in sustainability, alongside representatives from other non-profit as well as for-profit organizations. A theme that emerged was a (near) consensus that sustainability is necessary, but the mechanisms desired and required to achieve it are still not fully understood. Bill Clark, Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development at Harvard University expounded on his research regarding barriers to establishing sustainability as a field: mutual incomprehension between and among scientists, policymakers, and the general public (avoided by trust-building); fragmentation of knowledge (avoided by strategic integration, supply-chain thinking, and project management); and inflexibility (avoided by shifting from knowledge systems to learning systems, and creating safe spaces for experimentation and failure). The last barrier especially brings to the forefront the importance of the university in this process.

In conferences or symposiums such as this one in which there is a great deal of information packaged into a short time frame, participants sometimes leave with a sense of overwhelm. However, in this case, the collective sense of optimism around cross-discipline and –sector collaboration resonated above all. The combination of meta discussions around sustainability with concrete examples of current (NSF-funded) research, as well as generative discussions around the real challenges different stakeholders are facing in this movement afforded an energetic dynamic.

Be sure to check the NSF website for archives of the plenary speeches, Powerpoint presentations, and more information.