Andrea Novicki from Duke University added a new post on the Center for Instructional Technology's (CIT) blog about a UMBC hybrid learning effective practice: using participation portfolios to manage and assess online discussions.

Can a Parking Lot be Good for the Chesapeake Bay?

To view scenes from UMBC CUERE’s pervious concrete installation, click the play button below.

9/3/2008

The answer could be yes, if it’s made of pervious concrete, a ‘green’ building material and the subject of a recent how-to workshop hosted by UMBC’s Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE).

Pervious concrete allows stormwater to slowly drain through it like a sponge. Traditional concrete causes runoff that erodes waterways and carries pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.

The August 27 event drew 90 public and private sector attendees from all of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Delaware) to UMBC. Attendees included state and local regulators and managers for planning, stormwater, environmental protection and highway/transportation departments as well as private sector engineers, architects, developers, builders and concrete suppliers and contractors. 

“We were delighted by the overwhelming turnout and interest,” said Stu Schwartz, organizer of the event and a senior research scientist at CUERE with more than 15 years experience in land use and water quality issues. “It was a great success in providing practitioners consistent information on how to use pervious concrete effectively.”

According to Schwartz and his colleague Norb Delatte of Cleveland State University, the workshop also taught attendees how to navigate Maryland’s recent changes in development laws, such as the Maryland Stormwater Act of 2007, which calls for “environmental site design” for new construction and development.

The highlight of the day was the arrival of a concrete mixing truck for a lesson in the proper pouring and installation of the material at two instrumented test plots outside the Technology Research Center building. The test beds are equipped with scientific instruments to give UMBC researchers long-term data on pervious concrete’s effectiveness as a building material and for environmental stewardship. Gwen Stanko, a doctoral student in CUERE’s prestigious IGERT program, and other UMBC students will help monitor the test beds.

The workshop and research effort was funded by the Chesapeake Bay Trust, part of the organization’s new Pioneer Grant Program, which focuses on larger, higher-impact grants to improve the health of the Bay. All labor, equipment and supplies to prepare the sites were donated by Increte of Maryland, and the test beds were installed by Z-Con Inc.

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

A DVD-ROM co-authored by Helen Burgess, an assistant professor of English, has received a favorable review in the international science research journal Nature (March 5, 2009 edition).

The DVD-ROM, Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, examines the issue of owning human tissue and genetic material for research and potential profit. Biofutures uses video, text, interviews, film clips and Web links to explore ownership of human body parts. The discussion centers on themes of law, biology and culture.

The review applauded the approach of exploring the subject through multimedia information sources.

"The authors use their broad backgrounds in science policy, history and English literature to locate the questions of body ownership within the wider fields of social science and bioethics,” the review said.

Burgess worked with co-authors Robert Mitchell, a faculty member in the Duke University English department, and Phillip Thurtle, a faculty member in the University of Washington history department.

"Helen Burgess' recognition in Nature shows the wide-ranging scholarship that takes place in the UMBC Department of English today and our interest in new media," said Jessica Berman, associate professor and department chair.

"This recognition also shows the value of an interdisciplinary approach to such thorny issues as the ownership of body parts and the information derived from genetic material," Berman said.

Burgess is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures.

Biofutures is a production of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Chris Swan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, was featured in a March 3 entry in the Baltimore Sun's "Bay & Environment" blog.

Swan is one of just a few researchers in the nation studying the environmental impact of salt used to clear roads after winter storms. Sun reporter Tim Wheeler quoted Swan and government officials on the balance between possible harm to Maryland waterways' frogs, zooplankton and insects versus safety for the state's drivers.

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology, was quoted in a Feb. 24 Baltimore Sun story on recent controversies about the popular social networking site Facebook's privacy policies.

"It used to be that 'private' was intimate and invisible. But what we have here, on Facebook in particular, is intimate and visible," Tufekci says. "It's a public/private mixture that we've never had, and it's turned all sorts of things upside down."

Green Skies: A Better Environment for Air Travel

Hillol Kargupta logs thousands of frequent flier miles each year to do research, conduct business for a successful, global firm and to visit his family. But it was his quest to make those flights friendlier to the environment that recently won him a highly competitive IBM Innovation Award and a $20,000 grant.

Kargupta, an associate professor of computer science, is an expert on deep data mining in mobile environments. He is also the founder and president of Agnik, a company that pioneered the use of sensor technology to improve efficiency in ground transportation.

Now he’s looking to take his research and business skyward. And when the European Union includes aviation pollution in its ambitious cap-and-trade emissions market system next year, Kargupta hopes his sensors will analyze the data that makes skies greener in the EU and around the world.

“Every second of flight burns about a gallon of fuel.” says Kargupta. Airplanes already have sensors that monitor and adjust fuel/air ratios to yield the best fuel economy, he observes, but analyzing that data for emissions purposes “is a chance to meet a real market need.”

The available information is staggering. New York’s JFK Airport, says Kargupta, produces a continuous stream of about 100 megabytes of data per minute. “Multiply that times all the world’s airports,” he continues, “and it equals a huge amount of data changing rapidly over a large area.”

Kargupta is enthusiastic about the daunting task, however: “It’s just the type of challenge we like at UMBC.”

In addition to his research and business success, Kargupta is also a dedicated mentor. His former graduate students have gone on to careers at NASA, Columbia University, IBM, New Mexico State University and Haifa University, Israel.

(2/20/09)

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

A noted expert on the neuroscience of laughter has turned his focus to tears. Or more precisely, how digitally removing tears from photos of crying people makes it tough to tell just what emotion is being expressed.

For research recently published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at UMBC, gathered hundreds of slides of crying and non-crying people from photo sharing sites like Flickr. With some simple Photoshopping, tears were removed from the shots of crying people. The tear-free images and their teary counterparts were shuffled in with a long sequence of portraits of people with neutral expression and shown to undergraduate volunteers.

When asked to rate the emotions being expressed by the now-tearless faces, the results were startling: faces without tears not only don’t appear very sad, but are seen as displaying awe, concern, contemplation or puzzlement.

“Remarkably, the role of emotional tears as a visual signal has been neglected,” Provine said. “On one level, this confirms that tears signal sadness, but the surprise is that tears confer meaning to neutral faces. In other words, tears are a breakthrough in human emotional signaling.” Only humans produce emotional tears.

"Tears add meaning and nuance to the limited expressive range of the neuromuscular instrument of the human face. Like sobbing and laughing, tears are honest signals, and are hard to fake,” said Provine. “We need to replicate research on human facial expression using tears as a variable. They change everything”

Lacking Photoshop, you can approximate the effect of tear removal by using your finger to block out the tears in any photograph.

Provine’s research focuses on the neuroscience of everyday life, what he calls “sidewalk neuroscience.” He believes that common behaviors can provide startling insights into human nature and how the brain works.

Provine’s latest work on tears, yawning, laughter and many other fascinating but neglected human behaviors will be presented in a book to be published by Harvard University Press.

It’s no surprise to UMBC Professor of American Studies Warren Belasco that food is entering mainstream curricula at American colleges and universities.

A number of academic institutions are using Belasco’s latest book, Food: The Key Concepts (Berg Publishers), as a required text in undergraduate courses examining how food can be viewed in the contexts of history, culture and the environment.

“This book is really an introductory overview of how one would teach food,” Belasco said. “The book is dedicated to students at UMBC because they really shaped it. Students don’t hesitate to tell me what they think.”

Samantha McGarity ’09 recently completed Belasco’s foundation American Studies course on American food.

“We looked at every part of food and consumption: Why do we eat what we eat? How do we eat what we eat? How was the food produced?” McGarity said. “I realized just how much I don't know about the food industry. It forever changed the way I look at what's on my plate.”

In an early chapter, Belasco cites the ordinary act of toasting a slice of white bread to illustrate the comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to food. He suggests that toasted white bread can trigger study of why some cultures value processed white grains more than whole grains, where toast fits in one’s morning ritual and who invented the sandwich.

Belasco spoke recently with the Washington Post about the implementation of food courses at Yale, several University of California campuses and the University of New Hampshire. The report called him “a pioneer” in the discipline.

With more than 25 years of experience as a food scholar, Belasco has served for the past five years as editor of Food, Culture & Society, an international multidisciplinary research journal.

He returns to the UMBC classroom after a 2008-09 sabbatical. He will continue to engage students in food topics that most never envisioned, such as his vision of a “sustainable hamburger” that governments, the food industry and agricultural scientists could develop as a departure from grain-fed, high-fat burgers.

“The basic pattern of a semester is to start with an appreciation of how food creates community and identity. I call this the ‘Oh, wow’ stage,” Belasco said. “From there, we move quickly to the ‘Oh, no’ stage: the problems with meat production, animal rights, environment and the obesity epidemic.”

As students become aware of these challenges, lively conversations emerge.

“The course is never the same two years in a row,” Belasco said.