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1. Zhilkina Named GLIAC Tennis Freshman of the Year |
by Wes Frahm, director of athletic communications and marketing
Michigan Tech women's tennis player Vicoria Zhilkina was named Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Freshman of the Year Wednesday, Oct. 29, when the league announced its 2008 award winner. Seniors Silvia Oliveros and Samantha Jang-Stewart were also honored by the GLIAC.
Zhilkina, the first Tech player to earn GLIAC Freshman of the Year honors, went a combined 22-1 in singles and doubles for Michigan Tech as a rookie. The St. Petersburg, Russia, native posted a 10-1 No. 1 singles record and a perfect 12-0 doubles slate at No. 2. Her only loss was a 7-6, 6-2 setback to Northwood's Darina Berkova, who won the ITA Great Lakes Regional Singles Championship.
"Victoria's very deserving of the award," said head coach Mike Axford. "She played very well. It's a great honor for her to be the first Tech player to win the award."
Zhilkina and Oliveros (San Luis Potosi, Mexico) were both named All-GLIAC First Team. Oliveros compiled a 10-6 record in singles including a 7-5 slate at No. 2. She was also a member of the Huskies No. 1 doubles team that went 5-7.
Jang-Stewart (Calgary, Alberta) garnered All-GLIAC Honorable Mention laurels. She was 3-8 in singles and 3-9 in doubles.
"It's nice to have our two seniors recognized in their final seasons," said Axford.
Michigan Tech finished its fall season with a 7-4 slate and a fifth-place result at the GLIAC Tournament last weekend. |
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2. Reminder: Retirement Social Today for Corrine Leppen |
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A Halloween social to celebrate Corrine Leppen's retirement will be held today, Friday, Oct. 31, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Dow eighth-floor atrium. |
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3. Videos of University Senate Meetings Now Available Online |
The University Senate is now posting streaming videos of senate meetings on their website. To watch the video, you must have a high-speed internet connection and use RealPlayer. If you don't have RealPlayer, you can download it for free from www.real.com .
To view the meetings online, visit www.sas.it.mtu.edu/usenate/ . On the left side of the screen, click on Senate Meeting Dates. Then click on the meeting number you wish to view.
The videos will be available for the school year and possibly through the summer, and then they will be removed. The meetings will still be broadcast on Charter, as always, but now those without cable can also view them. |
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4. On the Road |
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Professor Barry D. Solomon (Social Sciences) presented two invited lectures to the Department of Economic History at the University of Umea, in Sweden, Oct. 29-30: "The Evolution and Experience with Emissions Trading Schemes in the United States" and "Grain and Cellulosic Ethanol and Biodiesel in the United States: History, Economics and Policy." |
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5. In Print |
Professor Barry D. Solomon (Social Sciences) is the lead editor of a new book, "Renewable Energy from Forest Resources in the United States," Oxford: Routledge, 2008. He also authored three of the chapters:
• Solomon and master's candidate Nicholas H. Johnson (Social Sciences), "Introduction," chapter 1
• Solomon, master's student Justin Barnes (Social Sciences) and Associate Professor Kathleen Halvorsen (Social Sciences/SFRES), "From Grain to Cellulosic Ethanol: History, Economics and Policy," chapter 3
• Solomon, "Regional Economic Impacts of Cellulosic Ethanol Development in the North Central States," chapter 13 |
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6. New Funding |
Zhangping You (CEE) has received $25,000 from MDOT for the first year of a potential multiple-year project totaling $190,000, "Laboratory Evaluation of Warm Mix Asphalt."
Karla Kitalong (Humanities) has received $18,147 from the University of Central Florida for "Water's Journey Through the Everglades Formative Evaluation." |
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7. Teaching at Tech: Teaching for Tomorrow |
by William Kennedy, director, Center for Teaching, Learning and Faculty Development
Schopenhauer observed, "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." One of my core beliefs is that education should be about enabling students to exceed the individual "event horizons" that they bring to the University.
According to author Ray Kurzweil, the world of exponential change that our graduates will experience will be radically different from the world of linear change upon which our present educational systems are built.
Educational critic Sir Ken Robinson observes, "Children starting school today will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue . . . what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it."
What will that world look like? According to Kurzweil,* the rate of technological change, now doubling every decade, will accelerate exponentially as a tsunami of capital investment floods in to fuel continued development in the lucrative computer industry. The temporal and spatial resolution of brain scanning technologies, now doubling each year, will enable us to decode human brain functioning and to create a generation of supercomputers able to emulate human intelligence. A decade later, personal computers will be able to improve upon human neural processing systems in power, speed and accuracy. Kurzweil writes, "Computers will be able to combine the traditional strengths of human intelligence with the strengths of machine intelligence" by the mid 2020s.
This generation of computers will be able to recognize patterns, form invariant representations of those patterns like the human brain and then use those representations to make predictions about future events. These computers, like their human predecessors, will be able to generate mental models of reality and use those models to rapidly sift through billions of "what-if" scenarios with speed and accuracy beyond the capabilities of the human brain. These machines will be able to instantaneously link up with millions of other machines via the Internet to solve daunting problems, and then instantly unlink themselves to perform more mundane operations.
Human brains, according to Kurzweil, while temporarily enjoying superior processing capabilities in pattern recognition and prediction, have inherent limitations that will soon be exceeded by computing machines. For example, our brains are limited to about 100 trillion interneural connections per person. The rate of change of this capacity through biological evolution is painfully slow compared to the exponential growth rate in the processing power of computers. Today's computers enjoy about a million-fold advantage in processing speed over the neural circuits in our brains. Tomorrow's molecular computing circuits will give us machines that process information at least a billion times faster than our human brains. Once reverse engineering yields computers that think like people, their massive advantages in speed and accuracy will enable them to take on routine tasks as well as planning, research and design.
Helping our students to see beyond the carbon-based industrial "event horizon" will be a critical part of enabling them to participate in creating the future. What knowledge, skills and values must our students possess to reckon with what's likely to come? Can you teach students to embrace and make productive use of exponential change? I fear that many people graduating from college in the next few years will be hanging on for dear life while a precious few will have the mental and emotional agility and flexibility to fully participate in this period of enormous change. It's up to us to rapidly and radically rethink our programs to meet this challenge.
*The Singularity is Near, Viking Press, 2005 |
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8. Job Postings |
Staff job descriptions are available in the Human Resources Office or at http://www.admin.mtu.edu/hro/postings . For more information regarding staff positions, call 487-2280 or email jobs@mtu.edu .
Faculty job descriptions can be found at www.admin.mtu.edu/hro/facpers/facvac.htm . For more information regarding faculty positions, contact the academic department in which the position is posted.
Staff Job Postings
10/31/08
Director of the Isle Royale Institute
School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science
Regular, part-time position; 30 hours/week
Position duration dependent upon external funding
Interdisciplinary Programs Coordinator
Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies
Position duration dependent upon external funding
10/31/08-11/06/08
Office Assistant 4
Human Resources
UAW internal and external posting
Office Assistant 4 (two vacancies)
Merchandising
UAW internal and external posting
Michigan Technological University is an equal opportunity educational institution/equal opportunity employer. |
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