News as of 2 March 2004
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Dr. Vincent Del Casino has just been selected as the first recipient of the Glenda Laws Award for activist-scholarship in geography. The Glenda Laws Award of the Association of American Geographers will be bestowed at the 2004 AAG Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. This award is administered by the Association of American Geographers and endorsed by members of the Institute of Australian Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and the Institute of British Geographers. The annual award and honorarium recognize outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues. This award is named in memory of Glenda Laws_a geographer who brought energy and enthusiasm to her work on issues of social justice and social policy. All scholars involved in geographic research on one or more social issues will be eligible for this award, with preference given to researchers who have received their Ph.D. within the last five years. Dr. Del Casino was nominated by Drs. Chrys Rodrigue and Dennis Fisher (Department of Psychology and Director of the Center for Behavioral Research and Services) and Dr. Katherine Gibson of Australian National University and Dr. John Paul Jones III of the University of Arizona wrote letters of support. CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Del Casino, for all your hard work, which led to this internationally prestigious honor.
The Department of Geography hosted a group of faculty and students from area community colleges on Friday the 26th. Our guests met with Drs. Christopher Lee, Dmitrii Sidorov, Suzanne Wechsler, Paul Laris, and Chrys Rodrigue and Messrs. James Woods and Norm Carter, toured the Department, and had lunch at the Chartroom, coming away with those fabulous Geography @ the Beach t-shirts. We were delighted to meet Drs. Chris Carter and Ray Sumner from Long Beach City College, Mr. James Reck from Golden West College, Mr. John Fawcett who's staff at Orange Coast College and a student at LBCC, Ms. Jennifer Fechner who's a student at Mt. Sacramento, Ms. Cindy Cuevas and Ms. Rachel Cuevas from LBCC, Mr. Terry Lumati from LBCC, Mr. Aaron Carter from CSU Fullerton (and Prof. Carter's son). We hope to see a lot of you students transferring here (or joining our master's degree program) soon! And thanks to Prof. Norman Carter for organizing this event!
GSA will be holding a meeting THIS Wednesday, 18 February at 5 p.m. in The Pit. Be there or be square!
Dr. Frank Gossette's International Coöperation in GIS course sent 12 of his students to Salzburg, Austria, this winter break to work with their Austrian colleagues. Well, on 9 February, the Austrians are coming here! They'll be working on a GIS project related to wildfire while they're here from the 9th through the 20th. Dr. Gossette is arranging a full schedule of talks and field outings, not to mention a few social soirées. Welcome to Long Beach!
Dr. Vincent Del Casino and Dr. Dennis Fisher (Psychology) won a $341,221 grant for the the CSULB Center for Behavioral Research and Services from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The grant funds a project aimed at reducing HIV risk through interventions aimed at reducing the use of club drugs at mini-raves in the Long Beach area. The project is profiled on the My.CSULB home page, http://my.csulb.edu/! You can read the full story by clicking here.
Dr. Curtis met with fifty seventh graders from Stephens Middle School and talked with them about what the college experience is like and explained the great variety of classes that students here take and how they're organized: large lectures, seminar/discussion courses, and so on. He invited them to sit in on his large section of Geography 100, which they did and had a great time. He really enjoyed the large influx of curious students, too!
Zoe Schumacher and Doreen Jeffrey received scholarships from the Women and Philanthropy Program at Cal State Long Beach. The story was written up in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and you can read the story by clicking here. Congratulations!!
Dr. David Porinchu has a news item in the AAG Newsletter, "Symposium Report Examines Climate Change Ph.D. Programs." The article summarizes a symposium that discussed how graduate programs can provide graduate level training within one of the disciplines related to climate change, while still producing people who can work in the interdisciplinary approaches necessary to understand and respond to this problem. The article appears on p. 8 of the January 2004 issue.
The Natural Hazards Research and Appliations Information Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, assembled a peer-reviewed volume of twenty studies from the hazards research community on the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, a volume that includes an article by Dr. Chrys Rodrigue. The volume was reviewed in the Hazards Center's Natural Hazards Observer, where it was stated, "Based on findings from these studies, the book includes numerous conclusions and recommendations for the improvement of public policy and disaster response." Dr. Rodrigue was pleased to see that four of these are specifically called out, and her paper's conclusion was one of these: "More media attention to the broader political, social, religious, and other aspects of September 11 and similar disasters could help Americans better understand the terrorism risk and the consequences of preventative actions the country might take." The review is available online here.
Dr. Vincent Del Casino has a new publication out, the first article out of this department for 2004. The reference is Del Casino, V.J., Jr.. 2004. (Re)placing health and health care: Mapping the competing discourses and practices of `traditional' and `modern' Thai medicine. Health and Place 10, 1: 59-73.
Dr. Dmitrii Sidorov has a new publication out, this one in a premier German geography journal. The reference is Sidorof, Dimitrij. 2003. Raum für Religion? Die neue alte Rolle der Russisch Orthodoxen Kirche. Geographische Rundschau 54, 12, the title of which translates roughly as "Space for religion: The new old rôle of the Russian Orthodox Church."
Mr. Dan Hofer is a graduate student, who now works for the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA). His thesis is on the application of GIS to the creation of the Silverado Fire Plan, and it entails the creation of beaucoup maps in an ESRI software environment. ESRI, meanwhile, was interested in applying for a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Homeland Security Grant. It sought a partner among local planning agencies to go in with it on this proposal, and Dan's thesis maps became the deciding point leading to ESRI's choice to go with OCFA! And the grant proposal was successful, to the tune of $21 million!!! As Battalion Chief Mike Rohde described it, "ESRI could have pick a different agency but OCFA has the best contemporary looking Fire plan out there ... Aka Dan's maps." Whew!
Dr. Christopher Lee has been appointed the Representative of Principal Investigators on the CSULB Foundation Board of Directors, effective 1 March 2004. Congratulations!
Dr. Suzanne Wechsler just found out that a grant proposal she submitted as a Co-PI to NSF last February, along with Tom Meixner and Edith Allen of UC Riverside, Michael Goulden of UC Irvine, and M.E. Fenn of the U.S. Forest Servicehas been funded! The proposal is entitled, "SGER: Post-Fire Hydrology, Biogeochemistry, and Vegetation Response," and deals with the San Dimas Experimental Forest, which was burned out in 2002. Way to go!!!
Dr. Suzanne Wechsler has been serving as part of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) Committee on GIS Certification. The URISA Board of Directors honored the Committee with its Service Award this October. A thankless task gets ... thanked!
Undergraduates Ms. Leslie Edwards, Mr. Andrew Huston, Ms. Doreen Jeffrey, and Ms. Leeta Latham represented the Department of Geography at SCCUR on Saturday, 22 November. They gave a multimedia poster presentation entitled, "Oakland Berkeley Firestorm 1991," which included a web report on the firestorm and the map prepared for the web report by cartography students at CSU, Chico, and a movie organized around map animations of the fire's progress. Faculty mentors were Drs. Christine M. Rodrigue and Judith Tyner and Mr. Steven Stewart of CSUC. SCCUR is a very prestigious, multidisciplinary, refereed conference, which draws student research delegations from all over the country, so we are very proud of our Geography representatives!
The Geography SCCUR delegation wound up in the Los Angeles Times the day after! You can read about it in David Reyes' story, "Rabbit Diets Were Just for Starters: More than 500 undergrads from 90 schools show research projects at UC Irvine," in the California section of the paper on 23 November 2003, which you can get to (for a short while) here. Way to go, Mesdames Leslie Edwards, Doreen Jeffrey, and Leeta Latham and Dr. Chrys Rodrigue! And thanks to Dr. Rick Behl of Geological Sciences for spotting the article and letting everyone in GDEP know!
Dr. Chrys Rodrigue was interviewed by President Maxson about her interests in hazards, especially chaparral fire hazard, for his "Beach View" show. The President's Office has informed her that the show will be broadcast at 6 p.m. on 11 December on Channel 3 in Long Beach.
All faculty (full-time, part-time, and FERPs) can apply for an Enhancing Educational Effectiveness Award. The call for proposals, with deadlines, is available at http://www.csulb.edu/centers/fcpd/Funding/3eawards.shtml.
Dr. Chrys Rodrigue has a new publication out on her work on the media representation of the September 11th attacks of 2001. The paper is entitled, "Representation of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks in the Online Edition of the Los Angeles Times, and it came out in Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-Disaster Research, ed. Jacquelyn L. Monday.
Drs. Chrys Rodrigue and Chris Lee led two related Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project summer research projects, one on mapping Charmlee Park in the western Santa Monica Mountains and another preparing IKONOS satellite imagery for analysis of road networks and structures in the Santa Monicas in the event of a wildfire needing evacuation. Their teams have included three student interns: Ms. Sally Lwin (Lakewood High School), Ms. Luz Mendez (Cerritos College), and Ms. Barbara Talalemotu (El Camino College), with Ms. Dalina Thrift- Viveros (Millikan High School). Also involved were the following faculty: Dr. Tere Ramírez (Geological Sciences, CSULB), Dr. Stephen Koletty (El Camino College), Dr. Chris Carter (Long Beach City College), Ms. Elizabeth Fessler and Ms. Linda Sanders (Lakewood High School) and Mr. Myles Lovall (Lakewood High School), with Mr. Woody Williams (Millikan High School). Also part of the GDEP team were graduate students Messrs. Aziz Bakkoury and Brian Sims. Three posters related to these two projects were presented at an on-campus GDEP research symposium.
The GDEP Charmlee Project was the subject of a newspaper article in the Malibu Surfside News. You can read it by clicking here.
Dr. James Curtis has just been invited to serve in February 2004 as a distinguished visiting scholar in the Iowa State Center for Excellence in Arts and Humanities, in response to his novel, Shangó, a mystery story set in the context of Afro-Caribbean religious expression in South Florida urban landscapes. The Center's programming gathers artists, creative writers, and scholars who address in their work the question of our place in the world. Dr. Curtis has been invited to address the issue of what it means to live and work and write and create with a deep sense of place and how this affects the world around us. Another theme is exploring the rôle that the arts and humanities can play in understanding sustainability issues and what "nature" means to artists, historians, philosophers, scientists, and fiction writers. Dr. Curtis will be joining a lineup of prominent artists and scholars that includes Annie Proulx, another fiction writer; Ned Kuhn, an environmental sculptor; Lucy Lippard, artist and critic; John W. Roberts, African-American folklorist; Winona LaDuke, activist and writer; Osha Gray Davidson, non-fiction writer; and Scott Slovic, writer and critic. Congratulations!
Dr. Unna Lassiter has been appointed the Places OnLine coördinator for Europe by the Association of American Geographers. Places OnLine is a project sponsored by the AAG to provide access to the very best sources of web-based information about various places in the world. Check this out! http://www.placesonline.org/. Thanks, Unna!
The work of Dr. Rodrigue and her collaborator, Dr. Eugenie Rovai (Chair of Geography and Planning at CSU Chico) on the Northridge earthquake is discussed in Keith Smith's Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
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