Proposed merger of University of Maryland campuses

The proposal to merge the College Park campus with the Law School and Medical School in Baltimore is reported in the Chronicle here. It’s being strongly opposed by Baltimore City interests, but it certainly would increase the prestige of the university. It also makes sense thinking in the longer term about whether Mason or Maryland will be the dominant public research university in the National Capital Area.

So, as an ardent Mason supporter, here’s hoping that the folks in Baltimore are successful.

Stuxnet II is out there….

From Wired Magazine, this excellent portrait of DuQu. Bottom line: it’s doing active reconnaissance  on cyber systems and it’s as sophisticated as Stuxnet. The implication of the article seems to be the DuQu is setting up for a future cyber attack, learning about specific systems architectures and transmitting that information…somewhere.

Special Teaching Deals Being Called Off…

From today’s Chronicle here. My colleague, Jorge Haddock, dean of our School of Management, is part of the story:

Some administrators are beginning to make changes, sometimes by giving professors a choice in the process. At George Mason University, professors who agreed to chair one of five “areas,” or departments, within the university’s School of Management had always taught just one course a year, compared with the usual faculty load of four courses per year. When Jorge Haddock took over as dean of the management school two and a half years ago, he thought the course release for area chairs was too generous. So he offered them a new deal: They could teach two courses a year, with pay for one month during the summer, or teach three courses a year with pay for two summer months. While the university pays more, Mr. Haddock says it’s worth it to make faculty workloads more equitable across the board and to get full-time professors back into the classroom.

More on ditching Blackboard and powerpoint in teaching…

At least one of my colleagues here at Krasnow teaches using Facebook. I’m guessing he uses some combination of Facebook “pages” and “groups” and I’m hoping he set up another professional identity/login separate from his personal one.

Another colleague, she teaches in the Boston area, mentioned dropping the canned powerpoint slides that come with adopting a textbook these days.

Still other colleagues use Apple’s Wiki Server on in-house machines.

The key to all of these ideas is that the learners and teachers are able to leverage the collaborative power of the Net without falling prey to having the learning process (think learning management systems) absorb all the energy that should go into the class subject matter….this is especially true with regards to neuroscience, since the subject matter can be quite technical.

So here’s a bleg for Advanced Study readers: how would you use what’s free on the Cloud to teach undergraduates science?

The Institute wears its Fall colors…

We’re in the middle of Fall here and the DC area is really almost at its very best. Here’s a view of the new laboratory wing of the Institute with the glass cube great room concealed behind a carpet of tulip poplar yellows. Roberts Road in the foreground represents the eastern boundary of the campus which extends far to the west of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

Just how smart was Archimedes?

A terrific piece by Mary Carole McCauley in the Baltimore Sun, here. For those with a love of both archeology and mathematics.

Money quote:

Thus began a search for buried treasure — in this case, the lost writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, a famed Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century B.C.
Noel and his boss, museum director Gary Vikan, found a 174-page book made of cured goatskin that was ugly beyond belief. The sheaves were singed around the edges, the text and pages were defaced by water stains, and mold had eaten away entire sections.

Syracuse University, the Chronicle Debate Continues…

The Syracuse story began to play out in the Chronicle two weeks ago with Robin Wilson’s piece here. Today, Eric Hoover’s response is here.

As Syracuse is one of our official university peers, I’ve been following this story quite closely.

At question is the leadership style of President Nancy Cantor and her strategy to connect the University more closely with its community. Hoover’s response is specifically aimed at questions regarding the new strategy and I have to say it makes sense: over the long haul, given that the majority of Syracuse’s student body are going to be coming from its region in upstate New York, it makes sense to develop the caliber of those students.

The underlying assumptions are that the “out of state” competition is going to get tougher and that Syracuse wont be in a position to win that competition against other national schools (such as the place where Cantor was provost, Michigan).

Syracuse recently “voluntarily” stepped down from the prestigious AAU. I wonder to what extent there is an inter-relationship between the two stories.