New and Noteworthy

The Humanities and Technology Association will be having its annual conference September 24-26, hosted by the STS department here at the University of Virginia.

The STS 2009 Fall Colloquium Series schedule has been posted.

Previously Posted

The STS Department would like to congratulate Jonathan Merrell, Shokoufeh Dianat, and Jenna Zhang, winners for this year's Undergraduate Research and Design Symposium, along with all the other finalists.

Students in Benjamin Cohen's Spring 2009 STS 200 course, "Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Agriculture," will be presenting their work on April 28th as part of a community forum on local and sustainable food systems. The event, held at the Central Branch Library at 201 East Market St. in Charlottesville (2:00-4:30 pm), will have the engineering students participating with students from the Architecture School in dialog with community members.

Peter Norton was one of the guests at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book, where on March 19 he spoke about his recent book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" (MIT Press, 2008).

Benjamin Cohen was invited to contribute to a roundtable on science in the early Republic for the journal Historically Speaking. His essay on knowledge, expertise, and credibility can be found here.

Peter Norton was the guest of the Dutch Ministry of Traffic and Water Management in Utrecht, the Netherlands from February 5-7, where Dutch transport policy makers were consulting transportation historians from nine countries on the applications of history to current transport policy in the Netherlands.

Rosalyn Berne was recently interviewed by EarthSky.org, a digital media company seeking to bring the voices of scientists to people around the world. You can listen to the interview podcasts about the need for caution in applying nanotechnology to agriculture and on the broader implications of applying nanotechnology to agriculture and food production. (The department has mirrored the audio files locally here and here, for the convenience of on-grounds users.)

Deborah Johnson has updated Computer Ethics to a 4th edition (published by Prentice Hall), and has also completed co-editing for Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future (published by MIT Press).

Bernie Carlson received the 2008 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

Students in Benjamin Cohen’s Fall 2007 STS 200 course “Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities” have published the book they wrote as their final class project Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Design Behind the Curtain of ecoMOD3. Bound copies are available upon request.

Mike Gorman received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Program on Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education for a project titled Societal Dimensions of Nanotechnology: A Course Connecting Communities.

Joanne Cohoon received $599,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled: Outreach and Pedagogy to Increase Undergraduate Diversity at Engineering Schools.

Women and Information Technology: Research on Under-Representation edited by Joanne Cohoon and Bill Aspray (MIT Press, 2006) was selected by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine as one of its Outstanding Academic Titles of the year.

The STS Department is pleased to announce the appointment of Dan J. Plafcan as an assistant professor.

Bryan Pfaffenberger has been granted NSF funding for his continuing work on the history of voting machines.

Ed Russell was interviewed on WHYY on August 22nd regarding the history of dog fighting as background to the Michael Vick case. An archive of the show is available for RealPlayer here.

Deborah Johnson has been invited to give a keynote address at the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2007 in Minneapolis, MN in May.

Bernie Carlson's "Toward a Non-linear History of R&D: Examples from American Industry, 1870-1970" was just published in The Creative Enterprise: Managing Innovative Organizations and People, ed. T. Davila et al. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 1:43-76.

Bernie Carlson has been serving since 2005 on the Blue Ribbon Selection Committee for the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the committee that selects the inventors to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Deborah Johnson's paper "Computer Systems: Moral entities but not moral agents" appeared in the latest issue of Ethics and Information Technology Volume 8, No. 4, 2006.

On February 5, 2007, Bernie Carlson discussed technology in world history with Tom Graham on his "Insight" show, airing from 3 to 4PM on WMRA 103.5FM. An archive of the program can be listened to via RealPlayer with this link.

Mike Gorman will be teaching two STS courses in the Semester at Sea program in Fall, 2007.

Ed Russell was appointed to the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).

Rosalyn Berne was selected from a highly competitive pool for residency at the "Hedgebrook Women's Writers Retreat Center" on Whidbey Island, Washington. Hedgebrook supports women writers—empowering them to be catalysts for change in their own lives, in their communities, and around the world. Hedgebrook provides writers with the space, time, tools and network needed to create significant work, in solitude and community, in a variety of genres. Rosalyn Berne will spend a month in residency there, completing her first novel "Waiting in the Silence." In this fictional exploration of the future, Berne considers the meaning of family, privacy, womanhood, and spirituality in a nanotechnology enabled world.

STS Department Professors Michael Gorman and Bernie Carlson discuss the development of the Bell Telephone in the History Channel's program Man, Moment, Machine, in season 2, episode 7: "Alexander Graham Bell and the Astonishing Telephone"

Kay Neeley is the recipient of the 2006 Raven Award, given each year to "truly outstanding students,faculty, administrators, and alumni who have widely and sympathetically shared, supported, and advanced the function of this institution through excellence in service and contribution to the University of Virginia." The Raven Award is the highest honor given by the Raven Society.

"Inventor of Dreams"

Scientific American has published Bernie Carlson's account of Nikola Tesla in their March 2005 issue (pages 78-85).

Distinguished Visitor

Todd M. La Porte is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. His current research interests include public organizations, governance and the use and impacts of networked information technologies, for which he has received NSF and Pew Foundation support. He is also working on public attitudes to technology and homeland security, critical infrastructure protection, and organizational responses to extreme events, specifically the attacks of September 11th and Hurricane Katrina.

Where's TCC?

We're now officially called the Department of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). For more information, see About the Name Change.

Patricia C. Click presented the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Society of North Carolina Archivists in October 2003.

ASEE: TCC faculty presented seven papers at the 2001 ASEE Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Kay Neeley served as chair of the Liberal Education Division (LED); Bernie Carlson was Program Chair of LED for the 2002 Annual Meeting and was elected chair of the LED for 2003-2004. TCC faculty presented three papers at the 2002 ASEE Annual Meeting in Montreal and three papers at the 2003 ASEE Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.

Patricia C. Click and her book, Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862-1867, were the focus of William Friday’s weekly half-hour show, “North Carolina People,” on North Carolina Public Television, shown several times in May 2001 and distributed through PBS for showing throughout the United States during the summer of 2001. She was also a featured guest on Mary Hartnett’s half-hour show, “The State of Things,” on public radio station WUNC, June 2001, distributed to NPR stations throughout North Carolina and the United States.

Patricia C. Click was one of the featured speakers at the June 2001 national conference on Digital Archives in American History and Culture sponsored by the National Council for the Social Studies.

Mike Gorman was appointed a Sigma Xi lecturer in 2003.

Rosalyn Berne received a contract from Lawrence Earlbaum & Associates for publication of her book 'Meaning and Ethics inside the Development of Nanotechnology' (working title). The book should be in press in 2004.

Kay Neeley and Jack Brown are working with a national taskforce to heighten the attention paid by ABET to the contributions of the humanities & social sciences to engineering education.

Joanne Cohoon was the keynote speaker at the International Conference on Software Engineering in May 2003.

Joanne Cohoon was an invited speaker at the Microsoft Corporation on April 16, 2003. Her talk was titled “Gender Equity in Computer Science Education”.

TCC had a strong presence at the joint meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) and Society for the History of Technology (SHOT): Tom Powers, Jamey Wetmore, Deborah Johnson, and Mike Gorman made presentations at 4S; Ed Russell and Bernie Carlson served as panel chairs and commentators at SHOT; Peter Norton, Betsy Mendelsohn, and Jamey Wetmore presented papers at SHOT; Jamey Wetmore’s paper was nominated for the Robinson prize.