Faculty
Howard L. Erdman, Associate Professor of Government, has been awarded a Fulbright grant for political science research in India during the 1971-72 academic year. He will conduct research on the political attitudes and activities of businessmen in the cities of Baroda, Poona, and Coimbatore. He will be affiliated with the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.
Before going to India with his family, Professor Erdman will pursue preliminary work in London under a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, supplemented by support from the American Philosophical Society.
Dr. Howard H. Green '56, Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Medical School, demonstrated a computer program which helps solve the problem of acid base disturbances in hospitalized patients before a Quebec Medical Association meeting in Montreal.
He used a portable terminal connected to the Kiewit Computation Center by long-distance telephone for the demonstration, also witnessed by members of the New Hampshire and Vermont Medical Societies who were meeting jointly with their Canadian colleagues.
The computer aids the physician in solving acid base problems. By feeding laboratory information into the program, the computer generates a solution and also provides a list of the most common conditions which create the problem.
"Even though the computer produces a recommended solution, the physician still retains the final decision on how a patient should be treated," Dr. Green said. "The computer simply helps the physician do the calculations and provides a greater insight as to how he might proceed with treatment and what might be the root cause or causes of the patient's condition."
J. Douglas Marshall, Assistant Professor of Classics, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. He was one of 110 recipients of a Younger Humanist Fellowship which he will use to study medieval Latin "vision literature" at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded 326 fellowships and summer stipends totaling $2.4 million. A total of 1414 applications were judged by the National Council for the Humanities, composed of 26 persons appointed by the President.
Edward A. Yonan, Assistant Professor of Religion, has won the Susan Colver-Rosenberger Educational Prize awarded for the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation presented over a three-year period at the Divinity School, University of Chicago.... Prof. Frank Smallwood '51 of the Government Department was elected vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Vermont State Colleges.... Graham B. Wallis, Associate Professor of Engineering at the Thayer School, received the Lewis F. Moody Award from the Fluids Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers presented annually for the outstanding original paper on the practice of mechanical engineering.... Prof. Denis G. Sullivan of the Government Department has been asked to organize a series of panels on "Political Belief Systems and their Formation" at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association in Chicago next fall.
Reflecting on a recent talk at the University of Montreal on "Hamlet de Shakespeare a Stoppard," Prof. Thomas H. Vance of the English Department confided, "Despite the title, I delivered my talk in English (for which reason, I was told, a couple of rabid French Canadian Nationalist students boycotted the occasion), but discussion, fairly lively, was carried on in a mixture of slightly broken English and fractured French."
While there he visited a close relative, Eugene A. Vance '57, recently named Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Montreal after teaching seven years at Yale. "He is bilingual and conducts his classes in French, thus avoiding boycotts," reports the senior Professor Vance.
Later Professor Vance lectured at Marlboro College on "Poetry and Revolutions." It was an outgrowth of a lecture he gave in different forms at several German universities last year on "Poetry of Protest in America, World War II to Present," one version of which is being published in a collection of essays by German and American scholars entitled, Amerikanische Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert.
Five members of the Earth Sciences Department presented papers on a variety of research projects at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington. They were Professors Charles Drake, Robert Decker, Larry Dingman, Noye Johnson, and Richard Stoiber.
Also on the program were five graduate students who are currently at the College or were graduated during the past year. These included William Rose '66, Richard Birnie '66, Fleetwood Koutz, Michael Carr '69, and Paul Taylor.
Prof. John T. Lanzetta of the Psychology Department lectured on "Integration Problems in Small Groups" at the University of Illinois. In announcing his lecture the sponsor, The Interdisciplinary Seminar on Cross-System Approaches to International Integration, called him "one of the country's foremost experts on small-group behavior."
Professor Lanzetta has been elected a member of the Publications Board of the American Psychological Association and named editor of the Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology published by the American Psychological Association.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded Charles J. Lyon, Adjunct Research Professor in Botany, a" additional grant for continued research on plant life in the absence of gravity.
Professor Lyon will use the grant for specific work on the effects of hormones in controlling the form branched plants. The problem centers on the unknown mechanism by which most plants grow straight up rather than sideways.
His research project evolved from the orbital flight of a miniature "space garden" aboard Biosatellite II in 1967. His was one of 13 biological experiments on the flight. During that flight, Professor Lyon said, "We proved out the clinostat which had been under scientific suspicion." The clinostat is a ground-based instrument which simulates the state of weightlessness and reveals the form plants would take if there were no force of gravity on earth.
The botanist notes that "the basic growth processes of higher plants are independent of all effects of gravity." In the absence of gravity, he explains, the roots and shoots of plants tend to grow in such a manner as to reflect their evolutionary adaptations to gravity.
The dynamics of the drift and deformation of the Arctic Ocean ice pack were studied recently by a party of seven geophysicists, including Wilford F. Weeks, Adjunct Associate Professor of Earth Sciences; W. J. Campbell, former Visiting Associate Professor of Earth Sciences; and Stephen Ackley, graduate student in Physics. Professor Weeks and Mr. Ackley are members of the Snow and Ice Branch at the U. S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover.
They first traveled to Tuktoyaktuk, an Eskimo village on the eastern edge of the Mackenzie Delta. From "Tuk" they flew 300 miles north to a camp on an old polar ice floe. There they were joined by oceanographic research groups from the University of Washington and Columbia University.
The research team investigated the strains in the ice pack as it drifted under action of the wind and currents, and also studied the mechanics of formation and the physical properties of the pressure ridges and hummocks that develop as the ice floes deform. It served as the "ground truth" party for eight remote sensing overflights by NASA. U. S. Coast Guard, and U. S. Navy aircraft.
The research program on the ice pack was a pilot run on the AIDJEX (Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment) Program which will study the large scale movement and deformation of arctic sea ice in 1973-74.
