Faculty
After nearly a decade of work, Psychology Professor William. M. Smith has developed a delayed visual feedback machine which he hopes will provide significant contributions to man's understanding of the relationships of the sensory system, the brain, and behavior.
The device, built with the cooperation of Ampex Corporation engineers, is a special video-disc recording and playback mechanism which can delay a person's vision of his own behavior as it occurs. For example, an individual can watch a televised view of the movements of his hands and arms while performing some action like writing, yet see that action as little as one-thirtieth of second, or as long as three to four seconds, later.
Actually, the device only exaggerates what happens normally since there is a miniscule split second's time for the brain to register what the eye sees and to transmit "orders" to the motor system. By exaggerating the "normal" delay in his experiments, Professor Smith, who is also associate dean of the faculty for the social sciences, can study aspects of human behavior under stress. He has already established that delays up to one-quarter and one-half second between what one does and what one sees have profoundly disturbing effects on coordination and produce marked emotional reactions as well. Performing such simple tasks as drawing a square or writing one's name become extremely difficult.
A recent practical example of the problem caused by such vision delays could be observed in the difficulties earthbased operators had in trying to command by remote signal television cameras following the Apollo astronauts walking on the moon 250,000 miles away.
Although the visual-delay unit is designed primarily for research in the areas of perception, learning and visual-motor coordination, Professor Smith believes it can have useful applications in other fields such as medicine.
"Because introduction of even a small delay continuously between doing and seeing 'amplifies' even the slightest discoor dination;" professor Smith explains, "it is possible that the technique will have diagnostic value in the study of certain forms of visual-motor disorders caused by injury or disease."
Similarly, the technique has promise for the study of the effects of drugs, including alcohol, fatigue, and other forms of stress on visual-motor coordination.
Dartmouth's relatively small but wide-ranging and varied collection of medieval manuscripts has been researched and described in a handsome paper-backed volume, edited by Art Professor Robert L. McGrath and published recently by the Dartmouth College Library.
Research and much of the writing about the illuminated manuscripts, which Professor McGrath calls in his introduction to the book "tiny windows on the medieval world," were done by 11 undergraduates who were in Professor McGrath's course on medieval art three years ago. Also helping was Dr. Dick Hofnagel, an associate professor of maternal and child health at the Dartmouth Medical School, who as a hobby had been studyin a French and Latin Manuscript and contributed his description of it to the volume
The volume includes sections on French Dutch, Flemish, Italian, German, and English manuscripts and choral books and leaves.
Publication of the volume, entitled simply Illuminated 'Manuscripts in theDartmouth College Library, was made possible by a gift of the late June Helm Gale of New York City. The publication was issued in memory of her husband, the late Arthur Loren Gale '27, who gave the library many of the manuscripts described.
Preliminary results of a three-year Dartmouth College investigation of alternative policies to meet the natural resource requirements of the United States during the next 50 years were examined by specialists from government, industry, and education who traveled to Hanover early in April for a two-day seminar sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
The Dartmouth studies were presented for analysis and critique by Dr. Dennis L. Meadows, Associate Professor of Engineering and Business Administration and an international authority on the use of mathematical models and high-speed computers to help man solve complex social and environmental problems, and Dr. Joel Rahn, a post-doctoral scholar at the Thayer School.
They are developing a number of complex computer models designed to forecast a long-range natural resource availability, but, Dr. Rahn explained, "We wanted to obtain expert opinion on our preliminary work before proceeding further. The participants in the seminar were people who could provide the necessary professional insights and criticism for our study."
Discussing the scope of the investigation, Professor Meadows said, "Today the United States has six per cent of the world's population and consumes approximately 30 per cent of the world's natural resources. We want to learn how our nation can minimize the long-term political, economic, and ecological costs of its requirements from the world's resource base."
Gordon W. Gribble, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and an authority on organic synthesis, has been awarded a three-year $55,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute in support of his efforts to synthesize in the laboratory two new anti-cancer drugs.
The alkaloid drugs, vinblastine and vincristine, have proven very effective against several forms of cancer, including Hodgkin's disease and leukemia inchildren but at the present time they are only available in very small amounts fromcertain plants
Professor Gribble, who recently developed a new and relatively inexpensiveway to produce in the laboratory achemical substance indentical to the sex attractant secreted by the female house fly tobe used in traps for male flies, now hopesto make the important anti-cancer drugsmore readily and more cheaply availableby learning how to produce them syn thetically in the laboratory.
His preliminary work already has attracted considerable attention and lastmonth he spent a week doing collaborativeresearch with Dr. George C. Levy at theGeneral Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady. They are investigating the nuclear magnetic resonance
properties of the complex organic molecules related to the anti-tumor drugs as a method of analysis. He also has lectured recently on his work at the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
As a result of their success in developing meaningful land-use maps from imagery signaled to earth from the Earth Resources Technical Satellite (ERTS-1) launched last July, a three-man Dartmouth team of geographers has been front and center in NASA-sponsored symposia evaluating the ERTS-1 program.
Last fall, of 300 subcontractors designated to handle specific ERTS projects, the Dartmouth team comprising Geography Professor Robert B. Simpson, Assistant Professor David T. Lindgren, and David Ruml '71, of Norwich, a former Dartmouth geography major now working at the' College as a research assistant, were one of only ten invited to report at an initial progress symposium.
Again last month (March), at a second symposium at the Goddard Space Center of NASA at Greenbelt, Md., attended by more than 150 of the 300 research groups, the Dartmouth team was one of a handful of researchers asked to report to the plenary session, including top NASA officials and Congressmen and Senators. The five-day session also featured a NASA film on the potential of ERTS imagery, and again the work being advanced at Dartmouth was one of only six projects selected for showing in the film.
The earth resources satellite, which has been whirling around the earth since last July at 496 miles high, takes 188 multiple •mages a day, each covering 100 square miles on five different bands of the spec- trum, three of them visible light bands and two in or near the infra-red band. Every 18 days, the satellite completes its photographic coverage of the earth and starts all over again.
In their evaluation of ERTS mapping of northern Megalopolis, comprising the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the Dartmouth team has found that ponds down to 100 yards long can be identified and land-use specified in at least 11 areas, exceeding the most optimistic hopes for ERTS as a major new tool for land use policy planning and policy implementation for states and regions.
Man continues to look to animals to enlarge his knowledge of himself, and as part of this scholarship Roger Masters, Associate Professor of Government, received a grant f rom the American Council of Learned Societies to travel to Murten, Switzerland, last month to give a paper before a conference on "The Logic of Inference from Animal to Human Behavior." The conference was sponsored by the International Social Science Council.
Professor Masters, who is a co-editor of a department in the magazine Animal andHuman Ethnology, discussed meaningful ways human beings may be compared to other animals and the extent to which biological factors are useful in describing or explaining politics. He is scheduled to introduce next fall a new course on "Biology and Politics," which will discuss this general issue as well as the political implications of new bio-medical technologies.
Stresses with which mature men must contend as members of contemporary society will be researched by a team of investigators headed by Dr. Stanley D.Rosenberg, under combined grants from the Ittleson Family Foundation and the Van Amerigen Foundation.
Dr. Rosenberg, a member of the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical School, explained: "We do know that men who have reached maturity exhibit great vulnerability to such modes of personal disorganization as alcoholism, marital dissatisfaction, psychosomatic disorder, hypochondriacal complaints, and other neurotic and psychotic disorder."
Calling the study of "mid-life crisis" an area of "great potential in social psychiatry," Dr. Rosenberg said, "Not only are middle-age identity problems of immediate concern to mental health prac- titioners, but further exploration of the problem holds forth the promise of generating more concrete understanding of the ways in which family structure and social change interact to result in the individual's positive social adaptation."
Dr. Rosenberg will be joined in the research by Dr. Robert L. Vosburg, Associate Professor of Psychiatry.
Donald McNemar, Assistant Professor of Government, has been named to the governing council of the Northeastern Political Science Association.
Mario di Bonaventura, the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music and Director of Music at the Hopkins Center, who brought most of the great names in contemporary serious music to Dartmouth during the summer Congregations of the Arts and who added a new musical dimension to the Dartmouth experience, has resigned to become head of G. Schirmer, Inc. - Associated Music, oldest music publishing company in the United States.
Professor di Bonaventura, an authority on modern music and noted conductor as well as educator, joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1962. In keeping with the tradition of innovation which he established at Dartmouth in 11 years, he conducted the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra last month in a world premiere of Walter Piston's "Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra." The Piston work was commissioned by Maestro di Bonaventura for the Dartmouth Symphony in 1970 and was written especially for soloist Salvatore Accardo who flew back from Naples, Italy, to play the premiere performance. The concert, the next to last which Professor di Bonaventura is scheduled to conduct with the Dartmouth Symphony prior to taking over his new assignment, also included firs' American performances of works by Czech composer Miloslay Kabelac an Polish composer Artur Malawski. Prior to leaving Dartmouth, Maestro di Bonaventura will also conduct two concerts in Central America and two in Yugoslavia.
Gordon W. Gribble, Assistant Professor ofChemistry, has received a three-year $55,000 grant from the National CancerInstitute to support his work on laboratorysynthesis of anti-cancer drugs.
