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Author Ibram Kendi Delivers MLK Celebration Keynote

“We’ve been taught about King’s dream, but how often have we been taught about King’s nightmare?” Ibram X. Kendi asked audience members as he opened his keynote speech for the University of Vermont’s Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration, Education and Learning Series. “If King’s dream has been racial progress, then his nightmare has historically been racist progress.”

A bestselling author, celebrated historian and founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, Kendi demonstrated how the opposite of “racist” is not “not racist” or lack of racism, but “antiracist,” and how racial inequity is not the result of racist people or ideas, but the result of racist policies.

“When you track racist ideas or racist policies, you’re tracking and studying the ways in which they evolve and change, the ways in which they became more sophisticated…and there’s no more sophisticated racist idea ever created than the idea that this nation is post-racial. Because like every other racist idea, the purpose of this idea is to make Americans believe that the problem is people and not policy,” he said.

In Washington, D.C., Kendi leads a first-of-its-kind center dedicated to eliminating racist policies that perpetuate racism and racial inequity and is a professor of history and international relations. In 2016 he became the youngest winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which explores the tangled history of racist policies that spur and justify racist ideas. His latest book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” quickly became a “New York Times” bestseller. Kendi was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and is a regular contributor to “The Atlantic” and the “New York Times,” among other outlets.

Throughout his speech, Kendi challenged racially charged ideas and perceptions with history and facts. He pointed to disparities in the justice system, noting that African Americans account for 40 percent of the incarcerated population and only 13 percent of the national population. “It’s either because black people commit more crimes or it’s because of racist policies,” he said.

He explained that similar policies, like Jim Crow Laws, have come to be considered racist based on their outcome and results observed in practice, not on a litmus test of racist language or intent at the time of its proposal. “Historically the heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial,” Kendi said, then posed a question: “But what if we, as a nation, defined policies as racist based on outcomes?” 

Just as the margin between justice and injustice does not exist in policy—every law, legislation or policy either leads to justice or injustice, he argued—the margin between racist and antiracist does not exist in our daily lives. Kendi implored the audience to consider the binary nature of racism and how the opposite of racism is not the absence of it, but rather the act of being antiracist. “Every idea either connotes one or the other. Are we supporting racist or antiracist? There is nothing between racist and antiracist.”

He explained that the sting of being called “racist” stems from its perception as an attack rather than as a fact or descriptive word, like a tattoo rather than a trait. In a personal and powerful anecdote, Kendi compared the sting and hurt he felt in the moment his doctor diagnosed him with stage four cancer, to the pain that can come with being called “racist.” What’s more, he shared how to become “antiracist.”

“Even though I’m shocked that someone would say that about me, I have two options: I deny it, or I go through the painful process of healing.”

Source: UVM News

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In Cuba, Cleaner Rivers Follow Greener Farming

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, food production on the island of Cuba was reduced—as the supply of Russian fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and oil dried up. Under the stress of an imminent food crisis, the island quickly rebuilt a new form of diversified farming—including many urban organic gardens—that depended less on imported synthetic chemicals. Over the last two decades, Cuba blossomed into a worldwide model for conservation agriculture, with improved soils and cleaner water.

At least that’s been a popular story among journalists.

Now—for the first time in more than fifty years—a team of Cuban and U.S. field scientists have worked together to rigorously test a key aspect of this story: the impacts of contemporary agriculture on water quality in Cuba’s rivers. Despite centuries of sugarcane plantations and other intensive farming, the international team discovered that none of the rivers they explored show deep damage.

Instead, the scientists measured much lower nutrient concentrations in all of the twenty-five Cuban rivers they studied than are found in the U.S.’s Mississippi River. And they think Cuba’s transition toward sustainable agriculture—and its reduced use of fertilizers on cropland—may be a primary cause.

“A lot of stories about the value of Cuba’s shift to conservation agriculture have been based on fuzzy, feel-good evidence,” says University of Vermont geologist Paul Bierman, who co-led the new research. “This study provides hard data that a crucial part of this story is true.”

Bierman and geoscientist Amanda Schmidt from Oberlin College led the American half of the international team, while Rita Yvelice Sibello Hernández, a scientist with CEAC (Centro de Estudios Ambientales de Cienfuegos), an ecological research group, headed up the Cuban effort with CEAC science director Carlos Alonso-Hernández.

The new study, “¡Cuba! River Water Chemistry Reveals Rapid Chemical Weathering, the Echo of Uplift, and the Promise of More Sustainable Agriculture,” was published January 30, in the early online edition of the journal GSA Today, the leading publication of the Geological Society of America.

Pollution problems

The scientists from both countries worked side-by-side as one team doing extensive fieldwork—with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation—and then coordinated lab work and analysis to look at many measures of river water across central Cuba. The team found high levels of E. coli bacteria in the waters—likely the result of large numbers of livestock and Cuba’s intensive use of horses and other draft animals for transportation and farm work.

However, the scientists also found much lower levels of phosphorus and nitrogen pollution in Cuban rivers than in the United States where intensive farming and chemical fertilizer use is widespread. The new study shows dissolved nitrogen levels in Cuban rivers running at roughly a quarter to a third of those found in the Mississippi River—where excess nitrogen is a primary engine of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. “Cuban river waters provide evidence that agriculture need not overload rivers, and thus reservoirs and coastal zones, with nutrients,” writes the 15-person research team that included seven Cuban scientists and students and eight U.S. scientists and students from UVM, Oberlin, and Williams College.

“This research can help us to better understand how land and rivers interact in the context of sustainable organic agriculture,” said the CEAC’s Rita Yvelice Sibello Hernández, “and may give a good example to other people in the Caribbean and all over the world.”

Scientific diplomacy

Cuba is a motorboat trip from Florida—less than a hundred miles. And the island nation is the most populous in the Caribbean with more than 11 million citizens and a long and tortuous history of complex relations—cooperation and conflict—with the United States. But there has been vanishingly little collaboration between U.S. and Cuban scientists since the 1960s—much less than with other, more-potent geopolitical foes of the United States, from Iran to China.

“We have much to learn from each other,” says Cuban scientist Alejandro Garcia Moya, a co-author on the new study. The kind of river data that the team collected “are needed to guide sustainable development in Cuba, and by example, in other tropical and island nations,” the team writes. Not only did the U.S. team provide important technical expertise and verification of results—but the joint research reveals that Cuba also has a lot of opportunity to improve its river water quality. The new study points toward the need for improved management strategies to reduce animal manure and sediment loads going into rivers—such as fencing to keep cattle off river banks—that “could further and rapidly improve central Cuban river water quality,” the scientists note.

Conversely, “Cuba has been having a forced experiment in organic agriculture since the late 1980s,” says Oberlin’s Amanda Schmidt. “So Cuba is a very interesting place to look at the effects of both conventional agriculture and the effects of organic agriculture at a national scale,”—and may suggest pathways to improve U.S. agriculture. Fertilizer use in Cuba peaked in 1978 and has been lower since, according to World Bank and other data. U.S. fertilizer use spiked after the 1960s and has remained at more than twice the Cuban use rate.

“There’s a takeaway we bring back to the U.S.: our river waters do not need to look the way they do,” says Paul Bierman—a professor in UVM’s Geology Department, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Gund Institute for Environment—“we can manage fertilizer differently.” There are, of course, complex questions about yields, farm policy and more, but this newly reported data on the low levels of nutrient pollution found in twenty-five Cuban rivers, “suggests the benefits of Cuba’s shift to conservation agriculture after 1990,” the U.S./Cuban team writes, “and provides a model for more sustainable agriculture worldwide.”

Source: UVM News

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‘Choose Vermont Scholarship’ Program to Award $60,000 in Scholarships to Vermont’s Incoming College Students

The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation and 13 Vermont colleges and universities — including the University of Vermont — are announcing the “2020 Choose Vermont Scholarship Program,” which will award $60,000 in scholarship money to students who commit to attend a Vermont school by June 1. Both out-of-state and Vermont students are eligible to enter.

The program was developed through a partnership across Vermont’s higher education sector to market Vermont as a top destination for attending college.  The campaign targets students already accepted to a Vermont school, encouraging them to take the next step and “Choose Vermont.”

“As we work to grow our workforce and help Vermonters in their careers, our higher education system plays a critical role,” said Governor Phil Scott. “These institutions, however, are feeling the effects of Vermont’s demographic crisis and declining enrollment. It’s a testament to Vermonters’ ingenuity and collaboration that public and private partners are willing to work together to pool marketing resources and highlight the state as an ideal location for higher education.”

“The variety of higher education institutions we have in Vermont makes it a wonderful landscape for attending college. Whether you are looking for a top liberal arts school or learning a trade at a technical school, Vermont has it all,” said Ted Brady, Deputy Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. “Couple that with tremendous access to outdoor recreation, the arts, and welcoming and vibrant communities, and it all adds up to an incredible place to attend college.”

Students who commit to attend one of the 13 participating Vermont schools between January 1, 2020 and June 1, 2020 and then register at ThinkVermont.com/scholarship will become eligible to win a $5,000 scholarship to their school.  The Vermont Student Assistance Corporation will offer an additional $5,000 scholarship to a student who commits to any of the 13 participating schools.

The inaugural Choose Vermont Scholarship Program was launched in May of 2019, giving away two $5,000 scholarships and drawing over 1,400 entries.  The success of that program led to more scholarship funding from colleges statewide for the 2020 program.

The Choose Vermont Scholarship Program is made possible by Vermont’s participating colleges and universities along with the support of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges, and the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.

For full details and to find participating schools: https://www.thinkvermont.com/scholarship

Source: UVM News

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Voices for Change

With every mass shooting, gun violence surges into the headlines. And with it come the thoughts and prayers, the calls for gun control legislation, more effective mental health screening, or bolstered school safety. The debate rages, then quiets, until the cycle begins anew with the next instance, tragically, often weeks or mere days away. But for advocates working to effect change, this issue is a constant. Three UVM alumni, all of them motivated by the unthinkable massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School seven years ago, are among the faithful raising awareness and pressing for progress on this deeply rooted American problem. 

Po Murray

On December 14, 2012, Po Murray ’89 believed she was living in one of America’s safest neighborhoods. The illusion would shatter that morning when a 20-year-old neighbor named Adam Lanza murdered his mother in their home then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary armed with an assault rifle, a handgun, and multiple rounds of ammunition.  

Murray and her husband, Tom Murray ’89, had lived in Newtown, Connecticut, for thirteen years, and their four children had all attended Sandy Hook Elementary. Their youngest, Tommy, graduated from Sandy Hook the previous spring and was a sixth grader in middle school when the shooting occurred. The Murray family lost beloved teachers they had known for years and children from their neighborhood, as shock and grief rippled through their entire community. Though she considered herself politically aware at the time, Po Murray admits she had no sense of the weakness of gun laws. “At that moment in time we decided we needed to take action to create some cultural and legislative changes to reduce the epidemic of gun violence in our country,” she says. 

Initially, Murray joined with neighbors and co-founded Sandy Hook Promise to help heal the community and advocate for gun control. A few months later, she took the lead again, co-founding Newtown Action Alliance, a national all-volunteer grassroots organization focused on advancing common sense gun laws in the state and nationally. 

Last fall, Murray was in the midst of a fairly typical week, which saw her traveling to Washington, D.C., with families affected by gun violence to bring their personal stories to Congress. She was joined by Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting. He and Murray lobbied Congress to take action on Jaime’s Law, requiring background checks on ammunition purchases. 

Murray is heartened that H.R. 1296, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2019, introduced by Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, has garnered 214 co-sponsors. With just four co-sponsors still needed to push a vote, Murray says, “We’ve moved really close, closer than we’ve ever been.” She adds that banning assault weapons is just one of many laws and other steps necessary to stem the tide of gun violence. 

She finds hope in the fact that so many candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president are speaking out on gun control, often adopting the tell-it-like-it-is terminology of Newtown Action Alliance, describing assault rifles as “weapons of war.” She also finds hope in the “unapologetic voices” of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as they rose up to demand action. She credits them with helping push red states, and states like Vermont with a deep gun culture, and some Republican lawmakers to shift course in favor of common-sense gun laws. “As this generation of students becomes voters, there will be a significant change in the future,” Murray says. 

Mariah McGough

On December 14, 2012, Mariah McGough ’17 was a high school senior in Brookfield, Connecticut, which borders Newtown. Among the schools where she worked part-time in an after-school program: Sandy Hook Elementary. She knew two of the twenty children killed and continued her job when school resumed after the horrific day. “Needless to say, it was a life-changing experience. The work I do now is very personal, but even more rewarding for that reason,” she says.  

McGough is a communications associate with Everytown for Gun Safety, a New York City-based non-profit. She works, in particular, with the organization’s grassroots effort Moms Demand Action. She’s the point person in the northeast region and a number of other states, working with volunteers, mothers and fathers, and families touched by gun violence, helping them share their personal stories with the media. “My job is to elevate their voices and change how we talk about gun violence in America by passing the mic over to them,” she says. 

A public communication major at UVM, McGough has found work in line with her education and purpose. She credits Kate Finley Woodruff, faculty member and associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as a key influence. A class with Woodruff on socially responsible marketing steered McGough toward non-profit work; she later gained experience with an internship in Burlington and began her career at Everytown as an intern. “Without a doubt, I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the way that I was taught about communications at UVM,” she says. 

McGough takes exception to the notion that “change never happens” when it comes to addressing gun violence. Citing the issue of daily individual shootings in American cities, as opposed to mass shootings, she highlights the number of community-based initiatives that are making a difference. She notes the state-level institution of common-sense measures, such as red flag laws, allowing law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms from an individual who might harm themselves or others. “Action in congress is long overdue,” McGough says. “But the fact is, it is happening in incremental steps—at the local level, at the state level. Groups like ours are gaining more momentum than ever before.”

Rob Cox

On December 14, 2012, Rob Cox ’89 was on a transatlantic flight from London to New York. The longtime Reuters journalist was returning from a business trip, looking forward to being back home with his wife, Hannah, and their two sons in Newtown, Connecticut. As his plane landed at JFK in the early afternoon, Cox’s phone lit up with texts, voicemail alerts, and 200-some new emails. The first text he read was from a Danish friend: “Please tell me your son wasn’t at that school.”

Fortunately, neither of his sons was at that school. Older son, Sam, was at his first semester of boarding school; younger son, Ethan, was at Newtown’s middle school, on lock down. “When I got home, I hugged my children so tightly I am surprised to this day that I did not break their ribs. I was so thankful that my boys were safe,” Cox says. “But, by then, I knew there were 26 families in my town who were not so fortunate.”

As their emotions processed through empathy, compassion, anger, Cox and his neighbors also felt an immediate call to action. Within 24 hours of the massacre, Cox and a circle of friends were working to develop what would become Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to healing their own community and helping others avoid the same fate. 

Cox left the Sandy Hook Promise Board in 2015, but continued to focus on links between finance and the gun industry in his Reuters columns. That work took on a renewed emphasis with the 2018 killings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A day after that shooting, Cox took the lead among national media in highlighting Wall Street’s ties to the gun complex. Subsequent pieces covered consumer protests which helped motivate corporate action, such as Walmart’s ceasing sales of AR-15 ammunition and advocating for universal background check laws. 

Though Cox now lives in Paris, focused on his work as global editor for Reuters, colleagues with the news organization in the United States carry forward his work examining connections between finance and the gun violence epidemic. 

Read a 2014 interview with Rob Cox, recounting the first years of Sandy Hook Promise and reflecting on UVM’s influence upon him.

Source: UVM News

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Living Robots Create Global Media Splash

New creatures, called “xenobots” were designed on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont by professor of computer science Joshua Bongard and his graduate student Sam Kriegman.

Then biologists at Tufts University took the UVM designs and assembled them out of frog cells. The result was “a new class of artifact,” says Bongard, “a living, programmable organism”—that led to a scientific study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 13.

And the other result was an avalanche of global media attention. Many hundreds (maybe thousands) of stories were published—from Boston to Beijing.

One of the biggest stories, “Meet the xenobot: world’s first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells,” was published out of CNN’s international desk in Hong Kong and picked by TV stations around the country. This led to a broadcast appearance by UVM’s Josh Bongard as a guest on Fredricka Whitfield’s Sunday interview show. After the interview, CNN featured a photo of a xenobot on its Instagram feed. It has 95,551 likes.

The BBC World Service also served up their expert interview work in a conversation with Bongard about computer-designed organisms.

Science Friday, the widely syndicated program aired by radio stations across the country, invited Josh Bongard to be their guest in a wide-ranging conversation with host Ira Flatow. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an inviting nine-minute-long radio conversation with Bongard for their flagship science program, Quirks & Quarks.

Bloomberg News produced its own “QuickTake” video about the research and also tweeted the video. Sky News produced an online story and also interviewed Bongard for global television broadcast on their program, “The Sarah-Jane Mee Show.”

Many of the nation’s leading science magazines covered this research including Scientific American, The Scientist, Cosmos, Popular Mechanics, IEEE Spectrum and a thoughtful story, “Meet Xenobot, an Eerie New Kind of Programmable Organism,” in Wired.

Other influential publications took up the xen0bot story too, including Smithsonian, The Economist, The Week, Esquire, and Forbes.

Newspapers around the world reported the news, from The Boston Globe to the San Francisco Chronicle to the The Times (of London) and other British tabloids, including The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Guardian which republished a UVM-produced video.

Other international coverage included the Irish Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, New Zealand Herald, L’Express (France), Der Tagesspiegel (Germany), and El Mundo (Spain). 

The MIT Technology Review, reported a story, “These “xenobots” are living machines designed by an evolutionary algorithm,” and another one for their Chinese edition. And Inverse may get the best-but-most-misleading-headline award with its story, “Scientists develop ‘walking caviar’ to make the first-ever living machine.” Even the inimitable website IFLScience!, with its fifty million readers, covered the xenobot work.

Local and Vermont media also covered the work, including an interview with WCAX television. 

Source: UVM News

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Tiny Price Gaps Cost Investors Billions

Imagine standing in the grocery store, looking at a pile of bananas. On your side of the pile, the manager has posted yesterday’s newspaper flyer, showing bananas at 62¢ per pound—so that’s what you pay at the register. But on the other side of the pile, there’s an up-to-the-minute screen showing that the price of bananas has now dropped to 48¢ per pound—so that’s what the guy over there pays. Exact same bananas, but the price you see depends on which aisle you’re standing in.

New research from the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation shows that a similar situation—that the scientists call an “opportunity cost due to information asymmetry”—appears to be happening in the U.S. stock market.

And, the research shows, it’s costing investors at least two billion dollars each year.

The first of three studies, “Fragmentation and inefficiencies in the US equity markets: Evidence from the Dow 30,” was published on January 22 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Light Speed

Instead of price discrepancies over days or even seconds, these stock market “dislocations” blink into existence for mere microseconds—far faster than a person could perceive—but still real and driven by the strange fact that information can move no faster than the speed of light.

This ultimate limit has become more important as trading computers have gotten faster—especially since 2005 when regulation changed and as various outlets of the ostensibly singular US stock market have been spread to several locations over dozens of miles across the Hudson River from Manhattan in northern New Jersey. “Even in cartoon form [below], some refer to our simple map of the stock market as a gigantic bowl of spaghetti,” says Brian Tivnan, a research scientist with both UVM and MITRE, who co-led the new study.

This increasingly complex trading arrangement—formally known as the “National Market System”—includes the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and many other nodes including ominous-sounding private trading venues called “dark pools.” Therefore, as price information, even at near the speed of light, winds about in this electronic spaghetti, it reaches some traders later than others.

And, like the two aisles in the supermarket, some people buying and selling stocks use a relatively inexpensive, slower public feed of information about prices, called the Securities Information Processor, or “SIP,” while other traders—millions of times each day—are shown a price earlier, if they have access to very expensive, faster, proprietary information called a “direct feed.”

The result: not all traders see the best available price at any moment in time, as they should according to both leading academic theories and market regulation. “That’s not supposed to happen,” say UVM scientist Chris Danforth, who co-led the new study, “but our close look at the data shows that it does.”

This early information presents the opportunity for what economists call “latency arbitrage,” which brings us back to the bananas. Now imagine that the guy in the other aisle, who knows that bananas can be had at this moment for 48¢/pound, buys the whole bunch, steps into your aisle and sells them to all the people who can only see the 62¢ price. Each pound of banana only profits him 14¢—but suppose he could sell a million of pounds of bananas each day.

The research team, housed in UVM’s Computational Finance Lab—and with crucial work by UVM doctoral students David Dewhurst, Colin Van Oort, John Ring and Tyler Gray, as well as MITRE scientists Matthew Koehler, Matthew McMahon, David Slater and Jason Veneman and research intern, Brendan Tivnan—found billions of similar opportunities for latency arbitrage in the U.S. stock market over the course of the year they studied. Using blazing-fast computers, so-called high-frequency traders can buy stocks at slightly better prices, and then, in far less than the blink of an eye, turn around and sell them at a profit.

“We’re not commenting on whether this is fair. It is certainly permissible under current regulation. As scientists, we’re just rigorously looking at the data and showing that it is true,” says Tivnan. For the new PLOS ONE study, the research team used data from the thirty stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average—and studied every price quote and trade made for an entire year, 2016.

Apples to Apple

In one case highlighted in the new PLOS study, the team looked at the sale of shares of Apple, Inc. on the morning of January 7, 2016. The scientists picked out any price dislocation greater than a penny that lasted longer than 545 millionths of second—enough time for a high-speed trade. In one moment, “on the offer side from 9:48:55.396886 to 9:48:55.398749 (a duration of 1863 microseconds),” the researchers write, “the SIP best offer remained at $99.11 and the Direct best offer remained at $99.17. Thus, any bid orders submitted during this period stood to save $0.06 per share.”

And, in fact, one hundred shares of Apple—at approximately 9:48:55.396951 in the morning—sold for $99.11 when they might have fetched six cents per share more, costing that investor a few dollars, about the price of a few bananas. But, multiplied by 120 millions times in just the thirty stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average—as the scientists report in their new study—this kind of price gap cost investors more than $160 million. And over the larger Russell 3000 index, the result across the market was a cost of at least $2 billion.

The new PLOS study, and two related ones, are the first public research to make direct observation of the most comprehensive stock market dataset available to regulators and investors. With support from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation, the researchers at MITRE and UVM were able to examine direct feeds that customarily cost high-end investors hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.

“In short, what we discovered is that from these momentary blips in the market, some people must have made a lot of money,” say UVM’s Chris Danforth, a professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and Complex Systems Center.

On Wall Street

The Wall Street Journal broke the news on these studies last year, when they were still in a pre-print public server, the “arXiv.” Now the first of them has completed peer review and is being published in PLOS ONE. The second, that examines a broader pool of evidence of these market “inefficiencies” in nearly 3000 different stocks, is in revisions and remains posted on the pre-print arXiv. And a third, even more far-reaching study, is in development by the team.

Since the Wall Street Journal article was published, the Securities and Exchange Commission appears to have grown more concerned about these price gaps and the different data streams that investors have to work with. On January 8, the SEC put out a request for comment on a newly proposed set of rules to modernize the governance of how the National Market System produces and disseminates data. Since 2005, “the speed and dispersion of trading activity have increased substantially,” the commission writes, and, “there have not been adequate improvements made to address important differences between consolidated market data and proprietary data products.”

The scientists in UVM’s Computational Finance Lab saw this coming. “Along with others in the scientific community, we identified these same concerns, probably five years ago or more,” notes Brian Tivnan. “But our study is the first to quantify the implications of these concerns.”

How to fix these differences between players in the market will be difficult, the researchers think. “Dislocations are intrinsic to a fragmented market,” Tivnan says, such as now exists in the U.S. stock market with multiple exchanges spread out between four New Jersey communities and with many complex back-and-forth flows of information.

“No technological upgrade will eliminate dislocations,” Tivnan says, “even if the exchanges could upgrade the underlying technology to transmit information at the speed of light.”

Why can’t faster shared technology fix the problem? “Even when controlling for technology, such that all investors rely on the same tech, relativistic effects dictate that the location of the investor will determine what that investor may observe,” says Brian Tivnan. “That is, what you see depends on where you are in the market.”

Source: UVM News

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Cutting College’s Price Tag from Capitol Hill

When Kaitlyn Vitez ’15 packed up her New Jersey apartment two years ago to move to Washington, D.C., she wrapped her fragile kitchenware in loose pages from an expensive textbook. It had been required for an economics class she took senior year and, like many textbooks today, was an unbound custom edition for that class, and was ineligible for re-sell or buy-back programs at the end of the semester. The book had become useless to Vitez—an anthropology and global studies graduate—so she utilized it as best she could.

Ironically, on the other end of that move, the job that Vitez had relocated to D.C. for uniquely positioned her to help other graduates and students avoid those same financial frustrations. As the director of the Make Higher Education Affordable campaign at U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), she raises awareness and support for policies that help bring the cost of education down for students and graduates, who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.

Since 1970, the consumer advocacy group U.S. PIRG has strived to protect Americans from powerful special interests that influence a range of industries. “In my case, for example, we’re talking about big textbook publishers and student loan servicers that rip off students,” Vitez says.

An average day for her might involve lobbying congressmembers to increase federal Pell Grant spending, strategizing with other organizations across D.C. or student organizers across the nation on college affordability initiatives, or meeting with Capitol Hill staffers to gain support on legislation that protects students from predatory loans or exorbitant fees at on-campus banks.

But one of her major priorities for reducing student debt goes back to her expensive packing hack. Vitez estimates that textbook prices have risen three times faster than inflation in recent years and cost students roughly $3 billion in financial aid each year. “When you’re registering for classes, you should know how much that class is going to cost,” she says about the sticker shock many students experience only after they’ve enrolled in a class.

She is a fierce proponent of opensource textbooks, which offer students free or low-cost access to quality course materials, and played a crucial role in getting a federal opensource program passed. She even jammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s phoneline with calls from hundreds of students supporting funding for the program, which was expected to save them up to $50 million on course materials each year. Funding for the program was subsequently renewed in the latest federal budget.

“It goes to show the power of organizing and why it’s important that we’re not just getting people to volunteer in their communities, but getting people invested in changing how higher education works, and making their voices heard on a higher level,” she says. “I’m not just fighting for college to be more affordable; I’m getting students to make that call.”

Empowering and organizing students is a skill Vitez has honed since her days at the University of Vermont. As president of the student organization for food justice, Campus Kitchens, she led dozens of volunteers and coordinators each week in shifts at the food pantry in downtown Burlington, designed practica for the nutrition department and oversaw summer interns who tended the garden outside of Jeffords Hall. But she knew that real impact—whether it be in the fight against hunger, access to education or consumer protection—begins with policy.

“I was doing a lot of service work and, fundamentally, I was looking to make a bigger change than putting food on the table for folks after graduation. While service work is really important, what’s more important is preventing people from having to get in line at the food pantry in the first place,” she says. “I wanted to find a job that was going to give me the skills to make larger systemic change and have a much bigger impact.”

Source: UVM News

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Prioritizing Positive Impacts Over Profits Alone

Revealed in conjunction with the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a first-of-its-kind rating by Positive Impact Rating (PIR) has named the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business among the top echelon of business schools in the world that are emphasizing the importance of social impacts alongside business and economic advancements. The inaugural report, “Positive Impact Rating for Business Schools,” is a new rating conducted by students, for students, and is the product of the first global assessment by students on how well their schools confront business’ societal impacts.

“This adds to our string of accolades that affirm that we have developed the world’s best MBA program to educate students to address the world’s greatest sustainability challenges via the power, ingenuity and innovation of business,” said Sanjay Sharma, dean of the Grossman School of Business. “We welcome the Positive Impact Rating as a global initiative that empowers students in MBA programs all over the world to express their concerns for the future of our planet and how well the program prepares them to become responsible business leaders for the 21st century.”

UVM’s Grossman School of Business, which houses the Sustainable Innovation MBA (SI-MBA) program, was rated at the second-highest level, “level 4: Transforming,” alongside eight other schools worldwide. No school attained the highest level, “level 5: Pioneering,” among the thirty leading schools included in the report.

According to the report, “The nine top-rated schools on level 4 are recognized by their students for including sustainability and societal engagement in their mission and for the degree to which these are seen as a driving force for the school (23 percent higher than average). These schools are also recognized by their students for having a culture that is aligned with their school’s purpose, for most of their people being highly motivated beyond self-interest and for strongly supporting personal development (18 percent higher than average). The positive impact of business schools goes beyond their contribution to business and the economy; it addresses the need for their positive impact for society.”

UVM’s accelerated one-year SI-MBA program directly confronts this value shift by addressing environmental, ethical, poverty and inequality issues through global innovation and enterprise. Unique in its mission, the program replaced UVM’s traditional MBA program upon its creation in 2014, thereby eliminating the potential to “saddlebag” sustainability initiatives to the pre-existing program and truly rebuilding it from the ground up. Today SI-MBA retains the foundational business school toolkit required for graduates to succeed in business, while training future leaders to use business as a tool to make meaningful change in the world. Graduates have gone on to work for companies such as Unilever, Microsoft, and Starbucks, and have also started successful businesses such as Sap! Beverages and Propagate Ventures.

It has been ranked the No. 1 “Best Green MBA” by Princeton Review for the past three consecutive years and was ranked the No. 4 “Better World MBA” by “Corporate Knights,” a leading sustainable business magazine, in 2019. UVM’s SI-MBA team placed first at the inaugural Total Impact Portfolio Challenge last spring, beating out 25 other teams from schools including Wharton, Columbia, Yale and Georgetown in a competition to build financial portfolios that make profits and positive impacts on the world.

“Business schools are traditionally seen to serve students by developing their management competencies and to serve business organizations by providing them with educated talent, insights from research and continuous education for their staff…This new business school rating responds to these demands,” PIR said in a media statement. PIR and its activities are endorsed and supported by WWF Switzerland, OXFAM, Global Compact Switzerland and it is operated in close collaboration with student organizations including oikos International, Net Impact, AIESEC, SOS UK and Studenten voor Morgen.

Source: UVM News

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Banning Food Waste: Lessons for Rural America

While Vermonters support banning food waste from landfills – and a whopping 72 percent already compost or feed food scraps to their pets or livestock – few say they are willing to pay for curbside composting pick-up, new University of Vermont research shows.

The study comes as Vermont prepares to implement a mandatory law that makes it illegal to throw food items in the trash beginning July 1, 2020. Several large cities including San Francisco and Seattle have implemented similar policies, but Vermont is the first state to ban household food waste from landfills. The policy is the last phase of a universal state recycling law passed in 2012 that bans all food waste, “blue bin” recyclables and yard debris from landfills statewide by 2020.

“Reducing household food waste is a powerful way individuals can help reduce the impacts of climate change and save money,” said Meredith Niles, UVM Food Systems and Nutrition and Food Sciences assistant professor and lead author of the study. “Vermont has made a significant commitment to this effort and it’s exciting to see the majority of Vermonters are already composting to do their part.”

Previous research by Niles and other UVM colleagues showed Americans waste nearly a pound of food daily, roughly one third of a person’s recommended daily calories. When disposed of in a landfill, food waste rots and produces methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Conversely, composting can aid in carbon sequestration and creates a natural fertilizer for farms and gardens. 

While several states and municipalities are exploring food waste strategies, few studies have examined food waste perceptions and behaviors in rural communities. 

“The trend in big cities has been to offer curbside compost pickup programs, especially in densely populated areas, but there isn’t a one size fits all for how we manage food waste,” said Niles. “Our study suggests that, especially in more rural areas, people may already be managing their food waste in a way that leaves it out of the landfills.”

Niles surveyed nearly 600 households through the 2018 state Vermonter Poll, conducted annually by UVM’s Center for Rural Studies. The study showed support for the new food waste ban, but only a minority of residents indicated they would be willing to pay for a future curbside compost pickup program. People in urban counties were significantly more likely to want curbside compost pickup compared to those managing their food waste through backyard composting or by feeding to pets or livestock.

“In a rural state like Vermont, households are generally further apart, which can increase food waste transport costs and have a negative environmental impact, especially if participation in a curbside compost program is low,” said Niles, who is also a fellow at UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment. “Instead, focusing curbside programs in densely populated areas may be more cost and environmentally effective and also garner greater household participation.”

Research has shown the rates of home composting in Vermont are much higher than in other regions. One third of Vermonters indicated they are exclusively composting or feeding food scraps to pets or livestock, with no food scraps ending up in the trash. This research suggests that investing in education, outreach and infrastructure to help households manage their own food waste could have significant environmental and economic impacts in other rural regions seeking food waste management solutions.

Individuals interested in learning home composting techniques may consider participating in the Vermont Master Composter course offered online each fall by UVM Extension or consult the cooperative extension service in their home state.

The Vermonter Poll is a statistically representative, statewide telephone poll of Vermont residents conducted annually since 1990. The poll offers a unique opportunity for researchers, policymakers and organizations to examine public opinion on a range of contemporary issues in the public arena.

The questions analyzed for this study were sponsored by Casella Waste Systems, Inc., through a research grant to UVM. Casella was not involved in the data collection, analysis, interpretation or study results.

Source: UVM News

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Vermont Student-Athletes Achieve a Record Fall Semester

University of Vermont student-athletes continue to excel at historic levels in the classroom. During the fall semester, UVM student-athletes combined to achieve a school-record GPA of 3.297. It is the 33rd consecutive semester the department GPA has been above 3.0.

“I’m incredibly proud of the collective academic performance of our 400 plus student-athletes,” said Director of Athletics Jeff Schulman. “Their ability to successfully balance academic achievement with the heavy demands of Division I athletics is a testament to their hard work and the commitment of our dedicated faculty, coaches and academic services staff.  We are fortunate to be part of a University that truly believes in—and supports—a scholar-athlete model where academic and athletic excellence can so successfully coexist.”  

There were 32 student-athletes who achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA in the fall semester, with a third of the student-athlete population maintaining a 3.6 GPA. The women’s cross country program had the top GPA in the department at a 3.63. The top men’s team was alpine skiing with a 3.52 GPA. Overall, 16 teams improved their GPA from the spring to this fall, and every team at UVM maintained a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

“Our student-athletes represent UVM’s strengths in a powerful way,” said UVM President Suresh Garimella. “Their discipline and ability to balance—and benefit from—physical and intellectual endeavors will serve them long after graduation.”

For the athletics department, it was the 30th semester on record where student-athletes had a higher GPA than the general student population.

“This is an impressive accomplishment for our scholar-athletes,” said UVM Provost Patty Prelock. “I am proud of our students’ commitment to learning and competing, and the support of their coaches and academic staff.”

This exceptional academic performance comes at a transformational time for UVM Athletics. Construction is underway on the state’s largest athletics, recreation and wellness facility, which includes the Tarrant Center, the new home for UVM’s men’s and women’s basketball programs, as well as space for a variety of academic, social, cultural, and entertainment programming. There will also be major renovations and improvements to historic Gutterson Fieldhouse, home of UVM men’s and women’s hockey, and the Phyllis “Phiddy” Davis ’45 Recreation and Wellness Center.

This will amount to a five-fold increase in the amount of space dedicated to health, wellness and recreation for the entire student body and the broader campus community. View a live construction cam to monitor the progress of the facility project.

Source: UVM News