Tag: University of Vermont

A UVM research study, which discovered Instagram photos hold clues to aid in the early detection of depression, was one of the 20 most popular pieces of academic research in all of 2017, according to a new ranking.

The annual Altmetric Top 100 ranks which pieces of research have caught the public imagination in the last 12 months. To determine 2017’s list, Altmetric tracked over 18.5 million mentions of 2.2 million different pieces of research.

The study by UVM professor Chris Danforth and Andrew Reece of Harvard University, “Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression,” came in at No. 17. Danforth is a professor in UVM’s Department of Mathematics & Statistics and co-director of the university’s Computational Story Lab.

Published Aug. 8 in a leading data-science journal EPJ Data Science, the research was covered by media outlets around the world including The New York Times, USA Today, Quartz, and nearly 250 others. The study was also mentioned in thousands of tweets, blog posts, and more.

“As in previous years, medical and public health issues have drawn the highest levels of attention,” according to Almetric’s website.

Read more about Danforth’s findings, and view the full Altmetric Top 100 ranking. 

Source: UVM News

Welcome to our newest Catamounts: the first members of the Class of 2022. On Thursday, December 14, decisions for the thousands of students who applied early action were posted online (and sent via snail mail).  

Accepted students took to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to share their good news. Some of the hundreds of posts follow below; see all of the posts from the Class of 2022, and follow UVM on Twitter @uvmvermont, Instagram @universityofvermont, Snapchat @uvmvermont, and on the UVM Facebook page. 

 

Source: UVM News

Walking into Morrill Hall Tuesday and Thursday mornings during his first semester at UVM, Tom Freeman has stepped into an immersive learning experience of a different sort.

Yes, on a pedestrian level, Morrill of the distinctive red tile roof, granite entry columns and gray marble staircase, is the classroom location for “Why Build That?” a College of Arts and Sciences Teacher-Advisor Program (TAP) course taught by Professor William Mierse. But to Freeman, the building is also the focus of research at the heart of his work in the course.

Mierse, a veteran professor of art history, initially developed “Why Build That?” years ago, recognizing the rich learning resource in a campus buildingscape that spans centuries and architectural styles, including gems by the likes of Henry Hobson Richardson and McKim, Mead & White. Also essential, the primary sources in UVM Library Special Collections, where students can trace the long and winding road from inspiration to funding, blueprint to building.

Mierse saw, too, that the course would be well-suited to TAP, which emphasizes group work to build a tight cohort of peers, strong faculty mentoring since the professor is also the students’ first-year advisor, and a bracing, we-are-not-in-high-school-anymore intellectual jolt.

“Most of the students come in with a pre-set conception of what they think architecture is, and during the course of the fourteen weeks that pre-conception is severely challenged,” Mierse says. “They come out with, I hope, a quite different view of how to go about the process of looking at buildings.”

Along the way, Mierse’s syllabus puts a heavy emphasis on enhancing student’s skills in collaborative work, speaking, research, and writing, all core elements of TAP courses. Beyond campus, students explore the architecture of Burlington and examine decidedly different places and cultural/political circumstances with readings such as At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg by Rebecca Ginsburg.

As student Tom Freeman has delved into the architecture of Morrill Hall during the course, he has come to appreciate the history and symbolism of a building that honors the Vermont congressman, Justin Morrill, who sponsored the Land-Grant College Act of 1862.

“Without this land grant, most universities around America, including UVM, never would have created agricultural departments.  Without these agriculture departments, America’s middle class never would have grown to the size that it is today,” Freeman says. “The Vermont Legislature funded this building which shows that it was not just UVM that felt the need to commemorate Justin Morrill.”

Another landmark building at the opposite end of the Green has been the focus of student Grace Valickis’ research. A psychology major, she has dug into the history of her academic home, John Dewey Hall, originally opened in 1905 as home to the university’s College of Medicine. Beyond a greater understanding and appreciation for architecture, Valickis says the course has sharpened her analytical sense around political, economic and social issues.

At semester’s end, the students in “Why Build That?” write an argument, framed as a letter to UVM’s Board of Trustees, for why “their” building should be preserved or torn down.

Mierse says his goal isn’t to create architectural or art historians with this one course. Instead, he hopes the students will grow as thoughtful, informed consumers of architecture. Whether it’s building or remodeling a house, managing an office space, or voting on municipal development, Mierse says, buildings and the multiple issues around them impact all of our lives. 

Source: UVM News

When Kirsten Farrell G ’98 left UVM with a master’s degree in school counseling and skills as an athletic trainer she wasn’t quite sure how she would utilize the rare combination. Two years later, as a teacher and athletic trainer at Venice High School, she found an innovative way to leverage both. Across the years, her work would change the lives of students, recently earning her recognition as a 2018 California Teacher of the Year.

Farrell, a health science and medical technology teacher, started the first on-campus sports medicine program in California focused on training students how to perform the duties of an athletic trainer. The idea to start the L.A. Unified Sports Medicine Team came to Farrell after three students asked if they could shadow her while she worked as an athletic trainer at Venice High football games.

Because the students enjoyed the experience so much, Farrell eventually started incorporating aspects of athletic training like CPR and First Aid certification, taping and stretching techniques and rehabilitative exercises into her sports medicine course curriculum. It wasn’t long before she had to cap the program at 40 students, who gain hands-on experience while providing sideline game coverage and rehabilitation services for more than 400 athletes on 23 athletic teams.

The result, some 13 years later, has been an increase in the number of students at Venice High – many of whom live in poverty – who enter the medical field after graduation as emergency medical technicians, for example, or go to college to become athletic trainers, physical therapists, nurses or doctors.

“In addition to exhibiting educational excellence, Ms. Farrell is someone who embodies an entrepreneurial spirit,” says L.A. Unified Acting Superintendent Vivian Ekchian. “Breaking new ground in important fields, she is an amazing role model for students everywhere.”

Farrell says she was surprised to have been named a finalist by the California Department of Education in her own Los Angeles Unified School District – the second largest district in the United States – much less being honored as one of five finalists in a state where 300,000 teachers educate approximately six million students.

“I think the award has a lot to do with the fact that students can take what they learn in my classroom and turn it into an on-campus internship as members of the sports medicine team,” says Farrell. “We strive to make sure that all kids have the opportunity to attend college after graduation or have the skills to go directly into the workforce.”

Seizing a rare opportunity at UVM

A self-described “Army brat,” Farrell moved often as a child, eventually landing in Rhode Island where her father was stationed at Naval War College in Newport. After earning a bachelor’s degree in education at Plymouth State, she taught elementary school in Tokyo, where she became interested in school counseling and athletic training while coaching at a middle school. 

Farrell moved back to the United States to find a college that would let her major in school counseling and become an athletic trainer. UVM accepted her as a full-time graduate student in the counseling program and also agreed to let her work toward her athletic training certification as a non-traditional student. Following graduation, she taught briefly at a boarding school in Switzerland before moving to California to take a job as an athletic trainer for West Coast Sports Medicine Foundation, which included rehabbing and training professional athletes from the National Football League and National Hockey League.

Now that the L.A. Unified Medicine Sports Team has been in place for 13 years, Farrell is hearing from former students working as EMTs, massage therapists, nurses, doctors and trainers. “We visit graduates working in the field so students can see someone from their high school working at a Division I program like UCLA that they hold up on a pedestal,” says Farrell.

Thinking back to her time at UVM, Farrell credits the “face-to-face” time during her counseling internship, as well as her clinical experiences with patients in athletic training, for her success. “After having those experiences at UVM I’ve always felt that there was nothing anyone could throw at me that I couldn’t figure out,” she says. “I run my program at Venice the same way by having students sign up for shifts that include both game and athletic training room coverage.”

Farrell is currently looking into doctoral programs focused on education and social justice issues related to what she views as a serious lack of medical care of inner-city athletes. “It’s an area that is sorely lacking,” she says. “I’d like to help bridge that gap.” 

Source: UVM News

A first-of-its-kind model—that measures the effects of human behavior on climate—provides new insight into the range of temperatures the planet may face in the coming century. And it provides “a rational basis for hope”—one of the co-authors says—that people, as the dominant cause of global temperature rise, may also be a crucial factor in helping to reduce it.

The results, published January 1 in the journal Nature Climate Change, demonstrate the importance of factoring human behavior into models of climate change.

Combining climate projections and social processes, the model predicts global temperature change ranging from 3.4 to 6.2°C by 2100, compared to 4.9°C from the climate model alone.

“A better understanding of the human perception of risk from climate change and the behavioral responses are key to curbing future climate change,” said lead author Brian Beckage, a professor of plant biology and computer science at the University of Vermont.

Drawing from both social psychology and climate science, the new model investigates how human behavioral changes evolve in response to extreme climate events and affect global temperature change.

The model accounts for the dynamic feedbacks that occur naturally in the Earth’s climate system—temperature projections determine the likelihood of extreme weather events, which in turn influence human behavior. Human behavioral changes, such as installing solar panels or investing in public transportation, alter greenhouse gas emissions, which change the global temperature and thus the frequency of extreme events, leading to new behaviors, and the cycle continues.

Due to the complexity of physical processes, climate models have uncertainties in global temperature prediction. The new model found that temperature uncertainty associated with the social component was of a similar magnitude to that of the physical processes, which implies that a better understanding of the human social component is important but often overlooked.

The model found that long-term, less easily reversed behavioral changes, such as insulating homes or purchasing hybrid cars, had by far the most impact in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and thus reducing climate change, versus more short-term adjustments, such as adjusting thermostats or driving fewer miles.

Basis for hope

“It is easy to lose confidence in the capacity for societies to make sufficient changes to reduce future temperatures. When we started this project, we simply wanted to address the question as to whether there was any rational basis for ‘hope’—that is a rational basis to expect that human behavioral changes can sufficiently impact climate to significantly reduce future global temperatures,” said co-author Louis J. Gross, director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who co-organized the working group that produced the new study.

“Climate models can easily make assumptions about reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions and project the implications, but they do this with no rational basis for human responses,” Gross said. “The key result from this paper is that there is indeed some rational basis for hope.”

That basis for hope can be the foundation which communities can build on in adopting policies to reduce emissions, said co-author Katherine Lacasse, an assistant professor of psychology at Rhode Island College. “We may notice more hurricanes and heat waves than usual and become concerned about climate change, but we don’t always know the best ways to reduce our emissions,” she said. Programs that help reduce the cost and difficulty of making long-term changes or that bring in whole communities, Lacasse says, can help support people to take big steps that have a meaningful impact on the climate.

The new study was supported by the National Science Foundation and was a result of combined efforts of the joint Working Group on Human Risk Perception and Climate Change at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland, where UVM’s Brian Beckage has been a long-time collaborator. Asim Zia, a UVM professor in Community Development and Applied Economics and computer science, was also a co-author on the new study.

“Our paper shifts the focus from the uncertainty in the physical climate system to the social components of the system—the human behavior,” says Beckage, “and how to best invest resources into the social components that are most likely to have the largest impacts on reducing future climate change.”

Source: UVM News

What would the late Andy Warhol make of the social media age? Snapchat moments and Instagram pics direct from The Factory?

Daring to speculate on the vision of an 89-year-old Warhol armed with an iPhone, art historian Anthony Grudin says, “He would have been deeply excited by, enchanted by, mystified by all of these new possibilities.”

Apt terminology in this regard—“amateur cultural participation”—is a phrase the UVM associate professor of art history discusses early in his 2017 book “Warhol’s Working Class,” published by The University of Chicago Press. Today, that could describe the high school kid whose cell phone video of police brutality goes viral or a comedian who finds her first audience via YouTube.

Decades before this revolution, Warhol was carving a similar path.

“I think of him as one of the first people to really glimpse and get excited about this new possibility,” Grudin says. “I think that is at the core of his achievement and his importance as an artist.  He sees the early stages of this opening through all of these relatively cheap reproductive technologies he loves to experiment with—Polaroids, tape recorders, video recorders, silk screens, even the personal computer.”

“Warhol’s Working Class” is an outgrowth of Grudin’s research at the University of California, Berkeley. Setting out to write a comparative discussion of minimalism and pop art, he became deeply intrigued by Warhol, particularly in regard to class issues. Warhol was one of very few modern artists from a working-class background, Grudin notes. His father worked construction; his mother cleaned houses; Warhol was born into “the abject poverty of a Pittsburgh ghetto.” But his achievement as an artist would vault him to a place among the glitterati, the rare millionaire artist and the rare individual who experienced life at both ends of the class spectrum.

Grudin breaks new ground with his discovery and examination of a marketing campaign by Macfadden Publications, an odd moment in early sixties consumer culture. It came at a time when national brands (like, say, Campbell’s Soup) were losing ground to generics and store brands. Macfadden, publisher of pulpy magazines such as “True Story,” argued that the future of national brands depended on the masses of working-class consumers who would remain loyal because of the perceived higher status of name brands. That same demographic defined Macfadden’s readership. Seeing an opportunity, they made their pitch to potential advertisers with tough-to-miss, full-page ads in “The New York Times,” “Wall Street Journal,” and “Chicago Tribune.”

The first Macfadden ad appeared Aug. 14, 1961. A few months later, Grudin notes, Andy Warhol began painting soup cans.

While it’s impossible to directly connect dots between those two events, they’re indicative of the times and the milieu around consumerism and class within which Warhol blazed his trail. And they add another dimension to a critical consideration of the artist’s life and work. While scholars have looked at performance of gender, sexuality, and race in regard to Warhol, this focus on the performance of class introduces a fresh perspective.

Grudin notes that a more egalitarian art world, allowing for expression across class lines, isn’t necessarily comfortable or welcome. He says, “That provokes a lot of anxiety in people, and it also provokes responses to that anxiety—people who come along and say, ‘you’re scared of what us ‘low-lives’ are going to do with this access; let us show you what we’re going to do. It will be scary. It will be rough. It will be weird. That’s part of Lou Reed, part of punk rock, and definitely part of Warhol.” 

Source: UVM News

In all of our 226 years, 2017 will be a hard one to top.

See the campus transformations and a few of the unforgettable moments that defined life at the University of Vermont.

 

 

Source: UVM News

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine has again ranked UVM among the top best-value public colleges in the country.

To compile its best-value list, Kiplinger’s first ranked schools based on measures of academic quality. It then factored in cost and financial aid measures. Quality criteria account for 55 percent of total points and cost criteria account for 45 percent.

Kiplinger’s draws its list of best-value schools from a field of nearly 1,200 higher education institutions in the U.S. UVM was tied for 14th among all publics on the Kiplinger’s list for its four-year graduation rate. On the overall list, the university ranked 58th for in-state and 94th for out-of-state students among public colleges, respectively. 

The fact that the university was again ranked high in value by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance is an affirmation of UVM’s core strengths, said Stacey Kostell, vice president for enrollment management. 

“Students are attracted to the University of Vermont because we provide a high quality academic experience,” she said.  “Families also know that we work hard to keep tuition increases as low as possible and to offset them with annual increases in scholarships and financial aid.”

The University of Vermont was also ranked a top 50 public university by U.S. News & World Report. 

Source: UVM News

Two members of the UVM history department and the UVM Miller Center for Holocaust Studies have been invited by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to take up prestigious research fellowships in the fall 2018 semester. 

Associate Professor Susanna Schrafstetter will be the Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Invitational Scholar for the Study of Anti-Semitism while working on her project “Seeking Survival in the South: German-Jewish Refugees in Italy, 1933-1950.”

Professor Alan Steinweis, who is also the Director of the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, will hold the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Fellowship, which he will use to work on several research and writing projects related to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Both scholars will be in residence at the Mandel Center in Washington, D.C. from September through December 2018.

Schrafstetter’s project focuses on the thousands of Jews from Germany who fled from National Socialist persecution between 1933 and 1940 to Fascist Italy. For the majority of these individuals Italy served as a temporary refuge, but a substantial number of Jewish refugees from Germany and other European countries remained in the country until the end of the Second World War. Following the Italian entry into WWII in 1940, they experienced internment, and, after the German occupation of Italy in September of 1943, they faced arrest and deportation to Auschwitz. Schrafstetter will explore questions including the reasons German Jews fled to Fascist Italy, and how they perceived everyday life as refugees and internees in Italy.

Steinweis is writing a book on the history of Nazi Germany now under contract with Cambridge University Press. The book will contain extensive sections about Nazi racial policy and the Holocaust, but will situate those topics in the broader historical context of the Nazi regime. He will also begin research on a new project about Georg Elser, a German cabinetmaker who came close to assassinating Hitler in November 1939. Steinweis says Elser’s story has received much less attention than the failed attempt on Hitler’s life by German military officers in July 1944. His work will focus on Elser’s actions in 1939 while exploring why it took so long for post-war German society to honor his deed. 

“We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Schrafstetter and Dr. Steinweis to the Mandel Center as research fellows this fall,” said Dr. Wendy Lower, Interim Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. “Each day the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum receives new material on the Holocaust, arriving from around the globe. Professors Schrafstetter and Steinweis will benefit from our extensive holdings and in turn, their research findings will enrich our understanding of how and why the Holocaust happened.”

The Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont promotes scholarship, education, and public awareness about the Holocaust. Drawing upon the expertise of a distinguished faculty from across the university, the Miller Center offers an undergraduate minor field in Holocaust Studies and supports graduate training in the disciplinary departments.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is an integral part of the Holocaust Museum, supporting scholarship and publications in Holocaust studies, promoting the growth of Holocaust studies at American universities, and initiating programs to ensure the ongoing training of future generations of scholars specializing in the Holocaust.

Source: UVM News

Source: UVM News