Wednesday
September 30,2009
3:00-4:30 p.m.
Campus Center Atrium

As Despommier wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed on August 24, climate and population growth could make farming as we know it today untenable in another half century. While a reliable food supply has benefited most of the civilized world, traditional farming has also damaged natural ecozones and created new health hazards. Infectious diseases occur with devastating regularity at the tropical and sub-tropical agricultural interface. Exposure to toxic levels of some agrochemicals is another associated health risk. Further, with the world’s population expected to rise to at least 8.6 billion over the next 50 years, the farmland available will not produce adequate food using current technologies.

 Vertical urban farms could help to repair many of the world’s damaged ecosystems and moderate global climate change. Social   benefits include fostering a sustainable urban environment that encourages good health, new employment opportunities, fewer abandoned lots and buildings, cleaner air and an abundant supply of safe drinking water.

 Co-sponsors: NJIT Technology and Society and Forum Committee, Albert Dorman Honors College and Sigma Xi.

Wednesday
October 7, 2009
2:30-4:00 p.m.
GITC 3740

Captain Drew Swenson graduated from Purdue University in 1986 with a BS in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering. He entered Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, FL, was commissioned an Ensign in January 1988, received naval flight officer wings in May 1989 and joined VF-84 in 1990 flying the F-14A Tomcat.  He completed one and a half deployments aboard USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (CVN 71) accumulating 42 combat missions during Operations Desert Storm and Provide Comfort and led 12 fighter-support/reconnaissance missions during Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Captain Swenson received an MS in Space Systems Engineering in 1995 from the Naval Postgraduate School.  Upon  completion, he was assigned to the USS ENTERPRISE (CVN 65) as the Assistant Strike Operations Officer.  After the first cruise of CVN 65 since its nuclear refueling, he ramped up to the position of the Strike Operations Officer, a Lieutenant in a Commander position and the most junior Strike Ops on the east coast at the time.

In 1998, he was selected as an Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officer and was assigned to the Naval Aviation Repair Activity [NAPRA] in Atsugi, Japan.  After his first year, he was selected to attend Naval Test Pilot School.

Upon graduation, he was assigned to VX-30 in Point Mugu, CA, serving as the VX-30 Projects Department Head.  He planned, led, and chased the first Tactical Tomahawk and was the first to hand fly this weapon.  He also was the first to dual-drop a GPS guided weapon (JDAM) on moving targets during DARPA’s AMSTE  program.[DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. One of its leading programs is AMSTE, Affordable Moving Surface Target Indicator]

 He reported to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in 2003 and joined the IMINT [IMagery INTelligence] directorate  as the Chief System’s   Engineer/ Payload lead for the Space Radar Program.  He also served as the technical lead for a classified ACTD [Advanced Concept Technology Demonstator]  which is currently in orbit.

Captain Swenson reported to PMA-201 as the In-Service Assistant Deputy Program Manager.  He was responsible for  managing four diverse IPT’s consisting of General Purpose/ Practice Bombs, Fuzes, Weapon Racks/ Launchers, and External Fuel Tanks/ Aerial Refueling Stores.

 In 2007, he volunteered for a Navy Individual Augmentation tour in Baghdad, Iraq, serving with Joint CREW Composite          Squadron-1 as the Officer-In-Charge of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division Electronic Warfare Officers.

 Captain Swenson is currently serving as the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) 4.8 Military Director.  As of April 2008,  Commander Swenson was selected for the rank of Captain (promotes September 1, 2009) and assumed new responsibilities at  Lakehurst, NJ , as the Support Equipment and Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Engineering Military Director.

 His personal decorations include the Bronze Star, Air Medal (2), Navy Achievement Medal (2) and the Navy Commendation Medal (3).  He has accrued over 1500 flight hours and 200 arrested carrier landings.  He resides in Lakehurst, NJ with his wife Joellyn and daughter Avery.

In his Colloquium, Captain Swenson intends to cover a fairly wide range of topics including:

 • NAVAIR, the Naval Air and Engineering Station, an introduction to its wide spectrum of activities.[http://www.navair.navy.mil/lakehurst/nlweb/].
• Naval Aviators/ Naval Flight Officers and what exactly their responsibilities are.
• Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officers [AEDO’s], who are selected from the previous group of aviators and flight officers to perform specific  functions within NAVAIR, like Depot work, Aircraft and Aircraft-related acquisition, as well as Spacecraft  acquisition.  In all there are approximately 300 AEDO’s serving in the Navy, of whom about half have advanced degrees and qualifications and half are graduates of the Test Pilot School. A few of them are on active duty as NASA astronauts.
• Test Pilots: what they do, with concrete examples of test work and the connected problems.

Captain Swenson will also talk about experimental aviation, an area not specifically related to his work but of great interest to him.
In covering these subjects, he will of course also make us aware of the numerous internship possibilities and the wide variety of career opportunities open to NJIT students and graduates in many of their study areas and where NAVAIR plays a leading role in the world.

Monday
October 12, 2009
11:30-1:00 p.m.
Campus Center Ballroom A

 Bruce D. Marcus serves as executive vice president and chief information officer of The McGraw-Hill Companies, providing overall technology leadership for the corporation and its businesses and working with business management to expand the application of effective technology solutions across the enterprise. He also serves as a member of the corporation’s CEO Council. Before becoming CIO, Bruce was senior vice president, Enterprise Systems, with responsibility for systems development across The McGraw-Hill Companies. Previously, as vice president of Business Operations and Technology for Platts, he was responsible for Platts’ global technology development, administration, and operations, as well as its Content Management Services and Internet businesses. Bruce has held positions in all three of McGraw-Hill’s segments. He served as a  business systems consultant for McGraw-Hill Higher Education and as senior director of software systems development for Standard and Poor’s. Prior to joining The McGraw-Hill Companies, he served as the managing editor of Pathfinder Press, a small trade publishing house. Bruce holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a minor in Chemical Engineering.

In his colloquium Bruce Marcus will raise some thought-provoking questions. He is convinced there is now an enormous world of opportunity for technologists who want to help lead businesses to success.
Technology is rapidly moving from a back office efficiency focus to a growth focus: customers, products, solutions.
This requires new ways of thinking: commodity services will continue to move to the lowest cost provider, more things will become commodities, where then is the value add?

Alignment and innovation.
Impact of the recession – did companies try to tread water or seize the opportunity?
Dot-com boom – many colleagues thought technology now drives the bus – it did, but the technologists didn’t.
What does the future hold then?

Monday
October 19, 2009
11:30 – 1:00 p.m
Campus Center Ballroom A

 Mark Gluck is a Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University - Newark, co-director of the Rutgers Memory Disorders Project, and publisher of the public health newsletter, Memory Loss and the Brain. He works at the interface between neuroscience, psychology, and computer science studying the neural bases of learning and memory. His research spans numerous methodologies including neurocomputational modeling, clinical studies of brain-damaged patients, functional and structural brain imaging, behavioral genetics, and comparative studies of rodent and human learning. He is the co-author of Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Models of the Hippocampus and Memory (MIT Press, 2001) as well as a new undergraduate textbook  Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior (Worth Publishers, 2008).  He has edited several other books including Neuroscience and Connectionist Theory (1990), Model Systems and the Neurobiology of Associative Learning: A Festschrift for Richard F. Thompson (2001), and Memory and Mind: A Festschrift for Gordan H. Bower (2007), as well as over 80 scientific journal articles and book chapters. His awards include the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Society and the Young Investigator Award  for Cognitive and Neural Sciences from the Office of Naval Research. In 1996, he was awarded an NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Bill Clinton. For more information, see http://www.gluck.edu.

 Neurocomputational models  provide fundamental  insights towards understanding the human brain circuits for learning new associations and organizing our world into appropriate categories. In this talk he will review  the information-processing functions of four interacting brain systems for learning and categorization: (1) the basal ganglia which incrementally adjusts choice behaviors using environmental feedback about the consequences of our actions, (2) the hippocampus which supports learning in other brain regions through the creation of new stimulus representations (and, hence, new similarity relationships)  that reflect important statistical regularities in the environment, (3) the medial septum which works in a feedback-loop with the hippocampus, using novelty-detection to alter the rate at which stimulus representations are updated through experience, (4) the   frontal lobes which provide for selective attention and executive control of learning and memory. The computational models to be described have been evaluated through a variety of empirical methodologies including human functional brain imaging, studies of patients with  localized brain damage due to injury or early-stage neurodegenerative diseases, behavioral genetic studies of naturally-occuring individual variability, as well as comparative lesion and genetic studies with rodents. Our applications of these models to engineering and computer science including automated anomaly detection systems for mechanical fault diagnosis on US Navy helicopters and submarines as well as more recent contributions to the DoD's DARPA program for Biologically Inspired  Cognitive Architectures (BICA).

Wednesday
October 21, 2009
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Campus Center Atrium

John Columbus received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree Cum Laude with a major in Graphic Design at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in 1969, where he started making films. He made two short films exhibited at the Ann Arbor and Chicago Film Festivals before entering Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, Film Division in fall 1972, where he collaborated on two additional films. After earning his M.F.A. in Film Directing in 1975 and completing several Ph.D. credits in film studies at Columbia, he joined the arts faculty at Stockton State College, Pomona, N.J. While at Stockton, Columbus became the founding vice president of the Atlantic Film Society and started an annual spring film festival. Columbus also completed two additional short films that aired on New Jersey Public Television.

In 1980, Columbus started the nationally recognized Black Maria Film Festival.  In 1981, Columbus became an adjunct faculty member at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and subsequently completed two more films. Columbus has been guest film curator for the Flaherty Film Seminar, acted as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts, been guest critic-mentor at Rhode Island School of Design, Film Programmer and Trustee of Robert Flaherty Film Seminars and is Secretary and Charter Member of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park in West Orange, N.J.

John Columbus, Director of the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film Festival, will present and discuss excerpts from two important short films that demonstrate the power of film to influence public opinion though the stylistic and content choices of the filmmaker. The notorious yet grandiose 1934 Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” by the controversial filmmaker and actress, Leni Riefenstahl, will be analyzed in comparison to the poetic 1955 documentary film “Night and Fog” by the French New Wave Director, Alain Resnais. One film celebrates and elevates the Nazi Party Congress and portrays Adolf Hitler as a hero, while the second explores the aftermath of the Nazi era in a haunting portrayal of the abandoned ground of Auschwitz and Majdanek Concentration Camps.

Wednesday
October 28,2009
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
GITC 1400

The Colloquium which follows is the first in the new Herman A. Estrin Colloquium Series  that we are introducing this semester,  in cooperation with CSLA.   With annual presentations in the fall of each year, this new series will focus in particular on the interface between science, technology and society by featuring leading researchers in the field of communication.

Herman A. Estrin, a graduate of Columbia University, was among the nation’s foremost researchers and instructors in professional and technical communication.  Author of such works as Higher Education in Engineering and Science (McGraw-Hill, 1963) and The Teaching of Technical Writing (National Council of Teachers of English, 1975), Dr. Estrin brought the field of  technical writing into national prominence through his tireless efforts at the state, regional and national levels.  When he died on May 7, 1999, he had taken his place as one of the most highly regarded figures at NJIT.

Jo Allen, professor of English and Provost of Widener University, will launch the Estrin Series. 

As Senior Vice President and Provost at Widener University, Dr. Allen oversees the administrative and curricular work of planning, budgeting, goal-setting, and assessment for academic programming in eight schools/colleges -- the College of Arts and Sciences; the Schools of Business Administration, Engineering, Hospitality Management, Human Service Professions, Law, Nursing; and the University College -- on Widener’s four campuses:  Chester, Harrisburg, and Exton, PA, and Wilmington, DE.  In addition, she oversees the work of Student Affairs (Student Life, Residence Life, Judicial Affairs, the Wellness Center, the Student Health Center, the Interfaith Center, and International and Multicultural Student Services), as well as the Honors program, Cooperative Education, Theatre Widener, multi-media resources, academic support programs, and the libraries.  She co-chairs the University’s strategic planning work, which has received national acclaim for integrating planning, budgeting, assessment, accreditation, and now a comprehensive fund-raising campaign for the University.

A professor of English, she is the past president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, the largest international scholarly organization for technical and professional communication scholars.  Dr. Allen has published books and articles, and presented papers in over 100 national and international scholarly venues, focusing on communication, assessment, and higher education.

As the chief academic officer of Widener University, Dr. Allen combines her disciplinary expertise in technical and professional communication with a broader perspective on higher education trends in America.  Of the utmost concern, she says, is the devaluation of good judgment in communication practices throughout the academy and beyond.  Citing increasing carelessness with the truth and decreasing civility in general, communication in the 21st century stands at a perilous crossroad:  between honor and courtesy on the one hand, and deceit and rage on the other.  She then describes the implications of taking each pathway and describes an appropriate course of action in communications, building largely from the messages and style of the colloquium’s namesake, Herman Estrin. 

Thursday
November 5,2009
7:00 p.m.
Jim Wise Theatre
NJIT Campus

Most of us have heard of the mythical figure of Medea in ancient Greece, whose story is told in one of the best known plays of Euripides (4th century BCE).  The production we are going to see this evening is, however,  a hip hop, rock and roll adaptation and is set in our present world. In this version, Medea is a recording artist that is stranded by her husband, Jason, who wanders on to being put in charge of an entire country.  In this version the  dress of the actors is modern, the music original and the dance contemporary.  The audience should have a lot of fun.

Friday
November 13, 2009
8:30 – 10:00 a.m.
Campus Center Atrium

Albert Dorman Honors College Board of Visitors Roundtable

This is a special event just for Honors students, so you should make sure you save a time slot on your calendars and well ahead of the actual date for this very special event.

There are a number of reasons that make this Roundtable special :

Firstly, it offers a remarkable opportunity for you as honors students – especially for the juniors and seniors among you, who are now focusing more concretely on their future careers and prospective employers.  Members of the Board of Visitors come earlier than their actual meeting on this day so as to place themselves completely at your disposal.  You will be able to interact with and question them face to face in an informal and relaxed atmosphere.

Secondly, the event is very special because of the wide professional experience and the thoroughgoing knowledge of the world of business that the Members of the Board of Visitors bring with them. They were invited to join the Board precisely because of this knowledge and experience.  They are corporate executives at the height of their careers.  The organizations they work for operate in a wide variety of business fields at the local, national and international levels. As Members of the Board they play an important role here at NJIT and the Honors College by making sure that the education and training you are receiving is what industry today is looking for and actually needs.

Finally, they represent and promote the best interests of the Albert Dorman Honors College and actively raise funds to advance its best interests and to ensure as many educational opportunities as possible are open to you.

At the Roundtable itself, the Members of the Board will each be seated at their own table, with their names and areas of expertise clearly posted. [By the way, In the photo at top left, the Member of the Board discussing with the students is Albert Dorman himself, for whom the Honors College is named). You will be able to join the Member – or, in the course of the session, various Members – that you feel will know more about your particular area of interest.  You will then have the opportunity to ask them questions and to discuss your ideas and plans with them.

Wednesday
November 18, 2009
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Campus Center Atrium

Monday
November 23, 2009
11:30 - 1:00 p.m.
Campus Center Ballroom

A Cross-Cultural Encounter
Dr. Srabanti Basu
Senior Lecturer
Heritage Institute of Technology
Kolkata, India

Dr. Srabanti Basu is a senior lecturer in Biotechnology at the Heritage Institute of Technology (HIT) In Kolkata, India, which is affiliated to the West Bengal Institute of Technology (WBUT).  Her research is mainly in areas of environmental biochemistry and biotechnology.  Presently she is working here on campus with Dr. Liping Wey, Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, as a visiting scholar under the Fulbright Nehru Environmental Leadership Program. 

Apart from her work as a professor, she is also interested in journalism.  Dr. Basu worked for some two years as sub-editor for the science pages of The Telegraph, a leading English-language daily newspaper in Kolkata.  As a freelance journalist she continues to contribute articles to the science and education columns of English and Bengali newspapers and magazines. 

Her special interests include elocution and dramatics.  She is particularly devoted to Bengali poetry, experimenting above all in communicating poems through recitation.  It is interesting to note that the public recitation of poems has grown into a highly regarded separate form of the performing arts in Kolkata and attracts a large public following.

Noteworthy, too, is that Srabanti Basu perfected her  skills in recitation under Bratati Bandyopdhyay, one of the most popular and highly regarded teachers of elocution in Kolkata, who has for a long time now experimented with combining public recitation with other art forms, especially music.

The Colloquium is intended as an exercise and experiment in communication across cultures.  The ideas behind it are many, but here are the two main driving thoughts.  First, there is the example of people like Roald Hoffmann, Professor Emeritus of Humane Letters at Cornell University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981.  If you go to his website (www.roaldhoffmann.com), you will find he welcomes you to his “land between chemistry, poetry and philosophy”, which is an interesting combination, to say the least, promoting an interdisciplinary and multi-level approach.  Dr. Basu also has some interesting anecdotes to recount about meeting with Roald Hoffmann and Laura Rosenberg, a well-known psychiatric counselor, and the trials they conducted together, almost on the spur of the moment,  in successful intercultural communication without even the slightest knowledge of  the languages being used (Bengali and Russian).  Second, it comes from reflecting on the teaching at drama school that, whenever we communicate, we are in fact using four different languages, each important for truly successful and full communication. In addition to word language (which is what we are usually referring to when we use the term), there are also crucial additional languages we employ when we communicate, namely body language, sign language and sound language.  For instance, experienced business people doing business abroad will tell you that, if you are in a business meeting say with people from another culture and they suddenly, and without warning,  start talking to one another in their own language, you can still get a very good idea of what they are saying – and accordingly of how the meeting is going – by making sure you do not automatically “switch off” but instead listen and observe them with your full and undivided attention while they are talking.  Their body language (e.g.  taut posture or puzzled look; a grimace expressing incomprehension), their sign language (hand gestures), and the tone of their voice (“sound language’) convey significant meaning, too. Of course, we have to emphasize that such a careful observer/listener is already highly sensitized toward cultural differences and an open-minded learner.

Dr. Srabanti Basu has a great deal of experience in the public recitation of poems;  in her home city of Kolkata she has worked with eminent elocutionists and shared the stage with them in numerous public performances.  In the Colloquium she will recite poems of outstanding Bengali writers, like Rabindranath Tagore (the first non-Western writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature).  Each poem will then be read again in an English translation, so that you can check just how much you got of the message of the poem through concentrating fully on observing and listening to Srabanti Basu as she recites the poems. 

This can certainly be an enlightening experience for us all.  The poems start in praise of India and the incredible open-mindedness and tolerance of its culture toward other worldviews.  This ancient and forbearing culture has  also survived as a unifying element  in Bengal even after it was sliced in two when India gained independence.  Certainly, there have been episodes of hateful clashes, but the poems end on the optimistic note that the divisions between races and culture will give way to a prevailing realization that we are much more alike than we are different.   Together the poems embody an extraordinary vision of India and the world in general.

Thursday
December 3, 2009
7:00 p.m.
Bradley Hall Theatre
Rutgers-Newark Campus

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are turned on their heads in this fast-paced, rollicking ride as two narrators and several actors attempt to combine all 209 stories ranging from classics like Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel to more bizarre, obscure stories like The Devil's Grandmother and The Girl Without Hands.

This is a wild, free-form comedy with lots of audience participation and madcap fun.