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Stacy Cordery |
Cordery at
Miller Center: Although Stacy Cordery completed a tour promoting her
biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth last fall, that doesn’t mean that
the MC history professor has finished her book-related travels. Cordery,
whose book “Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess
to Washington Power Broker” was published last year, has been in demand
as a speaker since authoring the acclaimed biography, which chronicles
the life of Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, who was also known as “the
other Washington monument.” On Monday, Cordery was in Virginia to serve
as the featured speaker at the Miller Center Forum, which regularly
draws nationally and internationally recognized experts in public
affairs, American politics and foreign policy. Located in
Charlottesville, the Miller Center of Public Affairs is a national,
non-partisan center dedicated to researching, reflecting and reporting
on American government. Video of Cordery’s presentation at the Miller
Center is available at
www.millercenter.org/scripps/digitalarchive/forumDetail/3907.
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Chris Fasano |
Physics computers break century mark:
The trusty old computer has certainly made our lives easier. Imagine how
much easier life would be with 100 of them. Chris Fasano, the Martha S.
Pattee Professor of Science, doesn’t have to imagine – he knows. “The
Monmouth College physics department has now passed 100 processors
running continuously on our parallel computer,” he said. “Over the past
three years, I’ve been building a grid computer to do high-performance
computing. It is quite unusual to find such a computer at a college like
ours.” The computer now consists of 112 Sun UltraSparc II processors,
allowing the physics department to do large scientific computations by
dividing the problem in pieces that each processor can work on. Fasano
hopes to build the system to at least 128 processors – a “good number
for geeks,” he said – with the possibility of growing even larger if the
Haldeman-Thiessen Science Center room housing the processors can be
properly cooled.
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Woody Ball in a
recent photograph. |
Ball, former dean, dies at 89: Elwood H. “Woody” Ball, age 89, of
Monmouth, died March 2, 2008. Ball taught music at Willamette University
and his alma mater, the University of Michigan, until 1953, when he came
to Monmouth. An accomplished organist who had been playing since he was
16, Ball was a fixture on the instrument in the Monmouth College
Auditorium, playing at regular chapel services and other occasions.
Through his retirement in 1983, Ball served in several capacities,
including professor of music, dean of men and dean of students. In his
final two years with the college, he established and served as the
director of the college’s first career development office.
Studying the boy wizard: While MC
has so far stopped short of creating a course called “Harry Potter 101,”
the wildly popular seven-book series by J.K. Rowlings does find itself
as a classroom topic on campus. A recent CNN story titled “Pottermania
Lives on in College Classrooms” said that courses featuring the
fictional boy wizard are taught at such highly-regarded universities as
Yale, Stanford and Georgetown. MC English professor Mark Willhardt was
asked to comment on the CNN story. “The more the ‘Harry Potter’ books
are perceived as not simply adolescent literature – but rather as
theology, or sociology, or even history – the more likely they are to
become enshrined in the classroom, and thus to be understood as
‘classics,’ something more valuable than even their record-setting
sales,” he said. “Students who love to read have read them; students who
don’t love to read have read them. If you’re a teacher and trying to
reach the greatest number of students, you could do worse than basing a
discussion or two around Potter and his adventures.”
