Congrats, grads!

Congratulations to the WWC class of 2009, particularly the Global Studies majors like Luke Bernard (pictured here in a photo by John Coutlakis of the Asheville Citizen-Times). Keep us posted on your post-WWC lives!

Interesting talks this week

On Wednesday, at 7 PM, in the Holden Arts Center, James L. Peacock will be speaking about Globalism and Art in Anthropology. Dr. Peacock is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of nine books, including four widely influential books about Indonesia and, most recently, "Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World" (2007).

On Friday, at 4 PM in the Jensen Lecture Hall, Roberto Barrios will presenting a talk on "Creolization and Neoliberalism in New Orleans’ Post-Katrina Recovery Planning." Dr. Barrios is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University, and is a former Warren Wilson faculty member. His work focuses on the socio-cultural implications of post-disaster reconstruction policy and practice. This presentation will kick off the Academic Capstone Carnival, which will continue next week.

Also, the Social Sciences Capstone Carnival is happening next week. Stay tuned for details!

Who's out there?

In this age of ubiquitous internet communication (which is, of course, global) it sometimes becomes difficult to know just who it is doing the communicating. There is also a fair amount of spam out there -- not just in email, but browsing blogs, skype, and undoubtedly focusing like a laser on Twitter.

If you are out there, are human, and find value in the Torrid Zone, could you take a second to comment on this blog post and say hello? And if you are so inclined, tell us what you'd like to see more of here. Are the Torrid Zone Tweets of interest? Alumni updates? Current student projects? Application deadlines? Inquiring minds want to know.

Global Studies "Info-rama"

The Department of Global Studies will be holding an informational extravaganza next Wednesday, April 15th, in the Mierke C room in Gladfelter from 11:30-1:00. Please drop by to:

--hear about exciting courses for the fall
--learn about upcoming changes to the Global Studies major (including a new regional concentration in Appalachian Studies, new thematic tracks, and a new minor in applied geospatial technology)
--hear about study abroad opportunities for your cross-cultural experience
--meet your fellow majors/potential majors
--ask questions

If you are a senior, please come by to share your hard-earned experience with new majors. If you are a freshman or sophomore thinking about declaring a Global Studies major, come by to learn more. And if you are a junior, well, just come!

Please pass this along to anybody you think might be interested. Hope to see you there!

GIS Crew working on web map for "Year of the Park"

Corey White of the GIS crew has been hard at work on a map of green space in Buncombe County as part of the county's "Year of the Park" project. Below is the customized Google map he's been working on, which will eventually be embedded in the YOP's website as well as several others. Try clicking on a tree for park information, including directions. Nice work Corey!




View Larger Map

Reminder from the International Programs Office

Attention rising juniors and seniors!

Selection sheets for 2009-2010 study abroad courses are due back in the International Programs Office no later than Monday, March 30 at 5:00 pm. Please participate in this important process that will help us determine which study abroad courses will be offered next year. If Study Abroad courses do not receive adequate student interest, as evidenced by returned selection sheets, the College will not offer them next year.

The sooner you turn in your selection sheet, the better your chance of placed in your preferred study abroad course next year. You must also meet all other upcoming application deadlines to secure your space in the course.

Please note that if you are graduating in May 2010, your selection sheet should state "Fall only." As a rule, students may not participate in study abroad courses during their final semester at Warren Wilson.

If you have not received a selection sheet, but you will have earned at least 60 credits by the end of this semester, or you will have been enrolled at WWC for at least 4 semesters, please contact us. At this point, only juniors and first-semester seniors are eligible to sign up for these courses. If there are still spaces available after these students have had the opportunity to sign up, we will announce openings to other students.

If you have any questions about specific study abroad courses, please feel free to ask International Programs staff or the individual course leaders indicated on the selection sheets.

International Programs Office
Lower Laursen, x3057

From the International Programs Office

The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship application cycle is currently open for study abroad programs beginning Fall 2009 and the 2009/2010 academic year.

The program offers grants for U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means to pursue academic studies abroad. This award helps to defray costs including program tuition, room and board, books, local transportation, insurance and international airfare.

Award amounts will vary depending on the length of study and student need with the average award being $4,000. Undergraduate students who are receiving federal Pell Grant funding at 2-year or 4-year colleges or universities are eligible to apply.

Students who apply for and receive the Gilman Scholarship to study abroad are now eligible to receive an additional $3,000 Critical Need Language Supplement from the Gilman Program for a total possible award of up to $8,000.

Critical Need Languages include:

• Arabic (all dialects)
• Chinese (all dialects)
• Turkic (Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgz, Turkish, Turkmen, Uzbek)
• Persian (Farsi, Dari, Kurdish, Pashto, Tajiki)
• Indic (Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Sinhala, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi)
• Korean
• Russian

This congressionally funded program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and is administered by the Institute of International Education -- Southern Regional Center in Houston, Texas.
For further information or to apply, please go to http://www.iie.org/programs/gilman/overview/overview.html

Congratulations to Chris Fusting ('08)

GIS crew member Corey White, former crew member Chris Fusting ('08) and I attended the NCGIS conference in Raleigh last week. Chris was one of this year's recipients of the Herbert Stout Award for Innovative Student Papers. He presented a paper called "Investigating LIDAR Data at the Bent Creek Experimental Forest."

Congratulations Chris!

GIS Crew...what are they up to?

You may remember a recent post about GIS crew member Nora Purcell. Nora is studying abroad this semester with the International Honors Program on Health and Community. She is traveling to Switzerland, China, South Africa and India over the next several weeks. You can follow along via her blog by clicking here!

Safe travels, Nora! We look forward to having you back at WWC this fall.

GIS Crew....what are they up to?

Here's another installment of our series of posts on GIS Crew members past and present. This time we're focusing on our very first crew member, Rebecca Davanon. She started the crew back in Fall 2005 and did a lot of great work getting the crew up and running. She's now working full-time in GIS for the City of Nashville. In her words:

"I work for the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County's Emergency Communications Center (ECC). Our center receives and dispatches fire, police, and medical calls and communicates directly with PD, FD, and EMS as they respond to calls....I maintain the street centerline database and the common place point database used by ATM and CAD. As new streets and addresses develop in Davidson County I add them into a GIS database and map. This map also contains fire beats, police beats, wrecker beats, and lots of other jurisdictional zones which I update as necessary. I use a tool called Motorola Geofile Utility to convert GIS data into a format CAD/ ATM recognizes. I update street and common place changes to the CAD system at least once a week and am responsible for updating all 911 ATM maps once a month. When discrepancies in data occur during a call, it is reported to me and I research and correct the database error. In addition, I maintain the county Neighborhood Notifier mxd for auto-dialing residents with emergency information. I also help with special projects like developing an emergency response system for Davidson County greenways, verifying street data in the field with a Trimble GeoXH unit, and ordering annual orthophotos for ATM. In addition to all this, I help maintain our MDC server that manages police mobile laptops, the AVL server, CAD information databases, the many software upgrades the occur over time, and of course hardware issues. I am being trained in managing all these systems and will eventually be on 24 hour call for 911 operations in case issues arise during my off hours."

Great to hear what you're up to, Becca.

WWC GIS Day 2008

That's right, it's GIS Day again -- here's our slate of events for Wednesday, November 19th:

11:00-12:30 Open House
Coffee! Cookies! Cool maps!
Join us in the GIS lab to look at a gallery of our maps and projects, learn to use a GPS unit, or chat about the crew.

1:00-1:30 Alex Haynes
Spatially interpolating sensor data using Java, Ruby on Rails and Google Earth
Alex Haynes will cover what the title says, except that it will be more interesting. Also, we can see Russia from our lab.

2:30-3:00 Nora Purcell
Sickness in Space: GIS and Disease Patterns
Inoculate yourself against ignorance. Warning: Early ignorance season predicted this year. Ignorance may cause astronauts to become ill.

3:00-3:30 Corey White
Predicting water main breaks in the San Antonio water system
Come learn about predictive modeling applied to water main breaks in San Antonio. There will be free hats.

3:30-4:00 Chris Fusting
Open Source GIS
Do you like free things such as hats? Then you will really, really like open source GIS. Open source is like a long walk on the beach at dusk with a special friend.

4:00-4:30 Geocaching!
Okay…we were making up the other free stuff. We’re sorry. But if you come to geocaching you can compete to find hidden treasure!! It will not be lame hidden treasure like in that hippie song “One Tin Soldier.” It’ll be good, like what pirates find.

Global Studies grad working in Panama

Sophia Levin-Hatz (Global Studies '08) is currently serving as the country director of Global Environmental Brigades in Panama City, Panama. She is working with environmental organizations and communities to develop service projects for students from U.S. universities.

While at WWC, Sophia spent a semester working with the Foundation for Sustainable Development, and she wrote a senior thesis on the history and evolution of development thought as it pertains to both theory and policy in the developing world.

You can read about Sophia's work on her blog, where she will keep us posted on her hard work.