UVM Blogs

Daniel H. Krymkowski, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology[/caption]

In his classic book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase “abstracted […]

Dona Brown, Professor of History[/caption]

For many of us today, the phrase “going back to the land” may bring to mind a vision of the 1960s: yurts and domes, communes and co-ops. But Americans have been […]

Valerie Rohy, Chair and Professor, Department of English[/caption]

This lecture examines the retroactive formation of gay identity through the act of reading in a famous lesbian novel of the 1920s, Radclyffe […]

Crystallization is the name for processes by which atoms and molecules organize themselves into patterns ranging from simple to intricate.  In modern science and technology, the natural processes behind […]

Chinese characters, unlike the writing system of any Indo-European language, are formed with no letters or combination of letters to represent the sounds of the Chinese language. Chinese characters have been a […]

Tunisia, the original site of the Arab Spring uprisings, was regarded by many as having the best chance of bringing its democratic aspirations to fruition. But as the Jasmine Revolution enters its second year, […]

Sustainability politics has been around for three decades; environmental politics for five (under that label).  Over the same period, the political world has become considerably more democratic.  More […]

I’m guessing that you probably don’t know exactly what we mean when we say “University information” in a security related discussion.  This is because the definitions are buried in the fairly recently published University Information Security Policy and just like End User License Agreements, nobody likes to read policy statements until we have to.…[Read more]

Is this email legitimate or a hoax?  This is the single most frequently asked question we have.  The answer is almost always no but people still ask and occasionally one of our clients will fall for a scam and end up with a compromised account. The basic rule of thumb should be: if you want [...]

Two Continents.  Two Epic heroes. Two classical scholars.  Professor Usher will discuss how the work of maverick Classicists Milman Parry (1902-1934) and George Thomson (1903-1987) revolutionized the field of Classics in their day and how their scholarly discoveries and vision brought him recently to Africa and Mongolia in pursuit of the study…[Read more]

Greetings- For those running MacOS X Lion, aka 10.7, it is now safe to install the 10.7.3 update.  Apple switched from the context sensitive Software Updates version of the update (which is supposed to only install the components of the update that your computer needs) to the “Combo” version which contains everything for all currently [...]

If you do not have a Macintosh computer and are running OS X version 10.7, this article does not pertain to you.  Please keep moving folks, nothing more to see here. Macintosh users with the most recent version of OS X, 10.7, aka “Lion”, there is an updated version of the OS that adds some [...]

After the Systems Architecture and Administration (SAA) group replaced the old active directory filing appliance with honest to goodness Windows 2008 Servers, http://webfiles.uvm.edu went away. Well, thanks to the SAA group,  it’s back and in a supercharged version.  Connect, log in using your UVM netID, and you not only can get at your personal…[Read more]

Valerie Rohy, Professor of English We have all heard the charge that gay men and lesbians seek to “recruit children to their lifestyle”–a claim based on the old belief that homosexuality can be caused, like other bad habits, by dangerous influences. In response, queer communities increasingly cite theories of biological determinism to argue that…[Read more]

William Mierse, Professor of Art and Art History The lack of surviving textiles is one of the major gaps in our understanding of ancient art. We know that they were important. But the archaeological record has preserved few examples until quite recently. Over the last twenty years excavations in the Taklimakan Desert in China’s Xinjiang [...]

English Professor Major Jackson’s Full Professor Lecture, “The Dadaab Suite and Other Poems,” Tuesday, October 4, at 5:00 p.m. Dadaab, Kenya is the home of the oldest and largest refugee camp administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The camp was built for 90,000 refugees in 1991 as a consequence of the civil war [...]

Recently we’ve seen a rash of people infected with official looking but entirely fake antivirus malware. In general, the user reports that they were just using a web browser, minding their own business when suddenly a window appears that looked like it came from Microsoft Windows, and which informed them that they were infected with [...]

Tracing the contours of power in cities, Professor Cope discusses ways that socially marginalized groups are subject to – and act upon – spatial constraints and restrictions in everyday life. Focusing on women, youth, and people of color, she draws on the idea of the mutual constitutions of society and space to illuminate intersections of [...]

If Americans ever think about Soviet cinema, they either imagine dreary propaganda films or remember world-class avant-garde directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. Some Soviet movies were indeed dismal propaganda, and more than a few were cinematic masterpieces (usually the ones in trouble with the censorship). There was, however,…[Read more]

One reason the U.S. was late to create a central bank was that earlier renditions of central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States (1791-1811 and 1816-1836, respectively), drew political fire as large, financially powerful corporations. Although both institutions performed well, it proved impossible for either to convince both a…[Read more]

It is well known that exercise improves cardiovascular fitness, promotes a stable and healthy body weight, and strengthens the immune system. There is now growing evidence that exercise also improves emotional health. Studies of humans and other animals have shown that voluntary exercise reduces many of the signs and symptoms of anxiety and…[Read more]

The United States came to lead the world economy by the early 20th century. As symbolized by Henry Ford’s automobile production, it was the world’s most mechanized country. Among the factors accounting for the ascendance of this once-backward colony, the rapid diffusion of technological knowledge was particularly important. Supported by effective…[Read more]

Building on his recent book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet- a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology-Tom Streeter looks at the persistence of romanticism in the twenty-first century. Communities as diverse as computer programmers, CEOs, and college students at times demonstrate a…[Read more]

Satire is always hungry for pieties: commonplaces we learn and repeat without ever asking how, public figures we esteem without ever quite understanding why. For this reason, there is a certain rhetorical violence to satire that is at once its greatest draw, and its greatest drawback. Because he or she makes sport of powerful people [...]

What does it mean to be a woman then and now, at two turns of the century? What does it mean to be a feminist, a scholar, a brown, thick-accented woman in American academia? Escaja’s lecture invites you to reflect on the elusive concept of otherness, from fin-de-siecle decadence to technological fallacies of liberation in [...]

Howard Professor of Zoology and Natural History of the Department of Biology Of the nine species of bats that occur in Vermont, only two were of conservation concern prior to the 21st century. By the winter of 2007-2008, white-nosed syndrome had spread into Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and killed somewhere on the order of 600,000 bats. [...]

A pair of department administrators asked me for help with editing files in Sharepoint. It turns out that they were confused about the difference between clicking on the name of a file and selecting “Edit in Microsoft ” from the drop down menu. They assumed that the two actions would give you the same results when [...]

Professor, Department of Chemistry Molecules taking part in chemical and biochemical reactions receive their energy either thermally (i.e., heat), photo-chemically (light), or through electron transfer (electricity). The last of these often requires transfer of a single electron from one molecule to another. Given that an electron is, by far, the…[Read more]

Are you still running Symantec Antivirus security software on your computer? If yes, it’s time to remove/replace it. ETS has just announced that they are decommissioning the on campus management servers for that software package as of November 30th. Although this shouldn’t affect your use of your computer, you should note that because Symantec hasn’t [...]

We’ve seen many UVM customized phishing scams recently, including one that mocked up our webmail login page exactly. The only legitimate email regarding password or status changes to your UVM email account is the one that comes from David Todd and DOES NOT ask you to do anything but go to the UVM account page [...]

Professor, Department of Psychology Tobacco use and dependence rates are disproportionately high among those with anxiety and its disorders. Professor Zvolensky provided an overview of the scientific literature on anxiety, smoking, and smoking cessation. He also discussed current promising treatment and prevention approaches for smokers with…[Read more]

So we arrived home on a lovely evening and began the great unpack. Today it’s raining, again. The rest of our trip home was completely uneventful, thank goodness. All in all we travelled ten thousand miles in four weeks. You should also note that the actual drive was spread over only 19 days of those [...]

We’re so glad that we decided to stop here on the final stretch for home. None of us have ever been to Niagra and it didn’t disappoint. It turns out that this the very first state park established in America. People used to all sorts of dumb wierd things here, like go over the falls in [...]

We caravanned our way out of Indy and up into Michigan, with my sister’s family along behind. Perhaps this was one time we shouldn’t have followed the AAA triptik because they sent us via the most direct route, but perhaps not the fastest. Lots of little towns and much time spent in the “Cone Zone” again. [...]

Did you know that Indiana has more miles of interstate highway than any other state in the union? Did you know that just about every mile of those interstates is under construction this summer? Maia has dubbed such sections as “The Cone Zone” and we’ve spent many a slowdown sitting in them this summer. These are [...]

We left Keystone SD in a cloud of dust for the long schlep to Omaha. The landscape is far less exciting for us now, although I suspect that’s because it pretty much looks like home now, just a bit flatter. We actually stopped in Wall, South Dakota, home of the famous Wall Drug. Our vehicle was [...]

After another day flying through the “Deep Nothing”, where the highway is so straight that you don’t even need to hold onto the steering wheel the whole time, we arrived in Keystone SD. As the sun set, we first tried to visit the Crazy Horse monument, but discovered that a) it’s only partially completed and b) [...]

Whooeee was this a long driving day. We snaked our way up on narrow roads, many of which were under construction. After dark it reminded us of home, no street lights and just tiny little signs that were easy to miss. We had the lovely experience of winding through Jackson, WY at 10:00 pm on a [...]

We retraced our route up from SLO to the Sacramento area, then vectored off into the Nevada desert. Our nation is indeed a vast quantity of not a heck of a lot. We could drive for literally hours seeing not much more than power lines, highway and sagebrush. The temp was hovering between 96 and [...]

Next stop, and the highlight of the entire trip for Miss Maia Grace, was Atascadero, near San Luis Obispo (“SLO” for those far hipper than myself), to visit her favorite Preschool/Kindergarten teacher of all time, Jolie Burrows, husband and professor extraordinaire, Matt Moore and their wee son Eli. Once again we rolled through extensive…[Read more]

We drove up through southern California, which is basically solid agriculture from one end to the other. Almonds on the left, and grapes on the right, then grapes on the right and almonds on the right. Punctuated by fields of roses, truckloads of tomatoes and a gigantic cattle stockyard (dubbed “Cowschwitz” by our friends, it is [...]

Hoookay, well the Nevada desert is pretty darn hot. We left Jacob Lake and headed south on I-15, passing through Las Vegas. At one point the temp was 111 degrees. We passed through Zion National Park in the process, a park that Melissa and I had visited back in 1992. It’s a place where you basically [...]

We arrived in Jacob Lake, AZ at 5:30 in the evening. As predicted, there’s not very much to Jacob Lake. But the RV park was very nice, run by a couple of retired couples. We ended up parked next to a family from New Jersey. The dad had lost his job so they decided to take [...]

Sooooooo, we had a wee bit of car trouble on the way out of the Colorado mountains. Our poor old Pilot didn’t like climbing hills at 65 pulling a trailer in 95 degree heat (gee go figure!?). Nearest Honda dealer: Orem UT, 90 miles to the north. To our currently warped perspective, that’s nothing more [...]

So, despite the fact that company, like fish, starts to stink after two days, Laurie graciously spent a second day playing with us in Colorado. After a great light breakfast, we were off on ATVs to the top of the ridge for a snack and some pictures, then stops at several restored homesteads on the way [...]

With reluctance we packed up Otiss and left Santa Fe, heading north on US 285. Our next stop is a friend’s ranch in northern Colorado, but we thought we had a relatively short driving day, and needed to blow a little time in order to work with our friend’s schedule. So we took the “high road” [...]

Today’s entry written, at least partially, by the lovely Alaina Hendrickson: Hey everyone! I thought I’d give you a little flavor of our dinner at the Black Eyed Pea Restaurant in Dallas, TX. You may not find this that amusing, but keep in mind that this was obviously our waiter’s first week or so and that [...]

Just a short entry from Arlington Texas. We arrived at one of the more bizarre KOA campgrounds (oh, sorry – KAMPgrounds) which is in the middle of basically a mall in Arlington. Imagine 150 RVs parked next to the University Mall and that’s basically what we’re looking at. We’re having a severe case of RV [...]

We’ve been traveling with one tail light out on the trailer for a couple of days now. It’s fine as long as we only want to turn left all day. The lights worked fine when I took the trailer down to get inspected, and for the first few days of our trip, but they were good [...]

We got off the highway in Hermitage TN (which by the way boasts the estate of President Andrew Jackson), followed our AAA Triptik directions down an access road between a gas station and a McDonalds, and came out in the middle of a brand new housing development. All of the houses are made of brick here, [...]