Social Sciences
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Students at Michigan Conference of Political Scientists
November 27, 2004
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From Left to Right: Gerard Greer,
Summer Hodgman, Matthew Drewek, Mary Durfee, Jeremy Koenen, Karl
Haapala, and Agustin Robles Morua (kneeling). Click to enlarge. |
Michigan Tech undergraduates and graduate students attend the annual meeting of the Michigan Conference of Political Scientists at Central Michigan University, October 15-16, 2004. Prof. Mary Durfee took a group of students to a political science meeting in order to showcase the excellent work of Tech students. She organized a panel, Teaching Politics Across the Disciplines, that outlined strategies faculty can take to encourage students in all fields, graduate and undergraduate, to incorporate political science into their studies. Students on the panel then briefly explained the work they had done in different courses and why the projects engaged them as scholars.
Gerard Greer (SS) talked about a study he did in Introduction to American Politics about the difference in perceptions between citizens in large cities and in Houghton concerning preparedness after 9/11. He found preliminary evidence that citizens in NY City believe there is better security than do Houghton citizens.
Summer Wright Hodgman (SS/HU) discussed her research project in American Foreign Policy on imagining communicative contexts in cyberspace. She illustrated how the problem ties in both with literacy and with power.
Jeremy Koenen, CS, discussed the evolution of a project on intellectual property and software development. He did a term project in American Foreign Policy on US stands in the World Intellectual Properties Organization and, there, discovered a particular set of problems associated with open software development. He then did a research project in World Affairs that explored the technical and political issues, especially between the US and China, on open software development.
Karl Haapala (Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering) outlined the insight he had gotten into sustainable technologies in his Master's thesis: regulations represent a failure of engineering design. He then discussed how he planned to develop this concept further in his doctoral work as an IGERT Sustainable Futures trainee.
Agustin Robles Morua (MS Environmental Policy) presented on his field work in Tesopaca, Mexico. He used ethnographic techniques to better understand the community's response to a planned waste lagoon a group of Tech students had designed in Prof. Alex Mayer's Field Engineering course. He illustrated how there were distinct views on the project as well as a problem in bureaucratic politics for the town leaders. He then linked the engineering project and the community-based research to ways policy making could be improved.
At the close of the conference, Matthew Drewek, (Ph.D. Civil and Environmental Engineering), gave a plenary address on "Approaches to Agent-Based Modeling of Terrorist Activity." The talk was based on his preliminary work to use agent-based modeling to understand and categorize threats to infrastructure posed by terrorism, and is part of his NSF Graduate Fellowship award. The Tech team received many positive comments from other participants on the quality of their presentations and their contributions to the sessions presented by others at the conference.
In a post conference dinner, participants had a vigorous discussion of Mr. Drewek's work and convinced Prof. Durfee to offer a research course on the new form of modeling. The 1-credit spring course, co-taught with Dr. Bulleit of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will introduce the students to key examples of computational modeling of social phenomena and then "let them loose" to try some modeling on their own, with faculty assistance.
