College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 19, May, 2004

Issue 19, 5/25/04

Contents:

The Plunger Experiment

Where Book Reviewers Get Their Start

Barry Robinson, The Recording Industry, and Penn State

The Travels of Aimee Betz

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Penn State

College of the Liberal Arts

Alumni Relations and Development

WHO WE ARE:

    LAzine is the electronic alumni magazine of the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. To date, we’ve published nineteen issues and our readership base has grown to over 26,000 individuals. We were one of the first colleges at Penn State to develop and use the electronic magazine format and other Penn State units have since followed our lead and now produce electronic magazines like ours.
   Our goals remain the same from issue to issue: to reach as many alumni as possible with the latest news about the College of the Liberal Arts in an easily accessible format. We will continue to bring you up-to-the-minute information about faculty research, program support, alumni and student accomplishments, and other news that illustrates how Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts remains competitive among the American public universities.
   Gabriel Welsch or Aimee LaBrie, both graduates of the English Department’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program, produce the magazine about every eight weeks. Because we are always seeking compelling stories, don’t be surprised if you hear from members of the staff from the Office of Development and Alumni Relations asking for a phone interview or a one-on-one meeting. We’re always on the lookout for stories of interest, particularly those that highlight the interesting lives and successes of our alumni, current students, and faculty in the Liberal Arts.
   If you know someone who would like to be added to our mailing list or if you have questions or story ideas, please respond to lazine@la.psu.edu. In future issues, we will include more news and updates about Liberal Arts' priorities and the work of the Alumni Relations and Development Office. In the meantime, to learn more about the College of the Liberal Arts, please visit our Web page at http://www.la.psu.edu.

THE PLUNGER EXPERIMENT

   One of the on-going debates in cognitive psychology involves motor planning, or how much of our general movement is planned and how much of it is automatic. To be exact, how much actual cognition or mental activity is involved in doing something as simple as picking up a newspaper and moving it from your desk to the recycling bin?
   A recent study conducted by Penn State psychology professor David Rosenbaum and cognitive psychology graduate student Rajal Cohen suggests that in the split second before you reach to move something, your brain has a plan. Without consciously deciding how and where to move, the brain calculates the optimal place to grasp an object to ensure the “end-state comfort” effect, an end position that allows joints to be in mid-range once the object has been set down. In other words, where people take hold on an object allows for insight into the planning of movement. This idea has recently been reinforced by the “plunger experiment” done by Rosenbaum and Cohen.
   Using an ordinary $1.95 bathroom plunger, Cohen and Rosenbaum asked individuals to pick up the plunger and move it from one platform to the next: higher, lower, on an even plane. They watched closely to see where the person grabbed the plunger and if the grasping position changed depending on where she was being asked to place it. They found that the higher the end target, the lower the grasp on the pole. Cohen explains that “it has to do with control, but it’s also about comfort. You want to keep as many of your joints in mid-range as possible.”
   If, for example, you knew you were going to place the plunger on a high shelf, it wouldn’t make sense to grab the plunger at its top. “If you do that, you’re going to end up on your tiptoes when you set it on the higher plane,” Rosenbaum explains. What this suggests is that “without knowing it, people imagine the position they want to be in at the end.”
   Of the hundreds of people who participated in this simple experiment, virtually all of them responded to the varying conditions with similar movements. Because of the consistency of the responses, a deviation from the typical movement pattern could suggest some kind of deficit in the brain. “This would reveal a fairly subtle problem with object manipulation. Stroke victims, for instance, may know what an object is. They may be able to say, ‘That is an apple,’ or ‘That is a toilet plunger.’ They may actually be able to move their hands, but they can’t quite link up how to move in respect to the object.”
   Greater understanding of how the brain plans movement can help not only in understanding the brain itself, but also in figuring out ways to build more efficient robots. “For example,” says Rosenbaum, “we now have a rover on Mars. It wheels around and drills holes. But if it were a human on Mars, she would walk around and pick up rocks and look at them, or if she happened to see a Martian, she might wave to the Martian and shake hands with it. So, a lot of research is being done to help engineers develop better robots by understanding how human beings move. We want to find a way to enable robots to look at an object and figure out how to take hold of it and move it. Our advice to people working in robotics is to get the robot to think about different positions it could get into at the end of the task it’s doing, and then work backwards from that final position.”
   For Rosenbaum and Cohen, the study itself touches on larger questions. “We’re interested in understanding how people think and how people act in the world,” Cohen says. “As you start asking more and more detailed questions, you start to realize how much we really don’t know.”
   The results of the study will appear in Experimental Brain Research. Psychology undergraduates Sarah Benjamin, Robin Fleckenstein, Erin Halloran, and Kristin Sopronyi, also played a large role in conducting the experiment.

WHERE BOOK REVIEWERS GET THEIR START

   “This will be the most demanding and rewarding course you take in graduate school.” Those are among the first words Robin Becker utters when she enters English 570, a course in book reviewing for graduate students in English and creative writing. Her prediction, as it turns out, appears true. Almost every student in every book reviewing class she teaches places at least one (if not several) book reviews in serious literary journals, including places like The Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Mid-American Review.
   Becker, professor of English and women's studies, has published numerous poetry collections including Venetian Blue, The Horse Fair, and All-American Girl, and she has a reputation among graduate students as a challenging mentor. Laura White, a third year fiction student, joined the class forewarned about the work it requires. “A student from a previous class told me to expect the class to be a full time job,” she said. “That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not an extreme one.”
   Becker structures her course with several key goals. First, students learn the basic skills for beginning the book reviewing process. This includes contacting publishing houses for review copies of their newest publications, learning what literary journals are most likely to be interested in a particular book, and querying editors to read reviews. Along with these challenges, students must write pieces of varying lengths (anywhere from the 200 word reviews seen in Publisher’s Weekly to feature length reviews like those in The Nation). In this way, when they leave the class, students take with them the ability to market their reviews to a wide range of review publishers. However, reviews do not get sent to editors until they receive the approval of the editorial board comprised of fellow class members.
   Graduate student Allison Schuette explains this part of the class as being where “very intensive revision happened. Everyone signs off on the longer reviews before we send them to Robin, who then signs off on the reviews before they go to an editor. In other words, the reviews are pretty perfect by the time they make it into the mail.”
   Finally, the class inspires conversation and interaction among students about writing in general, writing schedules, angles to take in a particular review, questions to answer, and the literal exchange of books and information about what journals might be interested in one review or another.
   Another of Becker’s students, Robin Mozer, delineates the validity of her experience in the class. “This has been by far my most productive semester ever. The schedule has forced me to become a more organized, more deliberate writer and learn how to manage my time for looming deadlines. I’ve also gotten my first publication ever in this course. It’s done wonders for my confidence as a writer.”
   Though the class fills almost immediately, Becker can only teach it every other year. She demands as much of herself as she does of her students, meeting with them several times over the semester, offering detailed suggestions and revisions, and continually asking them about their progress with editors.
   “ It’s been very rewarding for me as a teacher," Becker says. "I think people took very seriously my request that they make the effort to have at least three pieces accepted for reading. We’ve got fifteen weeks to do this great thing. The rigor pays off and you can see it in the numbers of reviews that students are getting placed, you can see it in the confidence with which they go about their lives as writers, and you can see it in the quality of reviews that we’re getting out of the revisions.”
   Laura White sums up her perspective of English 570. “Taking Robin’s class is like a writing boot camp and I can say now, at the semester’s end, that we’re all in excellent condition. Our writing has obviously improved. But it’s not just about the writing. I’ve come to consider book reviewing as an important, on-going aspect of an engaged writer’s life.”

BARRY ROBINSON ON THE INTERNET, THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, AND PENN STATE

   In late April, Penn State Trustee Barry Robinson ’67 political science visited campus because the Department of Political Science honored him with their Outstanding Political Science Alumni Award during a weekend that featured its Alumni Board of Visitors meeting with students and participating in career and mentoring events.
   Robinson’s career provides plenty of grist for students to consider. Today, Robinson is Senior Counsel for Corporate Affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc., the nonprofit trade association representing the United States sound recording industry. But he has also worked for the Judge Advocate General, the Carter/Mondale campaign of 1976, and the Department of Commerce.
Robinson joined the RIAA thirteen years ago, just after one major change in the industry—the widespread adoption of the compact disc—and just before its latest growing pains, the adolescence of the Internet and its famous MP3 files.
   “It was an exciting time,” he recalls. “Experts forecast there would be some change on the horizon, we didn’t know what. The chairman at the time asked me what I thought of the idea of a celestial jukebox. He said, ‘We’re in this digital time. It may be possible to have songs beamed to us from somewhere, and we just pick the song we want at the diner, at home, wherever.’
   “I said, ‘That would present a whole new way of doing business.’ That was ten years ago.”
   The business complications have dominated Robinson’s work. He notes that technology is dictating a familiar cycle of change in the recording industry. As anyone over 35 remembers, people used to buy music primarily through singles, and it was a bonus if you found a whole album by a favorite group. Music recordings were a singles driven market until the Beatles and others ushered in concept albums.
   When CDs and other digital recording technology enabled artists and publishers to put out more content, many felt there was a dilution of quality. Robinson says, “Consumers responded to this frustration by saying, I want to get individual songs, and the Internet made that available. You could pick the songs you liked, burn them, and not have to buy the whole album—a great drawing card. Now, our industry has had to get its mind around offering single selections again—and to deal with the thorny rights problems that come with it.”
   Penn State President Graham Spanier’s work on music piracy and a host of Internet issues has attracted national attention, and because of his background and his position as a Penn State Trustee, many wondered what role Robinson played in the efforts to curb music piracy on University systems.
“It was a fortuitous coincidence,” Robinson says. “The fact that Graham Spanier has been very involved in Internet 2, and chaired committees in the area of Internet tech gave him a predisposition to look at uses of college networks for purposes other than lawful ones. I happened to be in recording and highlighted our concerns, and because of the large number of violations occurring on campuses nationwide, it was a natural evolution to focus together on the problem.”
   Robinson said many felt the gulf between universities and the entertainment sector was unbridgeable, seeing first amendment rights and privacy rights as an impenetrable barrier between the two, when, to Robinson’s thinking, the two had much more in common.
   “Universities are major generators of intellectual property, and they rely on copyright to protect it,” Robinson says. He argues that the principal tool for research is the computer network, to the extent that non-academic uses lessen the efficiency of those systems and makes it awkward to get research accomplished. And when music is disseminated without permission, the recording industry has a copyright problem. Both have a stake in the problem.
   Further, Robinson says, “It is very difficult to argue that the state legislature should allocate more resources for information tech if much of the usage taking up the capacity is illegal. It’s not a winning argument.”
Robinson is concerned about the argument as someone who cares a great deal about students (to the extent that he established the Barry K. Robinson Undergraduate Education Abroad Endowment, and has given to other funds in support of the University, including the Renaissance Scholarship Funds) and the future of the University.
   “The Trustees’ tremendous job is to keep up with student abilities and aspirations through facilities and curricular offerings,” he says. “Some of the students I come across are so astoundingly bright and have great imagination about what they can do, and because they can imagine what they can do, in most cases they will be able to do it. Finding ways to keep them interested in following their ambitions is a huge task for faculty and everyone, and is a constant learning process for everyone.”

AIMEE BETZ, FULBRIGHT RECIPIENT: THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES

Editors Note: For the past year we have followed the travels of Aimee Betz, one of several Fulbright Recipients in Liberal Arts, by publishing her stories. We have also published the stories of Hasana Sharp and Savina Rendina. This entry, from Aimee Betz, is the final installment of her adventures and the final story of the series. The editors thank all three women for their contributions.

Phuket, Thailand

Holding a gibbon. My life long dream of holding a monkey was fulfilled but immediately my instinct told me I should not be holding the little guy; this action only encourages further capturing of gibbons. You practically have to drop the gibbon to avoid having it in your arms because they throw them on you so you have to pay money for holding it. My guilt instigated my search for information on the gibbons and I discovered that there was a rehabilitation center for captured gibbons. I tried to repent by gaining knowledge and making a donation. It didn’t work so when you travel, please don’t hold wild animals on the street or pay to watch any perform. Unless it is a professional establishment they are probably illegally captured and mistreated!

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Climbing 272 steps to go to the Batu Caves wherein lays an old Hindu temple alive with thousands of wild, wandering monkeys. We were able to witness many ceremonies in preparation for Thaipusam festival.
A unique diversity of architecture including buildings from the British colonization period, Moorish style buildings like the Sultan Abdul Samad Building built in 1894 which is now the location of the High Court, quaint mosques like the Masjid Jemek built in 1909, modern mosques like the National Mosque built in 1965 and modern buildings like the Petronas Twin Towers which is the tallest building in the world (88 floors). The contrast of the delicate mosques between skyscrapers was a breathtaking view.

Penang, Malaysia

This island, particularly the city of Georgetown, was called the Pearl of the Orient during Britain’s colonization. Malaysia was colonized or occupied by so many countries: the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the Japanese. An interesting contrast is with Thailand that managed to remain independent. Due to many large companies taking their factories to countries with cheaper labor, Penang looked to us to have lost its Pearl. We felt as though we had entered a tourist trap. We were spoiled after the beaches of Thailand and only one of the tourist sites was worth the taxi ride to it. Lek Kok Si Temple was beautiful, especially with all its decorations for the Chinese New Year.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

A two day, one night trek in the jungle which included hiking, hot springs, waterfalls, an elephant ride, a Bamboo raft ride for two hours with three of the French people in our tour group, sleeping in a village and experiencing lack of sleep due to being too cold, and seeing villagers running to change into their traditional village wear when they saw us approaching. This last image was quite sad; I felt like an intruder at each village but after playing with a few children in one village, I realized that globalization is affecting these villages with or without tourists.

Bangkok, Thailand

List of our favorite attractions: the Grand Palace, the Temple of Dawn (Wat Arun), the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Wat Phra Kaew) and the largest reclining Buddha in the world (Wat Pho). We also added the floating market, a cultural performance (mainly of Thai dancing) and the show “Always Beside You, Your Majesty” to vary all the buildings and Buddhas we were seeking.

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Revisiting the War Museum, the collection of gripping photography taken during the war had expanded and pictures of victims of landmines and bombs that have gone off since my last visit had been added. There was also a display of artwork by elementary students about peace and war.
Touring the Cu Chi (Ben Dinh) Tunnels that I had been unable to go to when I was in Vietnam with Semester at Sea. The Cu Chi tunnels are literally tunnels built under the city of Cu Chi. Some Vietnamese people originally started digging them to assist liberation from the French but after the twenty years that it took to dig them, the French were already gone and the American war was approaching. The people of Cu Chi used the tunnels as a way to conduct guerrilla warfare against American troops. The first stop was a little hole that I volunteered to jump into and gleefully took a photo as I was stuck inside. As we continued the tour and saw the numerous booby traps, I started to feel very uncomfortable. Only a couple decades ago, soldiers from my country were walking on this land, not as a tourist but scared that at any minute they would fall into one of the booby traps filled with spears and lose their life.

Hanoi, Vietnam

Trying to explain to a taxi driver that we wanted him to drive us outside of the city so that we could see water buffalo and countryside life. He thought we were strange but not as crazy as the farmers who laughed at us jumping with excitement and running towards the water buffalo we spotted submerged in a tiny pond.

DO YOU KNOW?

   We know there are lots of distractions out there, lots of things to call you away. That may explain why we had no correct answers (or guesses) for our last trivia question. We noted, in our last issue, that Liberal Arts has lately earned notable support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We asked: how many faculty in Liberal Arts have earned NEH support this year?
   We are giving you another shot, this time with a hint or two. First, by year, we meant the academic year 2003-2004. Also, where might you poke around to find the answer? Check out our faculty members in philosophy and history. Check the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Google the NEH. We will send a prize to the first correct answer we receive.
   But we'll also ask an easy question this time: one of Liberal Arts' core departments is currently changing locations. Do you know which one? We will provide the answer next time, as well as a prize to the first correct answer for this question.