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Gender Institute to hold conference
“Globalisms” will be the theme of “Gender Across Borders,” the UB Gender Institute’s annual conference, to be held tomorrow and Saturday in Clemens Hall. In keeping with this year’s theme, the conference, which will be free and open to the public, will feature a truly international group of scholars working across and between academic disciplines. It will include three keynote speakers, as well as 17 panel sessions on a wide variety of topics, among them “Women at/in War,” “Gender in Development,” “The World(s) of Psychoanalysis” and “Indigenous Disciplines: Domesticity, Education, Colonization.”
Delivering keynote addresses will be A. Kiarina Kordela, professor of German studies, Macalester College, “Here + Elsewhere”; Farhana Sultana, professor of geography, Syracuse University, “Gendered Waters: Negotiating + Experiencing Contradictions of Nature + Society in the Development Process”; and Katherine McKittrick, professor of gender studies, Queen’s University, Ontario, “The Mortality of Place/Black City Life/Black Poetic Life, or Dying to Live Just Enough for the City.”
For a full schedule, visit the conference Web site.
WBFO completes successful pledge drive
WBFO 88.7 FM, UB’s National Public Radio affiliate, last week completed the most successful on-air fund-raising drive in its 51-year history, raising a total of $230,000 in pledges.
The previous high for an on-air fund-raising drive was $200,000.
The drive began March 18 with the popular “Super Thursday” matching pledge day, and the final pledges came in during the last hour of WBFO’s “Morning Edition” with Bert Gambini at 9:59 a.m. March 25.
A total of 1,538 listeners from Western New York and Southern Ontario pledged their support during the weeklong drive.
Mark Vogelzang, WBFO general manager, said the station’s “recent program changes—based on our listeners’ request for more NPR offerings—were reinforced by all the positive comments that came in with listener pledges during the drive.”
WBFO membership now totals more than 7,000 and is growing, Vogelzang noted.
A public service of UB, WBFO reaches an audience of almost 100,000 people in Western New York and Southern Ontario through its main signal in Buffalo and through repeater stations WUBJ 88.1 FM in Jamestown and WOLN 91.3 FM in Olean.
Reiser to give architecture lecture
The UB Architecture Graduate Student Association will sponsor a lecture by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, principals of Reiser + Umemoto, a firm whose spectacular buildings are exerting considerable influence over the practice of contemporary architecture, at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in 301 Crosby Hall, South Campus.
The talk will be free and open to the public; a reception will follow.
Reiser and Umemoto—operating in New York City as Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture P.C.—say they approach each project as the continuation of an ongoing inquiry into relationships among architecture, territory and systems of distribution.
Daniel Libeskind calls their work ‘inspiring…characterized by an inventive constellation of amazing objects that raise questions about the chaotic disorder of institutionalized arrangements.”
One of the firm’s most notable recent buildings is “O-14,” a 22-story commercial tower perched on a two-story podium in the center of Dubai’s business district. The building has generated extraordinary international interest in the architectural press, as it is among the most innovative designs in a sea of generic Dubai office towers. Its 300,000-plus square feet of space is sheathed in a 40-centimeter-thick concrete shell perforated by more than 1,300 openings that create a lace-like effect on the building’s façade.
Cognitive scientist Elman to speak
Jeffrey L. Elman, noted psycholinguist and cognitive scientist, and a pioneer in the field of neural networks, will present two lectures next week at UB as the Center for Cognitive Science’s 2010 Distinguished Speaker.
Elman will discuss “Event Knowledge and Sentence Processing: A Blast from the Past,” at 2 p.m. April 7 in 280 Park Hall, North Campus. He will speak on "Words and Dinosaur Bones: Knowing About Words Without a Mental Dictionary” at 2 pm. April 8 in the Student Union Theater, North Campus.
Both lectures, which are free and open to the public, are co-sponsored by the Department of Psychology’s Donald Tremaine Fund.
Elman, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California-San Diego, is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the 2007 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science.
His positions at UC-San Diego include founding co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC-San Diego, dean of the Division of Social Sciences and Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair.
His primary areas of research have been on language processing and learning. His early speech perception research in the mid 1980s focused on uncovering the mechanisms that make it possible for humans to perceive complex acoustic inputs with such apparent ease.
With collaborator Jay McClelland, his speech-perception research led to the development of the TRACE model, a neural network that takes either simulated or real speech as input and exhibits a number of phenomena characteristic of human perception.
TRACE remains a highly influential model that continues to stimulate a large body of empirical research.
In 1990, Elman introduced the Simple Recurrent Neural Network—also known as an Elman network—which can process sequentially ordered stimuli. Elman nets are used in a number of fields, among them cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics.
Elman’s more recent work has focused on both sentence-level and discourse-level language phenomena, in particular on the role of “higher-level” knowledge, including event representations, in expectancy generation in sentence processing.
Music to offer free concerts
Budget-conscious music lovers at UB can find much to keep them busy in April.
The free monthly Brown Bag Concert will take place at noon on Tuesday on the stage of Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall, North Campus.
Patrons are encouraged to bring their lunch and enjoy complimentary Tim Horton’s coffee. Each attendee will receive a pair of complimentary tickets to a more formal concert within the following month.
The lineup of free events offered by the Department of Music includes the following ensemble performances and student recitals:
• Robert Fullex, percussion, MusB Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 6, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Wind Studio Recital, noon April 7, Baird Recital Hall, 250 Baird Hall, North Campus.
• Computer Music, 8 p.m. April 7, Black Box Theater, Center for the Arts.
• Edward Chilungu, piano, MM Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 8, Baird Recital Hall.
• Katie Clark, piano, MM Recital, 3 p.m. April 11, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Tom Varco, bass, MusB Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 11, Baird Recital Hall.
• Voice Studio Recital, noon April 12, Baird Recital Hall.
• String Studio Recital, noon April 13, Baird Recital Hall.
• UB Choir and Chorus, Harold Rosenbaum, conductor, 7:30 p.m. April 15, Lippes Concert Hall.
• UB Percussion Ensemble, Tom Kolor, director, 7:30 p.m. April 16, Lippes Concert Hall.
• UB Concert Band, Jon Nelson, conductor, 1 p.m. April 17, Lippes Concert Hall.
• UB Saxophone Ensemble, Harry Fackelman, director, 3 p.m. April 17, Baird Recital Hall.
• Drew Burke, tenor, MM Recital, 5 p.m. April 17, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Sara Lynn Ianni, soprano MusB Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 17, Baird Recital Hall.
• UB Jazz Ensemble, Dave Schiavone, director, 3 p.m. April 18, Baird Recital Hall.
• UB Contemporary Ensemble, Tom Kolor, director, 7:30 p.m. April 18, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Brass Chamber Music Concert, 4:30 p.m. April 19, Baird Recital Hall.
• String Chamber Music Concert, noon April 20, Baird Recital Hall.
• “On the Edge” Class Recital, 3 p.m. April 20, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Lana Stafford, flute, MusB Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 20, Baird Recital Hall.
• Equasia Jennings, soprano, Junior Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 21, Baird Recital Hall.
• Randy Andre, tenor, MM Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 23, Lippes Concert Hall.
• UB Symphony Orchestra, David Leung, conductor, 3 p.m. April 25, Lippes Concert Hall.
• Jonah Ferrigno, bass, MusB Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 25, Baird Recital Hall.
• Susan Carter, clarinet, MM Recital, 7:30 p.m. April 26, Baird Recital Hall.
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