Ganymede, courtesy of NASA

The largest moon in the solar system, Ganymede could qualify as a planet, if it weren’t for the fact that it orbits Jupiter. So, creating a map of Ganymede is a massive undertaking, given the satellite’s size, its distance from Earth and the apparent complexity of its geologic history.

It was big news when the map was completed, particularly since researchers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are currently planning an unmanned mission to Jupiter and its moons for 2020.

The new map, drawn from evidence collected by the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft, supports a theory developed by Wheaton Associate Professor of Geology Geoffrey Collins, Wes Patterson of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) about the “grooved” surface features of Ganymede.

“When you look at really close-up pictures of these grooves, a lot of them look like huge normal faults, a geological feature produced by pulling the surface apart, like the Hudson River Valley or the Basin and Range [Province] in Nevada,” Collins says. “We really want to know what forces pulled the surface apart.”

The theory advanced by Collins and Patterson is that the  forces that created these grooves involve orbital resonances of two of Jupiter’s three other satellites—Europa and Io. (For every revolution of Jupiter made by Ganymede, Europa orbits the planet twice and Io circles it four times, according to Scientific American.)

Graphic separation of the tectonic features on Ganymede, from oldest (blue) to youngest (red). The brown areas are ancient dark terrain that has not been torn apart by tectonic activity. (Image courtesy of Geoffrey Collins.)

Wheaton students have been an integral part of this work, as Collins has regularly included undergraduates in aspects of the research from classification of grooved terrain on the moon’s surface to creating an image database of crater and impact basins on the satellite.

Students who have worked on the project include Karrie-Sue Farrar ‘03, Jonathan McBee ‘04, Emily Martin ‘06, and Jonathan Kay ‘08. Kay also was a coauthor on the Ganymede map paper, which was submitted over the summer.

Collins’ research explores geological processes on the icy satellites of the outer solar system. He has been involved with various NASA projects such as the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn. A 2007 study by Collins and a research partner suggested that there is a sea of liquid water trapped beneath the ice on Enceladus, raising questions about whether the Saturn moon might feature other conditions favorable to life.

Source: Scientific American.

The debate over health care reform resists easy answers. And Associate Professor of Philosophy Stephen Mathis offers another tough question for the public, government officials and the health care industry to chew on.

Why should health care be a for-profit industry anyway?

Professor Mathis poses the issue in the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in an essay published in the newspaper’s oped section.

A scholar of social and political philosophy, the professor points out that, so far, most of the health care debate has revolved around the question of whether the U.S. health care system should include a public option. Or, to put it in more loaded terms, should we shun any and all forms of “socialized medicine?”

In his essay, the professor says that some aspects of the health care system are not part of the marketplace.

First, we tend to think it inappropriate to profit from others’ misfortunes, whether they are illnesses or accidents. This also helps explains why our police and fire departments are all either government-funded or volunteer. So when it comes to protecting lives or saving them, we disapprove of those who profit from others’ misfortunes because they take advantage of others when they are most vulnerable.

Craig Andrade, Wheaton’s associate dean of health and wellness, has always stressed the fact that maintaining good health is key to succeeding in college. This year, staying healthy likely will be more challenging than ever since both the seasonal flu and the new H1N1 swine flu virus are lurking.

So Andrade has headed up efforts at Wheaton to prepare for and hopefully prevent widespread illness on campus. The Office of Health & Wellness has an updated Web page with the most current information about how to avoid the H1N1 virus (big hint: wash your hands!) and what to do if flu-like symptoms develop. Before students arrived on campus, Wheaton e-mailed an advisory letter urging them to get vaccinated against both the seasonal flu and the H1N1 virus. Campus flu clinics also will be made available to them this fall. And this week Andrade held a workshop with faculty and staff members to discuss the best ways to keep illness at bay, especially considering that the flu season has already arrived with a vengeance on many campuses nationwide.

“We’re trying to get the message out in every way possible,” he told the Attleboro Sun Chronicle in a recent article. Read the story here: http://www.thesunchronicle.com/articles/2009/09/11/news/5625914.txt

Wheaton has a long history of incorporating service events into the experiences of first year students. This September, the college’s freshmen will commemorate 9/11 by embarking on a day of service in the Norton community.

The event is Wheaton’s way of joining in the National Day of Service and Remembrance proposed by President Obama.

“The whole thing is to take a tragedy and take what has sort of become a perpetual day of mourning into something that looks forward, not backward,” said Vereene Parnell, associate dean of service, spirituality and social responsibility. About 90 first-year students have signed up for Friday’s activities, which will start with a 10- to 15-minute ceremony, she added.

Wheaton students will be working at the town’s Head Start, where they will help prepare five classrooms for the start of school; Norton’s Library Park, where they will join volunteers cleaning up the site; and the Attleboro-Norton YMCA.

Source: The Sun Chronicle

It’s always great to be considered among the best. Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.) has just been ranked as one of the best colleges in the country, according to The Princeton Review, which recently announced the colleges profiled in its 2010 edition of The Best 371 Colleges.

 ”Each of our 371 ‘best’ colleges offers great academics,” Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s vice president and publisher said in a statement mentioned in a Providence Business News story. “However, we don’t rank schools academically because our goal is to help students find and get into the best school for them. Instead, we tally 62 ranking lists based on how students at these schools rated their campus experiences, plus ratings based on institutional data we collect on issues important to applicants. It’s all about the fit.”

The rankings were based on a survey of 122,000 undergraduates. About 325 students completed surveys at each school, and the rankings are based on what the students reported about their campus experiences. The questionnaire covered everything from academics and administration to quality of life on campus.

The Princeton Review, an education services company, has published The Best 371 Colleges since 1992. Read the Providence Business News story here: http://www.pbn.com/detail/43846.html  Find out more about the Princeton Review rankings here: http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx

Gone are the days when being social meant a face-to-face encounter. Who needs to take time to be face-to-face when Facebook is so much faster? But what are the implications if you are a business owner, where establishing relationships with clients is crucial to success? Should you be twittering, or is that unprofessional? And exactly what are you supposed to be saying on that podcast? Kristin Sundin Brandt, a 1994 Wheaton graduate, has plenty of answers. And apparently they are good ones because she just won top honors in the national Awards for Publications Excellence (APEX) competition.

Brandt is vice president at Sundin Associates, a marketing and advertising agency in Natick, Mass. The two-part series of articles she wrote for the American Bankers Association’s Bank Marketing magazine were real winners in the category of “How-To-Series.”  In the articles, she holds the hand of the socially shy and walks them through the new media-from podcasts to blogs.

She writes: “With the list of new Web sites, online services and social networks-MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gather, Eons, Twitter, Jaiku, just to name a few-growing every day, it can be easy for a marketing officer to feel overwhelmed by the options. For many, the pressure is on to figure out how to leverage these new technologies. But the real question is: Should we leverage these new technologies?”

Yes, but you need to figure how best to do that for your business. And realize, she wrote, that social media is “not a replacement for traditional marketing and advertising tools. Just like you can’t reach 100 percent of the population through your local newspaper, TV station or radio station, you cannot expect to reach every potential customer through electronic means. When considering your target audience, new media such as blogs, podcasts and social media networking should be considered as a piece of your marketing mix, and selected only when appropriate.”

Brandt frequently speaks on the topic of social media and has helped many Sundin clients successfully get social in the world of Web 2.0. She has a gift for connecting with people, which she regularly uses as executive editor and co-host of “Manic Mommies,” a weekly podcast for parents seeking a work-life balance.

To read her two winning entries, go here:

 http://www.sundininc.com/Blog/2009/07/06/OurKristinBrandtWinsNationalAwardForNewMediaArticles.aspx Go to the bottom of the page and click on the two new media white papers.

All attention is on “green” these days. John Kricher, Wheaton’s Howard Meneely Professor of Biology, knows all about the complexity of green, having spent most of his life studying ecology.

In his recently released book The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth, he gets provocative by challenging the long-held belief that there is a “balance of nature.” Who doesn’t know not to mess with Mother Nature, right? Well, Kricher says, “The balance of nature is simply comfort food for the human mind.” The environment is not static, “it never has been, it never will be” or evolution never would have taken place. That’s what he told host Mark Lynch on WICN public radio (90.5-FM) in Worcester, Mass., when he was interviewed on the program “Inquiry.”

Kricher was in his element. He writes a great deal about ecology and natural history and has authored three ecology field guides to various regions of North America. At Wheaton, he teaches a variety of courses in ecology and evolution that include a historical perspective emphasizing the history of life on Earth.

In The Balance of Nature, he traces the history of the science of ecology and evolutionary biology and how we developed the notion that there is a balance of nature. The host asked what led him to write this book.

“I started in ecology back when I was in high school when I first got interested in it because of birding,” said Kricher. “I began my graduate career in 1966 and joined the Ecological Society of America. So I think I had a very good background in basic ecology. And as I thought about it I focused more and more on what actually had I learned in a career in ecology. I think that’s what brought me largely to a focus on a balance of nature and how ecologist have really treated nature. One of the curious things is, of course, you ask any ecologists what’s really important and the ecologist will ultimately say we need to preserve biodiversity. But one of the things that struck me was ecologist have never really been able to explain in clear scientific terms why we need to preserve biodiversity. And the implication has always been that there has always been a balance of nature.”

He notes that to be able to make the best environmental policies regarding our ecosystems, it is important to understand that nature is dynamic, complex and ever changing. To hear more, listen to the interview at http://www.wicn.org/audio/inquiry-john-kricher.

Wheaton President Ronald Crutcher and Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick march with the Class of 2009.

Graduation season brings with it certain rituals: the donning of academic regalia, the hard-to-forget strains of Elgar, the anxiety over what happens next and the yearly survey of commencement wisdom.

Commencement speeches are a difficult species of address. It is an event at which a distinguished person has been invited to speak to an audience largely uninterested in what he has to say. As more than one speaker has noted, the graduates are merely waiting for said speaker to sit down so the ceremony can get to the point: the awarding of diplomas.

Nevertheless, the national media single out a dozen or so notable addresses each year. The New York Times published its round-up today and featured Wheaton’s commencement and its speaker, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, as one of the season’s most memorable addresses.

Here’s the quote that the editors of  Times chose to highlight:

Our youngest daughter, Catherine, graduated from high school a couple years ago. Sitting at her graduation, I couldn’t help but think about the difference between her journey and my own nearly 35 years earlier. I grew up on welfare on the South Side of Chicago in my grandparents’ two-bedroom tenement. I shared a room and a set of bunk beds with my mother and my sister, who is here today — so we would rotate from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor. I went to overcrowded, sometimes violent public schools. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t love to read. But I don’t actually remember ever owning a book until I got my break in 1970, when I came to Massachusetts on a scholarship to boarding school. … Now, our Catherine, by contrast, has always had her own room, most of that time in a house in a leafy neighborhood outside of Boston. By the time she got to high school, she had already traveled on four continents, she knew how to use and pronounce the ‘concierge,’ and she had shaken hands in the White House with the president of the United States.

If you would like to read more,  a transcript of the entire speech, as well as an mp3 audio file ready for download, are available from the college web site.

Source: The New York Times

While we’re well past the first 100 days, the Obama Administration continues to fill out its ranks with appointments to top-level staff positions throughout the executive branch.

Among the latest set of senior administrative appointments is Stacey Jordan, Class of 1990, who has been appointed as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the U.S. Department of Education.

Here’s the department’s announcement:

Stacey Jordan comes to the department from The Education Sector where she has served as communications manager since 2007 working with executive, policy, research and marketing teams to develop communications strategies on education policy. Jordan has also served as special advisor for education policy to the mayor of Providence, R.I., and as director of The New York City Department of Education Office of Strategic Partnerships which was created by the NYC chancellor to engage the private and public sector to support improvement of New York Public Schools. Jordan earned a B.A. in philosophy from Wheaton College and a master’s in social welfare policy from the University of Texas in Austin.

According to the Education Department’s web site, Intergovernmental Affairs oversees communications about federal education initiatives, polices and programs to state  and local elected officials as well as to other federal agencies. It also is responsible for building partnerships to improve education for all children, including partnerships to leverage increased support for high academic standards and educational excellence.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Education

Ah, the joys of summer … camping in the great outdoors, basking in the midnight sun, protecting yourself from mosquitoes able to carry off small animals, cleaning up after busloads of tourists and long-haul truckers.

Slate Creek Inn, at Coldfoot Camp

Not your idea for a summer vacation? Well, you needn’t go yourself.  Ted Worcester, of Wheaton’s Class of 2012,  jetted off to Alaska for the season to work at Coldfoot Camp, a combination tourist lodge and truck stop above the Arctic Circle. And he’ll tell you all about it.

In his blog, While in Alaska, Ted chronicles the challenges and joys of life at one of civilization’s furthest-flung outposts. The updates take place daily, and usually include photos to provide the reader with a better sense of place.

Ted describes the site of his summer sojourn this way:

Coldfoot is located on mile 175 of the Dalton Highway, a 414-mile gravel road that runs from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay.  It is mostly frequented by truckers running supplies from Fairbanks to oil workers drilling in Prudhoe Bay.  The journey for these truckers is often arduous due to rough conditions of the road.  Imagine an 18 wheeler going 50 miles per hour down a dirt road filled with potholes and unexpected forms of wildlife.  Coldfoot itself is 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 240 miles below the Arctic Ocean.  According to the census, there are 13 permanent residents of Coldfoot.  However, hundreds lodge at Coldfoot year round, mostly during the summer season, as they make their trip up the Dalton Highway.  As far as infrastructure, there is a hotel, restaurant, satellite internet access, and satellite television.  Coldfoot is far from being a Ritz Carlton, in fact the buildings, most of which resemble trailers, are very rudimentary. (more)

The blog offers some fascinating reading about a most unusual summer job and an interesting young man. It also says something about the ubiquity of modern communications that we can keep up with Ted on a daily basis, even as he explores life in one of the more remote corners of the country.

Source: While in Alaska