Date Speaker Topic
Sept 13 Steve Turns The Classical Guitar - History & Construction
Oct 11 Dean Snow The U.S. and the World Heritage Sites Program
Nov 8 Roger Geiger American Higher Education Since 1980
Dec 13 Bill Arden The Star We Live With - Studying the Sun
Jan 10 Ron Smith The NCAA, Football Concussions and a Multimillion Dollar Lawsuit
Feb 14 Steve Smith Traditional Farming in Latin America
Mar 13 Gordon DeJong Is Demography Destiny? Ten Master Trends
Apr 10 Heather Shoenberger Artificial intelligence in the Public Space
May 8 Jean Lee The Washingtons and the Many Worlds of Mount Vernon
June 12 Ming Tien Wolf vs Dog - Genetics and Biochemistry
Click on the name for more information about the speaker and topic.
President John Dillon jad53 @psu.edu
Vice President Terry Engelder jte2 @psu.edu
Corresponding Secretary Art Goldschmidt axg2 @psu.edu
Recording Secretary Charles Maxin cwmaxin @gmail.com
Treasurer Peter Jurs pcj @psu.edu
Past President. Larry Ragan. lcr1 @psu.edu
Webmaster John Golbeck jhg5 @psu.edu
Second Wednesday of every month (except July and August), social hour at 5:00 pm, dinner at 6 pm, Ramada Inn and Conference Center, 1450 South Atherton St. State College, PA.
https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/ramada/state-college-pennsylvania/ramada-state-college-hotel-and-conference-center/overview. For those joining us remotely by Zoom, (https://bit.ly/3P85hmb) the program begins at 6:45 pm.
International Association of Torch Clubs, Inc. was instituted on July 10, 1924. Its web page can be found at www.torch.org.
Steve Turns is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering, retiring after 35 years of service at Penn State. He received his BS from Penn State, an MS from Wayne State University while working at GM Research Labs, and subsequently his PhD from University of Wisconsin- Madison. His research interests were combustion, combustion-generated air pollution, and engineering education. He is the author of three textbooks. His An Introduction to Combustion is used around the world and is available in Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese editions. He has received several Penn State teaching awards. Steve has always enjoyed listening to and making music. As an adult, he resurrected his interest in trumpet playing by taking lessons from Penn State professor Rob Howard and performing in a wide assortment of musical groups. More recently he has abandoned the trumpet for the guitar, and fulfills his need to be always making something by building guitars. Steve and his wife Joan have been married for 53 years and have two sons, two granddaughters, and two grandsons.
The presentation briefly reviews the historical development of the classical (nylon-stringed) guitar. Starting with the musical bow (130,000 years ago), the development follows through the Roman Cithara (origin the of word guitar), the Gittern (13th Century), the Vihuela (15th Century), the Renaissance guitar (1450-1650), the gaudy Baroque guitar (1650-1750), the Romantic guitar (1750-1850) to the modern Classical guitar (1850-present). The second part of the presentation shows, step-by-step, how a modern artisanal Classical guitar is constructed. Details include, among others, the construction of the neck, bending of the sides, installing the rosette in the top panels, bracing the soundboard, and assembling the components. The presentation concludes with Torch Club member Wayne Osgood playing one of the presenter's guitars. Several guitars are available for inspection.
Dean Snow received his BA from the University of Minnesota in 1962 and his PhD from the University of Oregon in 1966. He taught at the University of Maine for three years and at the University of Albany for twenty-six years, during which time he established and carried out archaeological research programs in highland Mexico, New England, New York and the British Isles. He is known for his research into the paleodemography of prehistoric populations in all of these areas. Snow moved to The Pennsylvania State University in 1995, where he served as Head of the Department of Anthropology for the following ten years. He served as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1978-1979. He served as Chair of Section H (Anthropology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1999-2000 and subsequently as secretary of Section H 2000-2006. In 2005 he was a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. before returning to Penn State as Professor of Anthropology. He served as President of the Society for American Archaeology 2007-09. In recent years he has carried out research on human sexual dimorphism as expressed in hand stencils found in prehistoric art contexts in Europe and many other parts of the world. His recent writing has focused on a range of topics in archaeology and history. His 1777: Tipping Point at Saratoga was published in 2016, and a new edition of Archaeology of Native North America came out in 2019. His most recent book is The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, 2023.
On Tuesday, September 19, 2023, a UNESCO panel meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia inscribed the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks on World Heritage List. It is the twenty-fifth such designation for the United States. The list also recognizes sites like Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, and Rome. The Hopewell earthworks are the largest such structures in the world, having been built by indigenous Americans 1500-2000 years ago. The presentation discusses these remarkable archaeological structures, along with what is currently known about their ages, geometry, original purpose, and history of research and preservation.
Roger L. Geiger, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Penn State, was head of the Higher Education Program for ten years. He has written extensively on the history of American higher education, research universities, and higher education policy issues.
His latest book, American Higher Education Since World War II: A History, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. His preceding study, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II,(Princeton University Press, 2014) received the Outstanding Publication Award for 2015 from AERA Postsecondary Education.
Roger received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan (1972) and held various appointments at Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies (1974-1987) before joining Penn State. Since his retirement in 2017, miscellaneous reviews have been shared on his website Roger’s Notes: https://sites.psu.edu/rogerlgeiger/, including a review of Ellen Schreckeer, The Lost Promise published in Quellette. Fall, 2018 was spent as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo.
The starting point for this interpretation of American higher education is c. 1980, the date of a “neoliberal turn” in American society and the beginning of a new era in higher education. Among the new features of this era were the initiation of a loan culture for student finance, tuition escalation accompanied by discounting, and the rejuvenation of the private sector. Academic research also adapted by emphasizing innovation and technology transfer (although not discussed here).
In the following decades, these trends hypertrophied: Federal student loans became the largest source of funding for higher education; tuition discounting became general in the private sector; and a ‘super elite’ of affluent private institutions emerged. The result was growing stratification—in institutions, in student academic qualifications, and in student outcomes. The paper explains how federal student loans evolved into the current crisis and how tuition discounts ballooned to 50 percent. The extreme inequality in spending, student SES, and SATs is documented, along with the emergence of semi-elite public research universities.
American higher education has now evolved into four sectors: the Academic Sector of selective private and public institutions; the Open Sector of relatively unselective colleges; declining Community Colleges; and a new, growing Commercial Sector of online institutions. Looking forward, trends for enrollments, politicization, meritocracy, and social stratification are all discouraging; but the Commercial Sector should do well.
Bill Arden holds bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and acquired a master's in astronomy later in life (there’s also an MBA in there, but we don’t talk about that). After a career in engineering and management, he taught college in Minneapolis for 12 years, teaching astronomy for the last two. He moved with his wife Connie Sherman, to Pennsylvania in 2016 to be closer to family. His studies in astronomy included five years of research modeling the solar corona; that’s the origin of the talk at the meeting.
Astronomy is, by its nature, an observational science. We don’t have laboratories where we can “turn up the temperature on that star and see what happens.” The sun is the nearest thing we have to a lab; we can study it up close (well, we consider 93 million miles to be “close" in this business) and investigate aspects of stellar physics that would be impossible any other way. The talk will cover some basic concepts about our star and some of the techniques, instruments and spacecraft we have to explore its behavior.
Ron Smith retired from Penn State in the Department of Kinesiology in 1996 after 28 years as a sport historian, researching and writing about intercollegiate sport history. 'I have written 8 books on football and sports, mostly intercollegiate athletics. My most recent book is "The Myth of the Amateur: A History of College Athletic Scholarships." A couple years ago, I was involved in writing an amicus brief that was used against the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the U. S. Supreme Court 9-0 defeat of the NCAA and allowing athletes to profit from the use of their names, images, and likenesses (NILs). Presently I have a book-length manuscript at a university press about Walter Byers and his 36-year reign as Executive Director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. I am also involved in a multi-million dollar lawsuit, Robert Geathers v. the NCAA, which is scheduled for a jury trial in South Carolina in March, 2024'.
The Geathers' lawsuit is the focus of my talk at Torch. It looks at the case and why the NCAA does not want to allow my 50-page history of the failure of the NCAA to be part of the jury trial. The history has to do with the failure of the NCAA to do anything about concussions and brain injuries in football for more than a century.
Steve Smith was born and raised in Seattle. After high school he received a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in International Relations and was on the cross country, track and lightweight football (weight limit of 154 lbs.) teams. In the summer before his senior year he was in a Peace Corps training program at Notre Dame University, where he met his wife Michelle. They married the following summer, 1967, and went to Bolivia for two years, living in a small village at about 10,000 ft elevation in the Andes. Steve’s work was with the small farmers, where he learned a deep appreciation for their methods and skills. After Bolivia, they went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Steve earned a MA and Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics. After a two-year post-doc and a year with Wisconsin state government, they moved to Moscow, ID, where Steve was on the faculty of the University of Idaho. In 1986 they came to Penn State, where Steve joined the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, and Michelle was a Spanish teacher at State High. He taught international agriculture and rural and regional economics, and spent his last six years as department head, retiring in 2010.
Traditional farming, or peasant farming, is usually characterized as primitive or backward, and clearly not “modern” by U.S. farming standards. While it is true that traditional farming is not highly mechanized and chemically dependent, it is highly sophisticated. Traditional farmers rely on what they produce for their sustenance, and cannot afford crop failure, or they don’t eat. They have been using their methods for generations, if not hundreds of years, and these methods are well-adapted to their conditions. In this presentation I will show a variety of traditional farming methods from the high Andes and humid tropics in the Amazon and Costa Rica, and how the farmers adapt to and take advantage of the natural conditions in which they live.
A native of Kentucky, I received my B.A. in Sociology from Central College, IA., M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Kentucky, and post-graduate studies in Demography at the University of Chicago. I joined the Penn State Sociology Department faculty in1963 and pursued my entire academic career here. I was promoted to Full Professor in 1972 and named Distinguished Professor in 1992. My scholarship and grant-funded research and publications focused primarily on internal and international migration topics, including developing a motivation-based theory of migration decision-making, and conducting collaborative research projects in the U.S. and international projects in Peru, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Israel, The Philippines, Thailand, Romania, and South Africa. I was co-founder in 1972 of the continuing very research active Penn State Population Research Institute, served as Director in 1974-76, 1983-88, and in 1987 was founder and for 25 years Director of the Penn State Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Demography, which continues to be ranked by U.S. News and World Reports in the top five demography training programs in the U.S. I have served as the principal academic advisor for 31 Masters students and 33 Ph.D. students. As director of the Graduate Program in Demography I wrote and received 10 competitively-awarded multi-year training grants, totaling 40 cumulative years of support, from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and from the Hewlett Foundation to provide fellowships for 215 U.S. and international graduate students to pursue their Ph.D. studies in Demography at Penn State. After retiring in 2012, I worked for five years on an NIH funded research grant on the health of children of Mexican immigrants, and on developing an on-line World Campus Master’s program in Applied Demography. In 2020 I received the Laureate Award from the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (top world demography association) for career contributions to the discipline of Demography.
Is demography destiny for the future of U.S. society? To address this question, I note the difference between demographics and the science of demography. As used in marketing and politics today, demographics focuses on the size and territorial distribution of populations based on their characteristics, i.e. age, sex, race-ethnicity, education, income, political affiliation, etc. Demography as a field of study focuses not only on population characteristics but also on major concepts of population dynamics, including fertility, morbidity and mortality, internal and international migrations, population aging and family structure changes. Within each of these population dynamics categories, I identify a key master trend based on current and projected population data from U.S. Census Bureau sources. I conclude that while demography may not be destiny for a particular U.S. citizen, demography does predict the nature of change for health, economic, and political institutions of our country.
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Ming Tien
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