The nearly 200 educators from across the country who gathered this week at �ֲ���ý College for the Gordon Research Conference came to share new research on ways to make biology education more inclusive, diverse, and accessible in a setting aimed at fostering intense and intimate collaboration.

After just one day, �ֲ���ý Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks, one of two dozen speakers at the conference, said they were already there: “We’re really feeding off each other. The nerd energy here is at an all-time high right now.”

In all, �ֲ���ý had three professors contributing at the national conference, which reflects well on the college’s growing reputation for “doing a lot of work now on how we talk about power and privilege across all majors,” said Carrie Diaz Eaton, �ֲ���ý associate professor of digital and computational studies and one of the conference’s co-chairs.

April Hill, who is the college’s Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM, also presented at the conference about a �ֲ���ý team studying ways to make STEM more inclusive, research funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Hill’s talk focused on course and curriculum reform across STEM disciplines and how equity and justice can be used as guiding principles. 

Offered at �ֲ���ý and 19 venues in North America, Europe, and Asia, Gordon conferences are regarded as premier scientific gatherings.

“We are very proud of our faculty contributing to a gathering of some of the best educators in the world as the community explores ways to promote excellence in undergraduate biology education through social justice,” said Malcolm Hill, �ֲ���ý vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “It is a point of pride to host the conference at �ֲ���ý, and even more so to have these fantastic colleagues as part of our community.”

This summer, �ֲ���ý will play host to seven Gordon conferences on a dazzling array of topics, such as chronobiology, cerebellum, and photochemistry, in addition to undergraduate biology education, which has been offered at �ֲ���ý twice before since being added to the GRC roster in 2015 as a biennial conference.

As co-chair of this year’s edition, Diaz Eaton aimed to gather at the GRC a wide range of experts on the subject — specifically researchers from marginalized communities. 

“I really want to see and oftentimes use the voices of the people who have been marginalized in STEM education and oppressed historically, and challenge the community to start new conversations,” Diaz Eaton said.

“The folks we invited to be on stage are its own kind of display of voices that matter. There are a variety of individuals here sharing research and practice also grounded in their social identities and experiences that we wanted to make sure are lifted up in the conversation.”

The goal of the five-day conference — one of seven held by GRC around the world this year — was to challenge the 185 participants to critique themselves as well as their colleagues as they sought new ways to teach biology more inclusively, said Stanley Lo, a lecturer at the University of California San Diego and Diaz Eaton’s fellow co-chair.

The conference featured two dozen speakers who presented unpublished research in seminars that ran into the night. Afternoon sessions in Perry Atrium resulted in informal small-group discussions about new research that was shared by participants on posters. Yellow and pink sticky notes on the posters provided feedback from educators from as far away as Utah, Arizona, Oregon, and California.  

The fact that many of the symposium’s speakers were members of the marginalized groups they studied made their research more authentic and compelling, said Sam Long, a high school biology teacher and transgender man who came from Denver to speak about gender-inclusive education.

Long helped to found a group called Gender Inclusive Biology, a trio of trans and non-binary high school and middle school biology teachers who train educators to be more inclusive in representing gender, sex and sexuality. He relished the opportunity to collaborate and network with others studying equality in STEM — as well as the chance to speak about his own work.

Long is also a wheelchair user, and so he faces a number of barriers to access and inclusion in society.

“If I were to teach my students that people with XX chromosomes are women and people with X and Y chromosomes are men, that is oversimplified,” Long said. “They already know that doesn’t represent me, let alone all the students in our school or people in our community. Why not give the best science education and teach the complex truth about biology?”

“If students don’t feel well respected in the classroom, they don’t persist in science, and that’s not what we need.”

Lori Banks

Banks said the research shared on the first day of the conference helped her think more critically about how to teach biology in a more inclusive way. She pointed to several unpublished studies that looked specifically at the LGBTQ+ experience and how teachers are serving or not serving that community as examples.

“It’s nice to see the data so we can think about how to update our practices,” Banks said. “I think the biggest thing I’ve seen on a couple of different posters is just the language that we use in classrooms and about creative ways in which we can be more inclusive. If students don’t feel well respected in the classroom, they don’t persist in science, and that’s not what we need.”

As Perry Atrium buzzed late Monday afternoon with educators and scholars sharing ideas, Banks spoke with several colleagues about her work focused on STEM identity. One was Hannah Nichols, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, who was glad to be at this GRC. The mission to make science education more inclusive resonated strongly with her.

“I am a minority in my classroom. I am a Black woman and there are not many Black women in my class — or on my campus, for that matter,” Nichols said. “At the University of Georgia, you’d be very surprised, there aren’t that many. This has made me think about what is going on in my school and in my classrooms.”

Carrie Diaz Eaton has devoted her teaching and research to breaking down barriers to education, particularly in math, science, and technology.

A computational and mathematical biologist by discipline, the �ֲ���ý associate professor of digital and computational studies works with colleagues worldwide to create and share open educational resources, or OER:— free, licensed materials that anyone can access, customize, or share.

Diaz Eaton recently received a one-year, $380,213 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support those efforts. The grant will help her and her colleagues from two networks, and , to create and share OER, help educators use them in their classrooms, and put equity and inclusion at the center of everyone’s efforts.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to help her create sustainable ways to use, create, and share open educational resources. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“We’re looking at all angles of what happens in the classroom and making sure those practices and resources are open to everyone who needs access to them,” Diaz Eaton says.

Diaz Eaton is the co-founder of QUBES, an online hub for open access materials in biology and related fields. Created in 2014 to share lesson plans, software, and online modules for mathematical and quantitative biology, QUBES has since expanded into helping instructors learn how to incorporate free materials in their classrooms and guiding scholars as they create and share their own OER.

The Hewlett grant will subsidize QUBES’ operations, ensuring the site continues to be free to all, Diaz Eaton says.

“Who pays for these resources, and how do we keep those projects and communities going?”

OER stakeholders extend beyond the students and teachers who use the materials. Education researchers study the effectiveness of OER, librarians work with online textbooks and other OER in many fields, and professional societies can set standards for materials.

To bring these different stakeholders together, Diaz Eaton co-founded and directs the SCORE Network, which addresses challenges in open education and finds ways to make it sustainable. In other words, Diaz Eaton says, “Who pays for these resources, and how do we keep those projects and communities going?”

The network made some headway in answering these questions at a summit at �ֲ���ý in October. With support from Hewlett, �ֲ���ý will make “catalyst grants” to individuals and organizations from the SCORE network to implement some of the ideas that the summit produced.

The Hewlett Foundation supports a variety of initiatives related to open education.

For example, an OER hub that’s having trouble getting submissions of material from the creators of lesson plans might collaborate with a professional organization that already has a good way of getting such submissions.

Or, two different OER hubs might work together to combine their websites, saving money.

“Many of the folks that we’ve been talking to are coming from different worlds, and each might have a problem or obstacle they might want to overcome that the other might have a solution to,” Diaz Eaton says.

Even with the rise in open access materials, barriers persist, Diaz Eaton says.

Proprietary software remains expensive, for example, and many professional conferences — critical opportunities for scholars to stay abreast of developments in their fields — remain costly.

“We really want to close the gaps in who can succeed in a mathematical and computational education.”

So with the help of the Hewlett grant, the organizations Diaz Eaton works with will create programs to help keep equity, inclusion, and social justice at the center of conversations around open access.

QUBES is already helping run virtual conferences, for example, and is creating a summer program to help curriculum developers incorporate universal design and inclusive pedagogy, two concepts focused on increasing access. With the new Hewlett funding, SCORE and QUBES will collaborate to set up a mentoring network to help faculty and curriculum developers adopt these practices.

“We really want to close the gaps in who can succeed in a mathematical and computational education,” Diaz Eaton says — not only because it would help individual students and teachers succeed, but because “having a quantitatively-literate society is important, especially now.”

The importance of open educational resources has hit home for Diaz Eaton in the past several weeks. This semester, she was already teaching her digital and computational studies classes using free online textbooks and software that students can access through a web browser.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches her 2019 course “Calling Bull in a Digital World” in Carnegie Science Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

While the transition to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic was abrupt and difficult for everyone, at least the way her students accessed their course materials was consistent.

“Adopting these principles helps make us more nimble moving forward, more resilient,” Diaz Eaton says.

Diaz Eaton says that she’s lucky to work at �ֲ���ý, which has made OER a priority in recent years. The library in particular, in an effort led by Associate College Librarian for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications Krystie Wilfong, has acquired materials that are free for students and helped faculty create their own materials.

“�ֲ���ý has been a leader in its own right in thinking about OER and also in conversations about inclusivity,” Diaz Eaton says. “It’s the best place to drive these conversations forward.”

Kirk Read’s oral French course has long had a theatrical flair.

To teach lessons in vocabulary, grammar, and francophone culture, the professor of French and francophone studies conjured the fictitious Marie Malika d’Alger and created an episodic play, in French, about her life and adventures as a young Franco-Algerian woman.

For more than 20 years, Read gave the scripts to his students in hard copy. The students would learn the lines, create their own additions to the protagonist’s life and times, and take quizzes and tests that Read administered.

This year saw a change in the presentation of Read’s course. With support from the college’s Information and Library Services department, Read and a group of students spent last Short Term turning Marie Malika d’Alger into what’s known as an open educational resource (OER) — specifically, a website that anyone at �ֲ���ý and beyond can use freely.

In April, students in Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read’s oral French course perform a scene from Read’s Marie Malika d’Alger plays. From left, Kaylah Johnson ’21, Kate Carrier ’22, Jamie Kelleher ’19, Jake Michael ’21, and Emma Vlahakis ’20. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Read and his students are perhaps the most, ahem, dramatic example of efforts at �ֲ���ý to use advances in information technology to make course materials cheaper, more accessible, and more versatile.

Key to the college’s growing success in adopting OERs — or, more broadly, less-expensive course materials — is creating new partnerships across campus. To that end, �ֲ���ý librarians reach out to individual faculty members, and professors know that they can come to the library with their own ideas. Meanwhile, staff at the College Store review course materials and reach out to professors if there are cheaper options available.

The �ֲ���ý library monitors the cost of course materials and helps faculty secure less-expensive alternatives, says Pat Schoknecht, vice president for information and library services and college librarian.

“We’re actively looking for the courses where the textbooks are really expensive, or those courses that have a very high enrollment even if the textbook isn’t that expensive,” says Pat Schoknecht, vice president of Information and Library Services and college librarian. “When we find them, we will go in and actively talk to the faculty member” about alternatives.

That could mean using an open educational resource, or OER, strictly defined as a material whose components are in the public domain and are free and open for anyone to use. It could also mean using an ebook or journal that the library licenses, or simply a less expensive textbook.

Recently, the library received a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to join the and provide mini-grants to �ֲ���ý faculty who review, use, or implement open access materials.

Long an economic challenge for students, required course materials — whether a copy of the Norton Anthology of American Literature ($50.65, used) for an English course or much more expensive textbooks in STEM disciplines or foreign languages complete with a code for online assignments — can run into the hundreds of dollars, potentially shutting students out of certain courses and majors.

Students pack the Ladd Library during the week before finals in April 2018. Students have sometimes pushed the library and their professors to explore alternatives to traditional textbooks.�� (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In response, �ֲ���ý has tried to make those costly materials available through Ladd Library: Since 2013, the library has kept a copy of every required course material on reserve, one of the few such programs of its kind. In addition, other campus offices, including the Office of Intercultural Education, maintain collections of frequently needed course materials.

What’s different now is that technology and the availability of OERs have caught up to the need.

“The resources and platforms have been upgraded to a point where they’re actually really good,” says Krystie Wilfong, an associate college librarian who works to gather and share open access materials. “The content the faculty needs is there, because a faculty from a different institution has written something they can then adopt.”

In 2011, the price of a book that Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer uses for her differential equations course rose “precipitously,” she said.

“It really helped to make the point clear in a way that I couldn’t ignore, and students let me know that that was a problem.”

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer works with students on Pi Day in 2018. Greer has used a variety of free or low-cost online textbooks for her math courses. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Greer found a cheaper textbook for that course, but the episode prompted her to try to minimize costs across all her classes. She took materials she had already created for graduate-level courses and adapted them for �ֲ���ý juniors, and she pored over listservs and online repositories for math assignments.

For her multivariable calculus courses, she used free online materials by MIT mathematician Gilbert Strang, and Calculus I and II courses across the department transitioned to an this year.

Along with Kirk Read and Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton, Greer shared her story at an April symposium on open educational resources, organized by ILS, supported by the Dean of the Faculty’s office and the Davis Educational Foundation, and attracting librarians, booksellers, and informational technologists from 22 institutions in New England.

After assigning Strang’s material for several semesters, Greer surveyed the students who had used the online textbook and presented her findings to the attendees. Using the website had its drawbacks — students had to get used to navigating sections online as opposed to turning the pages of a book and writing notes in the margins — but they enjoyed the low cost, versatility, and accessibility.

Indeed, finding and using OERs benefits students in at least two ways: reduced cost and, in some cases, improved teaching.

In 2013, then a professor at Maine’s Unity College, Diaz Eaton was seeking resources to teach quantitative biology, an emerging and growing field that incorporates math and computer science. Colleges and universities were trying to develop new educational materials on the fly — but the experts from school to school weren’t necessarily talking to each other.

“People were reinventing the wheel at multiple institutions,” Diaz Eaton says.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches a course on detecting misinformation in March. Diaz Eaton created QUBES, a hub for free biology course materials. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Now, at �ֲ���ý, Diaz Eaton is continuing her work with QUBES; this month she on making open access to biology education sustainable. She and her DCS colleagues are also working to incorporate open access into the structure of the nascent program. She makes sure to use free software to teach programming and involves students in designing her courses.

“We’re thinking about open access as being more than just digital access, but also access into DCS itself,” she says.

Kirk Read’s spring 2019 oral French course was the last to use traditional printouts or PDFs of the play Marie Malika d’Alger. The class now uses a dedicated website, which will be opened beyond the �ֲ���ý community by next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The �ֲ���ý students who helped Kirk Read redesign his oral French course last May felt similarly empowered. They were quick to grasp the benefits of OER, as well as some of its challenges, like how to compensate or reward scholars who invest time and talent to create the materials.

Now well into the first semester of the redesigned oral French course, Read and his students are liking the online version of Marie Malika d’Alger. Lessons and scripts are clearly organized, each image is licensed or copyright-free, and Read and his students thought through issues like how best to give assessments through the site and how to make the site accessible to users with disabilities.

And if a problem crops up during the course, Read can change the site on the fly. The course website is designed to be usable by anyone and everyone with some knowledge of French, and he plans to open it to outside users within the next year.

“The students get to own this text more than anything else,” Read says. “It’s online. I can upload a different PDF or talk about things they like better than what I propose. They’re not spending a dime for this, and it’s attractive and interactive. I’m totally happy with it.”

Purposeful Work

Five ways to optimize your internship experience — Forbes

“At least 80 percent of us want purpose in our work,” says Rebecca Fraser-Thill, referencing a recent study by �ֲ���ý College and the polling firm Gallup, “and having an internship during college is the most powerful way to get there.”

A Forbes contributor who is director of faculty engagement and outreach for Purposeful Work, Fraser-Thill also notes that an “internship is only as transformational” as a student makes it.

With that in mind, she offers tips for interns, such as how to make the most of each day, “beyond the office as well as within it.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Forbes, June 27, 2019��

�ֲ���ý College

�ֲ���ý College achieves carbon neutral status — multiple outlets��

Media outlets reported on the announcement that �ֲ���ý achieved carbon neutrality — bringing the college’s net carbon emissions to zero — one year ahead of schedule.

Out of 700 colleges and universities that pledged in 2007 to go carbon neutral, �ֲ���ý is one of seven to have achieved the goal. It did so through a combination of efforts, most notably by reducing energy consumption, strengthening a culture of sustainability, and using wood-derived renewable fuel oil.

“The one that often gets overlooked, but is closest to my heart, is efficiency,” �ֲ���ý’ sustainability manager Tom Twist told Mainebiz. “That’s been our silent strength.”

Read the stories:��

• “,” Mainebiz, May 27, 2019��
• “,” Sun Journal, May 16, 2019��
• “,” Bangor Daily News, May 16, 2019��
• “,” Energy News Network, June 5, 2019

Carrie Diaz Eaton

Misinformation is everywhere. These scientists can teach you to fight BS — The Washington Post��

Ben Guarino of The Washington Post highlighted efforts by Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton to teach her students how to sift through misinformation in the news.

Her winter semester course, “Calling Bull in a Digital World,” was modeled on a similar course at the University of Washington.��

“The problem is not new,” Diaz Eaton told Guarino. “BS has been around forever. But it’s the way that technology has exploded that has really scaled up the amount of information and the amount of BS and how much we’re required to filter.”

One of Diaz Eaton’s students, Carol Harding ’19, learned�� to use statistical methods to make graphs�� showing Lewiston’s declining crime rate, countering public perceptions of the city.

Read the story:��

• “,”�� The Washington Post, June 24, 2019��

Louis Scolnik ’45

ACLU of Maine honors Judge Scolnik — Andover Townsman��

Andover Townsman covered the news that the ACLU of Maine has honored its founding president, Louis Scolnik ’45, with its annual award for “outstanding commitment to the protection of civil liberties.”

Scolnik, born in Lewiston and a local resident for many years, is a retired justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

Louis Scolnik ’45 is seen in 2013 at the annual luncheon for graduates of the Navy V-12 officer training program stationed at �ֲ���ý during World War II. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Scolnik was honored for a number of achievements during his long legal career including, as chair of an advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in the 1960s, efforts to end housing discrimination against African American military personnel stationed at Dow Air Force Base in Bangor.

He also had a hand in an unusual court case involving �ֲ���ý students in 1959.

• “,” Andover Townsman, June 13, 2019 ��

Jennifer Guckel Porter ’88

How to move from self-awareness to self-improvement — Harvard Business Review��

In Harvard Business Review, regular contributor Jennifer Guckel Porter ’88 took on a prickly topic: changing unproductive behavior and rewiring bad habits in the workplace.

The answer is self-management, “a conscious choice to resist a preference or habit, and instead, demonstrate a more productive behavior,” wrote Porter, who is the managing partner of The Boda Group.

“Start by recognizing your current actions, considering alternative options, and then putting in the hard work required to resist what may be most familiar or comfortable,” she wrote. “Instead, commit to effectively executing what is most productive.”��

Read the story:��

• “,” Harvard Business Review, June 19, 2019��

Kevin Lentini ’13

Married teachers win trip to Croatia — Today��

Using creativity and humor, Kevin Lentini ’13 and his wife, Kristin, won a seven-day vacation to Dubrovnik, Croatia, in a contest sponsored by NBC’s Today show and Airbnb.

Both teachers, the Lentinis submitted a video showing the pair standing at a marked-up whiteboard delivering a lesson on how to use persuasive rhetoric — specifically, how to “use persuasive rhetoric to persuade AirBnb and Today show to gift us a vacation.”

In the “logos” part of the lesson (an appeal to logic), they calculated that together they had graded 9,000 assignments this year. Conveniently, the distance from their Massachusetts schools to Dubrovnik and back is — wait for it — about 9,000 miles.��

“We know that teaching is hard,” said host Jenna Bush Hager as she congratulated the couple. “Y’all could really use a vacation.”��

Watch the video:��

• “,” Today, May 14, 2019��

Dorothy Foster Kern ’42

Three Auburn natives — all named Dorothy — turn 100 this year — Sun Journal��

The Lewiston Sun Journal reported that Dorothy Foster Kern ’42 is one of three local women named Dorothy celebrating their 100th birthdays in 2019. All three graduated from Edward Little High School and have been friendly with each other for nine decades.��

Kern worked in newspapers in the area before becoming Edward Little’s school librarian. As a child, she recalls one special treat: doughnuts.

“We had to be very careful how we spent money, but whenever we could have a doughnut, it was a real treat.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, May 10, 2019��

Mara Tieken��

Why more teachers should consider working in rural communities — Ed.

For a dive into the challenges, misconceptions, and promises of rural schools, Elaine McArdle of Ed., the magazine of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, talked to Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken.

Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken teaches “Community Organizing for Social Justice” in May 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Rural schools are often assumed to be white and one-size-fits-all, Tieken said. In fact, they are quite diverse and function as “nerve centers” of rural communities, bringing people together and tackling issues of sustainability and equity.��

“There is some really, really good work happening in rural places,” Tieken told McArdle. “We should be getting behind those good efforts and listening to people who live in rural areas and seeing their needs and strengths and what’s going well and how can we support that.”

Read the story:

• “,” Ed., Summer 2019��

Benni McComish ’20

What’s in your recycling bin? Interns will grade the contents this summer in 4 communities — Portland Press Herald��

Kate Lusignan of the Portland Press Herald covered a new internship program in four southern Maine cities and towns, in which interns peek at residents’ recycling to rate how well they’re sorting their waste. Benni McComish ’20 of Williamstown, Mass., is one of the interns.��

In the program piloted by waste management company ecomaine, interns open recycling bins and study the contents at the top. Then they tag the bins with a sticker — green for good sorting, yellow for some contaminants, red for so many non-recyclable contents that the city won’t pick it up.��

“Most often, the items they see that do not belong include paper towels and plastic bags — items that are commonly thought to be recyclable,” Lusignan wrote. “Seeing similar items in every bin implies that residents care about recycling efforts, but are unaware that certain materials are not recyclable.”��

Read the story:��

• “,” Portland Press Herald, June 19, 2019��

Joselle Deocampo-Gautam ’01��

A woman of influence works to bring women and minority groups into startup funding — Silicon Valley Business Journal��

Silicon Valley Business Journal named Joselle Deocampo-Gautam ’01, a new product innovation portfolio lead at Linkedin, one of its 100 Women of Influence.��

Deocampo-Gautam “democratize[s] finance for historically underserved and underbanked communities,” contributor Becky Bergman wrote.��

“Deocampo-Gautam is an immigrant to the U.S., as well as the first in her family to earn a college degree,” she wrote. “Never forgetting her roots, Deocampo-Gautam works to reform global finance in a way that brings more of the hidden market of women and minority groups into startup funding, global growth strategies and values-based entrepreneurship.”��

Read the story:��

• “,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, May 14, 2019��

STEM at �ֲ���ý

Lots of ‘cool science’ at �ֲ���ý spurred by federal program — Sun Journal��

Steve Collins of the Lewiston Sun Journal covered �ֲ���ý students’ and faculty’s participation in Maine INBRE, a federal- and state-funded program led by MDI Biological Laboratories that promotes biomedical research.��

The program, which helps students do high-level research, includes a wide range of projects, from a Short Term course to MDI Lab to use mouse poop to study gut microbiomes, to developing a high-resolution imaging system, to understanding aspects of nervous system cells.��

INBRE shows students that “every student can thrive, not just survive, in an academic discipline,” said Dean of the Faculty Malcolm Hill.��

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, June 9, 2019��

Nick Mazuroski ’09

Entrepreneurs on a mission: Three Maine eco-innovators out to conquer the green economy — Mainebiz

Solar entrepreneur Nick Mazuroski ’09 was one of three “eco-innovators” Mainebiz featured in order to highlight the green economy.��

Mazuroski is a part-time law student in Portland and vice president at Biomass Power Association. He also co-founded Dirigo Solar LLC, which in partnership with an Irish company is preparing to build solar power plants, employing more than 1,000 Maine residents in the process.��

Any green entrepreneurship has to make business sense, Mazuroski told reporter Renee Cordes. “We live in a capitalist society,” he said. “If the economics don’t work, you’ve got to find another way.”

Read the story:��

• “,” — Mainebiz

Sophie Claus ’19

Beverly’s Claus reflects on fantastic crew career — The Salem News

Columnist Jean DePlacido of The Salem News profiled Sophie Claus ’19, whose decision to try rowing for the first time in her first year at �ֲ���ý made her an integral part of a wildly successful team.��

A co-captain in her senior year, Claus helped lead the �ֲ���ý women to their third straight NCAA championship this year.��

“It’s been wonderful, and now my teammates are my best friends,” said Claus. “You’re out there all working hard together and moving faster than you thought you could.”

Read the story:

• “,” The Salem News, June 14, 2019��

Sameer Maskey ’02

A Conversation with Sameer Maskey — Voices in AI��

For analysis firm GigaOm’s podcast Voices in AI, Byron Reese talked to Sameer Maskey ’02, founder and CEO of fusemachines, a company that recruits artificial intelligence programmers from around the world.��

Maskey said he came to �ֲ���ý with the goal of eventually building a machine that could read a book and then discuss the book with the human, preferably in Nepali, his native language.��

Sameer Maskey ’02 works with Kristyna Alexova ’19, a 2018 Purposeful Work intern at fusemachines. (Nick Romanenko for �ֲ���ý College)

After years of studying artificial intelligence, he learned that such a machine would require artificial generalized intelligence, which means the machine can perform the same tasks as humans.��

But we’re not there and unlikely to get there soon, he says. “There’s probably some fundamental new ways of exploring things that is required.”��

Listen to the podcast:��

• “,” Voices in AI, May 16, 2019��

Did a certain well-known news organization “gerrymander” a map of the U.S. to bolster its claim of being the most-watched?

Are online translation services gender-biased?

Did a prominent Midwestern university make misleading claims about its status as a producer of Fortune 500 CEOs?

These are just a few of the topics awaiting answers from students taking “Calling Bull in a Digital World,” a new course offered by the Program in Digital and Computational Studies. The intention of “Calling Bull” is simple: to make students savvier consumers of information.

In particular, the course explores motivations and techniques that drive the daily barrage — coming from both ends of the political spectrum — of BS in mass media.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches her course “Calling Bull in a Digital World” in Carnegie Science Hall.

Taught by Carrie Diaz Eaton, associate professor of digital and computational studies, the course has equipped its 24 students with a variety of critical lenses for determining what’s slanted, downright fake, or innocent but wrong. The course is helping students “examine assumptions, think about how information is being presented, who’s presenting it, etc.,” Diaz Eaton says.

And along the way, “Calling Bull” has given students hands-on experience with the statistical programming language called R, which, among other purposes, is a powerful tool for analyzing data and rendering it visually.

“Nobody’s going to be a data scientist” after completing the 100-level course, Diaz Eaton says, “but we can give them some tools to better interpret the things they’re dealing with in the world.”

She adapted the �ֲ���ý offering from “,” a course launched to considerable acclaim in 2017 at the University of Washington by biologist Carl T. Bergstrom and information scientist Jevin West.

A stated goal of “Calling Bull” is to heighten students’ fluency with different modes of information — verbal, mathematical, visual.

In a look at how programmers’ blind spots can affect data quality, Diaz Eaton’s students have heard about facial identification algorithms, designed for fighting crime, that can reliably determine the gender of pale faces — but not dark ones. They’ve been introduced to Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers, an online effort, now discontinued, to call out scholarly journals whose failure to perform��peer review can open the door to specious scholarship.

And they’ve confronted the discouraging reality of the so-called bullshit asymmetry principle, which holds that debunking fake news requires 10 times more effort than creating it.

A stated goal of “Calling Bull” is to heighten students’ fluency with different modes of information — verbal, mathematical, visual. And the mechanics and messaging power of data visualization have figured prominently in the course.

Early on, the class developed what Diaz Eaton calls a data visualization rubric — a list of desirable characteristics in visualizations. “Basically, the class created the thing by which they will be graded,” she explains.

While Diaz Eaton’s 100-level course isn’t geared toward creating new data scientists, it can equip students with “tools to better interpret the things they’re dealing with in the world.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I think that makes them pay more attention to what they’re doing right. They know that they’re going to be held to it. And by creating it, hopefully they remember what’s in it a little bit better.”

Throughout the semester, for a fifth of their grade, students have practiced ways of rendering their own day-to-day circumstances as visualized data using the book Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal. (In exercise No. 21, covering a surprising range of parameters, students expressed a week’s worth of complaints as musical notation.)

The course has “been great because we’ve been able to focus on things that are applicable to what’s happening in our everyday lives,” says Carly Ransford ’22 of Carbondale, Colo. (For Ransford, politics and “problematic statements” were two high-pitched plaints in exercise No. 21.) “I was attracted to it based on how it ties in humanities content with mathematical tools and skills.”

In creating “Calling Bull,” Diaz Eaton included elements to help students gain confidence with the statistical programming language called R. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Ransford is typical of students that �ֲ���ý’ new DCS program seeks to welcome, not frighten away. “As someone who’s not typically super excited by math and statistics, I liked that this was kind of a new approach,” she says. “Coding is something I’d never done before, but this class made me feel like I could have an interest in it, and actually gain some skills in it.”

Diaz Eaton explains that in her consultations with other faculty as she created the course, colleagues in other disciplines wished for a course that would deepen student thinking about graphs and ease them into using R. “If students haven’t seen that in the past, it becomes a bit of a hurdle.”

R is a command-line environment, common among programming languages, rather than a point-and-click interface. “You have to think about where your data is stored and how to store it,” Diaz Eaton says. “You have to make a lot of choices along the way.

“That kind of computational thinking is often new to students.”

As important as it is to be able to spot BS, a good digital citizen should also be equipped to explain why it’s BS — hence the “Calling” in the course title. So the students’ final projects involve, in effect, busting the BS artists.

While the course “Calling Bull” is fun and empowering, its fundamental mission, of course, is profoundly serious. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Having found three appropriately aromatic examples of fake or misleading info, each student needs to use R to analyze the data in one of those three cases. For example, Ransford is examining just how randomly Google Translate assigns gendered pronouns to neuter terms that it translates from other languages.

For the second case, the task is to publicly refute an outstanding specimen of BS. And for the third, the assignment is to improve an existing public visualization of data.

“Calling Bull” is fun and empowering, providing a frisson of the particular satisfaction that comes with revealing a lie. But its fundamental mission, of course, is profoundly serious.

In a recent class session, says Diaz Eaton, “we talked about how having a successful democratic republic requires access to real and authentic information.” Once you lose the access, you may lose the democracy.

“That’s the real threat,” she says. “We want people to be able to think that they have a role as a digital citizen to play in the world of fake news and not feel like, ‘Oh, it’s just this thing that happens elsewhere.'”