Linda Allen (Economics and Finance) has co-authored Credit Risk Measurement: New Approaches to Value at Risk and Other Paradigms with Anthony Saunders, John M. Schiff Chair of Finance at NYU Stern School of Business. The book is a survey of modern quantitative tools of credit risk measurement available in both the proprietary and academic arenas. Included is a detailed description and evaluation of the proposed Bank for International Settlements Basle Capital Accord, which is due to be finalized in January 2002 and implemented in 2005. Credit Risk Measurement explains the economic intuition behind credit risk models as well as the advantages and disadvantages of several. The book will be published by John Wiley and Sons in Spring 2002. School of Public Affairs Dean Stan Altman served on the Mayor's Excellence in Technology Awards Program Committee to select the best of the city's technology accomplishments in the past year, with potential awardees ranging from Web site developers to technology project managers. Turan G. Bali (Economics and Finance) presented two working papers in the 2001 Financial Management Association meeting in Toronto and one at the 2001 Southern Finance Association meeting in Florida. The papers cover "Nonlinear Parametric Models of the Short Rate and Implications on the Prices of Caps and Floors" and "The Generalized Extreme Value Distribution: Implications for the Value at Risk." He has also recently had articles published in the Journal of Business, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Fixed Income, and Risk. Neil Bennett (Public Affairs) has two articles forthcoming: "Birth Weight and Income: Interactions Across Generations," with Dalton Conley (NYU), in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and "Social Science in Prime Time: Academia in the Public Eye," with David Bloom (Harvard), in Contexts. Bennett will also chair the session on "Consequences of Welfare Reform" at the 2002 annual meetings of the Population Association of America. School of Public Affairs Professors David Birdsell (principal investigator), Doug Muzzio, Neil Sullivan, and Sarah Sayeed are overseeing the academic development of a yearlong initiative to teach students about politics, government, and the media and to encourage students to become active participants in civic life. The project—organized as two programs entitled "Student Voices" and "Justice Talking"—is supported by a $400,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. This project will involve roughly 1,600 students enrolled in 18 NYC high schools. Lea K. Bleyman (Natural Sciences/Biology) was elected president of the Society of Protozoologists for a one-year term that runs to June 2002. The society has about 750 members, of whom nearly half live and work outside the U.S. Bleyman studies protozoa that live in ponds, primarily such ciliates as Paramecium. These organisms undergo sexual reproduction, and her research has focused primarily on the inheritance and expression of mating types (not male and female but "odd" and "even") and on their life cycles. Jean Boddewyn (Marketing and International Business) organized and chaired an All-Academy Session at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Washington, D.C. (August 2001). The session theme was "How Governments Matter," and the panelists included Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, who discussed how governments can increase national competitiveness by fostering cooperation among firms in industrial clusters. William Chien (Management) is currently examining issues corresponding to financial risk management, a field in which he's been active for over three years. He is also working on a combined theoretical and empirical approach to setting up trading limits on single-stock positions. The work will be of great use to institutions that need a risk-management-based model to help determine the position limits on their stock portfolios. With the assistance of Jane Crotty, Baruch's director of community relations and economic development (and lobbyist for the College), the Department of Natural Sciences received over half a million dollars from the New York City Council and the Manhattan Borough President for the construction and upgrading of three research laboratories. Chemistry Professor Linda Hoffman testified before the council, explaining the College's needs and describing a few of Baruch's most recent star students in the natural sciences, and seven council members attended or sent representatives to a tour of Baruch's current laboratory facilities. Each year, more than 2,000 Baruch undergraduates take a course in the natural sciences. Masako Darrough (Accountancy) is currently working on a research project that looks at start-up firms and their R&D expenditures. She has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Business entitled "A Positive Model of Earnings Forecasts: Top Down vs. Bottom Up," co-authored by Tom Russell (Santa Clara University). Her article entitled "Privatization and Corruption: Patronage vs. Spoils" was recently published in the International Public Management Journal. Darrough serves on the Research Advisory Committee of the American Accounting Association. Barbara Fife, director of external affairs within the School of Public Affairs and co-director of the school's Center for Transition and Leadership in Government, assembled a consortium of city schools specializing in public policy/public administration (Baruch, the New School, NYU, and Columbia) and media outlets (NY1, CUNY-TV, and WNYC) to sponsor two political debates for city-wide office. The first debate was the mayoral runoff for the two Democratic candidates held on Oct. 3 at CUNY-TV's studios. The second was a public advocate debate during the general election. In 2001, Aloke Ghosh (Accountancy) contributed two articles to prominent journals: "Does Operating Performance Really Improve Following Corporate Acquisitions?" in the Journal of Corporate Finance and "Financial Leverage Changes Associated with Corporate Mergers" (with Prem Jain) in the Journal of Corporate Finance. Operations Research and Quantitative Methods Area Coordinator Elsie Gottlieb (Statistics and Computer Information Systems) has authored an upcoming article for Naval Research Logistics entitled "Solving Generalized Transportation Problems via Pure Trans-portation Problems." Gottlieb's paper studies sensitivity issues in networks with gains or losses. Applications of such networks include cash management, capacity expansion, and logistics. Full-Time MBA Program Director Andreas F. Grein (Marketing), along with co-authors C. Samuel Craig (NYU) and Hirokazu Takada (Baruch/Marketing), were recently published in the Journal of International Marketing: "Integration and Responsiveness: Marketing Strategies of Japanese and European Automobile Manufacturers." Grein also gave presentations on international marketing management and strategies at two European conferences: the Strategic Management Society in Berlin, Germany, and the International Research Seminar in Marketing: Marketing Communications and Consumer Behavior in La Londe, France. The public's fascination with large-screen moving image technologies, including IMAX, 3D-IMAX, IMAX Solido, and Circle-Vision, has been at the heart of Communication Studies Professor Alison Griffiths's ongoing research. Funded by a PSC-CUNY grant, Griffiths has traced these contemporary technologies to their late-18th- and early-19th-century antecedents, the 360-degree rotunda panorama and the horizontal moving panorama. In July, she traveled to The Hague and London to visit one of the few surviving 19th-century panoramas in the Netherlands and to conduct print research at the Guildhall Library and British Library. "Each of these technologies offers audiences an immersion experience quite distinct from the traditional, promising the thrill of immense scale and virtual travel," according to Griffiths. Her first book, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture, is due out from Columbia University Press in early 2002. Richard Holowczak (Statistics and Computer Information Systems) is both a co-author of and collaborator on a major grant from the National Science Foundation in the area of e-government. This grant is a collaboration among Rutgers University, Baruch College, Columbia University, and the State of New Jersey's Office of Information Technology. The major goal of the three-year project is to undertake fundamental research and prototype systems development to support the delivery of government services using information technology. Among recent journal publications and conference papers, Holowczak has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming Managing Business with Electronic Commerce: Issues and Trends, edited by Aryya Gangopadhyay, Idea Group Publishing. Funded by a grant from PSC-CUNY, David R. Jones (Political Science) has been working on a project analyzing the effect that public disapproval of Congress has on congressional elections. While previous research suggests that individual members of Congress insulate themselves from negative feelings toward the collective body, Jones—along with his colleague Monika L. McDermott at Rutgers University—finds that evaluations of congressional job performance do, in fact, affect the electoral fortunes of individual members, particularly those from the majority party. Jones is also the author of Political Parties and Policy Gridlock in American Government (2001, Mellen Press). In December, Peter Orland (Natural Sciences, Physics) attended a conference in Seoul on field theory and strings and in February a meeting in Jena, Germany, on gauge theories. At both conferences, he delivered a paper on "Sense and Nonsense About Off-Shell Disk Amplitudes." In August, Orland spoke on "SU(2)-left X SU(2)-right Gauging of XXX Chains" at the Chinese-Canadian Mathematics Conference in Vancouver. In the last year, he has given a number of seminars at, among other venues, the CUNY Graduate Center, Syracuse University, the University of British Columbia, and the Niels Bohr Institute. Keith Ramig (Natural Sciences/Chemistry) co-authored with his students three presentations this spring: "A Practical Synthesis of Sevoflurane Using a New Halogen-Exchange Reagent" and "Progress Toward the Asymmetric Synthesis of Isoflurane," both given at the ACS Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting, and "Trifluoromethyl Group Methanolysis in the Synthesis of Halogenated Ester Precursors to Isoflurane Enantiomers" at the New York Chemistry Students Association 49th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. He also received a patent for work that he performed while at Bristol Myers-Squibb entitled "Preparation of (S)-2-Amino-6,6-dimethoxyhexanoic Acid Methyl Ester via Novel Dioxolanes," which explores the synthesis of an intermediate used in the preparation of a blood-pressure–lowering drug candidate. Management Chairman Harry Rosen recently attended a conference on education in South Africa. There he became friendly with Trevor Roxo, a fellow alumnus of the sponsoring organization, International House. Roxo teaches management and other basic business courses at the University of Transkei, a traditionally black university in the Western Cape, near Durban. Learning about the challenges faced by educational institutions in the post-apartheid country, Rosen decided to help. Back at Baruch, he asked members of his department to donate used textbooks to send to the South African university. "I wound up with 14 moving cartons full! It took almost four months to arrange for shipping, and thankfully I received help with this task from USAID in South Africa." The good news: Transkei received the shipment and is planning to designate a special room for these books called the Baruch Management Reading Room. Pleased and encouraged, Rosen hopes to do more. "I am still looking for other ways to inject modern business practice, Zicklin style, into South Africa," he says. E. S. Savas (Public Affairs) has just received a grant of $1,000,000 from New York City's Human Resources Administration to prepare a series of reports documenting the transition and changes in that agency to help other jurisdictions (and successors in New York City) involved in welfare reform. Among his many projects and publications, Savas is co-editing a book entitled Innovating Government: Governors and Mayors Speak Out, which consists of chapters written by eight governors and 13 mayors. Donald H. Schepers (Management) has presented papers at two major conferences in the past few months. In August, he presented a paper at an Academy of Management conference (Organizational Behavior Division) entitled "The Impact of False Information and Decision Timing on Personnel Decisions: Getting Hired vs. Staying Hired." He also presented a paper at the Eighth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics at DePaul University in October: "Machiavellianism, Profit, and the Dimensions of Ethical Judgment: A Study of Interactions." Robert Schwartz, Marvin M. Speiser Professor of Finance and University Distinguished Professor of Finance, this year edited Regulation of U.S. Equity Markets (with Antoinette Colaninno) and The Electronic Call Auction: Market Mechanism and Trading, Building a Better Stock Market, both for Kluwer Academic Publishers. He also co-authored two papers: "Controlling Institutional Trading Costs: We Have Met the Enemy, and They Are Us" and "What We Think About the Quality of Our Equity Markets." Virginia Smith (Fine and Performing Arts/Art) was in France last summer conducting research for her book Visual Set: Typography and the Design Arts, a creative documentation and exploration of relationships between different design disciplines, especially between graphic design and architecture. Shoshanna Sofaer, the Robert P. Luciano Professor of Health Care Policy at the School of Public Affairs, has been appointed to the Institute of Medicine's Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance. This three-year study will include six reports, each of which will synthesize and interpret the evidence of what it costs us as a nation, as individuals, as families, and in communities because of the large number of uninsured. In addition, Sofaer is heading, with fellow Public Affairs Professor Nancy Aries, an evaluation of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine's Visiting Doctor Program, with special emphasis on the effects of the program on internal medicine residents who rotate through the program for a month in their second year. This summer, School of Public Affairs Professors Gregg Van Ryzin and Doug Muzzio completed the second annual survey of New York City residents to determine their perception of the quality of New York City services. The survey was funded by the City Council. School of Public Affairs Professors Lynne Weikart, Sandra Stein, and Chris Mazzeo organized a two-day conference on the best practices in educational leadership administration at Verizon's Conference Center. The conference was supported through an $86,000 grant from the Stupski Foundation. For her Sept. 28 article on the government's expanded powers to freeze or block U.S. assets of foreign banks and organizations suspected of terrorist group affiliations ("U.S. Must Freeze Assets Sparingly, Be Open with Financial Sector"), Dow Jones journalist Rebecca Christie turned to the experts, including Baruch Law Professor Jay Weiser. Weiser cautioned against limitless government power for financial crime enforcement and seizure. "I'm a New Yorker so I'm very concerned about the terrorism risk," he said. Weiser especially pointed to problems with the investigation into suspected charities. Charities are a central component of the constitutional rights to free expression and free association, he pointed out, so they need to be in a more protected sphere. Also weighing in with her opinions about the legality of the new measures was Ruth Wedgwood, Yale University law professor and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Lilia Ziamou (Marketing) received two grants for the current academic year: a Eugene Lang Junior Faculty Research Fellowship and a PSC-CUNY Grant. She recently co-authored a Journal of Consumer Psychology article with S. Ratneshwar, "Promoting Consumer Adoption of High-Technology Products: Is More Information Always Better?" In the Austin, Texas, conference of the Association for Consumer Research this October, she and Ratneshwar presented their paper "Communication Strategies for Launching Technological Innovations: When and Why Is Comparative Advertising More Effective?"