F a c u l t y N e w s

of my earthquake postings. Let’s face it, a magni- tude 3.5 in Pomona is not exactly big news, but it’s good conversation fodder. In any case, with my eclectic collection of earthquakes, I try to sublimi- nally educate those who linger around my door about the real distribution of these events in space and time, as opposed to the distorted view we sometimes get from media. Why do I think this is important? I suppose part

of the reason is purely academic. I’d no sooner like to see people with a distorted view of our place in tectonic history than I’d have them believe the Earth is fl at or 5,000 years old or at the center of the cosmos. However, I think there’s a practi- cal reason too. That which we don’t understand or understand poorly, we tend to fear. That which we understand may still be worthy of respect, but we then have a rational basis for our response. Liv- ing in a seismically active region, I think we all need to plan rationally and realistically for those events that have a reasonable probability of occurring in our lifetimes, and we should refrain from hyping the risks that are very remote. Recently, a student and I were installing geodet-

ic survey equipment in a wilderness area along an active strand of the Cucamonga fault, not far from campus. A group of hikers happened by, curious about our reason for being there. As I expected, they were unaware that their prized hiking area was home to a major fault. Inevitably the conver- sation turned to predictions, and I told them that “their fault” could be expected to produce a ma- jor quake every 1,000 to 2,000 years, give or take a few centuries. Although it could be tomorrow, the time of the next big quake there is basically unknown. I’d like to think that my candid admis- sion of what we do and do not know about the fault was empowering to those hikers. Armed with some numbers and a bit of knowledge, they can plan for that “big one” that just might happen one day. But they don’t need to live in fearful dread caused by a distorted perception of how probable that event might be.

That seems like a good thing to me.

Outstanding paper of the year honors were awarded by the International Society of Parametric Analysts to

Donald S. Remer, Oliver

C. Field Professor of Engineering Economics, for “Long Range Planning Cost Model for Support of Future Space Missions by

the NASA Deep Space Network.” Remer coauthored the paper along with colleagues from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ran Libeskind Hadas, professor of

computer science, along with Chris Conow (Cal Poly Pomona ’11), Daniel

Fielder ’11 and Yaniv Ovadia ’10, recently

developed a new software package for the study of historical associations or the cophylogeny reconstruction problem, which arises in the study of co-evolution of species. Their open-source package,

called Jane, is available at www.cs.hmc.edu/~hadas/jane. A paper on the algorithm and the software was published in the journal

Algorithms for Molecular Biology (www.almob.org).

Paul Settles, head men’s tennis coach, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges, won the United States Tennis Association and the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Community Outreach Award for Southern California. Settles was honored for signifi cant contributions in developing community-based tennis programs through the Biszantz Family Tennis Center at CMC, which is shared with HMC and Scripps colleges.

Kerry Karukstis is a co-principal investigator on the largest grant in the 31-year history of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), of which she is a past president. She will work with colleagues across the nation to administer the $999,500 grant from the National Science Foundation which is aimed at improving the quality of undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education at state colleges and universities systems and public and private consortia. Through the grant, CUR’s

S P R I N G 2 0 1 0 H a r v e y Mu d d C o l l e g e

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FACULTY ACTIVITIES

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