Media Relations
Friday,
August 6,
2004
Geography Department
Recipients of the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at Indiana University Bloomington this year are Candy Gunther Brown in the Department of Religious Studies, Tony H. Grubesic in Department of Geography, Scott Michaels in the Department of Biology, Ethan Michelson in the Departments of Sociology and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Sima Setayeshgar in the Department of Physics, and Chen Yu in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
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Southern Indiana's rolling hills are greener now than they were a century ago, but the region's rate of reforestation may be on the verge of being outpaced by suburban sprawl's deforestation, according to a new report by Indiana University Bloomington and University of Minnesota researchers in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Former U.S. Rep. Lee H. Hamilton will speak at Indiana University Bloomington for a course on science and public policy. The talk, which is open to the public, will be at 3:15 p.m. on Sept. 26 in the Oak Room of the Indiana Memorial Union.
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Wal-Mart is Mexico's most important retailer and largest private employer, and it has transformed Mexican business practices, consumption patterns and supply chains. However, Wal-Mart has been unable to transfer its success in Mexico to other countries where it does not have the same advantages over its competitors. The "Walmartization" of Mexico has had a significant impact on the country's small-scale agricultural producers, and many local farmers have been excluded from the new system of food retailing. James Biles, a specialist in economic geography, is studying the consequences of these changes.
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Violent storms and terrorist attacks represent two different kinds of threats to the nation that the Department of Homeland Security must anticipate. Planners must stay ahead of threats to critical infrastructure networks of several kinds. Professor Tony Grubesic at Indiana University Bloomington studies the consequences of infrastructure failure and disruption for networked systems such as the interstate highway system, telecommunication backbones, commercial airline networks and the electrical grid.
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The great forests that once covered the eastern United States were cut down almost completely by settlers who needed open land for farming and timber for construction. When some areas proved unsuitable for agriculture, they were abandoned by the farmers who had cleared them, and the forests had a chance to grow back. But what grew back was different from what had been destroyed, partly because there was a lot less of it. "Breaking up forests into smaller communities changes the composition of species," said Indiana University scientist Kelly Caylor.
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