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Immediately after Federal Reserve policymakers announced a plan to pump more money into the economy with a policy known as "quantitative easing," Ann Owen, the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of Economics and director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, spoke with a National Public Radio (NPR) reporter about possible outcomes. The interview was part of a segment broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered program  on Nov. 3 titled “Fed To Buy $600 Billion In Treasury Bonds.”

The 2010 Lake, Stream and Watershed Issues Conference is being hosted and co-sponsored by Hamilton on Friday, Oct. 22, in the Fillius Events Barn. Associate Professor of Geosciences Todd Rayne will discuss the influence of surface water on municipal groundwater supply systems. Other speakers include individuals from Honeywell International, U.S. Geological Survey, SUNY-ESF, Natural Systems Engineering and Cornell University.

The Hamilton community and the college’s Entrepreneurship Club were at the center of a New York Times article titled “In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks” in which the college was described as “a poster-perfect liberal arts school.” Focused on the cost of textbooks, the article highlighted the club’s successful efforts to create getmytextbooks.org, a site on which students can sell or rent their textbooks to other students while effectively eliminating costs associated with middlemen.

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio in Albany will feature a reading by Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate on Tuesday, Oct. 19, as part of the public radio station’s Academic Minute. The new program airs each weekday at 7:37 a.m. and 3:56 p.m. on 90.3 FM in the Clinton area. Plate’s topic addresses the persistence of myth.

The New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium has received a $600,000, three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support collaborative programs in the areas of library collections, information technology, faculty and student development, and diversity.

Professor of Economics Ann Owen, along with the chief fixed income strategist at Morgan Stanley, was interviewed on American Public Media’s Marketplace about the decisions the Federal Reserve might make on interest rates and the possible effects these decisions might have on inflation rates. The syndicated program was broadcast across the nation on public radio stations on Oct. 15.

More than 50 students from Hamilton College and the five other New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium’s member institutions gathered at Colgate University on Sept. 24 for a Student Diversity Leadership Conference. “This was the first major event sponsored by the New York Six, and it was a great success,” said Amy Cronin, special assistant to the presidents for the consortium.

Having received a grant for $458,900 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stuart Hirshfield, the Stephen Harper Kirner Chair of Computer Science, and Research Associate Leanne Hirshfield ’02 have begun studying the real-time, quantitative assessment of computer users’ mental states to enhance usability testing and to create adaptive computer systems. They are creating a state-of-the-art usability laboratory that allows them to make concurrent cognitive, physiological and behavioral user measurements.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Hamilton College $800,000 in support of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi at http://www.dhinitiative.org), a research and teaching collaboration in which new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based research, scholarship and teaching, including curriculum development, across the liberal arts. This is one of the largest humanities grants ever received by Hamilton.

Property developer Stephen Steinberg ’66, a generous supporter of the College, is establishing a $1 million endowment to create the Steinberg-Lalli Scholarship Fund. Students with need who are accepted to Hamilton from the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, the public secondary school in Steinberg’s community, will be given first consideration for support from this fund. Steinberg’s objective is to support Hamilton’s need-blind initiative and encourage students from the Acton and Boxborough area to apply to the college.