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Hamilton’s Director of Donor Relations, Pamela Havens, attended the third International Conference of the Association of Donor Relations Professionals (ADRP) in Denver, during the first week of November.  Havens joined nearly 250 donor relations and stewardship professionals, from the United States and Canada representing a myriad of organizations, and led a session titled, “Panning for Gold: And the 2006 Stewie Goes To.” The session offered participants an opportunity to share success and horror stories, while brainstorming creative solutions.

Philip Terrie, professor of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, lectured at Hamilton on Nov. 14 in conjunction with the Adirondack Sophomore Seminar. His talk was titled “The Adirondacks and the Invention of American Wilderness.”

Hamilton College has announced the creation of the Richard W. Couper (RWC) Press named in honor of the late Richard W. Couper’44, an alumnus and life trustee of Hamilton and benefactor of the Burke Library. Couper also served as a former president and CEO of the New York Public Library, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and deputy commissioner of higher education with the New York State Education Department.

The Al Biles Virtual Quintet will present a jazz improvisation on Thursday, Nov. 16, at 4:15 p.m. in the Red Pit. This quintet is comprised of a single performer, Al Biles on trumpet, and his computer program, GenJam, which handles the bass, drum kit, and other instruments. GenJam (short for “Genetic Jammer”) doesn’t simply provide a musical backdrop - it is a computer program that implements an evolutionary computation technique that enables it to learn how to improvise jazz solos. GenJam trades fours or eights by listening to the notes and chord progressions on Biles’s trumpet and constructs its own solo based on the tunes played by Biles. The program will include a brief discussion of the technology behind GenJam. This performance is free and open to the public.

Debra Boutin, associate professor of mathematics, gave a talk in November at the 16th Fall Workshop on Computational and Combinatorial Geometry held at Smith College. In her talk, Boutin discussed results from her upcoming paper "Automorphisms and Determining Numbers of Geometric Cliques," joint work with Michael Albertson. This work shows that (with some minor assumptions) we can color each node of a complete straight line network with one of two possible colors in such a way that the result is asymmetric.

Philip G. Terrie, professor of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, will give a talk on “The Adirondacks and the Invention of American Wilderness” on Tuesday, Nov. 14, at 7:30 p.m. in the Science Center Auditorium (G027). Terrie is the author of numerous articles and several books on the Adirondacks, including Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks, Forever Wild: A Cultural History of Wilderness in the Adirondacks, and Wildlife and Wilderness: A History of Adirondack Mammals.

Vivyan Adair, the Elihu Root Peace Fund Associate Professor of Women's Studies, presented a paper at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association annual convention in Charlotte, N.C. in November. Her paper was called "Survival Narratives and the Politics of Modernist, Post-Modernist and Post-Positivist Representation." The paper was part of a special session on "Post-Modern Survivor Narratives."

Jay Williams '54, the Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Religious Studies, published a poem, "You Came," in the November edition of The Quest: Philosophy. Science. Religion. The Arts (Wheaton, Ill.).

Sharon Werning Rivera, assistant professor of government, and David W. Rivera, government department lecturer, published “The Russian Elite under Putin: Militocratic or Bourgeois?” in the April-June 2006 issue of Post-Soviet Affairs. The article investigated the widespread assumption that since Vladimir Putin took over the presidency from Boris Yeltsin on Jan. 1, 2000, large numbers of siloviki, those with experience in the military and security agencies, have been recruited into government service.

William R. Kenan Professor of Government Cheng Li was referenced in an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs magazines’s November/December issue in an article titled “China’s Leadership Gap.” Written by John L. Thornton, professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing and board chair of the Brookings Institution, the article referenced Li’s statistics and observations on the rising levels of education achieved by China’s political leaders. Li, who focuses his research on Chinese leadership, is also a senior scholar with the Brookings Institution and is a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a member of The Academic Advisory Group of the Congressional U.S.-China Working Group.