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Fisette, NRC panel advise Defense Department on green buildings

New recommendations by a National Research Council (NRC) expert panel on green and sustainable building performance could lead to a revolution in building science by creating the first large building performance database, says panel member Paul Fisette, a nationally recognized sustainable building expert in the Environmental Conservation Department.
 
Fisette and six other NRC panel members were asked to consider whether nearly 500,000 structures owned by the U.S.

Wier's new poetry collection published

English professor Dara Wier’s new poetry collection, “You Good Thing,” was published April 2 by Wave Books.
 
A review in the Jan. 21 issue of Publishers Weekly said, “Opening with a sketched map and quote—“by the longest possible route”—from Fernando Pessoa, Wier’s 11th collection delights in its turnings and tangents, line to line, poem to poem. These loose sonnets—in some respects traditional lyrics addressing a illusive Other—echo Pessoa’s experiments with how the self writes and is written.”
 
Writing in Heavy Feather Review, Jordan Sanderson said, “In the collection, imagination and

Auer wins British Ecological Society prize

Evolutionary ecologist Sonya Auer of the Environmental Conservation Department has won the Elton Prize, one of only five British Ecological Society (BES) young investigator awards given each year to recognize the best research papers published in the society’s journals by early-career scientists.
 
Auer won for the best paper of 2012 in the Journal of Animal Ecology for her research and writing on the effects of variation in food availability across life stages on growth rates in wild Trinidadian guppies.

Berger presents AutoMan computing platform at Rome conference

Emery Berger, associate professor of Computer Science, delivered an invited talk on “Programming with People: Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation” at the European Joint Conferences on Theory & Practice of Software (ETAPS) held March 22 in Rome.
 
Berger discussed AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system, which makes it possible to write programs that rely on people to perform computations that are difficult or impossible for computers to do.
 
AutoMan integrates human-based computations into a standard programming language as ordinary function calls, which can be

Obituary: George H. Reed Jr., retired head of Environmental Health Services

George H. Reed Jr., 82, of Mansfield, retired head of Environmental Health Services at Environmental Health and Safety, died March 26 at Southeast Rehabilitation Center in North Easton.

Born in Wilmington, Del., he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware and a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He joined EH&S in 1966 and retired in 1998.

He leaves his children, Dawn Leifer and David Reed, and five grandchildren.

Funeral services will be Friday, March 29 at 11 a.m. at the Douglass Funeral Service, Amherst.

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