Caswell, Mammen help draft national study of SNAP's adequacy

A new report, drafted by a national panel that included two Resource Economics faculty members, says the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), should consider several factors in determining whether benefits are adequate. These include time constraints on low-income families and their ability to cook healthy meals, differing food prices across the country and the availability of healthy foods from local food stores.
 
The report was drafted by a committee of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and was chaired

Gutermuth, international team observe 'hungry twin' stars gobbling first meals

Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must “feed” on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now a team of astronomers including Robert Gutermuth, a research assistant professor and expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual “baby” star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins, that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in Nature.
 
The extremely young object, dubbed LRLL 54361, is about 100,000 years old and is located about 950 light

Women for UMass Amherst supports campus through new fund

Women for UMass Amherst (WFUM), a network of alumnae and friends of the campus who have made gifts to support the university, is boosting its impact through a new dedicated, collective fund that is providing awards to worthy projects.
 
Women become members of WFUM by donating to any area of campus, according to Stephanie Flaherty, senior associate director of Annual Giving in the Development Office.
 
“Through WFUM, we want to build a network of like-minded women who inspire and encourage other women to support the university through philanthropy,” she said.

Shulman's text analytic software purchased by Canada-based Vision Critical

After more than a decade in development, DiscoverText, a cloud-based text analytic software developed by faculty member Stuart Shulman, has been purchased by Vision Critical, a Vancouver-based provider of consumer insight technologies and services.
 
Vision Critical officials announced the deal with Shulman’s company, Texifter, LLC, on Jan. 22. According to Shulman, DiscoverText is based on the idea of sifting huge amounts of text, such as documents, tweets and e-mails, making it easier to locate, classify and segment information using various parameters.

NEPR campaign passes $5M mark, groundbreaking set for Springfield facility

With more than $5 million raised as part of the New England Public Radio Foundation's 50th anniversary capital campaign for WFCR, the station will break ground for its new downtown Springfield facility on Feb. 8.
 
Of the $5,282,500 raised to date, $3,990,000 has been designated for facilities, leaving $1.4 million to be raised to fully fund the Springfield building project.
 
CEO and general manager Martin Miller said, "We are thrilled with the success of our campaign so far, and that after much planning and hard work, construction is set to kick off.

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