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Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

October 21, 2016

Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

Morton O'Kelly

Our Emeritus Professor colleague, Kevin Cox has found a new voice through the modern world of Blogs! Please see his new personal website entitled Unfashionable Geographies. It collects notes and comments on many interesting topics.  Nicely done Kevin!

You will notice that we have posted the new photographs with a blue/grey background on our notice board. You have heard too from Jens Blegvad who can guide you in linking your photo to OSU web sites. There are a few people who missed the first opportunity, and we will have a second chance to get your photo taken. Diane Carducci has the details --- October 25th, 9-11am.

Caitlin Stripling successfully defended her Master's Thesis this week.  The title of Caitlin’s thesis is “A Hurricane Specific Risk Assessment of the United States’ Gulf Coast Counties.”  Her committee was Jialin Lin and Jay Hobgood (adviser).

I am happy to report that the transition from Carmen to Canvas seems to be going smoothly. Anyone who has held off making the switch, please check around with other colleagues before next semester. It is generally a good experience, and Canvas has some excellent features.

As some will know, the university has used a system called "Research in View" (RIV) to track CVs and to assemble data on faculty publications. Given the effort that has gone into data entry and wrestling with RIV, it is somewhat of a surprise that OSU would consider starting over with a clean slate, but that is what is planned.
A perfect data entry system is somewhat difficult to design -- the desiderata would be that it is easy, automatically scouring the internet for data and populating our CVs automatically from those records. Well of course reality is a lot more complicated. The new systems will be more capable, and will ingest a lot of the needed data from other sources (including RIV), but there will inevitably be some need for intervention and active participation.
I have seen several iterations of this concept and we are not there yet! I will keep you all informed... Stay tuned for more announcements and transition plans from the University.

 

On a personal note, this week marks the 40th anniversary of my departure from Ireland to study at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. To those of you just getting started -- enjoy the journey. Time certainly flies by.