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Football to join intercollegiate sports lineup in 2009 BY STEVE DANIEL What may have seemed like third and long for Old Dominion football last year has now turned to first and goal. During a “tailgate party” at Foreman Field on May 31, university officials announced that football will return to campus in the fall of 2009, nearly 70 years after the school’s first and only program ended its 11-year run at the close of the 1940 season. The announcement followed two unsuccessful attempts in the mid- and late 1980s to resurrect football. Board of Visitors Rector James Hixon, however, assured the crowd of 400 that had gathered at the south end of the field that the board’s decision “was not made lightly.” The board agreed to endorse football as a Division I-AA intercollegiate sport contingent upon the university satisfying three criteria: assurance from an outside consultant of community support; acquisition of land for football practice fields and a field and facilities for women’s softball, volleyball and crew (sports to be added later to comply with Title IX); and an $8 million endowment. The first was met in December when consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers released a market assessment report indicating a strong base of support for football, particularly among alumni. In April, an agreement was reached with the city of Norfolk on the leasing of land near the campus. Although the June 2006 deadline to raise $8 million was not met, the board agreed to extend the timeline. Alonzo Brandon, vice president for development and alumni relations, has reported that more than $5 million has been pledged to date, and he anticipates having the full $8 million in hand by the start of the first season. Annual fund donations, student fees, ticket sales and concessions will also help sustain the new program. Wearing an ODU ball cap, Lauren Conner, the 2005-06 Alumni Association president, told those gathered for the announcement that football “provides another wonderful opportunity for alumni to stay connected to their alma mater.” President Roseann Runte, in her remarks, stressed that academic quality, other sports and Title IX will not be compromised by football. She added that she is convinced the time is right for the sport, noting that the movement started with the student government and picked up support among alumni and the Board of Visitors. Looking out at the stadium, she said, “Can’t you imagine in a few years, every seat filled and people cheering for Old Dominion’s team? We’re not going to have a tough start. It’s all the other teams that are going to have a tough season the day we begin playing football again at Old Dominion.” Getting to that point will take a lot of work, and the next few years will be busy ones for athletic director Jim Jarrett and his staff. The first order of business will be to retain an assistant athletic director for football. Up to 33 support personnel will be hired over the next three years to handle everything from ticketing to training, as well as the three new women’s sports: crew in 2007-08, softball in 2010-11 and volleyball in 2014-15. “We look forward to sitting in this stadium for our first football game in the fall of 2009 and ultimately competing for a CAA championship,” Jarrett told the crowd, eliciting enthusiastic applause. Plans call for hiring a head coach during 2007-08. Freshmen and junior college transfers will comprise ODU’s first recruiting class. Home games will be played at Foreman Field, a 20,000-seat stadium that opened in 1936. The facility will be upgraded to include individual chair-back seating, a game-day locker complex, luxury suites, and a new press box and concession areas. In his opening remarks at the May 31 event, Vice President for Institutional Advancement John R. Broderick gave a brief history of Old Dominion’s early days of football. In the program’s 11 seasons, the Norfolk Division Braves established an overall mark of 62-19-4. Three former players from that era were on hand for the announcement: Johnnie Brown ’39, Joe Brichter ’39 and Louis “Hickey” Smith ’38. Back to top
A study of spiny lobsters conducted by researchers at Old Dominion and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science shows for the first time that animals in the wild shun their neighbors who have contracted an infectious disease. The researchers reported in the May 25 issue of the prestigious international journal, Nature, that avoidance begins even before an infected lobster shows symptoms of the disease. The Nature article was written by Mark Butler, ODU professor of biological sciences; Donald Behringer, ODU research associate; and Jeffrey Shields, an associate professor at VIMS. According to the authors, the lobsters probably are prompted by their sense of smell to avoid infected creatures, and the tactic may limit disease transmission in the wild. Butler, Shields, and Behringer, who obtained the National Science Foundation grant that funded the team’s research, have been studying viral disease in Caribbean spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) for more than five years. A lethal pathogenic virus called PaV1 that strikes juvenile lobsters and is transmitted mainly by physical contact was the focus of the most recent study. Because spiny lobsters are social and share communal dens, such a virus could have devastating consequences if there were no mechanism to check its spread, the authors write. As it is, surveys in Florida waters of the juvenile Caribbean spiny lobster population reveal a steady PaV1 infection rate of less than 7 percent. This rate is far less than would be predicted by the social nature of the lobsters and the highly infectious nature of the virus. During underwater surveys, the researchers found that infected lobsters only rarely shared dens with healthy mates. To test whether healthy lobsters were avoiding the infected ones, or vice versa, laboratory tests were conducted. These showed that healthy lobsters avoided dens containing infected fellow crustaceans, but that infected lobsters did not discriminate between healthy and diseased lobsters. The researchers reported that lobsters inoculated with PaV1 developed symptoms of the disease after six weeks and became infectious after eight weeks. Most of the healthy lobsters began to avoid the infected ones before symptoms developed, and all were avoiding the infected ones within eight weeks. Butler said the research shows that spiny lobsters, though more primitive than many other animals, have evolved the biological machinery necessary to distinguish their diseased neighbors, and that their ability to do so is finely tuned to click in before the disease becomes infectious. “It’s unlikely that lobsters are unique in this way, and I suspect that other species have a similarly rich behavioral repertoire that permits them to detect and minimize the risk of exposure to pathogens,” he said in an interview. He noted that other scientists have long speculated that behaviors of this kind confer such an obvious survival advantage that the behaviors should have evolved. Research over the past half century has shown that social animals have evolved behaviors to decrease the probability of infection. For example, something as simple as diet change can accomplish this. But there are many other effective behaviors. Twitching by some mammals can drive off disease carrying mosquitoes. Grooming by licking can remove parasites and reduce the probability of wounds becoming infected. A dust or mud bath, or a long sit in the sun, and fastidious nest management, all are behaviors that reduce risk. “There is no record, however, of social animals avoiding diseased individuals of their own species in the wild,” the authors write. Added Butler, “Given the previous lack of evidence for behavioral avoidance of disease, most epidemiological models of the spread of disease in nature have assumed it does not exist. Our results suggest that we should revisit this assumption and consider how behavioral interactions among individuals may alter the spread of disease.” He said the research team now will try to determine: if lobsters detect disease via chemical or visual signals, how infection alters a lobster’s ability to detect whether another lobster is infected and how many ways the PaV1 virus can be transmitted. (Editor’s note: Since the publication of the article in Nature, the research has been featured in the national and international media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Science magazine’s ScienceNOW Daily News Web page.) Back to top Charles Wilson tapped for interim vice provost Charles E. Wilson Jr., professor of English and a past winner of a SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award, will serve as interim vice provost for undergraduate studies and dean of the University College in 2006-07. He will succeed John P. Broderick, who is stepping down the end of this month to return to his position as University Professor of English. In announcing the appointment on May 31, Provost Thomas Isenhour said of Wilson, “He was an excellent chair of the Department of English and is just finishing a year’s internship as an American Council of Education Fellow. Hence, Charles brings a variety of experience both from within the university and from other institutions.” Back to top
To find out more about the programs, including eligibility requirements, go to the Human Resources Benefits Web page: www.odu.edu/af/humanresources/benefits. Additional information, applications and related forms may be obtained at: http://forms.odu.edu/browse.php?cat=4. Back to top
An expert in the area of strategic leadership and strategic leadership processes, Judge is the author of more than 30 refereed articles on the topic. A university professor with over 20 years’ experience, he has researched and designed curricula in business management, strategic management, environmental management, business ethics and strategic leadership. Judge currently leads the Senior Executive M.B.A. program at the University of Tennessee and was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar at Moscow State University of International Relations, Russia, in 2001. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Back to top New show opens at gallery “The Persistence of Memory: Paintings by Judith Godwin, Janet DeCover and Katherine Bradford” opened June 3 and runs through July 16 at the Old Dominion University Gallery. The exhibition presents the exploration of abstraction by three generations of painters. For more information call 683-2355.
The award, which recognized his role in the development of an inert barrier coating to increase corrosion resistance, was announced at the council’s Tech Nite ’06 Awards Gala in Hampton on May 4. Elsayed-Ali directs the university’s portion of the Applied Research Center (ARC) in Newport News, where researchers have a special interest in space-age coatings and nanotechnology. Elsayed-Ali collaborated with engineering colleagues at ODU and with a local company, Control Corp. of America, in developing and obtaining a patent for the corrosion-resistant coating. Although the coating has multiple uses, it was conceived for use on regulators exposed to highly corrosive gases. Elsayed-Ali’s award was sponsored by the law firm of Willcox & Savage P.C. Back to top
Focusing on the history of opera and musical theater, the exhibit follows the development of opera from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” (1607), the earliest Western opera, to John Duffy’s “Black Water” (1998). It also traces the origins of musicals like Larson’s “Rent” and Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” back to works by Offenbach, Kendrick, and Gilbert and Sullivan. A Web exhibit is also available at www.lib.odu.edu/musiclib/exhibits/orpheus2006. The Diehn Composers Room is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information call 683-4175. Back to top
Ozcer prevailed in the AIAA mid-Atlantic regional masters competition at Penn State University in April. The region also includes Johns Hopkins University, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Maryland and the National Institute of Aerospace. He is among the graduate students who have participated in the award-winning sonic boom prediction and mitigation work of Osama Kandil, eminent scholar and professor of aerospace engineering. Ozcer is perhaps better known around the ODU campus for his weekend musical performances at Port City Java, a coffee shop in the University Village. Along with a plaque, he received a $500 prize and expenses to travel to Reno, Nev., in January to represent the mid-Atlantic region in the national AIAA competition. His paper is titled “Sonic Boom Prediction Using Euler/Full Potential Methodology.” “It is a new computational method to predict the noise of supersonic aircraft,” he explained. “The Federal Aviation Administration does not allow today’s supersonic aircraft to fly over land because of such noise. Our work can expedite the research on reducing this noise by providing accurate sonic boom predictions for complicated conceptual designs before they need to be manufactured and flight tested.” Ozcer said the ultimate goal of the work is to get “low-noise” supersonic business jets in service – flying both over water and land. “There is a big competition among the United States, France and Japan at the moment for this aircraft. Whoever builds it first will dominate a huge market.” As for his gigs as a guitarist and singer, he said he is not ready yet to call himself a professional. “I’ve been playing and singing with my friend Hector Garcia,” who is a visualization lab manager for ODU’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center. “It is our weekly therapy, really, where we provide some relaxing background music for those who come in to read or study.” James Leahy, a master’s student in aerospace engineering and president of ODU’s AIAA chapter, won third place in the AIAA regional competition. Back to top
“We have set the bar at a higher level,” said Richard Gregory, dean of the College of Sciences. Philip Langlais, dean of graduate studies and associate vice president for research, said the new program is “essential to achieving our goal of becoming one of the nation’s top 100 public research institutions.” He pointed out that chemistry, like physics, mathematics and biology, are fundamental components of the country’s biomedical and basic science research and education agenda. “Our faculty and key administrative leaders have successfully made the case that Old Dominion University has the ability and desire to meet the growing demand within Hampton Roads, Virginia and the nation for doctoral-level chemists trained to tackle our most pressing biomedical, environmental and basic science problems,” Langlais said. Joseph Rule, associate dean of the College of Sciences, and Kenneth Brown, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, attended the SCHEV meeting in Winchester last month, prepared to defend the degree proposal, if necessary. “But we were not asked a single question,” Rule said. The proposal was approved unanimously by the academic affairs committee and, then, by the full council. Alan Edwards Jr., director of policy studies and acting director of academic affairs and planning for SCHEV, wrote in a note to Gregory that the unanimous approval with no questions represented the “best possible scenario, an A-plus” for a proposal that was “so tight it left no doubts.” “This is a significant enhancement to our department,” said Brown. “With it, we can attract top-quality graduate students and top-quality faculty members who would not come to a non-Ph.D.-granting department.” He said some grants are awarded only to researchers in departments with doctoral degree programs. Rule noted that there are already master’s students in chemistry at Old Dominion who have indicated they will apply to the new program. “There has definitely been interest expressed,” he added. The ODU Board of Visitors gave its approval to the new program in December. Since then, the chemistry and biochemistry department has undergone an external review, and the proposal has been promoted in various forums by administrators from the sciences college, as well as by Langlais. SCHEV staff members had compiled a favorable report on the proposal prior to the May 9 meeting. The university projects a 2006-07 enrollment of 10 chemistry doctoral students, with the number jumping to 40 by 2010-11. Back to top
The Faculty Senate voted to approve several recommendations during its April meetings. All of the issues have been forwarded to the university administration. Among the proposals is the addition of two new degree programs: a B.A/B.S. in African American and African Studies and a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice. The AAAS interdisciplinary major would be a spinoff of the current minor program, which was established in 1987. Over the past three years, the number of AAAS minors has been steady. During fall 2004, the total number of minors was approximately 55. The senate also recommended that the Faculty Handbook be modified to simplify existing language and make clear that graduate certification is a requirement for supervising graduate student research as well as teaching graduate-level courses. The senate recommended the following language be added to the handbook: “Personnel with the title of Research Professor, Associate Research Professor and Assistant Research Professor may chair doctoral and master’s committees provided they are certified as graduate faculty. Research personnel are subject to all university, college and department policies and procedures governing graduate teaching, program implementation, and oversight of graduate research and must undergo the same formal academic review and graduate certification review as required of tenured and tenure-track faculty members.” In other action, the senate recommended changes to the Board of Visitors Policy on Tenure. The section proposed for revision deals with the exclusion of a period of time from the probationary period for tenure because of the occurrence of a serious event. The revisions are not intended to change the substance of the policy but to rewrite the section to define more clearly a serious event that would warrant the exclusion of a period of time. Back to top
Mayom, a pre-nursing student, grew up in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and emigrated to the United States in 2001. He was one of 3,000 “Lost Boys of Sudan” to get relocation and education assistance from various government and private agencies. He spent most of his youth thinking he had lost both parents, and all but one of his six siblings during two attacks on his Dinka village. But not long before he left Africa he learned through the Red Cross that his mother and one brother had survived. He had talked with his mother by telephone since then but did not have the funds to return to Africa to see her. Alicia Herr, senior laboratory specialist in the chemistry and biochemistry department, and the Rev. David LaSalle, director of the campus’s Episcopalian Canterbury Center, took up Mayom’s quest in late winter and were responsible for raising enough money to pay for the $1,500 round-trip airline ticket from Washington, D.C., to Ethiopia. He left in mid-May and returns in early August. Additional money that was raised will help cover other expenses during his stay in Africa, including travel from Ethiopia to Kakuma, Kenya, where his mother now lives in a refugee camp. Mayom said he also hopes to raise the standard of living a little for his mother, brother and about a dozen orphaned relatives who live in the camp. “We are so happy to help him,” LaSalle said. “He is a hardworking, gentle soul.” Mayom, who works at Sentara Bayside Hospital, also received some financial assistance for the trip from his coworkers there. He plans to continue his studies when he returns to Norfolk and get the training he needs to become a medical professional. His goal is to be a medical care provider in southern Sudan. – Jim Raper Back to top
• • • The College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) recently selected ODU assistant athletic director Debbie Byrne as recipient of its 2006 Trailblazer Award. The award recognizes individuals who are pioneers in the field of sports information and who have helped improve the level of ethnic and gender diversity within CoSIDA. Byrne supervises the areas of marketing, public relations and ticket operations at Old Dominion. She joined the staff in 1979. Back to top
Sandy tidal flats, such as those on Virginia’s Eastern Shore or North Carolina’s Outer Banks, hold clues that can help pinpoint the beginning of life on Earth, according to Nora Noffke, assistant professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences. Noffke’s findings, which were noted in the May 5 edition of Science magazine and were the subject of her paper published in the April edition of the journal Geology, provide some of the sturdiest evidence yet that life colonized Earth’s oldest sandy coasts at least 3.2 billion years ago. Her research comprises a decade of adventures in Germany, France, South Africa and the United States, and it illustrates the debt that scientific advancement owes to creativity, adaptability and tenacity of purpose. The flurry of recognition she has enjoyed this spring is based on a hypothesis that is, at best, tangential to her early work in science. Hers is a story of a geologist who becomes fascinated with felt-like microbial mats, which are living weaves of tiny organisms, or microbes. These mats can be found today blanketing sandy tidal flats in many coastal areas worldwide. Noffke has discovered occurrences of microbial mats just 30 miles from the ODU campus, near the northern terminus of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Her research builds a persuasive case that similar microbial mats existed in the Early Archean Age more than 3 billion years ago. In her early education at the University of Tubingen, Germany, Noffke’s geological focus was on macroorganisms—or larger critters—that made traces in sands and muds, later preserved as trace fossils in rock. Her doctoral study at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, however, veered off toward the relatively new discipline of geomicrobiology. Her Ph.D. adviser, W.E. Krumbein, was “one of the first microbiologists studying the interaction between bacteria and sediment or bacteria and rock,” Noffke said. Although it seems certain that early life on Earth involved tiny organisms, science had to go down difficult paths to look for evidence of life that was both many millions of years old and maybe only a few millionths of a meter long. Until now, only the filigrane fossils of smallest bacteria found in glass-like flintstone, or the “stromatolites,” build-ups formed by early photoautotrophic microorganisms, constituted an archive for the investigation of early life. The work of geochemists and paleobiologists has produced evidence suggesting that life did, indeed, evolve on Earth in the Archean, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago. Nevertheless, the evidence can be disputed – and often is both by scientists and creationists – particularly because fossil evidence can be mimicked by purely physical processes. For example, carbon believed to have organic origins can in fact be inorganic. Doing fieldwork for her Ph.D. on the sandy tidal flats along the North Sea, Noffke observed microbial mats constructed by cyanobacteria, the same organisms that Krumbein’s and others’ research linked to stromatolites dating to the Archean Age. “I thought that if living cyanos are abundant in the modern sandy tidal flats, they must do something in the sediment, such as make traces, and if they make traces, those structures might become preserved,” she explained. To understand her research, the layman should first know how a living microbial mat can affect a sandy tidal flat. One example is the stabilization of loose sand grains by a microbial mat. A microbial mat is coherent like a carpet, and cannot be torn by moving water. Therefore, the sand underneath a microbial mat cannot be disturbed. But where there is a rip or hole in the mat, the exposed sand can become transported away by water rushing over it. The results of this stabilization of sands by microbial mats are specific morphologies – forms or patterns – visible on the tidal surface. For her doctoral thesis, Noffke documented 21 of these structures (microbial traces) on tidal flats of the North Sea. Her first paper on the subject was published in 1996. She had enough funds for a four-day search, but by late on the fourth day she had found nothing in the old rock that resembled the microbial mat-related structures she documented by the North Sea. Then, in the evening, with the light of the setting sun illuminating the rocks with a steep angle, she discovered a slab of rock with a ripple pattern that looked precisely right. “I saw the ripples in a sudden moment and shouted, ‘Yes, that’s them!’” she said. Her revelations, published in 2000, came out simultaneously with similar findings of a research group at the University of Southern California. Noffke had not known that the group had been investigating the same hypothesis. Together, the two published reports spawned a new term for science: “microbially induced sedimentary structures.” Noffke did not rest on her accomplishment. She wanted to survey a region with sandstone that is older than that in the Montagne Noire. During her postdoctoral research as guest of Harvard University geology professor A.H. Knoll, she visited the 600 million-year-old Nama Group in Namibia, Africa. Shortly after joining ODU in 2002, she launched a 10-day expedition to the Pongola region of South Africa. This time, as her script seemed to dictate, she found no samples until the 10th day. “We had several hundred square miles to survey for a structure that might be just a few square inches in size. We had 10 days’ time, but no luck until on the last day. At 4 p.m., without much hope left, I decided to just take a last look at some exposed rocks near a lake. And here we found a rock with a wrinkle structure, just about 3 x 8 inches wide.” The offshoot of this discovery was a 2003 article in Geology that placed cyanobacteria potentially back as far as 2.9 billion years. A fortuitous meeting between Noffke, Virginia Tech geologist Kenneth Eriksson and paleobiologist Ed Simpson from Kutztown University led to Noffke’s next expedition to South Africa in 2004, this one to the Barberton greenstone belt near Swaziland. Eriksson is not an expert in microbially induced sedimentary structures, but once he became familiar with Noffke’s research, he knew just where to look for the structures. A variety of geological clues can pinpoint where ancient, sandy tidal flats existed, Noffke explained. Eriksson, who has taken many research trips to South Africa, was able to identify a relatively compact search area in the Barberton belt, and on this expedition the researchers were able to find samples right away. These were the samples dated to 3.2 billion years ago, and which led to the April 2006 article in Geology and the May 2006 “Editor’s Choice” news article in Science magazine. Noffke is first author of both the 2003 and 2006 papers in Geology, the latter of which was co-authored by Eriksson, Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory and Edward Simpson of Kutztown University’s Department of Physical Sciences. The Science article called Noffke’s latest discovery of fossil microbial mats “direct evidence” that life evolved on Earth during the Early Archean Age. It added, “Analysis of the carbon isotope compositions of the laminations further supports their bacteria origin. Concentra-tion of these features at the top of sedimentary sequences formed in shallow water environments suggests that the microbes in the mats may have derived their energy through photosynthesis.” In the April paper in Geology, Noffke noted that the oxygen content of the atmosphere prior to 3 billion years ago is not known. It may have been very low. “Photosynthesis of the ancient microbial mats inferred in this study may have been nonoxygenic,” the paper explained, “but if microbial communities of this type were oxygenic, then for hundreds of millions of years, such photosynthetic systems may have provided a steady, yet rapidly consumed source of oxygen – a source that would gradually come to dominate the atmospheric chemistry of Earth.” Noffke knows some will question her findings. But she said she and her co-workers have lined up five levels of proof, showing, for example, that the petrified structures she has identified in rocks are found only where ancient tidal flats existed. The structures exactly match those in modern sandy tidal flats produced by microbial mats. She also has proof from the carbon isotope tests to show that the carbon in her samples is organic, as well as proof from thin sections of the ancient structures in which the bacterial filaments of the microbial mats can be seen. She said she does not anticipate confrontations with critics whose religious beliefs place Earth as only thousands of years old, not billions. “I always tell my students to consider the ancients’ conception of time. The ancients had a different relation to time. How were they able to measure seconds, or to understand the duration of 100 years, let alone the duration of a billion of years – way above the experience of a person’s lifespan? For them, the Biblical saying ‘seven days’ could have meant simply a long, long time for something to be made that takes longer than a worker’s day. Indeed, believers in creationism and evolution can agree on the order of creation described in Genesis – of the land, the ocean and then all critters within.” Back to top
When Mark Dorrepaal was growing up in Ontario, just across the border from Detroit, he was a devoted fan of the Tigers and, like many boys, was a student of Major League Baseball (MLB) statistics. But, unlike most young fans, Dorrepaal had an interest in statistics that extended well beyond the performance of players. He found fascination in baseball schedules. “The Yankees would come to town, and I’d wonder, where were they last night, where will they travel next, and where are all the teams at any one time,” said the man who now chairs the ODU mathematics and statistics department. This boyhood fascination never left him, and to prove it, Dorrepaal chalked up a remarkable achievement this spring as the major league season was getting under way. He jumped into the lead of a World Wide Web-based contest to develop an optimized schedule for National League teams. He accomplished his feat without computer genius, which is what drives the sports scheduling of most of his competitors. He did it with paper and pencil and “noggin’ power.” Even people who do not follow baseball can appreciate the kind of interdependent scheduling that helps airplane travelers make their connections or keeps a school bus driver from traveling wasteful miles. Many, too, have heard of the decades-old mathematical word problems involving a traveling salesman who wants to know the most efficient way to visit several cities on a business trip. But no schedule seems as complex as the ones for the major league baseball season. Imagine 14 or 16 teams – depending on the league – playing 162 regular season games apiece. Also consider what the experts call the scheduling “constraints.” The Yankees, for example, would rather be playing road games outside of New York when the Mets are playing home games to minimize competition for spectator dollars. Also, for various reasons, including player fatigue, no road trip by a team should be longer than, say, 11 days. Efficiency hinges largely on miles traveled, so the Mets would not want a series that took them first to San Diego, next to Atlanta and then back to the West Coast to play San Francisco. The more efficient itinerary would take the Mets to San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Only recently have the major leagues begun to rely on sophisticated computing in order to fashion efficient schedules. Because there are billions of possible schedules, however, the National League (NL) and American League (AL) remain far from certain about how close they are to optimal travel schemes. About seven years ago, an academician under contract to MLB instituted the Challenge Traveling Tournament Web site (http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/TOURN) to solicit efficient schedules for baseball and other sports from hobbyists such as Dorrepaal and anyone else who was willing to participate just for the honor of getting a citation on the Web. The site’s originator and keeper is Michael Trick, professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. Several separate baseball scheduling contests are on the Web site, all for National League (NL) teams. For instance, you can try scheduling a season for only six NL teams, or eight, and so forth, just to get the hang of it. The contest that Dorrepaal led in the spring of 2006 is the 14 NL team schedule. (The NL has 16 teams.) Competitors are given distances for travel between the NL cities, and directed to make a schedule in which each team plays each other both home and away. The schedule is subject to constraints, such as no more than three consecutive home stands or road stands, as well as no consecutive home/away stands between the same teams. The objective is to complete the schedule with the fewest miles of travel for all teams. In the 1970s when he was in graduate school at the University of Toronto, Dorrepaal mailed off his first schedule to MLB. He served up another one in the late 1980s after he lost his wife to cancer and found himself working on the scheduling problem as a diversion. He never got more than a thank-you letter for all his effort. Having his name on the Web site now as leader of the 14 NL team contest is a far greater reward, he says. How did he surge into the lead? Since 2002 he has been a top-drawer performer on the scheduling Web site, but several computer experts, including Pascal Van Hentenryck, professor of computer science at Brown University, blew onto the site a few years ago with the kind of sophisticated software that can run circles around a paper-and-pencil guy such as Dorrepaal. Van Hentenryck, who currently leads the 16 NL team contest, took the lead in the 14 NL team contest in May 2004 with a miles total of 189,766. “The big boys had been trading the lead for a year or so in the 14-team contest, and Van Hentenryck’s new low miles total in the spring of 2004 seemed to be hard to beat,” Dorrepaal said. But the ODU professor wasn’t ready to admit defeat. Early this year, he began poring over the Van Hentenryck 14 NL team schedule. He divided it up into scheduling blocks and applied some of his tried-and-true “manual” methods of optimization. At Eastertime he was inspecting one block of the Van Hentenryck schedule when he had his “eureka!” moment. “His computer program is quite good. There is no question about that,” Dorrepaal said of Van Hentenryck. “But in doing a good job on the big picture, the program missed a shortcut or two.” Dorrepaal came up with a schedule that required only 189,759 miles of team travel, seven miles better than Van Hentenryck’s best total. The next quest would be a manual analysis of Van Hentenryck’s 16 NL team schedule. But Dorrepaal is not sure he wants to put himself, and his collaborating graduate student, George Chackman, through the rigors of another analysis. “Frankly, I’m not the computer genius you need to be,” said Dorrepaal, who has been on the ODU faculty since 1976. “I am maximizing my publicity with a minimum amount of ability.” (Editor’s note: Van Hentenryck retook the lead in the 14 NL team contest from Dorrepaal after this article was written.) But the competition, and his success, has sparked his interest in developing a scheduling template, or broad scheduling theorems, that might apply to many scheduling problems. He also has been talking with psychology professor Janis Sanchez-Hucles, the university’s NCAA faculty representative, about advice he might give the Colonial Athletic Association about basketball scheduling. He hopes that some of the scheduling patterns the Web site competition has produced will be used by MLB. He noticed that the 2006 schedule included some of the optimizing characteristics that are evident in the competition’s best entries. “I sent a note to Professor Trick asking whether the current major league schedule was generated by a software program similar to the ones used to generate solutions on the Web site,” he explained. “He answered that he and George Nemhauser (professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech) had done the 2005 schedule and that the current schedule was done by a Canadian company – a tiny, three-man outfit – that uses optimization software.” The Canadian company, Optimal Planning Solutions, was founded by a man who at one time scheduled the delivery of frozen French fries to McDonald’s franchises. The company now does scheduling not only for MLB, but also for the National Football League and several hockey leagues. In the real world, the MLB schedule has constraints, such as those imposed by television or by particular rivalries – between the Red Sox and Yankees, for one – that are not imposed on the Web site hobbyists. “It’s a tremendously complicated choreography,” Dorrepaal said. He would be the first to admit that computer scheduling experts have supplanted the veteran paper-and-pencil guys. But the guys at Optimal Planning Solutions should not be surprised if they get mail sometime over the next few years from a fellow Canadian, a mathematician named Dorrepaal. Inside, they just may find MLB scheduling tips written on a napkin. Back to top
The facility will cost an estimated $7 million and will be located on the corner of 45th Street and Monarch Way, adjacent to the Ted Constant Convocation Center. Owned by the ODU Real Estate Foundation, the building will replace the current bookstore in Webb Center. The university had previously announced a 15-year contract with Follett Higher Education Group to manage its bookstore operations. “This bookstore represents an important next step in the development of the University Village – it anchors the other retail and cultural attractions along Monarch Way to benefit both the university and the entire Norfolk community,” said Robert L. Fenning, vice president for administration and finance. “It will be a place where local residents can peruse one of the largest selection of books in Norfolk, enjoy a cup of coffee with a friend or unwind following a show at the Ted Constant Convocation Center.” The building’s first and second floors will be dedicated to the bookstore, which will offer approximately 20,000 titles – from bestsellers to children’s books. General merchandise will be located the first level and academic books on the second. The first floor will also feature a café, with an outdoor seating area. Old Dominion’s Office of Development will occupy the upper floors. Construction is slated to begin in late summer and officials anticipate the store to open in September 2007. Tymoff+Moss Architects is the consulting architect for the project. Follett Higher Education Group, a family-owned corporation that manages more than 740 college bookstores throughout the United States and Canada, began management of the current university bookstore May 27. “We thank Old Dominion for selecting Follett to be their educational partner for bookstore services,” said Thomas A. Christopher, president of Follett. “We will create a bookstore in which the university can take great pride and one that will be a benefit to the entire community.” Follett Higher Education Group, founded in 1873, also operates campus bookstores at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Notre Dame and Stanford University, among others. Additionally, Follett provides bookstore services and programs to more than 1,800 independently owned bookstores. – Jennifer Mullen
ARTS AND LETTERS
BUSINESS AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
HEALTH SCIENCES
SCIENCES
The course is intended for students who are pursuing careers in the health professions as well as for currently practicing health professionals. It will also prove useful for first responders such as police officers and firefighters, emergency medical technicians, emergency management specialists, communications specialists and others who frequently need to assist people whose primary language is Spanish. Spanish for Health Professionals will combine practical, hands-on instruction with active conversation and role-playing. A standardized, non-dialectical form of contemporary Spanish, which can be understood by native Spanish speakers from any country, will be used. Textbooks and formal classroom instruction will be supplemented by special presentations, guest speakers and use of the ODU language laboratory. The course will also emphasize the acquisition of useful Hispanic cultural competencies. Prerequisites include the successful completion of at least two semesters of college-level Spanish or three years of Spanish course work at the high school level. Back to top
The full-service salon, owned by Sabrina Martin, offers hair design, makeup, skin care, massage and nail care services. Located at 4300 Monarch Way, it is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. For more information call 489-4300 or visit www.sabrinasignaturesalon.com. La Herradura, located at 4220 Monarch Way, is owned by Wilfredo Andrade and Mauricio Andrade. It is open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday (with bar and dancing from midnight to 2 a.m.). For more information call 423-1605. Back to top
Study abroad, even short-term study abroad, almost always leads to some form of discovery – certainly of a new cultural setting, sometimes of facility in a language other than English, even of self-discovery. It is a truism that we only truly know ourselves and our own culture by being outside it and seeing it with new eyes. But sometimes the discovery is awful, even terrifying. Over the years I have led study abroad courses to the Europe I know best, German-speaking Europe. But the self-discovery component of the course was never explicit and most often only a gratifying by-product of the course and travel. Discovering that they are globally mobile is a very common outcome for students who have traveled little prior to study abroad. For study abroad professionals, this is most telling when the student returns for another, and longer, study abroad sojourn. This is true for a growing corps of ODU students. The single most enduring moral issue in the history that I have taught off and on over 35 years – modern German history – is, of course, the Holocaust. I included the Holocaust as one of several key topics every time I taught 20th-century Germany. But this semester I felt a personal need to focus on the Holocaust in my last teaching opportunity here prior to retirement. For this reason, I offered Germans, Jews and the Holocaust as a spring semester study abroad course. I was much encouraged when the student group met in late January – in fact on the 63rd anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power – for the first orientation to the course and to travel to Europe. One after the other expressed a personal quest to understand the Holocaust at a quite personal and even moral level. One said simply: “I want to understand why this terrible thing happened.” As the students gathered for pre-departure class sessions in late February, I found myself emphasizing the analytical problem – fascinating in itself – of how the Holocaust (and Auschwitz as the symbol of the entire process) could have happened. This led to an exploration of the “intentionalist” view that Auschwitz flowed logically and inevitably from Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism and the “functionalist” view that mass extermination developed only after a “twisted road” of contradictions and failures in Nazi policy toward the Jews. In this latter view, now widely accepted in one form or another among specialists, Auschwitz was not inevitable and was not even imagined until late in the Nazi era. But this approach inevitably focused more on the how rather than the more philosophical why of the Holocaust. I was going down the wrong path to my own self-discovery. Perhaps I was too focused on the historical subject matter itself to accept that the process of reflection on issues of good and evil might be more central to the experience. When we arrived in Berlin on March 3, however, I realized that I would be sharing a different kind of exploration with my students. We read the letters from families on the way to the camps in the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate (and the future U.S. Embassy). We heard Stephan Kramer, executive director of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, rail against the new memorial as a sham. Why did an American architect have to design the memorial? Why did an American choir have to sing at its dedication? Are there no Jewish singers to commemorate their own dead? Go to the places where the murders took place, Kramer said. “The Germans did not invent anti-Semitism. But Germans invented Auschwitz.” And on our final day in Europe, my students and I walked the 200 yards along snow-packed paths from the infamous “ramp” where the trains halted in Auschwitz-Birkenau to the gas chambers and crematoria. Here in this place more than 1 million human beings were worked to death, executed or gassed and died of disease and starvation. One student drew on Biblical imagery to understand what she was experiencing: “... it felt like walking in the shadow of death. So much death that you can feel it in the bitter wind. The silence that hangs in the air like a fog is a testament to the millions of cries and screams that echo in my heart.” Another wrote of the knowledge that can come only from confronting evil: “It’s grotesque, it’s disgusting, it’s hateful, and it’s absolutely necessary. ... Without seeing this, it is impossible to see the Holocaust for what it is. ... You can see a picture of a dinosaur, but it’s not like seeing the bones of a dinosaur. Auschwitz is the bones [of the Holocaust].” And most asked about the perpetrators as well. Who were they? Were they “ordinary” Germans – as Daniel Goldhagen infamously claimed 10 years ago? Or were they extraordinary Germans – even men with advanced university degrees? And could this crime have been possible without countless indifferent Germans, collaborating French and Hungarians and many other enablers, such as the Poles and, most tragically, even the victims themselves? But this line of thinking takes us back to the how and avoids the why. When Elie Wiesel spoke at ODU on March 28, the entire campus community had a chance to listen to a master of this kind of exploration. Few can hope to achieve his depth of thought, and few can bring his own experience literally from the hell of Auschwitz to this questioning of both human degradation and human hope. When he spoke of memory as a shield against indifference, hatred and violence, Wiesel captured the heart of the matter on why confronting the Holocaust is so important. That there are so-called Holocaust deniers as heads of state (for example, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran) and elsewhere in Europe and the United States (including in universities) only shows that education cannot guarantee a wiser, more humble, understanding of human nature. But directly confronting Auschwitz, as the deniers have not done, reveals both the potential for evil and potential for heroism and good in our nature. I want to thank my colleagues David Metzger, Cathy Banks and Elizabeth Lipsmeyer, who shared all or part of this exploration with me. Each in his or her own way helped sharpen my questions about the Holocaust – and offered many insights that had escaped me along the way. But my special thanks are to my students who spent their spring break asking some of the most difficult questions about one of the great crimes of human history, trying to imagine themselves in the place of the victims – and of the perpetrators and collaborators – in order to experience history as far more than names and dates, more than the how. To experience history as moral exploration. John Heyl, executive director of the Office of International Programs and professor of history since June 1, 2000, will retire on June 30. Back to top
– “Lobsters can detect disease, report says” “There is a constant need for additional chemists in the world. There has never been a low employment rate for chemists.” (Thomas Isenhour, provost) – “ODU to offer doctoral degree in chemistry” “It probably went through the Strait of Florida and in the Gulf Stream, past Cape Hatteras and kept on floating. It’s just amazing.” (Larry Atkinson, Slover Professor of oceanography) – “Tale of jet tail begins off Florida, ends on Irish coast” “That’s the importance of this paper. [Industrial poultry farms] are very close to sensitive bodies of water, such as the Chesapeake Bay.” (Greg Cutter, professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences) – “Chicken poop and arsenic” “New knowledge will always keep this country alive. This is the one place where the economic and cultural environments are in sync.” (Anil Nair, associate professor of business management) – “Playing in a global market”
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