Other News and Upcoming Events

(Note: For recent events, check our Facebook fan site athttp://www.facebook.com/UCLACommStudies  or our “In the Spotlight” news page)Greg Bryant has two of his compositions featured in the 360 degrees of 60×60 concert, which is being performed this summer in venues around the world, including the International Computer Music Conference in New York this month.Tim Groeling will be the keynote speaker this summer at the annual meeting of the UC Computing Support Coordinators–an  conference for UC-wide instructional technology professionals. He will be speaking on the uses of podcasts and improving scholarship through the use of instructional technology. He will also be lecturing on War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War (Princeton University Press, 2010; with Matthew A. Baum) at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in Montreal. In addition, he’d like for you to buy his other new book, When Politicians Attack: Party Cohesion in the Media (Labor Day 2010, Cambridge University Press). It’s a page-turner.Interviews with Martie Haselton and Kerri Johnson are featured in the Discovery Channel program, “The Science of Sex Appeal.” You can view their appearances onlinehere and here.Neil Malamuth will be conducting an interview with Australian film company Looking Glass Pictures for a documentary on the subject of pornography. Malamuth will also be giving the keynote address on “Scientific Research on Pornography” at a pre-conference seminar at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. Sylvia Merschel and Dee Bridgewater have created the UCLA Summer Institute in Communication Skills for International Students.  Enrolling students now, the Institute is a six-week, intensive program of study, providing international students a holistic learning experience in American-style English.  Comprised of two courses, CS1A (Public Speaking for Nonnative Speakers) and CS1B (Learning American English and Culture from the Movies) the Institute is an immersion-style program, designed to enable nonnative speakers to communicate effectively in personal, professional and academic situations.  Barry Sanders has been leading Ring Festival LA–a series of events across Los Angeles celebrating the first complete performances of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen ever presented in Los Angeles. Sanders enlisted over 120 institutions–in addition to the LA Opera–to program a variety of events concerning the Ring, including symposia at the Hammer museum, lectures, and a large concert of the UCLA orchestra and chorus in Royce Hall under James Conlon’s baton. You can read more about it in Barry’s blog at the Huffington Post.Francis Steen will be traveling to India this summer as a guest of the Rishi Valley Education Centre in the countryside north of Bangalore. Along with his colleagues Wendy Treynor and David DeLiema (a 2008 CS alumnus), he will be writing up their joint project to develop a new model of the architecture of the mind, with broad implications for communication and learning.