Notes: Arendt, Bansal, Goff, Kaye, Salisbury, Balsley

Lucy A. Arendt, assistant professor of Business Administration (management) recently attended and presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in Salt Lake City. Her invited presentation, “Triggering Voluntary Individual and Business Decision-Making Around Seismic Rehabilitation” identified ten categories of triggers intended to influence business decision making around seismic risk. The presentation relied on quantitative and qualitative data gathered over the past several years in California, Oregon, Washington, and Utah on the prerequisites to seismic decision making and learning about potential means to mitigate seismic risk.

A paper by Gaurav Bansal, assistant professor of Business Administration (statistics and MIS), was nominated for best-paper award at a recent international conference. Only 14 papers were nominated out of more than 200 papers presented at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), a premier MIS research gathering which took place in Paris in December. Bansal was co-author of “The Moderating Influence of Privacy Concern on the Efficacy of Privacy Assurance Mechanisms for Building Trust: A Multiple-Context Investigation,” published in the conference proceedings. The research examines user behavior with regard to the degree that privacy-policy statements and privacy-assurance cues alleviate web customers’ privacy concerns.

Victoria Goff, associate professor, Information and Computing Science, was asked to present a workshop on copy editing at the 18th annual Associated Collegiate Press Best of the Midwest College Newspaper Convention, which was held Feb. 20-22 in Minneapolis.

Harvey Kaye, professor, Social Change and Development, speaks on Wednesday evening February 25 to the Yale Political Union at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Composed of both conservative and liberal student organizations, the Yale Political Union has invited Kaye to present — and argue in favor of — the Resolution: “Americans Should Embrace Their Radical History.” Other recent speakers at the YPU include Justice Antonin Scalia, Arianna Huffington and Howard Dean.
Read more: www.yale.edu/ypu/index.html
and www.yale.edu/ypu/schedule.html.

UW-Green Bay Prof. Emerita Joyce Salisbury and former ad hoc guitar instructor Bob Balsley are on a 115-day jaunt around the world with the Semester at Sea program. Balsley is blogging for the Press-Gazette. Most recently they were in Namibia, Africa. Read their travel chronicles.