The Academic Senate Committee on Distinguished Teaching is soliciting nominations for this year’s Distinguished Teaching Awards, which are given to a select number of faculty and graduate students who have made extraordinary contributions to UCSD as distinguished teachers.
The committee, which is comprised of faculty and student representatives, will consider nominations from students and department faculty, and will then recommend a slate of candidates to be voted on by the Representative Assembly. Recipients of the awards will be honored at an awards presentation and reception in May.
Letters of recommendation should be submitted to the chair or director of the nominee’s primary department or program, who will formally nominate the candidate and prepare the dossier for submission to the committee. Additional details concerning awards criteria and the nomination process can be obtained from the nominee’s department or program. The deadline for submissions in March 1.
Zimbabwean musician to perform and lecture
Zimbabwean musician and composer Thomas Mapfumo will present “”Flowing with the Sound: From Tradition to Postmodernity in African and African-American Music”” at 4 p.m. in Price Center Theater on Feb. 23.
For the event, Mapfumo, who is known as the conquering lion of African music, will both lecture and perform.
In addition to the “”Flowing with the Sound”” presentation, Mapfumo will also lead a music practicum from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Feb. 17 in Mandeville Center B210, as well as a workshop on popular African music on Feb. 21 from 12:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Price Center Gallery A/B.
Mapfumo will also present music lectures in the departments of sociology, music and ethnic studies. In addition, he will convene a youth forum on Exploring Tradition and Heritage Through Music, a community outreach program for students from the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Diego, the Sojourner Truth Academy of San Diego and the Preuss School, on Feb. 19.
For his contributions to the music and culture of Zimbabwe, Mapfumo was chosen as the country’s Arts, Cultural and Literature Person of the Century in 2000.
SDSC claims Sapphire worm was fastest ever
The Sapphire computer worm that attacked the global Internet Jan. 25 was the fastest computer worm ever recorded, according to a team of network security experts from UCSD, the San Diego SuperComputer Center, the Eureka, Calif.-based Silicon Defense, UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
According to the security team, the Sapphire worm, which is also called the Slammer worm, doubled its numbers every 8.5 seconds during the first minute of its attack. Within 10 minutes, the worm had infected over 75,000 vulnerable hosts, which spewed billions of copies of the worm into cyberspace. The resulting chaos slowed Internet traffic and interfered with many business services.
The Sapphire is only 376 bytes, which enabled it to reproduce rapidly and fit in a network “”packet”” that was sent one-way to potential victims — an aggressive approach designed to infect all vulnerable machines quickly and saturate the Internet’s bandwidth.
According to experts, the speed with which the worm copied itself was limited only by the capacity of individual network connections.
The security team found that nearly 43 percent of the infected machines were located in the United States, 12 percent were in South Korea and more than 6 percent were in China.
UCSD to facilitate diversity summit on Feb. 7
A Diversity Summit forum will be held Feb. 7 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Price Center Ballrooms.
The forum will explore such issues as how UCSD diversity can be improved and what the university’s role is in building a community.
Discussion will be held with UCLA professors Walter Allen and Carol Peterson, Harvard University professor Marguerite Bonous-Hammarth, University of Maryland professor Jeffrey F. Milem, and UC Berkeley professor Rowena Robles.
