K'Cindra Cavin, Business Administration, and Adriane King, Financial Aid, passed the Certified Professional Secretary examination in May, becoming the newest additions to our staff who are CPS certified. The CPS exam, recognized around the world as the "capstone" of secretarial professionalism, is administered by the Institute for Certification, a department of the International Association of Administrative Professionals. The three-part exam covers management, finance and business law, and office systems and administration.

Gil Fernandez, History, attended the 2004 International Conference of the Mediterranean Studies Association, held May 26-29 in Barcelona, Spain.

Paula Hinton, History, presented a paper titled "The Port of Missing Men: The Impact of Murder on an American Town" at the conference of the Western Association of Women Historians, held May 21-23 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also presented a paper titled "The Butchering Widow: A Female Serial Killer in Turn of the Century America" at the conference of the Women's and Gender Historians of the Midwest, held June 12-13 at Loyola University in Chicago.

Susan Laningham, History, presented a paper titled "Their Sister's Body: An Ascetic Nun and her Brothers in Counter-Reformation Spain," at the Conference on the History of Women Religious, hosted by the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica June 27-30 in Atchison, Kansas.

Katherine Osburn, History, gave a presentation on "'Me, Too, Boys!': Teaching Gender in the U.S. History Survey" at the Southern Regional Conference of the Organization of American Historians, held July 9-11 in Atlanta. Her paper was part of a panel on the web site "Women and Social Movements"; Osburn is a member of the site's editorial board.

Kevin Thompson, Telecommunications, was named 2004 Tennessee Service Rifle champion after defeating the best marksmen in the state at the annual Service Rifle Championship matches held in June at the National Guard Rifle Range facilities located on the Arnold Air Force Base near Tullahoma. The tournament is conducted by the Tennessee Shooting Sports Association, the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association. Matches are fired at distances of 200, 300 and 600 yards, using high-powered rifles classified by the NRA as “service rifles,” the civilian equivalents of the currently issued military small-arms. Thompson is an experienced competitor, having been involved in the sport for seven years and has risen to the top of the NRA’s high-power classification rankings by reaching the “High-Master” level, requiring a 97% average score.

George Webb, History, presented two papers at "Lord of the Rings: Dendrochronology Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Pacific Division, held June 13-17 at Utah State University in Logan. The papers are titled "Contributions of A.E. Douglass to Astronomy, the Development of Dendrochronology and the Institutional Growth of Science in the American Southwest" and "Douglass's 'Cycle Problem' and the Scientific Community's Reception of the New Science of Dendrochronology."

Larry Wheaton, Facilities and Business Services, participated in the annual meeting of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration & Air-Conditioning Engineers, held June 30 in Nashville. He presented a paper on "Distributed Chilled Water Pumping at Tennessee Technological University," one of five included in a technical seminar on "District Energy Systems in Tennessee: Comparison of Chilled Water Pumping Schemes." Facilities engineers from across the region addressed campus systems that have inherent operational problems. Our system, installed in 1971, uses individual building pumps, saving energy and helping reduce the utility budget, but it's not very flexible when additional loads are added. After 10 years in the TBR budget pipeline, a plan for correcting our central cooling hydraulic problems has been funded, and the first phase of corrections is scheduled to begin this month.