• Richard T. Sylves Professor
• Publications
• Edited Periodicals
• Conference Papers
• Teaching 1982-1996
• Offices Held
• Panels Chaired
• University Service
• Departmental Service
• Community Service
• Grants
• Awards
• Professional Memberships
• Book Reviews
• The Book
• Work in Progress
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  • 06 SYLVES’ TEACHING
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• Thank you

HONORS

I was invited to apply for a one year visiting post at NSF’s Infrastructure Management and Hazard Response program by Dr. Doug Foutch. I was honored to have been asked but I declined the invitation, owing to other obligations I had.

Dean of the College of Marine Studies, Dr. Nancy Targett, renewed my joint appointment with the Graduate College of Marine Studies to June 30, 2009.

I was honored to speak at the National Academy of Public Administration, Annual Society Equity Conference, my PowerPoint presentation was on “Social Equity Issues of Hurricane Katrina.” Richmond, Virginia: Virginia Commonwealth University. February 16, 2007.

Professional Development

I made huge advances in my knowledge of Excel, Stata, and SPSS. I was aided in this effort by Graduate Student Zoltan Buzas.

Over the summer of 2006, I was provided the half-time services of Zoltan Buzas. Zoltan provided me invaluable help in conducting higher order statistical analysis of my presidential declaration data. He helped me relearn SPSS, something I had not used regularly since 1980. The Department provided me a guest license to use Stata. On my own, and with Jason Mycoff’s advice, I bought several Stata manuals. Zoltan helped me apply Poisson Regression to my data, something not possible with SPSS. Poisson Regression is the statistic of choice for the three sets of scholars who test hypotheses about presidential disaster declarations and the distribution of federal post-disaster relief.

I need to add that over the spring, summer, fall (all 2006), and now winter (2007), I have worked closely with David Racca of the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research on my Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI) grant project. We built the website we promised the foundation. You and anyone can now visit it by clicking on the link below:

HYPERLINK "http://www.peripresdecusa.org/" http://www.peripresdecusa.org

Work on this project took me into the study of ACCESS, a software program useful in database management. ACCESS makes it possible to configure data in a way that allows website users to manipulate variables and automatically build tables. You will notice, if you visit the site, that it is GIS assisted. We have an ArcView map base users can navigate to find the map locations of counties and/or states they select and for which they seek disaster declaration primary incident and federal relief cost information.