When you walk into a Wal-Mart (or Target, Best Buy, or any big-box retailer), you?ll encounter principles of social psychology operating everywhere. How is orderly behavior of large groups of people maintained, and why does it sometimes break down? Why are all the advertising models young, thin, and happy? How are shoppers and employees silently judging each other rightly and wrongly? What factors facilitate or inhibit employee helpfulness? Why is it a bad idea to stock the toilet paper in plain sight?

This course aims to provide first-year students with some of the foundational skills and knowledge necessary to be effective citizens, advocates, and activists here at UMass and beyond. Students will learn the basics of community problem-identification, problem-solving and policy development. By the end of this first semester at UMass, students will already have developed the capacity to be effective change agents on campus, and in their other communities. A range of guest speakers will round out the readings and other materials with their firsthand experiences as advocates and policymakers.

Mass killings occur in the U.S. about every two weeks. It seems like insensible slaughter by mentally deranged loners or terrorists whose very humanity is

You contemplate this often when you are reading articles from the NY Times that society should generally know and find interesting. One such example is e.g. Why elephants live as long as they do; the answer is they have more copies of a tumor suppressor genes.
This class will discuss topics that are important but in a way non-science major finds interesting and relevant.

Weekly topics will follow featured articles from the Science Times section.

The dramatic decline in honeybees over the past several years related to Colony Collapse Disorder has raised the public's awareness to the importance of these insects in our everyday life. This seminar will use the popular book 'Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis' by Rowan Jacobsen as a guide to examine the importance of bees in our society, the possible causes of declining honeybee health, as well as learn more about the biology and social society of bees.

Are you curious about politics or poetry? Where might they meet? Eileen Myles, poet and `92 presidential candidate, writes, ?what is a political poem today and how do we describe, experience, understand the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics that determines how we read a poem and whether it even seems political to us.? Join at this round-table where we?ll look at poetry as a response to politics and as a political act in itself. Our emphasis will be poems written during this election cycle.

vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia as a case study. Students will consider the normative implications of selecting
a judge who is granted life tenure and what qualities we should look for in a judge. In addition, we will delve into the
confirmation process, including selection by the president, hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the role of interest
groups and the media, and confirmation in the Senate.

Cultivate your capacity to be a leader! In this interactive course, we will identify and build individual strengths to empower positive stress management and increase your resilience. Everyone manages stress, whether with health promoting behaviors of exercise or health threatening behaviors of substance abuse. Evidence indicates that building on positive stress management strategies is far more effective than focusing on problems. Using mindfulness and focused writing will help make us aware of our own emotional responses to life?s challenges.

Globally, approximately 3 billion people, 40% ofthe earth's inhabitants, live on less than US $3.00 per day. This course introduces students to the real ity of poverty and the "bottom of the pyramid". Students are also presented with narratives of poverty from individuals' lived experience, macro approaches to poverty reduction and business strategies to address poverty. The issues of interest are also reviewed in different environmental contexts to provide insight into the broad diverse landscape of global poverty.

Description not available at this time