To see the the Knoxville Torch Club brochure, please click here. Please note that time and location of meeting needs to be updated..

“Are our strategic petroleum reserves safe?”
      Dr. Richard Berry, founder of Rembco, is an expert in karstic research with more than thirty years of experience. His talk will describe what is karst and pseudo-karst. By karst, he refers to the jumble of rock, silt, coal, and shale layers similar to the soil that lies to the west of the Appalachian Mountains.
      There are karstic formations world-wide. Such locations are subject to erosion as experienced along coastlines and rivers and often formed where earthquakes have occurred. Dick will describe his work on a salt mine at Weeks Island, LA where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was storing crude oil in deep caverns and the operational problems in a coal mine project in Virginia.
      As an aside, Dick Berry's extensive travels include trips to Japan, Nepal, Iran, China, Pakistan, Greece, Egypt, Australia, and Antarctica. Among his travel highlights, he has climbed many mountains including Kilimanjaro and a mountain in the Khumbu Valley near Mount Everest, and he performed a geology study on Antarctica.

April 15, 2010
Ric Morgan, Ph.D., D.Div.
Entrepreneur, professional speaker, writer, and photographer

"Five years of wonderful hospitality and really terrific memories as ambassador of Poland."
      Victor Ashe was nominated by President George W. Bush to be Ambassador to the Republic of Poland on April 8, 2004, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 21, 2004. He was sworn in on June 23, 2004, in Washington, DC. It was during Ashe's tenure as mayor of Knoxville that he, acting on the advice of Dr. Marek Pienkowski, helped to establish a sister city relationship with the city of Chelm, Poland, and led two delegations to that city. Ambassador Ashe has visited all 16 provinces of Poland three times and over 185 Polish cities and towns since arriving in Poland in July, 2004. Ambassador Ashe is the 24th American Ambassador to Poland and is the second longest serving Ambassador. Ambassador Ashe submitted his resignation as Ambassador to Poland and served until he was replaced.
      Amb. Ashe’s history of public service includes serving 31 years in Tennessee state and city elective offices. In December 2003, Amb. Ashe completed an unprecedented 16 years as Mayor of Knoxville, the longest mayoral tenure in the city’s 218-year history.
      Amb. Ashe was born January 1, 1945, in Knoxville, Tennessee and attended public schools there. He graduated from the Hotchkiss School, in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1963 and from Yale University with a BA in History in 1967. He received his law degree from the University of Tennessee College of Law in 1974. Ashe is an attorney and licensed to practice law in Tennessee. He is married and has two children.

October 21, 2010
Lawrence A. Taylor, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
Dir., Planetary Geosciences Institute
Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences
University of Tennessee

February 19, 2009
Engin Serpersu, Ph.D.
Department of Biochemistry & Cellular & Molecular Biology
University of Tennessee

"Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair"
      The author hopes that our members will experience Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair “like they’ve just walked into the front gates and taken a grand tour all around the 72 acres of the event.” Relive the world’s fair here in Knoxville and learn about why Knoxville was chosen as the city for a World’s Fair that is generally held in a major city. Knoxville hosted the official international exposition, fully licensed and sanctioned by the Bureau des Expositions Internationales in Paris, France.”
      Her recent book on the world’s fair was published by Arcadia Press as part of the Images of America Series.

"The causes and consequences of party system collapse in Latin America" 
      Political parties and party systems are a crucial element in democratic politics, especially in the fragile regimes of the developing world where effective parties may promote stability, accountability, and representation whereas weak parties foment conflict and volatility. My research examines why some party systems collapse when faced with considerable pressures, while similar systems confronting equally insurmountable obstacles endure. With particular emphasis on the case of Venezuela, I will explain how economic crises and institutional constraints make party systems vulnerable to collapse. Then I will discuss the ramifications of party system collapse for contemporary politics in Venezuela, as well as Bolivia and Colombia, where personalism and conflict threaten the preservation of democracy.

The demise of newspapers means better journalism
      The newspaper is holding back journalism from doing the best job that it can for society. The sooner the paper is gone, the better.
      Journalism will be better because there will be more reporting, more reporters, more and different ways of telling the story, more respect for the audience, better writing and better reporting.

November 19, 2009
John Shacter
Founder of JS Associates Technology and Management Consultants

“Major innovations in education and other institutions are urgently required — everywhere.”
      The world is clearly facing an unprecedented array of major technical and societal challenges. Among them are nuclear and bio-proliferation, deadly fanaticism, staggering debts and job upheavals, ever-growing populations in the context of finite resources, and wholly inadequate or ineffective nation-wide and world-wide education and communications. The mass media have also failed to provide an adequate “updating and repair job.” Moreover, there is also the obvious oxymoron of trying to run viable democracies with major gaps and inadequacies at all levels of pre-K-to-16 education. Neither do the world’s major problems seem to want to cooperate with our academic specialties and departments. They clearly require the application of multidiscipline approaches. In this context — how well are we, as the nation’s and world’s professionals and academicians truly set to “pitch in” — and how can we become more effective? (In the time allotted, John hopes to just “tease” us into the questions and discussion period. He will be available after the formal adjournment.)

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Our speaker, John Shacter, received his early education in Europe. He is a “semi-retired” engineer, management consultant and volunteer educator, and has just finished teaching a course on “math and money” for youngsters and adults in the Kingston Community Center. His technical career included major roles in the design and operations of the multibillion-dollar gaseous diffusion plants in Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth. At its New York headquarters, Union Carbide appointed him manager of corporate planning, including corporate goal setting and performance review. The National Academy of Sciences appointed him to a consulting panel advising the multinational technology-and-society research institute, “IIASA,” near Baden, Austria. His peers have selected him as regional “engineer of the year” and “boss of the year.”