AU, UA team up for earthquake study
Montgomery Advertiser – July 24
Students and scientists from the University of Alabama and Auburn University are jointly placing 23 highly sensitive seismic stations around the state as part of a national study of the inner earth. Data from the devices, which will record earthquakes originating all over the planet, will be streamed live on the Internet and could help change man’s understanding of how mountains and continents formed. “This is a huge step forward for us as geologists,” said UA geophysicist Andrew Goodliffe. “We’re going to see things that we never knew were there.”… Stanton Ingram, a UA graduate student in geology who helped find locations for the devices, said he and Auburn student James Taylor had little trouble finding landowners willing to have the devices buried on their property, despite warnings in training that it would be a tough sell. “We were received pretty well,” Ingram said. “I can count the people who said no on my hands.”…
WAKA (Montgomery) – July 23
How to Pack a Healthy School Lunch
Healthy News Digest – July 24
…Suzanne Henson, assistant professor and director of the Coordinated Program in Dietetics at The University of Alabama, offers her tips on packing school lunches loaded in flavor and nutritional value. Let children shop for, clean, peel or cut up fruits and vegetables (depending on age). If they feel invested in their lunch, they’re more likely to eat it…
YouTube hits don’t equate to votes in campaigns
San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News – July 25
A video of a tough-talking, rifle-toting Alabama candidate who rides up on a horse generated 1.7 million hits on YouTube with one of one of the most-clicked Internet ads of the campaign season. Then he lost—dead last in a three-way race for agriculture commissioner…Karen Cartee, an expert in political communications at the University of Alabama, says some Internet sensations are so attention grabbing that people can’t look away, but she questions their effectiveness on election day. She said many ad viewers on YouTube are young people who aren’t likely to vote in a primary even if they live in the same state as the candidate or they are political ideologues who have already made up their minds about a race. Busy working voters don’t have the time to noodle around looking at videos. “Internet ads are not nearly as effective as direct mail, broadcast, radio or print,” said Cartee, who has co-authored several books on campaigning…
Book profiles agents of change
Tuscaloosa News – July 25
…But Pruitt makes a convincing argument by the end of his book, “Taming Alabama: Lawyers and Reformers, 1804-1929,” that all seven attempted to change Alabama not as revolutionaries, but from within the bounds of law and society. “It’s a group of people who made a difference and shared a way of doing things, whether in prominence or relative obscurity,” said Pruitt, special collections librarian at UA’s Bounds Law Library. “In the end, they all tended to believe in the same thing, and that was fairness and due process — for the system to work.”…
College News
Tuscaloosa News – July 25
… Dauphin Island Sea Lab — University of Alabama students Ashley Bryant, Rebecca Candler and Cassie Craddock, all of Tuscaloosa, and University of West Alabama student Cheaka Tillman joined other college students from around the country at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab to gain hands-on experience in the marine environment as part of University Programs’ summer session at the sea lab. Some of the marine-specialized courses offered during the first summer session were coastal wetland ecology, marine invertebrate zoology, marine biology, coastal zone management and oceanography. Students spent time in the classroom, the laboratory and the field. Students collected marine samples in Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico aboard sea lab’s research vessel, the Alabama Discovery. They also participated in extended field exercises in salt marshes and dune habitats. Many students also journeyed to St. Andrews State Park in Panama City, Fla., to get an up-close look at a natural marine habit through a snorkeling trip.
Rural Medical Scholar graduates from family medicine program
Gadsden Times – July 24
Michael Luther is coming home to Sand Mountain to practice medicine. Luther graduated from the Tuscaloosa Family Medicine Residency Program in June. A DeKalb County native who graduated from Geraldine High School, Luther is a University of Alabama Rural Medical Scholar and a graduate of the University of Alabama School of Medicine. He is a member of the seventh class in the Rural Medical Scholars Program, which was established in 1996 exclusively for qualified rural students from Alabama who want to become rural primary care physicians in the state…