University of Alabama students aid Oklahoma twister relief
Tulsa World – March 19
A group of University of Alabama students will spend spring break helping build new homes in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City struck by a devastating EF5 tornado in 2013. About 16 students will make the trip for the 2014 Alternative Spring Break from Sunday to March 28. The students and leaders who will accompany them are from the Capstone Community Service Center, a university office which promotes volunteer work. The trip is the outgrowth of the original response on campus by the Community Service Center and Alabama’s Student Government Association to the May 2013 tornado, said Kimberly Montgomery, assistant director of the center. There were 24 deaths related to the system, according to National Weather Service Weather records.
KRMG-FM (Tulsa) – March 19
Alabama A-Day to include postgame field access for fans, halftime entertainment
Tuscaloosa News – March 21
Fans attending the University of Alabama’s annual A-Day spring football game will have postgame access to the field at Bryant-Denny Stadium for the first time, UA announced Thursday. Festivities surrounding the game, scheduled for 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 19, will include a giveaway of 12,500 posters of UA coach Nick Saban and members of the 2014 Crimson Tide team, along with season schedules, as well as halftime entertainment by Tony Hoard and the K-9 Crew, an act featuring aerial tricks choreographed to music by Hoard’s group of rescued dogs that has appeared on “America’s Got Talent,” “Good Morning America” and “Animal Planet.” Admission to the game, which will be televised on ESPNU, is free. Following the game, after players and coaches leave the field, fans will be able to go onto the field to take photos or take in the view from field level. A-Day festivities will begin at 11:15 a.m. at Denny Chimes with the annual Walk of Fame Ceremony, where Saban will join 2013 captains AJ McCarron, C.J. Mosley and Kevin Norwood as the former players leave their hand- and cleat-prints in concrete. Saban and the former players will address the crowd.
State parks pump up Alabama economy
Al.com – March 20
With an estimated economic impact of $375 million, Alabama’s 22 state parks fuel far more than family vacations and outdoor excursions. A recent study concluded the statewide network of picturesque locales supported 5,340 jobs – totaling about $140 million in earnings – and attracted an estimated $152.4 million in visitor spending in 2011, the most recent year for which data was available. Economists Samuel Addy and Ahmad Ijaz with the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce conducted the analysis. Alabama State Parks Director Greg Lein said the study confirms what anyone working in the system already knows: that “state parks are valuable tools to promote the state’s economy.” “But the study gave us real numbers for state parks’ overall economic impact and the many public and private jobs that depend on them,” Lein said. For instance, the report revealed state parks generate $10.9 million in state and local taxes annually.
WLTZ-NBC (Columbus, Ga.) – March 20
WAFF-NBC (Huntsville) – March 20
Researchers Find Foreclosures Racialized
SB Wire – March 20
According to a study published in The Professional Geographer, Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s mortgage foreclosure trends since 2008 have followed the race-wealth divide. Dr. Joe Weber, associate professor of geography and Dr. Bronwen Lichtenstein, sociology professor at The University of Alabama say the foreclosures disproportionately affect black residents. The two professors analyzed foreclosure data in Tuscaloosa from 2008 to 2011. They found foreclosure rates were mostly absent from wealthy white areas and were heavily concentrated in older black neighborhoods. The publication was published over the summer and titled, “Old Ways, New Impacts: Race, Residential Patterns, and the Home Foreclosure Crisis in the American South.” It differs from many other studies that focused on subprime and predatory lending tactics targeting poor minorities and minority neighborhoods in large cities by analyzing the race divide caused by foreclosure rates in a small Southern city.
ARTS AND HUMANITIES: Annual symposium focuses on Savannah River Plant
Aiken Standard (S.C.) – March 20
As longtime residents will attest, the decade of the 1950s brought enormous change to this part of the state. The advent of the Savannah River Plant, a 300-square-mile nuclear reservation with more than 200 buildings (including five reactors) and 6,000 permanent employees (mostly from other parts of the country) changed the social, political, and economic landscape. Indeed, in her book “Cold War Dixie” (University of Georgia Press), professor and author Kari Frederickson argues that what had been a largely rural, agricultural, and staunchly Democratic region became, with the influx of the SRP (now SRS) engineers and attendant technocrats, a largely suburban, middle-class and Eisenhower Republican enclave. This socio-political shift did not come without a price, and Frederickson, who chairs the history department at the University of Alabama, will be chronicling some of the more significant challenges that our local community faced with the construction of the huge hydrogen bomb facility on our doorstep when she visits Aiken next week. (Dr. Tom Mack holds the G.L. Toole Chair at USC Aiken.)
Can We Predict Where Lightning Will Strike?
Slate – March 20
Meteorologists have limited resources to deliver a lightning storm warning more than 15 minutes prior to the inevitable electrical event. But a method from researchers at the University of Alabama may eventually be able to as much as triple that advance-alert time by pulling all of the data together.
Python Auto-Pilot
The Scientist – March 20
Burmese pythons may have a homing sense that can guide them over distances as long as 20 miles, according to a study published this week (March 19) in Biology Letters. Python bivittatus, a native of Southeast Asia, is one of largest snakes in the world; individuals can grow to be nearly 20 feet long. Since 2000, Burmese pythons have become an invasive species in southern Florida, including Everglades National Park, probably from accidental (or intentional) release by pet owners. They compete with—and sometimes eat—native alligators, endemic apex predators. A research team, led by Michael Dorcas of Davidson College, implanted 12 snakes with GPS radiotransmitters. The researchers released half back into same habitat and moved the other half to a more appropriate habitat. When the transplanted snakes returned to their home ranges instead of exploring and adapting to their new habitats, the researchers realized Burmese pythons must have some kind of compass sense to help guide them back. The researchers plan to study exactly how the snakes navigate, suggesting that they may use smell, light, or magnetic forces. “I suspect that, if pythons can do this, all snakes can do it—rattlesnakes, vipers, the lot,” Stephen Secor, a herpetologist at the University of Alabama who was not involved with the study, told BBC.
LOCAL Q&A: University of Alabama Department of Criminal Justice instructor Christine Ivie Edge
Tuscaloosa News – March 21
My name is Christine Ivie Edge, and I have been a full-time instructor in the University of Alabama’s Department of Criminal Justice for the past five years….