Literacy needs to begin in the home at birth, experts say
Tuscaloosa News – May 8
It all starts at home. With one in four Alabamians being illiterate and 60 percent of children across the U.S. not reading on grade-level, children need to start learning vocabulary, word comprehension and reading at birth, top educators from across the state and country told about 250 Alabama educators Thursday. They spoke at “Lifting Literacy, Lifting Lives: A Statewide Summit to Discuss Literacy Issues in the Education of Early and Emergent Readers.” “They need to learn a minimum of seven words a day,” said Lesley M. Morrow, a professor in Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education and one of two keynote speakers at the event held at the Bryant Conference Center. . . . The summit was hosted by the University of Alabama’s College of Education, the Alabama State Department of Education and AdvancED. Peter Hlebowitsh, dean of UA’s College of Education, said the summit’s goal is to raise consciousness about the issue of literacy. “We’re trying to get people to think a little bit harder and deeper about how to move forward and how to teach kids to reach,” Hlebowitsh said. “The linguistic environment in the home is fundamental to creating the kind of apparatus that one needs to have good language skills in the future.”
CBS 42 (Birmingham) – May 7
Fox 6 (Birmingham) – May 7
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – May 7
UA researcher creates virtual reality lab to help people with severe weather anxiety
WDAF-Fox (Kansas City, Missouri) – May 7
Stormy weather this time of year brings a lot of anxiety for people especially storm survivors. But now there’s new technology being developed to help deal with that stress. Researchers at the University of Alabama are creating 3D simulations. The technology was originally intended for the video game market. The developers want to be able to help people prepare for and react to severe weather. The university says anxiety can be one of the biggest challenges when it comes to staying safe during dangerous situations. Developers are in talks with Google right now. They’d like to partner with the search engine to get this technology out of the lab and into your hands.
WXIN Fox (Indianapolis) – May 7
The science of analyzing music: mid-80s were out of tune
USA Today – May 8
Science has spoken: the mid-1980s were the worst era for pop music in the last half-century. The pop hits of those years were less diverse and more monotonous than at any other time during the last 50 years, according to a new analysis that imposes scientific rigor on the frothy subject of the USA’s top hits. The study blames pop’s mid-1980s blahs on new wave, disco and hard rock, which conquered the hit charts and ousted other genres. … The technique holds promise, agrees the University of Alabama’s Eric Weisbard, author of the book Top 40 Democracy. But he wonders how the study’s trends might’ve been influenced by outside events. The 1983-84 “revolution” identified in the new study, for instance, came just after the birth of MTV, when many unknown artists achieved fame on the strength of their image. All the same, the study is “not trying to make an old-fogey argument, ‘Things were better and now they’re all homogeneous,’ ” he says. “I like the fact that they’re noticing these things.”
America’s cities mirror Baltimore’s woes
Fox and Hounds – May 8
The rioting that swept Baltimore the past few days, sadly, was no exception, but part of a bigger trend in some of our core cities towards social and economic collapse. Rather than enjoying the much ballyhooed urban “renaissance,” many of these cities are actually in terrible shape, with miserable schools, struggling economies and a large segmented of alienated, mostly minority youths. We are witnessing an unwelcome reprise of the bad old days of the late ’60s, when much of American core cities went up in smoke. . . “Blacks who have relocated tend to be either retirees or well-educated, well-off middle-agers with children,” John Giggie, associate professor of history and director of graduate studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, toldBET.com. They move to the South not because they like the politics (most probably don’t) but because they seek economic progress. Part of the reason may be that sunbelt cities have more broad based opportunities for middle and working class residents than have the increasingly post-industrial economies of California and the Northeast corridor.
Special report: Paving a smooth path to equipment rental success
Facilities.net – May 8
Rental equipment has become a mainstay of maintenance and engineering departments in institutional and commercial facilities looking to supplement equipment arsenals with specialized power tools, aerial work platforms, and construction equipment, to name just a few rental options. The equipment enables front-line technicians to complete difficult or time-sensitive tasks and projects more safely and efficiently. But the path to completing projects sometimes results in mistakes by rental companies and managers, often delaying projects and threatening budgets. … “Anytime you are renting specialty equipment, you should be more vigilant in the planning process,” says Neal DiChiara, director of facilities maintenance at the University of Alabama. “The learning curve is usually greater, so extra preparation to include equipment operation training should be considered. “We had a remote control compacting machine here. The remote control worked OK when the rep dropped it off, but a couple of hours later it was not working OK. With the special equipment, we could have used more training. We eventually got it, and they made it right, but it cost us time.”
Council for The Advancement of Nursing Science elects leadership council chair
Arizona Republic – May 8
The Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science has elected Marti Rice, PhD, RN, FAAN and professor at The University of Alabama’s School of Nursing, as the 2015-2017 chair of its Leadership Council. The Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science fosters better health through nursing science and is an open membership entity of the American Academy of Nursing.
University of Alabama offering free memory screenings
Tuscaloosa News – May 8
Volunteers 50 and older are needed for free memory screenings through a project offered by the University of Alabama. The 45-minute screenings will be offered during the next few months at Gordon Palmer Hall on the UA campus. People can call 205-348-9973 to set up a screening. The project is being led by Forrest Scogin, a UA psychology professor. He led similar studies in 2013 and 2005. “We had over 100 people the first time,” Scogin said in a news release. “There was a full range of abilities, and there were some people whose memory was entirely intact. There were other folks who really struggled.” Participants won’t receive a diagnosis, but instead they will be given an assessment, which could include a recommendation to have a follow-up appointment with a doctor.
Sonic Frontiers: Anthony Braxton at Alabama
The Wire: Adventures of Modern Music – May 2015 (Link not available)
Despite the deep history of experimental music coursing through its veins, not since the late 1970s heyday of the TransMuseq label and the Raudelunas art collective has the city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, been considered a hotspot for avant-garde concerts. And yet, over the past five years – spearheaded by professor, saxophonist and composer Andrew Raffo Dewar – the University of Alabama has put Tuscaloosa back on the map when it comes to forward-thinking sonic endeavors. As the founder of the university’s Sonic Frontiers concert series, he has brought a wide array of talent to town since the program’s inception in 2010. This year’s Anthony Braxton residency, which ran between 18-25 February at various venues throughout the city, was the largest retrospective of the saxophonist’s work ever assembled in the southeastern United States, compete with a month-long art show featuring his graphic scores for “Falling River Music.”
Research: Buyers’ readiness to take risk is top cause for volatility in U.S. house prices
Science Newsline – May 7
The cliché version of the American dream usually involves getting married, finding a good job, raising 2.5 kids and buying a home with a white picket fence. But in recent times spiking prices can make home ownership impossible — or falling prices can trap homeowners in so-called “upside-down” mortgages, where debt dwarfs the shrinking value of a house. “To determine the right price of a house, people need to make long-term projections of many uncertain economic variables, such as interest rate,” said Shu Wu, associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas. “These projections can be subjective and are prone to big errors when people become either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the future.” According to new study to be published in the Journal of Money Credit and Banking by Wu and co-authors Joseph Fairchild at Bank of America and Jun Ma at the University of Alabama, consumer willingness to roll the dice in such a marketplace in large part triggers fluctuations in housing prices.
DESIGNDETAILS
Athletic Business – May 2015
By design, multipurpose activity courts are confined spaces – their dasher systems often relegated to out-of-the-way reaches of a recreation center’s footprint. In some cases, MACs are completely enclosed rooms of floor-to-ceiling cinderblock. Not so at the University of Alabama’s Student Activity Center at Presidential Village, where the MAC – and the activities it accommodates – is on full display. Glass dashers standing eight feet tall surround most of the synthetic playing surface lined for basketball, hockey and soccer, with netting extending to the rafters to keep projectiles in and out. Convertible goals can be recessed for soccer or brought into the field of play for hockey (with glass added to close off the rink end walls). The MAC is situated as one of three courts in an otherwise hardwood gym on the center’s second level.
Alabama map and county marriage collection
Starlocalmedia.com – May 8
The University of Alabama has an online map archive as well as maps outside the state. You can access it at http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/. The county marriage records of Alabama counties are presently about half-complete. More will be available for searching as they are digitized. The collection includes indexed images, records without images, and images that can be browsed but do not have searchable indexes. All are of course alphabetical by county, volume and date. The downside of the FamilySearch.org collection of marriage records is that when complete, only about 84 percent will be digitized and indexed. https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1743384.
Muscle Shoals student given Heart of Houston award
Florence Times Daily – May 8
Greer Underwood sat in the middle seat of the front row of the bleachers at Muscle Shoals Middle School gymnasium. … Underwood was honored Thursday as the Heart of Houston award winner. The award is given by the Jeremiah Castille Foundation to one middle school student in Alabama who defies the odds and perseveres through adversity. She exemplifies that, her family, principal and school counselor say. The Jeremiah Castille Foundation board thought she stood out against her peers so much so the board did not even have to vote before picking Underwood as this year’s honoree. “It’s just my daily life,” she said. . . . The Heart of Houston award is named for Houston Trailkill. Now a University of Alabama student, Trailkill was in eighth grade when his family’s house was destroyed by a fire. The family lost all possessions, and the one Trailkill wanted back the most was a Bible that Castille autographed years earlier after speaking to Trailkill’s church group in Cullman. Castille replaced Trailkill’s Bible with a new one with a fresh autograph, and Castille named the award in his honor after seeing Trailkill’s commitment to his faith and character in dealing with the traumatic fire. Each year an Alabama middle school student is selected to carry on Trailkill’s legacy.
First nonstop flight from DFW to Beijing takes off
KENS 5 (San Antonio) – May 7
Thursday marks a historic day for American Airlines and the North Texas region. For the first time, a plane is in the air — flying from Dallas-Fort Worth to Beijing, China non-stop. The new link between China and Texas had passengers excited at DFW Airport. There was a little taste of Chinese culture in Terminal D to kick it all off. It was the third new non-stop flight to China in the last year, and perhaps the most exciting part is the business opportunities it opens up. . . . “It’s amazing because for two years I have to transfer to Beijing, three flights. Right now two stops and directly to Beijing,” said Yudongun Zhao, a junior at the University of Alabama who’s from Beijing.