NIH funds a trio of robots to improve health, life quality for the disabled
Fierce Medical Devices – Dec. 5
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded three awards to develop so-called ‘co-robots’ who will work cooperatively with people to further health and quality of life. This funding for the trio of projects will total about $2.2 million over the next five years and stems from the four-year-old, interagency National Robotics Initiative. The co-robot awards went to a smart walker for the elderly being developed by University of Alabama professor Xiangrong Shen; a hand-word device to help the visually impaired grasp objects from University of Arkansas professor Cang Ye; and a developmental, social robot companion and playmate for kids created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Cynthia Breazeal.
Science Business – Dec. 4
Strings in Schools marks 10 years with performance Monday
Tuscaloosa News – Dec. 4
A decade ago, former Tuscaloosa City Board of Education chairwoman Shelley Jones and University of Alabama music education instructor Anne Witt started a grass-roots effort to create a stringed instrument music program in the Tuscaloosa City Schools. After much work, they convinced more than 120 individuals and businesses to financially contribute to the program, making the Strings in Schools program a reality. The program grew from a starting class of 15 students from three middle schools to an orchestra of more than 300 students spanning both middle and high schools. Tonight, Strings in Schools will celebrate it’s 10th anniversary with a concert at UA’s Moody Music Building at 7:30 p.m. The concert is free and open to the public. Donations will be accepted. “I was so discouraged that first year,” Witt said. “The second year, we had 28 students … I was even more discouraged.
Infographic: Where America’s mass shootings happened in 2015
PBS NewsHour – Dec. 5
When a mass shooting happens, the events that follow are increasingly familiar. But what’s happening before someone pulls the trigger? Following this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, the PBS NewsHour analyzed news reports of 354 shootings where at least four people were killed or wounded to understand where and when gun violence erupts in America. Through Dec. 4, 464 people died and 1,318 people were wounded as a result of such shootings this year, according to data pulled from the Guns Are Cool subreddit group and the Mass Shooting Tracker dataset, which the group maintains through crowdsourced reporting … The Mass Shooting Tracker data, however, is not perfect. For example, Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, said some people might argue that the dataset’s threshold is overly broad. He pointed to a 2014 study from the Federal Bureau of Investigations that defined and counted mass shootings more conservatively but still showed a rise in such violence in the last decade.
San Bernardino marks 355th mass shooting in U.S.
Celeb Café – Dec. 5
That sobering statistic from the University of Alabama Department of Criminal Justice was again brought to the forefront Wednesday, when a couple killed at least 14 people in San Bernardino, California – the deadliest mass shooting in the USA since the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, three years ago. As described in the article “The Mission-Oriented Shooter: A New Type of Mass Killer”, a mission-oriented shooter is a person whose mission is to kill as many people as possible, or to achieve maximum lethality. The U.S. has seen 355 mass shootings so far in 2015, according to ShootingTracker.com, which tracks deaths by guns in America. Suddenly, the little-noticed crime in Georgia became the second mass shooting in a single day – and the third since Robert L. Dear opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic last week in Colorado Springs, Colo.
WTTE-Fox (Columbus, Ohio and WZTV-Fox, Nashville, Tenn.) (same story) – Dec. 4
KDBC-CBS (El Paso, Texas) – Dec. 4
Fact Checker: Obama’s inconsistent claim on ‘frequency’ of mass shootings
Syracuse.com – Dec. 4
“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently.” –President Obama, interview with CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, Dec. 2, 2015 … Readers requested us to fact-check Obama’s broad statement at the Dec. 1 Paris news conference, that “mass shootings just [don’t] happen in other countries.” Critics pushed back on that comment immediately, noting that Paris – where Obama was speaking – had just experienced a mass shooting. The White House also pointed to research by University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford, who declared mass shootings the “dark side of American exceptionalism.” The paper is not yet published officially, but his findings have been covered widely in the news and has been used to support Obama’s argument. Lankford ran statistical analyses of the total number of public mass shooters per country from 1966 to 2012 in 171 countries, and controlled for the national population size.
Cynthia Tucker: Easy access to assault weapons is still gospel on the right
Wisconsin State Journal – Dec. 4
Did Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, suspects in the San Bernardino massacre, just hand the GOP nomination to Donald Trump? Will his poll numbers soar into the stratosphere now that Muslims with foreign-sounding names have been identified as the shooters who killed 14 people and wounded countless others? Even before Trump came along with propane tanks of bigoted rhetoric, Islamophobia had been burning through the cultural landscape … According to University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford, we account for less than 5 percent of the world’s population but 31 percent of its mass shootings. From his study of other countries, he has concluded that easy access to guns is a prominent factor.
CynthiaTucker.com – Dec. 4
OrovilleMR (Calif.) – Dec. 4
Troy Record – Dec. 4
Montgomery Advertiser – Dec. 4
UA Criminal Justice Professor talks about Mass Shootings
KMOX-AM, Radio (St. Louis, Mo.) (Live radio call in show) – Dec. 4
UA Criminal Justice Professor, Adam Lankford, answered questions on a radio call-in show on KMOX-AM radio.
Easy holiday gifts for kids to make
Fox 6 (Birmingham) – Dec. 7
In today’s Mommy Minute segment we are talking about some great ideas that your children can make for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, anyone in your family. These are very inexpensive and easy to make. Amy Walker from the Parenting Assistance Line is here to talk about these great ideas.
What to do if you are caught in a mass shooting
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – Dec. 6
Mass shootings are unpredictable, so it’s important to know the steps to keep both you and the people around you safe. UA Communications Professor Dr. Darrin Griffin says professors should have active-shooter training included in their course syllabus and should practice with their students in the classroom. Griffin says the three words – run, hide, fight – could keep you safe if you ever encounter an active shooter.
UA student art featured at Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – Dec. 4
This week’s First Friday featured art from a group of University of Alabama students called creative “co-op”. This student organization has members of all levels majors and ages. The collection has a wide variety of paintings, pictures and ceramics that are all for sale.
UA Gymnastics team holds Christmas Party for Rise Students
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – Dec. 4
The Alabama Gymnastics team hosted their annual holiday celebration for the children of the Stallings Rise Center on Friday afternoon. The team opened up their practice area to let about 100 energetic children play around.
Bryant-Denny Stadium is most Instgramed place in Alabama
WSFA-NBC (Montgomery) – Dec. 5
Bryant-Denny Stadium is the most Instagrammed place in Alabama. The list of most Instagrammed places in the U.S. was produced by Time Magazine’s website. University of Alabama professor, Dr. Chandra Clark says many fans want to take their photo or get video at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
Fox 6 (Birmingham) – Dec. 4
It’s Time to Stop Saying that JFK Inherited the Bay of Pigs Operation from Ike
History News Network – Dec. 7
On April 17, 1961, over 1400 armed Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in the United States-supported effort to spark the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s regime. The invasion was an infamous disaster: the Cuban government, forewarned, defended with a force of more than 20,000, and 1202 of the exiles were captured and 114 killed in action … The Kennedy Library’s account does not differ from those offered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in A Thousand Days and Theodore Sorensen in Kennedy, both books published in 1965. More recently, Howard Jones of the University of Alabama published The Bay of Pigs (2008) in the Oxford University Press series “Pivotal Moments in American History.”
THE PORT RAIL: When we all cherry-pick, where’s truth?
Tuscaloosa News – Dec. 6
We all cherry-pick, which is the art or craft of selecting some elements and omitting others. Historians do it all the time. Politicians are mature cherry-pickers. Polemicists are among the best. Dictators, radicals and other extremists also practice the craft to the point of criminality. Even theologians cherry-pick, nibbling here and there in Scripture, taking whole bites sometimes, picking out those areas they like and omitting those that can prove embarrassing or contradict their point of view. We call professional cherry-pickers lawyers. They pick and choose what supports their case and omit, omit, omit what lies on the other side of the equation. They even have a name for it: case law. (Larry Clayton is a retired University of Alabama history professor. Readers can email him at larryclayton7@gmail.com.)
Alabama Choir School winter concert
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – Dec. 7
You can hear the Alabama Choir School during its annual winter concerts this week. The performances will feature a variety of seasonal pieces including traditional holiday carols, spirituals and songs from around the world, contemporary and popular. Also featured will be selections from the classical repertory, both sacred and secular. Doff Procter is the artistic director. Conductor and administrator Hilen Powell is new to the staff this year. The Young Singers and the Children’s Chorus, the Concert Choir, the Ambassador Choir, and also the high school Chamber Choir will all perform. The founder of the Choir School, Karen Nicolosi, will conduct the two youngest choirs. The performances are set for Friday and Saturday, Dec. 11th & 12th at 7 PM in the Moody Concert Hall on the University of Alabama campus, Tuscaloosa.