Twenty-four renovated research greenhouses operated by the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at UNL will be dedicated at 11 a.m. Nov. 10 on the north side of the East Campus.
Darrell Nelson, dean and director of the Agricultural Research Division in IANR, will preside at the dedication. Paul Read, head of the Department of Horticulture, will describe the importance of the "near state-of-the-art" greenhouses which will enable IANR scientists to conduct plant research on the cutting edge.
The original covering of the research greenhouses had deteriorated to the point that transmission of light was reduced by more than 75 percent, hardly suitable for growing plants, Read said. The new covering, selected for longevity, durability and clarity, features tempered glass on the roof and sidewalls of 16 millimeter-finned acrylic, which allows for a dead air space for insulation.
Around the perimeter of each greenhouse, a 16-inch baseboard with two inches of insulation was installed to reflect heat from the heating system. Before this was installed, heat went right through the side panels to the outside. After a snowstorm, for example, the snow melted several feet from the greenhouse due to loss of heat. After renovation, snow remains around the base of the greenhouses.
While being renovated, up-to-date computer controls for temperature were installed. Conditions in the greenhouse now are monitored 24 hours a day at a central location or from remote locations by computer-telephone connections.
Funds for the $2.1 million renovation were provided by the Nebraska Legislature, the State Energy Fund, IANR and the agronomy, horticulture and plant pathology departments, which operate the greenhouses. Entomology greenhouses were renovated earlier.
A tree planted near the greenhouses will be designated to recognize
efforts by the Agriculture Builders of Nebraska, Inc. (ABN), in securing
support for the renovation. There will be guided tours of the
greenhouses. The dedication is open to the public.
By David Ochsner, Scarlet Editor
The UNL College of Architecture is fast finding itself on the forefront of the free trade issue as it takes the lead on the NAFTA Architectural Education Consortium. The consortium is a new exchange program that links six schools from three countries in an effort to facilitate unrestricted trade and mobility in all sectors of the architecture profession.
The consortium, made possible by a $306,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), is yet another step on the globalization of the architecture curriculum at UNL. The grant funds are divided equally between the three participating countries, with UNL receiving $102,000 of the FIPSE award.
Cecil Steward, dean of the College of Architecture, said he learned of FIPSE's interest in free trade issues during his years of leadership with the American Institute of Architects. Steward was on an AIA tri-national committee charged to align license reciprocity with the concept of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"There have been incredible obstacles in the past," said Steward, who cited one American architect who was awarded a project in Canada, but once he took his blueprints to that country he was taxed on the value of the building he had designed.
Steward said AIA's early involvement with the free trade issue preceded the NAFTA agreement, and helped foster the new NAFTA Architectural Education Consortium, known as NAEC.
The consortium consists of architecture programs from six schools: UNL and Howard University in the United States: the University of Toronto and University of Montreal in Canada; and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nuevo Leon in Mexico.
UNL's College of Architecture has been designated the lead institution of the consortium, which will oversee exchanges of eight students from each school during the second and third years of the three-year program. The first year of the program, now in progress, is used for planning.
"In addition to the exchanges, we also will examine and evaluate curricula at the six schools as well as the architecture profession in each country," said Steward. "Both professionally and culturally this puts these architecture programs and their students on the forefront of a new era in international trade.
Representatives from the six participating schools will meet later
this year at UNL to select students for the program. Steward and Sharon
Kuska, associate professor of architecture, will oversee the program at
UNL.
By Kim Hachiya, News & Information
A task force charged with reviewing the values of the UNL campus community, how behavioral expectations are communicated to students and measures taken if expectations are not met has been created by Joan Leitzel, UNL interim chancellor.
"Aggressive behavior, violence, disregard for others' property and a general lack of civility are becoming increasingly common in today's society and unfortunately, these negative behaviors appear to be on the rise at UNL," Leitzel said. "We have a judicial system in place to sanction offenders of the current Student Code of Conduct. We must look closely at that system in light of the values held on our campus and review how we as educators communicate our behavioral expectations to our students."
The Task Force on Conduct Standards and Behavioral Expectations will be co-chaired by Peg Blake, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and director of the UNL Health Center, and George Tuck, professor of journalism and mass communications.
The task force will be asked to gather and analyze data on the incidence of violence at UNL so an understanding of the depth and nature of the problem can be developed. The task force will consult with various campus groups to gather experiences, expectations and recommendations and will survey other institutions to see how they are responding to the issue. The task force will then articulate what UNL's shared values and expectations are in the area of student conduct and will make recommendations as to how UNL can create a community where everyone understands that violence is unacceptable, how expectations can best be communicated to various constituencies, and what characteristics of a judicial process are most effective.
The task force has been asked to present a preliminary report by March 1, and to complete its work by the end of spring semester. The first meeting of the task force is scheduled for next week.
Those asked to serve on the task force are Blake; Tuck; Delmer Esters,
residence director; Luis Diaz-Perdomo, UNL Health Center; Judith Kriss,
Women's Center; Jan Jacobs, psychology; Leo Sartori, physics and
astronomy; Jane Close Conoley, educational psychology and associate dean
of teachers college; Larry Doerr, United Ministries in Higher Education;
Angela Beck, women's basketball coach; Amie Haggar, UNL student; and
Brent Goertzen, UNL student.
UNL, in cooperation with Colorado State University, has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to assess how climate change may influence land uses and important ecosystems in the Great Plains.
Unlike most earlier studies of global climate change, the three-year project will try to sort out how agricultural and other large land-using activities are likely to be affected by climate change, which in turn will affect the kinds of resources available for those activities.
"Most of the research on the implications of climate change for agricultural systems has ignored the important linkage to natural ecosystems," said project manager Bill Easterling, associate professor of agricultural meteorology and director of the Great Plains Regional Center for Global Environmental Change at UNL.
"One of the missing ingredients in our understanding of how major climate changes may affect the Great Plains is the way deliberate changes in land use may affect the ways agricultural and natural ecosystems exchange greenhouse gases with the atmosphere. Changes in land use involving, say, the large-scale removal or addition of trees on individual farms could greatly affect whether the Great Plains either adds greenhouse gases to or takes them away from the atmosphere."
Easterling said a unique aspect of the research is the mixing of economics with climatology and ecology. Researchers will start by surveying land managers across the Great Plains, using an organized interview designed to obtain specific kinds of information about how land-use decisions are made to understand reasoning behind some land-use decisions. Information from the surveys will then be analyzed within regional ecological models.
"In the past, these types of analyses have treated regions the size of several states as a single unit, with little or no information about how climate change and ecosystems may interact on more localized levels," Easterling said.
"We argue that it makes more sense to start at individual enterprises - literally going down to small land holdings and talking to farmers, ranchers and local resource managers to try to understand what factors really control how land is used," he said. "We can then arrive at a more robust understanding of how the Great Plains ecosystems are affected by climate and land-use changes than is possible from running ecological models with regional information only.
"The work we are doing here is meant to connect local land use with
not only the ecology of the whole Great Plains, but also with economic
forces and environmental changes originating outside the region, in fact,
outside the country. These will also bear on how land is used across the
Great Plains," said Easterling.
While people may believe that rural families confront less family-work conflict than urban families, statistics in four Midwestern states prove otherwise, said a UNL family economic policy specialist.
According to Georgia Stevens, less than one-fourth of the children in Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota live in household with a stay-at-home parent.
People in rural areas struggle to obtain a higher quality of life both in economic and social terms, just like their more urban counterparts. As businesses employ more women in rural communities, work and family issues become increasingly important, she said.
A four-state survey, completed in 1994 by Stevens, UNL Family Scientist Herb Lingren and more than 10 extension educators throughout Nebraska, revealed that less than 10 percent of businesses surveyed has conducted any kind of formal assessment about work/family needs and issues.
Stevens strongly recommended that companies ask their employees about their needs and potential solutions in balancing work and personal life issues. Recent research indicates that work-family interference costs companies a great deal in teams of employee turnover, recruitment, productivity and absenteeism, and that providing support to families improves the companies' bottom lines.
The specialist said that some low-cost policies and benefits could greatly boost productivity. She included among those flexible work arrangements and information and referral services for dependent care. Workshops about work and family issues would cost little in view of the return in employee satisfaction, retention and productivity. Stevens suggested participation in alliances of business, citizen groups and community leaders. Groups committed to the process of addressing work and family issues can provide valuable guidance.
Other family friendly policies would include employee assistance programs for employees and their families, flexible spending accounts with pretax transfers and benefits like health and life insurance. Many businesses can benefit from evaluation of policies affecting part-time employees, she said.
For those hunting jobs and for economic developers in the four-state area, Stevens offered the following information gleaned from the Phase One study, conducted with a North Central regional Center for Rural Development grant. The survey showed that larger companies offer more support in terms of dependent care, organizational climate and economic benefits, but leave policies and job flexibility are similar to smaller ones. Subsidiaries of larger companies provide more support in those same areas and leave policies, too, but tend to be more rigid about schedules and work stations.
Companies employing a higher percentage of female employees generally offer more flexible work schedules, including opportunities to do some work at home, and more assistance with dependent care, regardless of size, she said, although the number of women on the payroll had no significant effect on leave, benefits or organizational climate.
Companies employing more professionals tended to provide more
dependent care, economic benefits and better working environments.
Businesses tended to offer more flexibility in work arrangements in cases
where the work force was younger, but a less supportive work environment
and less benefits. Employers that depended on more part-time workers
offered less generous economic benefits, Stevens reported.
Honoring the 1928 Daily Nebraskan circulation manager, the University of Nebraska announced Oct. 31 the establishment of the William H. Kearns Chair In Journalism. Funded by the William H. Kearns Foundation with a $600,000 gift to the University of Nebraska Foundation, the chair will recognize Linda Shipley, a senior tenured faculty member in the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Kearns' interest in advertising began while he was a student at the university. A Beatrice native and a 1929 NU graduate, he worked for Omaha and Chicago advertising firms before joining Ted Bates and Co. in New York in 1955. Prior to his retirement, he was the agency's executive committee chairman and director. In 1967, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus for his leadership in establishing the Nebraska Alumni Advertising Award. Kearns died in 1987.
According to Will Norton, dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, the Kearns Chair in Journalism benefits faculty and students in diverse ways.
"As well as providing a faculty stipend, the Kearns Chair funds a graduate research assistantship. The department currently has two graduate assistants, and with a third we will be able to expand our research efforts," said Norton. "The fund also provides a travel stipend for faculty and students to attend national journalism and mass communications conferences. It was Mr. Kearns's intention that the school be involved nationally in professional journalism organizations. We are grateful to Mr. Kearns for investing in journalism at UNL."
A UNL faculty member since 1984, Shipley was appointed associate dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications in 1991 and was chair of the advertising department from 1987-95.
She earned a bachelor's degree at UNL, a master's degree from the
University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of
Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the
editorial board of Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly and was a
member of the Accreditation Committee for Journalism and Mass
Communications Education from 1986-93. In 1992, the Association of
Newspaper Classified Advertising Managers named Shipley Outstanding
Educator of the Year.
What started as an idea in April of this year became a reality on Oct. 26 when Ward Sybouts and Dorothy Jo Stevens-Thompson used the new distance learning facility at Mabel Lee Hall to uplink their educational administration course to three sites across Nebraska. This first interactive class from the new distance learning classroom offered two-way audio and video linking teachers and learners.
Planning for the new facility got underway in the spring, only five months before fall classes were scheduled to start at UNL. Based on new technology, and what educators had learned by using an existing classroom in the Scott Engineering Center, the interactive classroom in Mabel Lee Hall took shape.
Sybouts, a professor in the UNL Department of Educational Administration, worked with faculty in the UNL Teacher's College and other interested staff to make recommendations based on proven teaching and learning practices for distance learning. This approach determined first what the teacher and learner needed, and then applied the audio and video technology accordingly.
Gone are the lecture hall seating and the push-to-talk microphones. In their place are moveable seating to enable small group interaction and overhead sound-sensitive microphones - one for every two students in the 30-student classroom. Added features include a computer and a desktop camera for sharing visuals and notes, operated by the instructor.
The ceiling-mounted audio system is a creative solution to a very old problem, according to Ken Johnson, UNL Telecommunications Coordinator. "By running the audio set-up through the ceiling rather than under the floor, we can accommodate a variety of student seating arrangements."
Teachers wanted, and received, more flexibility in the new classroom. In the new state-of-the-art classroom, they wear wireless microphones, rather than being tethered with audio cables. The overhead sound-sensitive microphone system is regulated by an automatic mixer that eliminates feedback. To enable both lecture and small group work, seating is movable and an overhead camera can monitor all activity.
UNL is offering two courses from the Mabel Lee classroom this semester. Sybouts and Stevens-Thompson teach Educational Administration 988 via Net 3 to sites in Chadron, North Platte and Scottsbluff. The second course, Curriculum and Instruction 834, links UNL with sites in Columbus, Grand Island, Kearney, Norfolk and North Platte.
"Net 3 is part of NEBSAT," Johnson explained. "Net 3 compressed video allows two-way audio and video interaction via satellite."
A demonstration of the new two-way interactive technology will take
place at 3:30 p.m., Nov. 9 at an open house in room 128 of Mabel Lee
Hall. A live hook-up to College Park in Grand Island and to the Panhandle
Research and Extension Center in Scottsbluff will start at 4 p.m.
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