U. Iowa Lab Gets $1M Grant To Fight Terrorism
(U-WIRE) IOWA CITY, Iowa – The University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory has received a $1 million grant to help become the idwest’s leading laboratory in the national effort to prevent bioterrorism, UI President Mary Sue Coleman said onday.
A special appropriation from Congress by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) spearheaded the funding, which Congress approved in late December 2001.
“We proposed to be the hub of the Midwest for monitoring bioterrorism threats,” Coleman said. “We would be working closely with the Centers for Disease Control in order to coordinate that.”
Although still in the planning stages, some of the money is expected to go toward building a new Hygienic Lab, which would then coordinate its research with the national network.
The lab, the state’s public health facility, plans to concentrate on preventing bioterrorism while continuing its daily research duties.
In the aftermath of the national bioterrorism scare, the lab received attention because it housed small, non-active samples of anthrax. Although the samples are non-lethal and present no threat to the public, the lab has been under increased security since then.
Public Safety officers guard the building’s three exits, and employees entering or exiting the building must show proper identification, regardless of whether they work in the lab. Six hundred people work in the building.
A separate building for the laboratory would make securing the facility easier, said Steve Parrott, the director of University Relations.
“It’s become much more costly to guard,” he said. “The money would be a big help.”
Michael Birmingham, a scientist who has worked at the lab for 10 years, agreed that “streamlining security would really help.”
“People are constantly moving through, collecting samples and doing research. It would help not having to check in all the time,” he said.
Created in 1904, the lab tests anything from water samples to suspected anthrax spores while working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency and state organizations. Because of the age of the current facility, a converted tuberculosis hospital, some employees say a new location would make their jobs easier.
“Working in this building isn’t conducive to the lab work that goes on inside,” Birmingham said. “Anytime you want to update a lab section or do anything, you have to deal with an old building that wasn’t designed to hold what it’s holding.”
House Stabilizes Low Interest Rates for Student Loans
(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES – While the current economic slump has caused the University of California Regents to consider raising student fees, the federal government took an important step in ensuring higher education remains affordable for future students.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that aims to keep interest rates low on federally granted student loans. The bill, which was passed unanimously by the Senate in December, extends the current formula for calculating interest rates on all federal student loans to 2006.
Today the interest rate stands at 5.9 percent – the lowest in history. But in 2006, the new bill will fix rates at 6.8 percent until 2012.
It now awaits President Bush’s signature.
“It was very hard,” said Bob Cochran, press secretary for Representative Bill McKeon, (R-Calif.), one of the bill’s authors. “We got unanimous support at the end of the day, but a lot occurred. (There were) negotiations with student groups, the lending community and higher education groups in general, like financial aid administrators.”
According to Ellynne Bannon, CALPIRG’s national advocate for higher education, who helped write the bill, a typical student will save more than $600 over the life of his loan.
The bill amends the 1998 Higher Education Reauthorization compromise, which set the current formula for interest rates on student loans.
Though interest rates are at an all-time low, based on reports from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, rates are expected to rise as the economy improves.
“Now it’s a fairly good time to be getting loans,” said Merriah Fairchild, a CALPIRG advocate for higher education in California. “It’s an unusual atmosphere to have interest so low, and we know it won’t last.”
An interest rate of 6.8 percent would be a good deal in 2006, Bannon said.
But if interest rates remain too low, lenders wouldn’t make enough money to continue in the program, Cochran said.
“Lenders are in there to make money,” he said. “There is limited profit, but they’re still there to make money.”
“There was concern at the time that if you had lenders dropping out of the program, then just the cream-of-the-crop kids – those at Stanford, UCLA and MIT – would get loans,” Cochran said. “We wanted to keep them in there to be able to serve all students.”
According to the UCLA Financial Aid Office, 42 percent of all students at UCLA received federal loans last year.
In a typical financial aid package, loans account for almost 24 percent of the money received. The average debt for UCLA students after four years of school is more than $16,000.
Kids Outperform College Students in Research Study
(U-WIRE) COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio State University students have a more difficult time answering simple questions than third- and fifth-graders according to a study published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
OSU researchers discovered children scored higher than adults when asked simple questions about the senses.
“The adults were answering them in metaphorical terms or in terms of what they thought we wanted to hear,” said Gerald Winer, professor of psychology.
Winer explained the study’s findings using Grice’s Theory of Language, which states people respond to intended meaning and not the literal meaning of language.
Participants for the study were 80 third-graders and 63 fifth-graders who attended a public elementary school in an urban neighborhood and 78 OSU undergraduate students fulfilling a research participation requirement for a psychology 100 class.
Researchers divided the study into two phases. In the first, the study looked at age differences of participants and their responses to the questions.
Each participant was asked five of the same test questions: Do you see with your fingers, touch with your eyes, hear with your eyes, see with your ears and smell with your ears?
Researchers asked these questions in three different conditions, Winer said.
The first time through, the questions were asked alone. In the second condition, the questions were followed by factual questions such as “Who was the first president of the United States? George Washington or Ronald Reagan?” In the third condition, researchers embedded the five main test questions in a series of questions that would elicit metaphorical interpretations.
The first phase of this study showed college students scored significantly lower than the third-graders and slightly lower than the fifth-graders.
During the second phase of the study, researchers divided the college students into two groups. One group was given the questions and instructed to answer them. Researchers told the other group before administering the questions the intent of the study was to compare its responses to those of the elementary school students, Winer said.
The college students who were told the study was focusing on the children’s responses answered the questions more literally than the college students who were just given the questions.
Colleges Use Virtual Site Tours
(U-WIRE) KINGSTON, R.I. – High school senior Mark Orsi visited the University of Rhode Island in addition to three other New England universities this week without leaving his North Kingston house. He even got to wear sweat pants and eat a bowl of ice cream as he viewed the new dorms in Freshman Village. Orsi, along with other prospective students, is taking advantage of campus tours via the Web.
After more than a year of collaborative efforts, URI has developed a virtual tour that can be viewed by prospective students without the inconvenience of taking a campus trip.
“The virtual tour is suppose to be supplementary to an actual tour; a student in New Jersey can look at different places at the university and want to come visit,” said Lisa Chen, URI’s Webmaster.
A simple view of the quad took site creators hours to develop. “We had to take a picture every five degrees to create panoramic view, it took many hours,” Chen said.
There are even virtual tour guides who provide testimony regarding the University of Rhode Island. The tour guides are the stars of their own video clips.
Although a “hit counter” has not been added to the site yet, Chen said that more than 3500 students visited the site last month.