THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7,2002
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 5A
Trivia buffs to compete at annual college bowl
By Mathn Dayani
ndayani@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
KU students longing for a bowl game won't have to wait until next football season.
The College Bowl, a one-day team trivia challenge hosted by Student Union Activities, is only a few weeks away, but the deadline to enter a team is 5 p.m. tomorrow.
Dawn Shew, program advisor for SUA, said the trivia questions covered a range of subjects, from James Bond to social theorist Friedrich Engles. She said the bowl would be an opportunity for trivia buffs to show their skills.
"It's pretty interesting to watch," Shew said. "You really do not have to be a rocket scientist to win this game."
But a rocket scientist wouldn't hurt a team either, Shew said. She said teams that wanted to be competitive should have students representing diverse educational backgrounds.
Jeff McAdams competed in last year's bowl and said his team had been composed of students who majored in history, biology, political science and math. Despite an early setback, McAdams' team won the tournament.
"We lost the first match and pretty much thought we were goners," said McAdams, Lawrence resident. "We happened to win from there on out. We had a lot of close games and there were some pretty good teams."
Shew said this year's bowl would give
teams more opportunities to compete than last year's tournament. She said the bowl would be in round-robin format, similar to preliminary rounds in World Cup soccer. Each team would be placed in a four-team division and play every opponent in its division. The winner of each of the tournament's eight divisions would advance to elimination rounds.
Ryan Doherty, coordinator for the bowl, said the teams picked up their intensity levels during the tournament's elimination rounds.
"Towards the end of the day, it gets very exciting," said Doherty, Lee's Summit, Mo., sophomore. "Some of the people who participate are unbelievable. The thought and the knowledge they display is just amazing."
Shew said members of the winning team would get a free T-shirt and the opportunity to travel to a regional College Bowl competition in a few months at a site to be announced. Last year's regional tournament was in St. Louis.
Each team consists of five members, who all have to be enrolled in three or more credit hours and have at least a 2.0 grade point average. No more than one graduate student may compete on a team. Registration is $30 for each team. The tournament will go from 8 a.m. to about 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, at several rooms in the Kansas Union. For more information, call SUA at 864-3477.
—Edited by Adam Pracht
Center's screen saver provides predictions about the Earth
By Justin Henning
jhenning@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
One University program has spent two years developing a screen saver, which computes, maps and provides information of where the Earth's plants and animals have lived, currently live and could one day live.
The Informatics Biodiversity Center at the University of Kansas developed this screen saver, called Lifemapper.
Lifemapper uses an artificial intelligence algorithm, called GARP for short. The Genetic ___
SCIENCE
examines and compares similarities between a species and the area and climate it is found in. It can then predict the likelihood of finding a specific plant or animal in an area.
This technological feat is called predictive modeling, and has helped to fill in the gaps in a museum's collection and data. Museum collections and data are subject to human error because they rely on observational data.
"Observational data, like when people go out and look for birds, is not done in a grid pattern," said Jim Beach, the National History Museum's director for informatics.
"So the data is very spotty."
That's where the GARP program comes in. By taking all of the "spotty" data and comparing them to the environmental conditions in which the species is found, it can predict the likelihood of the species showing up with frequency in that area.
One example is the Spotted Snakehead fish. Earlier in the summer, this fish, native to Asia, was seen on the southern coast of the United States. The species is also called the "frankenfish" because of its mouthful of teeth and ability to live out of water for three days. GARP came up with a model map of where it could show up next.
Now, the museum has just been awarded a 5-year $3 million grant to continue the development of the program. There are plans to make the program more user friendly and to incorporate more data from the world's ecosystem.
"We have these points, which represent the known data points, for a certain species, and we have these global data coverages that describe the environment at that particular point," said Jim Beach.
The species points are more specifically located in other collections at other museums worldwide, which all have their species databases linked through another computer
"This will help researchers address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology."
William Michener
director of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network at the University of New Mexico
program. The environmental data consist of layers that come from specific data. Each layer is thought of as one environmental occurrence, such as temperature, rainfall and elevation. It creates a mathematical description of where a species should appear and where it's known to appear.
"This will help researchers address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology," said William Michener, director of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network at the University of New Mexico in a press release, "Increasingly, these issues require efficient, automated access to diverse and widespread data."
The screen saver can be download- edat http://beta.lifemapper.org.
Edited by Chris Wintering
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