wednesday, august 27, 2003
news
the university daily kansan 7
7A
TRANSMITTERS/Devices give instructors instant feedback from class
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1A
the Spring 2003 semester.
The transmitters work by sending a signal to a receiver. One receiver can work for about 25 transmitters, so receivers are scattered throughout the classroom.
Shawl began using the transmitters because the technology was available and he thought it would help his students to learn.
"It makes an improvement in learning because it gets students involved," Shawl said. "They need to respond and can't just sit there."
here:
Before he used the transmitters, Shawl had students interact the old-fashioned way — by raising their hands.
Students can purchase the transmitters from local bookstores for $20 to $50. Each transmitter has an identification number that students e-mail along with their student information to their instructors. The instructors then put that information into the computer program used to run the receiver. Once the information has been entered, each student is associated with their individual transmitter and instructors can record individual scores for students.
tons students push to choose among possible answers on quizzes or tests. There is a sixth button on the receiver that allows students to go to previous questions. The information can then be projected onto a screen to allow students and instructors to see what answer was chosen.
individual scores not scored
The transmitters have five but
This gives instructors an opportunity to see immediately if students understand the question they are asked. Instructors then know if a concept is understood or if more class time should be devoted to it.
Diane Prine, Wichita sophomore and astronomy student.
said she thought the transmitters would promote much more interaction in class.
action in class. "At least you'll get some feedback." Princ said.
Shawl said the physics department had enough receivers to install them in another classroom in Malott Hall, located south of Budig Hall. He said the receivers would be installed soon and that other instructors were looking forward to using the transmitters in the spring.
The extra receivers will go into room 2074 Malott Hall.
Edited by Dave Nobles
Investigators counted the
"Smoking is, if you'll recall, a legal activity." he said when asked what the MPAA was currently doing to reduce teen smoking. "That being said, he'll be reading carefully the letter and the study it references."
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The letter to Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti did not offer any specific steps.
ing up the habit. In a letter yesterday, the attorneys cited a June study from Dartmouth Medical School that said children who watched movies in which actors smoke heavily were three times more likely to smoke themselves than those exposed to less smoking on-screen.
States to MPAA: Curb the smoke
smoking. MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor said Valenti had received the letter and would respond appropriately.
LOS ANGELES (AP) Attorneys general from 24 states are asking the film industry to reduce the amount of smoking in films to prevent teens from taking up the habit.
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Brendan McCormick, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, said the major tobacco companies agreed in the nationwide settlement signed in 1998 not to pay for product placement or to grant permission to films that want to feature their cigarettes. He declined to comment on the letter.
The Dartmouth study involved 2,603 children who were between 10 and 14 at the start of the study in 1999 and had never smoked when they were recruited. They were asked at the beginning of the study which movies they had seen from a list of 50 movies released between 1988 and 1999.
The Associated Press
"We're not saying any law has been broken," said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, one of the officials who signed the letter. "We're just asking out of a concern for the health of our kids that the industry do what it can to ensure that kids don't start smoking."
number of times smoking was depicted and determined how many smoking incidents each of the adolescents had seen. Exposure was categorized into four groups, with the lowest level involving between zero and 531 occurrences of smoking and the highest involving between 1,665 and 5,308 incidents.
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Twenty-two of those exposed to the least on-screen smoking took up the habit, compared with 107 in the highest exposure group,a fivefold difference. However,after taking into account factors known to be linked with starting smoking, such as rebelliousness,the effect was reduced to a threefold difference.
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Citizens lucky shuttle pieces missed
The Associated Press
After the shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas, news reports were filled with startling images and descriptions of its debris strewn over a wide area.
debris strewn over a Nearly 84,000 pieces of debris, weighing a total of nearly 85,000 pounds, were found over more than 1 million acres in Texas and Louisiana.
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Even NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, testifying before a Senate committee in May, called it "amazing."
You couldn't help but think:
Isn't it a miracle that the falling objects didn't seriously hurt anybody?
it amazing.
The Columbia Accident Inves tigation Board members wanted to find out just how amazing, so they ordered a study. Their finding: The chance of at least one person on the ground being seriously hurt by the falling debris was 9 percent to 24 percent.
The board said the study considered factors like where the
15. 9 percent. The study itself was not released and the researchers were not named. But Bill Ailor of The Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, Calif., who studies debris from re-entering spacecraft, said the conclusion made sense to him.
surpised the work Robert Culp, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who also studies space debris, said he considered the estimate much too high.
"To me it seems like a reasonable number," he said. "Maybe it could be a little lower. I would be surprised if it was much higher."
debris fell, the total weight of all the recovered objects and census figures for the area where shuttle fragments were found.
"The history of U.S. space flight has a flawless public safety record... It is unlikely that U.S.
The area is sparsely populated, with an average of about 85 people per square mile, the board said. It's not clear how many people were outdoors at the time, and the report noted that relatively few pieces of recovered debris posed a threat to people indoors.
The study also concludes that if a similar shuttle breakup occurred over a densely populated area like Houston, "the most likely outcome would be one or two ground casualties."
Ailor and Culp said that estimate sounded reasonable.
space flights will produce many if any, public injuries in the coming years," the Columbia report said.
But it noted that the Columbia disaster shows that a shuttle breakup has the potential to harm people on the ground. NASA had not made any documented effort to assess the public risk from shuttle re-entry before the Columbia accident, but it is now working on a national policy for protecting public safety during all operations that involve space vehicles, according to the investigation board.
NASA should be legally responsible for public safety, the accident report says, "during all phases of shuttle operations, including re-entry."
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The Associated Press
Iraq death toll surpasses combat deaths by two
ST.LOUIS (AP) — On a day when the postwar U.S. death toll climbed past the number killed in major combat, President Bush pledged "no retreat" in the war on terrorism and defended his actions in Iraq amid calls for more international help.
"We're on the offensive against terror, and we will stay on the offensive against terror," Bush told about 6,000 people Tuesday
"We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war: We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them ... before they hit more of
our cities and kill more of our citizens."
In Afghanistan, U.S.-led troops are meeting with an increasingly well-organized Taliban fighters. Rising violence between the Israelis and Palestinians has rocked the U.S.-brokered road map for peace. In Iraq, reconstruction work has been dealt a major setback by the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Bush faces tenuous situations on several fronts.
A grim milestone was reached Tuesday when the U.S. death toll in postwar Iraq surpassed the number killed during major combat. When Bush declared aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1 that major combat operations had ended, the death toll was 138. Since then, 140 have died, including two on Tuesday.
Although no weapons of mass destruction have been found and some analysts point to loose links between Saddam and al-Qaida, Bush insisted that the United States was right to invade Iraq. He said U.S.-led forces removed a brutal dictatorship that built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction.
While the president was in St. Louis, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, was at the
White House talking about the situation in Iraq with Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
economy. Bush cited progress in Iraq: More than 8,200 tons of ammunition seized since May 1. Forty-two of the 55 most-wanted Iraqi leaders captured or killed." The more progress we make in Iraq, the more desperate the terrorists will become," he said.
In an interview with The Washington Post for Wednesday's editions, Bremer said Iraq will need "several tens of billions" of dollars from abroad to rebuild the country and revive its economy.
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