Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

Humanities grant funds teacher education
The Center for the Humanities will use a $25,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to fund a joint project with the Madison Metropolitan School District. Steven Nadler, professor of philosophy and center director, says the “Expanding the Humanities” workshops will provide a forum to discuss the content of the high school humanities curriculum, with an emphasis on subjects not widely represented in high school courses.

“This is a truly collaborative initiative,” Nadler says. “The project brings scholars and teachers together to read and explore new material in the humanities. The long-term result of these intensive workshops should be a far richer classroom experience for the teachers and their students and a greater sense among UW humanities faculty of how to make their specialized research more accessible and relevant to a wider public.”

The program will sponsor three interdisciplinary workshops in the humanities for the academic year 2000-01. UW–Madison faculty and Madison high school teachers will participate in reading and discussion groups in three broad areas: philosophy: ideas and values; art, culture and society; and gender, race and ethnicity.

“These are not lectures or UW faculty-led seminars, but discussion groups with assigned readings that will provide opportunities for UW faculty and MMSD teachers to learn together,” Nadler says.

New eMedia Center facilitates panoramic visuals
A new campus center will enable faculty, staff and students universitywide to conduct collaborative computer visualizations in a large-scale virtual-reality environment.

The eMedia Center Visualization Lab, based in the Engineering Research Building on the College of Engineering campus, features a 5-foot-8-inch by 18-foot-1-inch panoramic screen driven by three Hewlett-Packard UNIX J5600 computers with dual processors.

The center’s visualization applications include:

• Static, dynamic and immersive computer-aided design visualization
• Static and dynamic data visualization from simulations and experiments
• Interactive visualization of molecular models
• Scene visualizations and animations
• Visualization, including movable “mannequins,” for human factors studies

For information, or to schedule a demonstration of the center’s capabilities, contact associate director Mike Redmond, 263-1584; redmond@emedia.engr.wisc.edu.

To protect water quality, understand farmer behavior
A recent university study finds that most Wisconsin farmers over-apply nitrogen and phosphorus to their corn fields although applying the correct amount would save them money and reduce harm to surface and ground water.

The study’s author believes those results point to the need to change the development of agricultural best management practices – such as nutrient crediting – meant to protect the environment.