Ag and Life Sciences ONLINE

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COLLEGE NEWS



- Orientation for State Fair exhibit volunteers



- Visiting Professor Program looking for presenters



- New requests for proposals on the Web



- Ambrosia for sale



- Change in Leopold Center Conference public

session



- Deadlines & Reminders



COMMUNICATIONS KIOSK



- Web report contradicts design concepts



INFOGRAZING



- Virtual university goes international



EXTERNAL VOICES



- A Father's Day tribute to a farmer



MARGINALIA



- Virtually immortal







C O L L E G E N E W S







ORIENTATION FOR STATE FAIR

EXHIBIT VOLUNTEERS



Volunteers for the college's

exhibit at the Iowa State Fair are invited for refreshments and

an orientation session 8:30-9:30 a.m. July 29 in 15 Curtiss Hall.

General announcements will be made at 9 a.m. The orientation will

include a chance to see the forestry department's stream table

in action. It will be set up on the west side of Curtiss. Admission

and parking tickets will be distributed. Tickets will be delivered

to volunteers unable to attend. Contact: Susan Anderson, 4-0705.







VISITING PROFESSOR PROGRAM LOOKING FOR PRESENTERS



The college's recruitment committee is looking for faculty members

to be presenters in this year's Visiting Professor Program, which

provides professors to high school classes. Participants are limited

to three high school visits a year to ensure that the time commitment

is not excessive. The committee wants to expand participation

from last year's 60 topics offered by 45 college faculty members.

For more information: Mike Gaul, 4-5624, mikegaul@iastate.edu.

Sign up with Norma Hensley, 4-6614, nhensley@iastate.edu.



NEW REQUESTS FOR PROPOSALS ON THE WEB



Proposals are being sought for the Small Business Innovation Research

(SBIR) Program and the United States--Israel Binational Agricultural

R&D (BARD) Fund. The deadline for the SBIR program is Sept.

4 and Sept. 1 for the BARD Fund. More information is available

from the college's Requests for Proposals page at: http://www.ag.iastate.edu/iaexp/rfp/





AMBROSIA FOR SALE



The Graduate Organization in Agricultural Education is growing

sweet corn on the Ag 450 farm and selling it to help send members

to conferences. The corn variety is Ambrosia, also known as Peaches

and Cream. Harvest begins the first week of August. The corn is

selling for $2 a dozen. Place orders as soon as possible by calling

Cheryl Abrams at 4-5872.



CHANGE IN LEOPOLD CENTER CONFERENCE

PUBLIC SESSION



Nina Leopold Bradley, daughter of Aldo Leopold,

will be unable to appear at a July 30 Leopold Center annual conference

session. Appearing for her will be Buddy Huffaker, an ecologist

with the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wis. Huffaker, who

knows and works with the Leopold family, will talk on Bradley's

original topic: "Family memories of Aldo Leopold." The

7:15 p.m. session is titled "An evening reflecting on the

land" and will include Iowa farmer and poet Michael Carey.

It will be in Scheman's Benton Auditorium. The event is free and

open to the public.





DEADLINES & REMINDERS



July 30-31: Leopold Center Tenth Anniversary Conference, 4-3711



Aug. 7-17: Iowa State Fair



Aug. 21: College of Agriculture faculty-staff retreat on distance

learning







C O M M U N I C A T I O N S K I O S K









WEB REPORT CONTRADICTS DESIGN CONCEPTS



An easy-to-use Web site restricts color

to links, presents a lot of text to make links more informative

and minimizes white space, according to the new report "Web

Site Usability: A Designer's Guide." It is based on usability

tests by more than 50 people as they searched for information

on nine popular Web sites. The study was conducted by User Interface

Engineering, a research and consulting firm. More results and

report ordering information are available at: http://www.uie.com.











I N F O G R A Z I N G







VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY GOES INTERNATIONAL



The Western Governors University, a so-called

"virtual" university that plans to begin offering courses

electronically next year, reports "explosive" interest

from students in foreign countries and has announced collaborations

with institutions in Great Britain, Canada and Japan. "The

Western Governors University is essential to a strong international

economy," says a WGU spokeswoman, "because it provides

an unprecedented access to higher education that students in remote

locations just haven't had." From the July 3, 1997 Chronicle

of Higher Education.









E X T E R N A L V O I C E S







A FATHER'S DAY TRIBUTE TO A FARMER



"My old man's idea of a good time, especially in the summer,

was to announce at supper that we should go for a drive. Then

we would all get in the car and drive up and down gravel roads

at about 25 mph looking at other farms ... If a farm was well-kept

and the beans were hoed and the buildings painted, my father ...

would say: "He's a good farmer." If not we would pass

the offending farm in silence and pity. This gave my father no

end of satisfaction. ... My father was a funny, proud man. He

was proud of the fact he'd graduated from college. ... He believed

in his wife and children, God, Iowa State University, Republicans,

Fords and the Chicago Cubs, more or less in that order."

From a Father's Day column in the June 15, 1997 Arizona Republic

by Clay Thompson.







M A R G I N A L I A







VIRTUALLY IMMORTAL



Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University envision a huge multimedia

database that could store minute-by-minute details of your waking

life, all packed on a hard disk the size of a quarter. "Your

great-great-grandchildren will be able to ask your database about

your life and times," says Dr. Raj Reddy, dean of the School

of Computer Science. As hard-drive prices plummet, "storing

all your visual experiences during your 5,840 waking hours per

year, including all your creative expressions, will soon cost

less than $1,000," says the director of CMU's new Human Computer

Interaction Institute, who predicts that in about 15 years, storage

costs will fall to about $50 for 100 years of life.