Recent graduate Sam Olson will never forget his first public relations class — not because of his grade, the projects or even the people taking the class with him, but because of the professor.

“Beth Wood truly cared about her students,” Olson said. “Rarely ever have I had a professor that is so approachable and makes herself readily available to all her students whenever they need it.”

Wood spent seven years lecturing and teaching at IU before she lost her battle with lung cancer in Nov. 2009. However, she did much more than just teach public relations.

Michael Evans, the associate dean for Undergraduate Studies at the IU School of Journalism, said Wood essentially founded the PR program in her time with the University.

On Saturday, Wood will be honored through an American Lung Association Lung Walk in Carmel, Ind. The walk will raise money for the 35 million people currently suffering from chronic lung disease in the United States. The walk, which offers both a 5-kilometer and a 1-mile option, will serve as the second of three outings to help those with chronic lung disease. The two options are offered because some participants are currently dealing with lung disease and want to participate in the event without overwhelming themselves.

“Generally, most of our participants finish the entire 3.1 miles,” said American Lung Association Special Events Manager Liz Zuercher. “Occasionally some of the folks that are doing the 1-mile route do need assistance with wheelchair assistance or something with that fashion to cross the finish line.”

While the location for the walk is in Carmel, it is held at the Monon Center, which was chosen for the walk because of its ideal location, its good relationship with the Lung Association and free parking for the participants. The park also donates the property use, allowing the Lung Association to keep its costs down, Zuecher said.

Honoring Wood is important for many of her former students.

“She made it so much more than textbook learning,” recent IU graduate Alison Sperling said. “Her real-world knowledge of PR made the class and her teaching unique to the journalism school.”

Sperling enjoyed Wood’s classes so much that she frequently recommended them to her friends who also wanted to study public relations.

Even those who had no knowledge of Wood’s reputation among journalism students still left her class in awe of her dedication to helping her students.

“She was always eager to lend a hand to whoever needed it, never giving up on anyone until the problem was solved,” Olson said. “Losing her was and still is a terrible thing, and she is going to be greatly missed by many.”

Most Indiana U. students are familiar with Bloomington’s ethnic restaurants, football games and bars. However, the Wylie House Museum shares a different story about the city that offers students a glimpse into IU’s beginnings.

One of Bloomington’s oldest structures, the Wylie House was built in 1835 at 307 E. Second St. by IU’s first president, Andrew Wylie. Home to Wylie, his wife and 10 of his 12 children, the house was passed on to Theophilus Wylie in 1859.

The building is now owned by the University and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A tour of the house, lasting about an hour, leads visitors through the historical home and into a history lesson about a time when Bloomington was still a frontier.

Jo Burgess, director of the Wylie House Museum, begins her tour near a mural covering the first-floor hallway. The painting depicts what Bloomington looked like in the days that Andrew Wylie inhabited the home. Horse-drawn carriages spotted the streets, and air conditioners and residence halls would have been considered futuristic.

Though the mural would not have been in the house during the time it was inhabited, the image gives context to the time period, Burgess said.

She pointed out a barn in the mural and said the museum purchased a 19th-century barn in Monroe County that is being relocated to the museum site.

The barn will house a new education center, she said.

“That will be a special place, and I am looking forward to that a lot,” Burgess said.

The tour begins on the first floor through a kitchen and master bedroom and continues up the stairs to more bedrooms and a balcony. A number of heirlooms and original pieces of furniture still fill the home. Some of the rooms in the house have been decorated interpretatively as the museum curators believe the rooms might have been used.

Burgess said residence halls were not built until the 20th century, and students often lived with families or professors around campus until the buildings were constructed. It is possible one of the bedrooms on the second floor was used for boarding students, she said.

Senior Michelle Bloomfield visited the museum for the first time Saturday. She said the experience taught her about the history of the University and the city where she has lived for the last three years.

“I thought the museum was really interesting and authentic,” she said. “All of the original pieces of furniture enriched my experience. Getting to see the history of Indiana University was also really cool.”

Bloomfield said she would recommend the museum to her friends as a short but fun way to spend an afternoon in Bloomington.

Burgess also encourages students and community members to visit the historical house.

“We have worked really hard in the last 12 years to revitalize the house, and our new barn is really special,” she said.

Artificial intelligence poker bots, created by undergraduate students from universities across Indiana, will battle for the top spot in Indiana U.’s first Poker Programming Contest.

The competition began May 22 and will accept entries until Aug. 14, said sophomore Eric Jiang, who planned the event.

Contestants can find information, announcements and rules at
http://indianapokerbot.com.

“We have every contestant write an artificial intelligence for playing poker,” he said. “Once they write it, all these poker bots will play in a tournament. That’s pretty much the big picture of how it works.”

Students from all over the state have shown interest in the contest, Jiang said, including undergraduates from IU, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Purdue University.

The idea is not totally new, Jiang said. There has been research and writing on the subject, and the University of Alberta has featured a similar competition for the past few years.

“They have graduate students doing research on it,” Jiang said. “I wanted to keep the playing field even — undergraduate students only, to keep it accessible for other people.”

Faculty advisor Gregory Rawlins, associate professor of computer science at IU, said the advantage of the tournament is that students are not required to come up with the best possible bot player, but to produce one that can be comparative to others in the same time frame.

It is unlikely that participants have previously made a poker bot to enter in the competition,

Jiang said, but they will be able to continue work on the design and enter it in later contests.

“DARPA, a research arm of the military, sponsors a project for a million bucks for a car that will drive itself across some distance out in the desert,” Rawlins said. “The first year was a complete fiasco — none of the cars completed the course. The second year, most of the cars completed, but very slowly. The third year, nearly all the cars completed and a couple of them were very fast.

“So a contest just in and of itself can have great consequences. I expect great things from the Indiana community.”

Jiang said he decided to go with poker because it is an accessible game to everyone.

“Not like chess — that’s just a really hard game for computers,” he said. “Even though poker has a lot of strategy, you can just jump in and start playing, use some commonsense rules.”

Jiang said he hopes the contest will encourage computer science students and motivate them to take on projects outside of the classroom.

“It’s really important for them to have their own interests and motivations to work on,” he said. “I hope this can provide something fun, encourage them to think creatively. Maybe win a little fame and fortune, I guess.”

Though the level Jiang is aiming for in the competition is unusual, Rawlins said he thinks the contest will spread knowledge of programming from the graduate level to the undergraduate.

“Programming knowledge has moved down to what kids know just because they have Xboxes,” he said. “The reason I agreed to be the sponsor is to give the tools that can help them make some kind of impact.”

For the first time in Indiana U.’s history 20 high school and middle school students will take on the African language of Swahili in a free four-week course that starts Monday.

The course was planned by IU’s African Language Program in collaboration with the STARTALK program. STARTALK is a grant-funded language program that wlll work with IU to attract students to lesser-taught languages. The grants are renewable every year; however, receiving one depends heavily on the success and number of students involved in the applying university’s language program.

Alwiya Omar, a Ph.D. in the African Studies Program and the Department of Linguistics, said the efforts have paid off.

This summer program is not the first time she has worked with STARTALK. Last summer, she worked with middle school students in Rochester, N.Y., where she collaborated with the program director and acted as an adviser.

The Swahili classes are formatted so there are two class sessions and a lunch hour each day. The first class will be a group lecture that lasts two hours. Then, during the lunch hour, associate instructors will facilitate conversation in Swahili with the attending students. The second class of the day will allow students to split into smaller groups to review the material learned throughout the day.

“It is a kind of immersion,” assistant instructor Abdulwahid Mazrui said. “This is not 100 percent immersion, but (the class) is going to be taught in Swahili and conversations (will be) in Swahili.”

Even though a four-week, three-credit class could seem daunting to the participants, Mazrui said no previous knowledge of the language is required to take the class.

“This is right from square one,” he said.

The intensive class will earn each participant three credit hours and two semesters’ worth of knowledge. There will also be contact between the program and its students throughout the upcoming school year. The summer instructors will visit the students once a month to maintain the participants’ knowledge and their interest in the language.

Though Omar commented on many of the attractive aspects of the class, there seems to be one positive attribute that stands above the rest.

“They don’t have to pay for anything,” Omar said. “What we need from the students is the motivation and dedication.”

When it comes to green farming, Will Allen, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow and self-described urban agriculturalist, goes above and beyond the call of duty.

With his innovative farming techniques, Allen has brought organic farming to the urbanized areas of Milwaukee and Chicago, providing lower-income families with high-quality foods necessary to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Allen was listed in TIME Magazine’s May issue as one of the “100 most influential people in the world,” and on Thursday, Allen will be the keynote speaker for the “Food in Bloom: Cross Pollination and Cultivation of Food Systems, Cultures and Methods” conference at IU.

Raised as a farmer’s son, Allen grew up with the knowledge of how to grow and maintain a wide variety of crops, said Jim Price, public affairs coordinator for Allen’s non-profit company, Growing Power.

“He wanted his own retail farm stand and found a place on the north side of Milwaukee that was the last piece of property in the city that was zoned for agriculture,” Price said.

With freedom to grow his own crops, Allen began to improve the poor condition of the urban soil with techniques his father taught him, Price said.

“He loves to say, ‘Good farming all starts with the soil,’” Price said.

The hallmark of Allen’s innovative farming techniques is his uniquely composed soil.
Using everything from leftover kitchen scraps to waste products of microbreweries, Allen was able to create a unique organic soil rich in nutrients, vital to the successful growth of his crops, Price said.

“We use all kinds of organic waste, but we don’t like to think of it as waste because we put it to very good use,” Price said.

After the compost is formed, Allen’s soil goes through a secondary refinement process that involves worm bins and depositories that make the soil more sustainable for crops, Price said.

“We have millions and millions of worms here working day and night to turn already good compost into really, really great compost,” Price said. “It’s the most extraordinary fertilizer available.”

After a while, Allen’s farming techniques caught the eyes of neighborhood children who wanted to know how Allen got his crops to grow so well in the middle of the city, Price said.

Allen saw an opportunity.

“He took it upon himself to become a trainer and started a little group with these kids and called it Youth Corps,” Price said.

Youth Corps takes children of all ages out of the public school system and teaches them not only urban agriculture but life and leadership skills as well, Price said.

The Food in Bloom convention will feature Allen as its keynote speaker and the only presenter that is free to the public, University Communications representative Steve Chaplin said.

The 12th annual meeting is a collaboration between the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition and will feature four days of food science presentations and organizational meetings as well as tours of farms and
food-related businesses.

This is the first time the conference will be held at IU and will include presentations from professors and researchers, giving students and other faculty members a chance to present innovative research as well as informative lectures, Chaplin said.

“For the general public, the real opportunity is to hear Will Allen speak,” Chaplin said. “Hopefully, it will leave you with not only knowledge of growing your own food but to leave inspired to work toward a more sustainable and economic system in your environment.”

As the heat of summer hits the Champaign community, the state of Illinois continues their plans for the 2010 Illinois State Fair in Springfield. The annual fair takes place from Thursday August 12th to Sunday August 22nd.

The fair, which is a combination of music, food, games, rides, and fun is packed full of exciting events this year. The fair will be host to more than 100 Carnival Midway and Adventure Village rides for the thrill seeking fair goer out there, as well as other attractions such as the Conservation World events, which include Chainsaw artists and lumberjacks, and the All American High Dive Show.

For the music lover out there, the Illinois State Fair is bringing in several artists to please your ears and make you dance. Some of the highlight artists of the fair are: Lady Antebellum (Fri. Aug 13th), tribute bands the Original Kiss Army and Journey Unauthorized (Sat. Aug 14th), Shinedown with Chevelle (Sun. Aug 15th), Cheap Trick with Blondie (Fri. Aug 20th), and Selena Gomez with Mitchell Musso (Sat. Aug 21st.). Tickets to see these artists are available at ticketmaster.com and vary from $5 to $30.

Also included at the 2010 Illinois State Fair are horse riding competitions, exotic animal shows, wine tasting, plenty of food and concessions, and a 500 pound sculpture of a cow made out of butter.

The 2010 Illinois State Fair looks like it will be packed full with fun and games for everyone. Tickets for the Fair are $5 per day and $7 to park. However, two dates to watch out for are Sunday August 15th when admission is free for Veterans and their families in tribute to Veterans Day and August 22nd when admission is $2 for everyone for Family Day. For more information about the 2010 Illinois State Fair go to www.agr.state.il.us/isf/.

The School Board of Alachua County, Fla. voted Tuesday night to implement a district-wide school uniform requirement for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Beginning in the fall, students will be required to wear uniforms consisting of solid-colored pants, shorts or skirts and a solid-colored shirt or blouse with a collar. The colors of the uniforms will be chosen by the individual schools.

The five-member board approved the plan in a 3-2 decision.

“The kids, unfortunately, are getting more and more outrageous with the clothes they wear,” school board chairwoman Virginia Childs said.

Students have been coming to school wearing slippers, pajama bottoms, baggy pants and overly revealing tops, she said.

“It’s very distracting for other people in the class to have that show going on,” she said.

Childs said the new policy will not only help students focus more on their studies, but she expects it will help alleviate bullying and peer pressure.

Tina Pinkoson, who voted against the uniform policy, said she was surprised it passed because she has gotten mostly negative feedback on the issue.

Pinkoson said it should be the parents’ responsibility to tell their children what to wear. She also said school uniforms will become a financial burden on the school district when it has to purchase the clothes for students who are unable to afford them.

“I don’t think that it has anything to do with the academic learning that’s going on in the schools,” she said. “There [are] bigger fish to fry, and we should be looking at those issues.”

Wiley Dixon, principal of Gainesville High School, said the seven high school principals in Alachua County sent a letter to the board recommending the policy not be approved.

The principals felt such a policy in high schools was unnecessary because there was never a problem with enforcing the old dress code, he said.

“We just felt that with young adults, they should be able to choose what they wear so long as it was within the school board policies,” he said.

Three U. Florida engineering students and a UF graduate will try to mow down their competition today.

The team’s GPS-guided lawn mower will compete in the seventh annual Institute of Navigation Robotic Lawn Mower Competition in Beavercreek, Ohio until Saturday.

Fifteen teams from the U.S. and Canada will try to cut at least 75 percent of a 150-square-meter lawn in the most “aesthetically pleasing” manner, according to the competition’s rulebook. First prize in the “basic” category, which the UF team entered, is $2,500.

Mike Franks, 30, Colin Watson, 21, Owen Allen, 25, and Andres Vargas, 23, have worked since January on the mower, which is intended to mow more accurately and time-efficiently than other self-propelled lawn mowers with the help from a GPS.

The system cost $15,000 and was borrowed from UF’s Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics.

Franks, an electrical engineering senior, said the UF team’s machine mows on a preset path.

“[It] mows more like a person would mow a lawn,” Franks said.

Student Government senators unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday that is intended to make absentee voting easier for students during SG elections, particularly for students at U. Florida’s satellite campuses.

Satellite campuses are located in cities throughout the state, including Orlando, Jacksonville and St. Petersburg.

The Satellite Campus Voter Participation Act, drafted by members of the Student Alliance party, requires the supervisor of elections to provide a ballot on the SG website and notify all students that the ballot is available two weeks before the submission deadline.

Senator Graham Clark, who represents the Student Alliance party, said the bill was necessary because the current absentee ballot system is difficult to use.

“We just think that it would be nice to make things easier for these guys,” Clark said.

The amendment passed with a vote of 50 to 18.

Currently, SG staff members send the link to the absentee ballot via the Gator Times, said Ben Meyers of the Unite Party.

“Most of what is said in this legislation is already done,” he said.

Senators also passed a resolution supporting the Florida American Legion Boys State and Florida American Legion Auxiliary Girls State programs and encouraging more support for the programs from UF.

A resolution is a piece of legislation that states the Senate’s opinion but takes no action.

The student government website is http://sg.ufl.edu/.

Steven Noll, a professor in the UF department of history, has been given the Florida Historical Society’s 2010 Rembert Patrick Award for his recently published book, “Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida’s Future.”

The book, which was co-authored by Santa Fe College history professor Dave Tegeder, examines the effort to dig a canal across Florida, according to a press release from the UF news desk.

Noll and Tegeder received the award for their 352-page book at the historical society’s annual meeting in St. Augustine on May 27, according to the release.

The Rembert Patrick Award each year goes to authors who write scholarly books about the history of Florida, according to the FHS website.

“Ditch of Dreams” which was published by the University of Florida Press in 2009, details the nearly 50-year fight by resident environmentalists against the construction of a canal across the heart of Florida, according to the University Press of Florida website.

“Ditch of Dreams” is Noll’s third book. He wrote “Feeble-Minded in our Midst” in 1995 and “Mental Retardation in America” in 2004.