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Medical reporting documentary
The Peabody Awards and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have produced a documentary on the making of WANE-TV’s Christopher, the winner of the first-ever Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Programming. The documentary is being distributed free to medical and broadcasting professionals throughout the United States.
Christopher, a documentary on the importance of organ donation, is the story of the parents of a young boy hit by a car who make the difficult decision to donate their son’s organs to those in need. Footage in the program was shot as the boy’s parents made their decision to donate.
To receive a copy of Making Christopher or for more information on the P/RWJF Award, contact Kim Cretors, award coordinator, by phone at (706) 542-8983 or by e-mail at kcretors@arches.uga.edu.
Technology training grant
The BellSouth Foundation, in partnership with the College of Education, has awarded a $150,000 grant for technology training for teachers in Clarke, Madison and Barrow counties.
The grant was awarded Dec. 2 to a consortium led by John Wiggins, director of UGA’s Educational Technology Training Center at River’s Crossing, where the training will be conducted. The grant will provide classroom teachers, pre-service teachers and the professors working with pre-service teachers training in curriculum integration through the Georgia Department of Education’s INTECH program.
A team consisting of five classroom teachers, five student teachers and one university supervisor will represent each of 10 elementary schools selected from the three school systems. Upon completion of INTECH, each school team will develop a plan to train other faculty members at their schools.
SREL enters record book
The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory will make its debut in the Guinness World Records database. SREL’s Rainbow Bay project will now be known as the longest, continuous “frog watch” in the world.
Whit Gibbons, who initiated the project in 1978, says that while the term “frog watch” is catchy, the project has actually tracked many species, including other amphibians, reptiles, waterfowl and small mammals. The project was begun with funding from the Department of Energy as an environmental assessment related to the construction of the defense waste-processing facility on the Savannah River Site.
DOE was concerned that the planned construction would eliminate a Carolina bay or seasonal wetland habitat. Gibbons and SREL convinced the DOE that to have a credible assessment, research funding should include a long-term study at a similar and nearby Carolina bay for comparison purposes. DOE approved the plans and, since the fall of 1978, pitfall traps and drift fences at Rainbow Bay have been checked daily, without interruption, in all kinds of weather--weekends and holidays included.
The work at Rainbow Bay has produced a wealth of scientific data and provided a training ground for numerous herpetologists who have been supported as students by the project. Also, there have been more than 60 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and book chapters about the work at Rainbow Bay.
James Spotila, chief environmental scientist for the U.S. Army, was one of the scientists who supported the Guinness entry. He says, “I have found that the Rainbow Bay Study on the Savannah River Site is the longest running, most complete study of any amphibian population in the world. This is truly a world record achievement.”
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