Monday, February 14, 2000
Wake-up call
The art of change
President Adams testifies before Web-Based Education Commission
Faculty renewal of library books moves to Web
Holiday schedule announced for 2001
Professor sets up ‘memory bank’ to preserve seeds of cultural legacies
Administrative Changes
Newsmakers

Thrown for a loss
A Super Bowl XXXIV feature in the Wall Street Journal focused on various problems created by the use of Roman numerals to describe the sporting event--not the least of which is that a lot of people don’t know how to read them. Rick LaFleur, head of UGA’s classics department, was contacted to provide some stats on the number of public high-school students currently studying Latin, which he estimates at 250,000--down from 700,000 in the early 1960s.
LaFleur was also quoted in a Christian Science Monitor article on the current resurgence of the classics, with enrollment increases at the high school and college level. A draw may be the current interest in multiculturalism, he says. “What sets classical studies apart from other areas of the humanities is that we’re both multicultural and interdisciplinary.”


Cold helped peach, blueberry crops
UGA extension coordinators told the Associated Press that back-to-back winter storms in Georgia were a blessing for the state’s peach and blueberry crops, which need “chill hours” to produce fruit. “It’s just what we needed,” said Danny Stanaland, the extension coordinator in Bacon County, the state’s largest blueberry producer.
Vidalia onions suffered only minor damage from the weather, according to David Curry, extension coordinator in Toombs County. The bad news: the cold had little effect on insects. “The idea that a little bit of cold weather is going to save you from bugs is not going to happen,” said Will Hudson, an extension entomologist in Tifton.


More storm notes
David Stooksbury, a faculty member in biological and agricultural engineering who serves as the state’s climatologist, was quoted extensively during the recent winter-storm alerts. He even showed up in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, explaining the problems of pine trees and power lines during ice storms.
“Any place you have coniferous trees, or trees that collect moisture, you’re going to have this problem,” he said. “Since the leaves don’t fall off in the winter it’s an excellent surface for water to grab hold of. And they’re real top-heavy. So the next thing you know the trees are all coming down.”


Bye, bye, birdies
Clearing even isolated patches in a forest can have a devastating impact on birds, according to Amber Keyser, a UGA geneticist quoted in a recent ABC News story on how humans are driving many bird species to extinction. Such clearing results in “forest fragmentation,” which Keyser says concentrates the birds in fewer areas, making their eggs more vulnerable to predators.




Trend to ‘dollarization’
Terry College economist George Selgin, an expert on monetary policy, was interviewed by Investor’s Business Daily on the world trend to dollarization--the use of the dollar as currency. Asked about the drawbacks to the global economy if many countries adopt the dollar, Selgin said, “The dollar isn’t a perfect currency, though no available currencies are. The more countries that rely on the dollar, the more the international currency system is putting its eggs in one basket. If you have multiple currencies, you are, in a sense, diversifying inflation and devaluation risks.”
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