PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 28, No. 11, Dec 4, 2008

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Brief Notes

Office of Provost and Office of CIO

‘IT@Illinois Symposium’ is Dec. 10

The Office of the Provost and the Office of the Chief Information Officer will host a symposium Dec. 10 on information technology at Illinois.

“IT@Illinois Symposium,” which will look at reconfiguring the campus IT environment to support pre-eminence in research, education and service, will include presentations by faculty members and other professionals.

The symposium will be from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Illini Rooms B and C in the Illini Union. Advance registration is not required.

More information is available at www.cio.illinois.edu.

Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award

Nominations due Jan. 20

Nominations for the Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award Program are due by 5 p.m. Jan. 20. The program is designed to recognize outstanding staff contributions to the UI.

As many as eight support staff members will be honored this year.

Any member of the campus community may make nominations. The nomination information packet, that includes the nomination form, may be obtained at the reception desk in the Staff Human Resources Office. The packet also is available on the Web at www.pso.uiuc.edu/cdsa or contact Jancy Hoult at 333-3101 or jhoult@illinois.edu.

Department of chemistry

Holiday show reveals magic of chemistry

A clear liquid is added to another clear liquid and the mixture turns pink. A glass rod touches a cotton ball and the cotton ball disappears in a burst of flame.

Is it magic? No, it’s … chemistry!

To find out how it works, don’t miss the Holiday Magic Show put on by the UI chemistry department this month.

Produced by chemistry teaching faculty members and students, the show demonstrates and explains many principles of chemistry, including kinetics, thermodynamics, gas laws and atomic theory.

See what happens to a pickle subjected to high voltage. Discover why helium gas and not hydrogen gas is used in party balloons.  Learn about this … and about gunpowder, liquid nitrogen and more.

The show is free and open to the public and will include about 25 demonstrations that will explain the science behind the “magic” of chemistry.

The show will be at 100 Noyes Lab. Show times: 7 p.m. Dec. 10 and 2 p.m. Dec. 14.  For more information, contact Don DeCoste at decoste@illinois.edu.

‘See Your Soldier’

Sign up for video visits with troops

The Champaign Extension Center will host free “See Your Soldier” videoconferences Jan. 12 and 13 for area families and their soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Families must register online at www.seeyoursoldier.uiuc no later than 5 p.m. Dec. 23 to be eligible for a time slot, and reservations will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. Families will be able to indicate their preferred location for the video visit.

The live audio/video linkages are being offered in collaboration with the Freedom Calls Foundation, which provides the videoconferencing equipment and satellite connection in Iraq. 

Locally, visits will be hosted by staff members at the Champaign Extension Center, 801 N. Country Fair Drive, Champaign. Thirteen other UI Extension offices throughout the state, and Richland Community College in Decatur, also will host visits.

When a family has registered, the military will alert the service member about the opportunity to visit with friends and family, and the time and date of the Internet transmission. If the soldier’s duty schedule can accommodate the visit, family members will be assigned a time for their 30-minute session. 

The program is limited to military personnel stationed at Al Asad Airbase (Air Force), Camp Taji/Cooke (Army), Camp Fallujah, Camp Taqaddum and Camp Victory.

Because Extension offices throughout the state will be sharing limited satellite time and facilities, scheduling of “See Your Soldier” visits is being coordinated through the state Web site rather than through local offices. Local Extension offices will be able to provide logistical information once the visits are scheduled, but Champaign Extension office staff members will not be able to schedule the sessions.  However, if you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in this program, contact the host Extension office at 333-4901.

I space

Exhibition explores dual identities

The boundaries of human duality are expanded and examined in an exhibition on view through Dec. 20 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the UI’s Urbana campus:

“CarianaCarianne: Relational Compositions” explores the concept of dual identities within a single being, as represented by two artists occupying a single body. “CarianaCarianne is the name of two individuals, Cariana and Carianne, who occupy one body and are collaborators,” says Julie Rodrigues Widholm, a curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Featured in the exhibition is CarianaCarianne’s evolving body of work, including drawings, sculpture, video and installation that investigates this duality, sometimes from a legal perspective.

Considering the work of CarianaCarianne, Widholm wrote: “To be expected, this notion is difficult for many to accept. However … for viewers to fall into a trap of preconceived notions and stereotypes of insanity would be to miss the profound metaphors within their work to which anyone can relate on a most basic human level.”

I space gallery is located at 230 W. Superior St., Chicago, and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Avery Brundage Scholarship competition

Applications due Jan. 31

UI students who excel in both academics and athletics are encouraged to enter the 36th annual Avery Brundage Scholarship competition.

Scholarship applications can be submitted online at www.usp.uillinois.edu/brundage. The deadline for submission is Jan. 31.

Full-time students at the Chicago, Springfield and Urbana campuses, including incoming freshman, graduate and transfer students, may apply. Grant-in-aid recipients may be eligible for Brundage scholarships under specific conditions. Academic and athletic competence will be considered over financial need.

The late Avery Brundage, a 1909 UI graduate, competed in the 1912 Olympics and later served as president of the U.S. and International Olympic committees.

Holiday shopping

Children’s book guide available

Whether you’re looking for a picture book, an age-appropriate nonfiction title or a page-turning thriller, let the 2008 edition of the Guide Book to Gift Books be your book-buying guide. The guide is now available as a downloadable PDF file at http://bccb.lis.uiuc.edu/gb2/.

Published to coincide with the winter gift-giving season, the 25-page annual guide is produced by Deborah Stevenson, the editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books at the UI and a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

The guide provides short descriptions of more than 300 of the best and most recent books published in four age groups: picture books for infants, toddlers and preschoolers; books for primary-grade readers (6- to 8-year-olds); books for middle-grade readers (9- to 11-year-olds); and young adult titles (12- to 18-year-olds).

Stevenson and her colleagues compiled the guide from their full book reviews of the past year, adding more than 100 new books to the 2008 edition.

Among Stevenson’s favorite books for 2008:

For pre-schoolers: “I like ‘Beep Beep’ and ‘Choo Choo,’ by Petr Horácek, which are two board books about a car trip and a train ride, respectively.”

For picture-book lovers: “I really like ‘The Chicken of the Family,’ by Mary Amato, for its lively, absurd story and illustrations.”

For middle-school readers: “Rachel Vail’s ‘Lucky’ is a story that’s very topical given the current economic conditions. It’s about a teenage girl whose mother loses her job, and the effect that has on her family and her comfortable lifestyle. I would compare Vail’s style to Judy Blume.”

For nonfiction readers: “Ann Hodgman’s ‘The House of a Million Pets’ really stands out. It’s an account of the author’s experiences of sharing her home with pets ranging from the usual – dogs and cats – to the decidedly unusual – prairie dogs and pygmy mice. I’m also impressed with Jack Prelutsky’s ‘Pizza, Pigs and Poetry,’ a humorous, creative book that encourages and inspires children to write simple poems.”

Just how many children’s books do Stevenson and her colleagues at the Bulletin, which reviews children’s books for librarians and educators, read each year?

“We review about 900 books, and we read about 500 more on the way to deciding what’s worth reviewing,” she said.

Survey research dissertation awards

Applications due Dec. 15

The Survey Research Laboratory is accepting applications for its annual Robert Ferber Dissertation Award and the Seymour Sudman Dissertation Award, both for excellence in survey research as part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation project.

All doctoral candidates on the UI campus are eligible with a dissertation that broadly relates to survey methods. Past winners have come from an array of disciplines in the social sciences, humanities and business. 

An award of at least $1,200 will be given to each winner. Applications are due Dec. 15. For complete eligibility and application information, go to www.srl.uic.edu/ferbersudman.htm.

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