Arabic and Persian Immersion Program moves to Madison, celebrates successful year

The UW-Madison Arabic and Persian Immersion Program recently completed its 6th summer of top-flight language education.

The 2009 program was held for the first time on the UW-Madison campus with 18 students enrolled in Arabic classes and 15 students enrolled in Persian classes. The move to the Madison campus was considered a resounding success for students and staff alike.

Madison gives students the opportunity to interact with numerous native speakers, enjoy field trips and excursions, and partake of the many middle-eastern restaurants in the area.  Student feedback clearly deemed both the program and the move to Madison a rousing success.

The APIP Executive Committee is now preparing for APIP 2010, June 12-August 7, 2010 at UW-Madison. APIP again promises to offer unlimited challenges to students willing to spend eight weeks learning Arabic or Persian in a most unique manner.

Please visit APIP for more details or contact the program coordinator directly via email at apip@global.wisc.edu

Category: Languages & Literature
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Phillips-Court wins publication award from Modern Language Association

The Department of French and Italian is pleased to announce that Kristin Phillips-Court, Assistant Professor of Italian, has been named the winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

Phillips-Court received the award for her work, "The Perfect Genre: Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy."

This award is made possible by the Modern Language Association of America and will be presented at the upcoming MLA convention in Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2009.

Please join us in congratulating Kristin on this achievement! 

Category: Languages & Literature
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UW Star Tracker guides another rocket into space

Astronomers sometimes need to use telescopes that are in space because the Earth's atmosphere blocks ultraviolet and X-ray light.

NASA's sounding rocket program sponsors astronomers and graduate students to build telescopes that can be launched into short (15 minute) sub-orbital flights that generate enough data for Ph.D. dissertations.

These rockets need to be pointed at their targets very quickly and very accurately.

Dr. Jeffrey W Percival and the technical staff of the Department of Astronomy's Space Astronomy Laboratory have invented a device called the "Star Tracker 5000," which in seconds calculates the rocket's orientation using whatever stars it first sees and then guides the rocket to its celestial target.

NASA has licensed this invention from UW-Madison for use in the sounding rocket program. The accuracy and speed of the ST5000 represents a generational leap in rocket guidance.

On November 13th, the ST5000 flew again on its 7th mission from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, guiding a University of Colorado experiment.

The flight was a complete success, with the ST5000 capturing an image of the sky, analyzing the initial star pattern, and computing the rocket's position and direction in a record 6.5 seconds, with a precision of about an arcsecond. This was followed by 368 seconds of X-ray observations of gas ejected from a long-ago supernova in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
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Nov. 21: 8th Annual Int'l Children's and Young Adult Literature Celebration

"Open a Book... Open a Door... Open your Mind... to the World" is an annual celebration of International Children's and Young Adult Literature sponsored by the Wisconsin International Outreach Consortium.

The all-day celebration will be on Saturday, November 21, featuring threeaward-winning authors Sylviane Diouf, Rachna Gilmore and James Rumford, and a scholar of Russian History, Kelly Herold.

The opening speaker, Megan Schliesman, is a librarian at the UW's Cooperative Children's Book Center. Sixy-five participants from Wisconsin and Illinois will attend this year's event.

Held in celebration of International Education Week, a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education, the aim of this workshop — designed for teachers, school and public librarians, students and faculty of education and library science — is to encourage the internationalization of school curriculum by incorporating literature about cultures from around the world that depicts unbiased and educated information.  [Read More]

Category: Area Studies
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Communication Arts professor to address William T. Grant Foundation

Robert Asen, professor of Communication Arts, will be traveling to New York in December to address an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the William T. Grant Foundation.

Earlier this year, the Foundation awarded Asen and colleagues a $450,000 grant to establish the REDD (Research on Education, Deliberation, and Decision-Making) Project, a two-year study tracking deliberation and decision-making in three Wisconsin school districts.

The subject of the address will be "argument analysis," an analytic method designed to assess how policymakers advance and support claims in group settings.

The William T. Grant Foundation believes that its grantees in fields such as Education, Medicine, and Public Health may benefit from considering the role of argument in policymaking.

Category: Social Sciences
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Jacobs to give Distinguished Lecture Series talk, 'Towards a History of Taste: American Film in the 1920s

Join Professor Lea Jacobs (Communication Arts and Film) on December 2 at 5:30p for her talk, 'Towards a History of Taste: American Film in the 1920s' at the Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140 (Elvehjem Building).  Her lecture is part of the Distinguished Lecture Series and the Focus on Humanities events.

There will also be a 'Humanities Happy Hour' before the lecture at the University Club with a cash bar from 4:30-5:30p.

The Hollywood cinema is often said to have altered in the decade following World War I. The lecture describes a decisive shift in taste that was manifested in critical discourse, in filmmaking technique and narrative.

It will contrast what came to be identified as sophisticated taste, films deemed on the edge of what censors or more conservative viewers would tolerate, with naïve taste, films dismissed as cloying, overly melodramatic, or simply old fashioned.

Category: Social Sciences
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Computer Sciences team heads to world finals of programming competition

For the 9th straight year a team of computer science students advances to the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest.

The team came in first among 201 teams at the North Central North America Regional Programming Contest on October 31.  They were the only team in the regional contest who provided a correct solution to all ten problems.

The annual computer programming competition draws about 7,000 teams worldwide and is organized in two tiers: a regional contest and the world
finals. Only the regional winners are guaranteed a slot in the world finals.

Since UW-Madison started participating nine years ago, Computer Sciences has always had a team advance to the world finals.

This year's teamconsists of first-year graduate students David He and Christopher Hopman, and junior Zef RosnBrick. They will be heading to Harbin, China, for the world championship in February.

For more information including other teams that participated, see the team's website and the UW press release.

Category: Biological & Physical Sciences
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