September 1996

"Krish" takes a global view of weather

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor,
Florida State Times

The satellite image shows the Earth belted in clouds. It's late July, and the hurricane and monsoon seasons are in full force at opposite ends of the tropics.
Thunderstorms roll off the coast of Africa, energized by the warm waters of the Atlantic. Thick clouds cover the Indian subcontinent, much like the flood waters that now cover nearly a quarter of Bangladesh.
For meteorologists, it's "the big picture." And it's what FSU Professor Tiruvalam Krishnamurti has been looking at for nearly 30 years.
For his contributions to international meteorology, "Krish" - as he is fondly known at FSU - will receive the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) highest scientific honor this fall.
The official presentation of the International Meteorological Organization Prize will be made on campus by the secretary general of the WMO and the director of the National Weather Service.
Krishnamurti is already the recipient of two of the American Meteorological Society's highest awards, the Rossby Medal and the Charney Award. And in 1985 FSU named him the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor.
A world-renowned researcher of global weather phenomena and numerical weather prediction, Krishnamurti is a pioneer in global hurricane modeling, or computer simulation of storms.
"We're developing a dense-resolution forecast model to study past storms, their tracks and their intensity," he said. "When we get a good simulation, we can ask the question, 'Why did the storm behave the way it did?'"
Just this past summer Hurricane Bertha baffled forecasters, who were expecting the storm to curve away from the U.S. mainland. Instead, it intensified and hit the North Carolina coast.
"We just keep on doing experiments and try to learn more and more about these storms," Krishnamurti said.
A native of Madras, India, Krishnamurti became interested in the weather as a child living near the Indian Weather Service in New Delhi. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's in meteorology in his native country, then came to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D. He joined the FSU faculty in 1967.
So for nearly 30 years, with FSU as his home base, Krishnamurti has traveled the world, training meteorologists in developing countries, and sharing his vision of the "big picture."
The World Meteorological Organization summed up his accomplishments this way:
"The benefits to international meteorology from Professor Krishnamurti's dedicated, selfless and highly productive scientific career are major advances in the basic understanding of the tropical atmosphere, improvement in forecasting methods in the tropics with special application to tropical cyclone forecasting, and the hundreds of highly skilled meteorologists from ... around the world whom he has trained and inspired."

Holocaust lessons to be learned

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

In 1994, Florida's public school teachers were told by the Legislature that they had to teach the Holocaust. But they weren't told how to teach it.
That same year the Holocaust Study Summer Institute for Secondary School Teachers began at Florida State University to help teachers and school administrators understand that the Holocaust is more than just a history lesson.
During the intense, often emotional week-long summer school for teachers, the institute stresses the significance of studying the Holocaust.
"It teaches important lessons in hate, intolerance, insensitivity and the resiliency of the human spirit," said Dr. Alleen Deutsch, associate director of FSU's Center for Professional Development, which operates the institute.
On the last day of this year's institute, several participants, all FSU graduates, reflected on what they had seen and heard.
"Right now my mind is so full ... This is going to be something I need to sit down quietly and reflect on," said Sharon Lasseter, a teacher at Robert F. Munroe School in Quincy, Fla.
"This year's History Fair theme was 'Taking a Stand in History.' I'd look at that differently now," said Sally Sperling, a teacher at Lincoln High in Tallahassee. "One of our speakers was the child of a survivor. He said his goal is to always speak up."
For two participants - Liz Ganyard and Elizabeth Smith - who had visited concentration camps, the institute was a stop in their personal journey to answer the question "Why?"
"Thirty years later, the impact of that visit (to Dachau) is still there," said Ganyard. "I see a lot of the same seeds being sown right now in our own country ... This is not just something I plan to take back into the school, but everywhere, into my church, into my community."
Smith, a first-year teacher who wanted to be accepted to the institute so much that she wrote "please, please, please" all over her application, said she now feels she can bring "so much more back to the classroom.
"I think it's extremely necessary to teach the Holocaust," she said. "You can take the lessons of the Holocaust and apply them to any situation.
"We have to point out how we're alike, not how we're different."

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Gift recalls golden age of radio

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

Voices coming out of a box.
For a 10-year-old boy growing up in rural Tennessee in 1937, it was a source of wonderment.
Now, nearly 60 years later, Jim Kirk hopes to revive the wonder of radio for a generation more in tune with CNN and cyberspace.
The radios that Kirk and his wife Biddie have so lovingly collected through the years, bought off dusty shelves in out-of-the-way antique stores, are now on display at FSU's Public Broadcast Center.
The 300-piece collection includes radios from the turn-of-the-century through the mid-'50s, televisions, musical instruments and clocks.
Kirk became a collector quite by accident. He thought he was buying an antique jewelry box, but it turned out to be a 1932 Emerson radio that was "falling apart." Once repaired, it became the first of hundreds of pieces crammed into a museum in the studios of WMOP-AM in Ocala, which Kirk owned from 1963-93.
"What an impact radio has made on my country and even the world," he says. "As I compare it with TV, I still think it is the premier medium. If you just give people the facts, they can take if from there."
Kirk's professional radio days began at FSU, where he earned the university's first degree in speech with a broadcasting emphasis. He worked as a staff announcer at WCNH-AM in Quincy, and he and station owner Ben Letson began what eventually became the Seminole Sports Network.
In 1953 Letson asked Kirk to manage WMOP, a new 1,000-watt station. Ten years later, Kirk bought the station. And while running Florida's oldest country and western music station, he also served as Ocala's mayor for three terms.
Kirk sold WMOP in 1993. These days, he spends his time working for the FSU Foundation and the Seminole Boosters. All three of his sons attended FSU (two graduated), and Kirk describes his grandchildren as "double-dipped Seminoles."
He enjoys traveling, mostly by car with the radio tuned in to the nearest local station.



Dramatic changes
give FSU students
powerful access

By Lawrence G. Abele
Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs

This fall semester, Florida State University will unveil one of the most technologically advanced campuses in North America.
New and returning students will see major campus-wide technological improvements that will put powerful information and research services and far more personal computers at their fingertips. These upgrades are being funded by university operating funds and a portion of the 7-percent increase in tuition.
All FSU students will be able to obtain free personal accounts that provide access to Internet services, free electronic mail accounts and Point to Point Protocol for dial-in access to the World Wide Web.
But students will get the biggest surprise when they visit the libraries, either in person or via cyberspace through their personal dial-in accounts.
More than 300 new PCs have been installed - with most in Strozier Library and others in Dirac Science Library - connected to top-of-the-line laser printers. Users will be able to zip the material they're working on to their e-mail accounts or download information to a disk.
Each computer will be hooked up to major databases, the Internet - so that some students can cruise the WWW using Netscape - and LUIS, the state university system-wide library network.
Students will have access to FirstSearch, which includes more than 60 high-demand databases and full-text periodicals and magazine databases. Those databases include WorldCat, the world's most comprehensive bibliography, containing more than 32 million records from 18,000 international libraries. Other databases cover all subjects from the arts to zoology.
What's more, FSU students will find that their university is the first in the nation to offer access to online research created by LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a leading computer research service with a database of more than 10,000 sources and more than 580 million documents - 3 million of them updated each week.
The service is being offered for the first time through the Internet and distributed by a computer system owned and operated by the university. In exchange, FSU will test it and supply LEXIS-NEXIS with information on how it works in a university market.
In minutes, students using LEXIS-NEXIS will be able to complete some of the typical undergraduate research that would take days or weeks in a traditional library. With some simple steps, they will be able to zero in on information in publications from nearly every English-speaking country in the world and many of the non-English speaking nations.
In addition, CD-ROMs licensed by the libraries on campus will be available via the campus network for remote access, significantly improving student access.
To help everything run smoothly, a new consolidated Help Desk in Carothers Hall will handle all requests for computing and networking assistance. Though most of our students consider themselves "computer literate," the Strozier Library staff also will provide training to students who need it and additional short courses will be offered by Academic Computing & Network Services.
The campus network has been extended to all large lecture halls and the entire network will operate three times faster.
More than 100 computers have been replaced and upgraded in public-access computer labs across campus and staffing and operating hours increased.
Network connections have been added to Landis Hall and Reynolds Hall and connections will be included in Bryan Hall when it opens this spring. Plans are for all dormitory rooms to be connected over the next few years.
Florida State University has listened to students and has taken a giant step forward, giving them some of the finest research and communication tools available.


Agreement opens door
for learning anytime, anywhere

By Browning Brooks
FSU Communications Group

It may not be long before Floridians can pursue a college degree on a home computer from any location in the state, "chatting" on-line with professors and fellow students they can see on the screen.
President Sandy D'Alemberte and Sir John Daniel, vice chancellor of the Open University - the English-speaking world's leader in distance education - signed an agreement in Tallahassee on Aug. 2, laying the groundwork to enable students at Florida's public universities and community colleges to learn anywhere at anytime.
The goal is to improve Floridians' access to a college degree by giving off-campus students a better chance to study high-quality courses from afar and traditional students much more flexibility while at FSU. The old idea of a "correspondence course" taken by a lone student who never sees or talks to the teacher or other students pales in comparison to the interactive experience administrators say is at the heart of the collaboration between FSU and OU.
More than 2 million people around the world have studied with the Open University by mail, TV, computer and telephone. It is Britain's largest educational and training organization and a leader in the large-scale application of technology to learning.
Established by Royal Charter in 1969, the distance-learning university has more than 200,000 students in the United Kingdom and another 16,000 in other countries. It is open to any adult living in the United Kingdom or the European Union, and awards bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees and professional diplomas to people who, because of where they live, the hours they work or other personal reasons, cannot attend traditional universities.
OU delivers specially prepared teaching materials such as books, audiocassettes and videotapes to students' homes or workplaces by mail, computer and BBC broadcasts, and uses an extensive network of more than 7,000 tutors and advisers. Its newest innovations include use of conferences held on the Internet and CD-ROMs.
Increasingly, such flexibility will be one of the ways higher education institutions improve quality and access while containing costs, said Dr. Judith Boettcher, director of the FSU Office of Distance Learning.
Integrating OU's experience and vast resource materials into FSU courses will produce new interactive ways to learn and will give students far more options in how they study, said Boettcher - such as enrolling in summer school from their own hometown, or taking courses they might have had to put off because of holding down a job.
Faculty members also will have more options in how they teach. It may be that an on-campus student at FSU, for example, isn't required by a professor to attend as many lectures in the traditional sense but must study material posted by computer, allowing for a more flexible study schedule.
"One of our goals is to accelerate the development of a distance-learning bachelor's degree in the liberal arts," Boettcher said. "This degree program will include existing FSU courses, adapted Open University courses and courses developed in collaboration with state universities and community colleges in Florida.
"A second goal is to offer a number of postgraduate degree and certificate programs in a flexible way in collaboration with the Open University."
Over the next few months, professors at Florida State and Open University will jointly examine OU's existing courses to determine those most suitable and appropriate for use in Florida. Initial discussions are focusing on the adaptation of high-demand, high-volume undergraduate courses, such as biology, psychology, and economics. Other discussions are focusing on courses with a British cultural perspective, such as a course in Shakespeare.
OU was set up with the mission of overcoming the boundaries of place and time, said Boettcher. Now, it will help FSU to do the same


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THE DEEP: Underwater
explorer dives into the unknown

By Judy Taylor Cramer
Managing editor, Florida State Times

Sylvia Earle is planning a journey to the bottom of the sea. And she plans to reach "Ocean Everest" - the seven-miles-deep Marianas Trench near Guam - not in a submarine but in an "underwater airplane."
If you're thinking Earle sounds like a figment of Jules Verne's imagination, think again. Earle, an FSU graduate, is a pioneering marine scientist and underwater explorer. She recently received the Lindbergh Award from the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation for her "lifelong love affair with the oceans and her inspired advocacy on behalf of their health" and for "the vital role she has played, and continues to play, in the development of state-of-the-art technology for exploration of the oceans."
When Earle graduated from FSU in 1955 at 19 with a B.S. in botany, the oceans were largely uncharted. Now, more than 40 years later, "the magnitude of our ignorance is still vast," Earle says.
"It's absolutely vital that we make the oceans a priority. There's so much we need to know."
A big wave first got Earle's attention when she was a 3 year-old visiting the Jersey shore. When she was 12, her family moved to Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico became her backyard.
Her first underwater adventures were in the Weekiwatchee River, where she used diving helmets and compressors borrowed from sponge divers. Later, as an FSU student, she tried scuba diving, which freed her to "go where the fishes were, to meet them on their own terms."
Since then, Earle has spent more than 6,000 hours underwater. She has set records for an untethered dive (1,250 feet in 1979) and solo dive (3,000 feet in 1985).
But her goal is to plumb the depths of the Marianas Trench, about 200 miles southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. At almost seven miles, the trench is the deepest region of the ocean, a mile deeper than Mt. Everest is high and seven times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
The project is being pursued at Deep Ocean Engineering Inc., a California company Earle co-founded in 1982. The company is using aircraft-design principles to create a new generation of vehicles: underwater planes called "Deep Flight."
In the meantime, she is writing another book, her fourth, and acting as "an ambassador-at-large for the world's oceans." As chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 1990-92, Earle expanded the marine sanctuary program, and continues to advocate the creation of Wild Ocean Reserves, marine wilderness areas where fishing and oil exploration would not be allowed.
In her most recent book, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans, Earle tries to put in perspective the significance of the sea and its creatures:
"Loss of horseshoe crabs might not seem like a big deal. I can imagine some of my cynical pals, drinking beer, munching pretzels, teasing me with killer questions, including the clincher: 'Who cares? I don't!'
"I can also imagine philosophical crabs, perched on their several-hundred-million-year record of success, disdainfully reviewing our meager history, thinking, 'Who cares? We don't!'"




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