Prizes for FSU radio, tv.

by Jeff Simon

Honors have come recently to Tallahassee's public television station and Florida's public radio station.

WFSU-TV won a 21st Century Award from the Association of America's Public Television Stations for innovative management. WFSU-TV pooled money from the public television stations in Tampa, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Gainesville and Tallahassee to hire a program director for all six stations.

Florida Public Radio reporters Buzz Conover and Susan Gage received Media Awards from the Florida Bar Association. Conover was honored for three stories about the "tobacco law," the Constitutional Revision Commission and the swearing-in of Florida Chief Justice Gerald Kogan. Gage won for stories about hypnosis in the law, the execution of John Earl Bush and a lesbian mother and her ex-husband, a convicted murderer.

Engineering school grows.

Hold the phones, there's more construction at Florida State. The FAMU/FSU College of Engineering is about to get a facelift.

Construction at Innovation Park began in February. The new building will be adjacent to the current building, and will house faculty offices, classrooms and laboratories for all college departments. The three-story, 98,000-square-foot building will be a little smaller than the original 110,000-square-foot building.

Construction of the addition, due to be completed by fall 1998, will cost around $15 million.

The college opened in 1982 with an enrollment of 35 and has grown to more than 2,000.

Faculty, staff give back.

Florida State faculty and staff have pledged more than $470,000 to the Campus Community Campaign for 1996-97. Since the campaign began in 1991, faculty and staff have given more than $23 million.

High ranking in the arts.

Garnet and gold flowed through the U.S. News & World Report's eighth annual "America's Best Graduate Schools" survey, as three FSU programs were rated among the best in the country.

FSU's schools of music and theatre have received the recognition before. This year, the film school joined them.

The film program tied for ninth with Northwestern University (Ill.) and Temple University (Pa.). New York University placed first.

FSU's music and theatre both ranked twelfth in the report.

Theatre tied with Boston University, Rutgers University and the University of California at Irvine. The theatre program has been on the list three years.

Music tied with three other schools for 12th place.

Yale University placed first in theater, and the University of Rochester-Eastman School of Music (N.Y.) took the top billing in music.

Computers for safety.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has awarded Florida State's Dr. Susan Hruska, a computer science professor, $416,000 to solve two serious problems: forecasting dangerous weather, such as deadly heat waves, and dealing with security at highly classified facilities, such as nuclear reactors at Los Alamos and U.S. Navy shipyards.

The money is to be split between the two projects.

"With the first project, what we are concerned about is that extreme event, a combination of heat and humidity that turns deadly," said Hruska. "We want to improve warning to the point that it will actually make people in danger change their behavior."

According to Hruska, FSU's "intelligent reasoning" system - a type of artificial intelligence that learns from its mistakes - will use economic and demographic data along with weather forecasting to determine which areas in the United States are in the most danger.

The other part of the project is to secure highly sensitive and classified areas from internal threats to safety and security with the help of new software.

The software being developed will differentiate between suspicious and normal behavior.

New scholarships.

FSU graduate Tom Gould (B.S. '69) and his wife, Lana, have set up a $100,000 scholarship for FSU merchandising students.

Gould is the vice chairman of Proffitts, the fastest growing department-store chain in America.

The gift is not solely need-based, but also looks at academic performance and leadership ability. Preference is given to full-time students with jobs.

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