ARIZONA SUMMER
Smell the roses? Football opens with high hopes page 7
AUGUST 9-22, 2010 dailywildcat.com
Building from the ground up Futuristic honors dorms taking shape By Bethany Barnes Arizona Summer Wildcat When students return to classes in the fall, they can expect to see progress on the Sixth Street residence halls and reopened driving lanes. Currently, Sixth Street and Euclid Avenue are blocked but will be reopened in time for the fall semester. “They will be pulling the fences in and be getting back into their own areas by the 13th,” said Melissa Dryden, senior program coordinator for planning, design and construction. By the fall 2011 semester, the Sixth Street residence halls will open. The Tyndall Avenue and Sixth Street residence hall will be a new dorm for honors students. Yuma will also continue to be an honors dorm, but Yavapai and Posada San Pedro will no longer be honors dorms. Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and University Housing Jim Van Arsdel has seen residence halls La Paz, Pima the Highland Halls, and graduate student apartments La Aldea, come to fruition. “It’s always a really fun process to do,”Van Arsdel said. Gordon Bates/Arizona Summer Wildcat The new halls will be a collection of several buildings in order to create a more intimate Having begun its construction in early 2009, the new student housing complex on Sixth Street and Tyndall Avenue is taking clear form and is making way toward its scheduled setting for students and a less jarring pres- completion time in the Fall 2011 semester. The Tyndall hall will join Yuma as an honors dorm and will have room for more than 700 students. ence for the local landscape. building to building, study and look outside. The new residence halls are designed to dence halls are based out of Denver, Colo., “The idea is the buildings kind of step up Designed with sustainability in mind, the draw students out of their rooms and invite and have worked on the Highland Halls, the from Sixth (Street),”Van Arsdel said. buildings will have hot water panels on the them into a social setting. Department of Aerospace and Mechanical The new residence halls will also use court- roof and outlets that turn off when no one is “With freshmen, it’s all about building rela- Engineering building and the Environment yards and bridges between buildings. in the room. tionships and communities,”Van Arsdel said. and Natural Resources building. The Tyndall residence hall will have glass “The basic design of the building has “We all respond to architecture in pretty preA unique feature the architects devised for study rooms and a “study bridge” with glass kind of been an amenity (in and) of itself,” dictable ways.” the Tyndall building is its entrance. windows that will allow students to walk from Van Arsdel said. The architects designing the new resiCONSTRUCTION, page 6
Infant language research tackles nature, nurture By Julia Etters Arizona Summer Wildcat
UA professor of psychology and linguistics LouAnn Gerken was recently awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to research how babies acquire language. Gerken’s research will examine a hybrid of two existing theories, commonly known as the nature versus nurture debate. These opposing theories argue whether babies learn more by absorbing information from their environments or as a result of their instinctive abilities to learn. Gerken has had an infant laboratory since about 1995. “The most interesting thing about infants, especially in the early months, is that they seem so helpless and incapable of doing much. So when we see how quickly they are able to take in information about the world and make sense of that information, it’s endlessly surprising,” Gerken said. Gerken said that in recent infant studies, babies have been
given examples of language concepts in two different ways. One method includes repetitions of a smaller number of examples, while the other way gives several examples, but without any repetition. One study found that babies needed three examples to learn a linguistic concept. Gerken’s research will experiment with giving infants more than three examples of a concept. She said this new dimension will help confirm whether or not increasing the number of examples helps babies or hinders them. She hopes to find that babies learn better with fewer examples. “I have some hints from earlier work that this is happening. The result I’m hoping for is not predicted by most computer learning models, and so the rest of the project will entail narrowing down why babies learn better from fewer examples,” Gerken said. Psychology senior Brooke White finds the project interesting and relevant. After taking a linguistics course, White learned that parents correcting their children’s words
did not contribute much to their development. “If babies only learned off of what their parents told them, they’d have a very limited vocabulary. You learn more with trial and error. You don’t learn by following others,” White said. Along with the hybrid theory, White agrees that both nature and nurture elements are required for learning, but emphasized that nature characteristics are more important. Psychology junior Andrew Hiemstra feels that the combination of the two theories is commonly accepted. “Some people will disagree with that, but pretty much everyone in psychology agrees that it’s down the middle somewhere,” Hiemstra said. Gerken remains enthusiastic about the hybrid theory and her studies. “I think the theory accounts for the fact that humans are very strongly affected by their environment in a way that nativist (nature) theories do not, but it LEARNING, page 2
UA to develop camera to study Mars' atmosphere By Will Ferguson Arizona Summer Wildcat
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, scheduled to launch in 2016, will be the first cooperative venture between NASA and the European Space Agency to explore the atmosphere of the Red Planet. The UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory was recently awarded a $30 million contract by NASA to build the orbiter’s state-of-the-art imaging device. A stereo camera called the High Resolution Stereo Color Imager, or HiSCI, will help the international team locate and map the source of trace gasses present in the Martian atmosphere. “The most important trace gas present in the Martian atmosphere is methane,” said Shane Byrne, assistant professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and deputy principal investigator on the HiSCI project. “We have had some detections of methane over the last few years but
the instruments we were looking with weren’t trying to detect that. Now we are going to go back and find out where all this methane is coming from.” Alfred McEwen, a professor of planetary science at the UA who leads the HiSCI project, said the methane present in Mars’ atmosphere could be coming from volcanic activity or possibly even from life on the surface of Mars. “There are a lot of (hypotheses) out there. We really don’t know, it is a first-order mystery,” McEwen said. “One possibility is that it is related to life on Mars.” In many ways, the UA team will be following up on the work of HiSCI’s predecessor, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, that is currently orbiting Mars. “We have this interesting observation that methane is there, but this trace gas orbiter should really help us figure out a lot more about MARS, page 2