The Rice Thresher, Vol. 99, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, March 9, 2012 Page: 4 of 16
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4 NEWS
the Rice Thresher
Friday, March 9,2012
Language classes change
by Ben Hawriluk
Thresher Staff
Starting next year, students taking in-
troductory language courses will attend
class five days a week, and courses will be
five credits.
As the language program currently exists,
students spend three hours per week in class
and two hours on the computer, and courses at
the roi or 102 level receive four credits.
The Center for the Study of Languages pro-
posed these changes to the language program
after an external review board found Rice to be
lagging in foreign language education vis-a-vis
peer institutions.
ii
The goal is that at the end
of two years of instruction,
our students will be able to
do more than they are able to
do under the current system.
Wendy Freeman
Center for the Study of Languages
Director
ft
"The schedule that we are embracing mir-
rors that at all of our peer institutions," CSL
Director Wendy Freeman said. "The goal is to
increase face time so that the amount of hours
in class in an introductory language course at
Rice is the same as at our peer institutions."
Because Rice students spend fewer hours
in class than their peers, they are, on aver-
age, one semester behind students from
peer institutions, Freeman said.
For example, she said that completing
the introductory textbook sequence in the
Chinese program requires three semesters
at Rice, but only two semesters at peer in-
stitutions.
According to Shumway, the increased
student-teacher interaction under the new
system will enable higher quality learning
and increased personal connections.
When asked about concerns about the
increased workload, Freeman said the
most important concern is the outcome.
"The goal is that at the end of two years
of instruction, our students will be able to
do more than they are able to do under the
current system," Freeman said.
Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway
said the quality of the current language
program does not match the quality of
Rice students or of the university at large.
"I don't think that the language pro-
gram as it currently exists is worthy of
Rice," Shumway said.
Shumway and the CSL are already
considering plans for language learn-
ing abroad. Shumway said he would like
to create a summer study abroad option
so that students could complete a year's
worth of instruction in eight weeks.
"I hope that within a year or two we
can make those experiences cost-neu-
tral," Shumway said.
In order to make language learning
abroad cost-neutral, Shumway said he
hopes to increase scholarship availability.
Will Rice College freshman Lynn Gai
said the proposed changes would make
her less likely to enroll in an introductory
language course.
"It would be extremely discouraging,"
Gai said.
Because introductory courses do not
receive distribution credit and because
of an already heavy course load, she said
that five classes per week would discour-
age her from enrolling in a class she would
normally want to take for fun.
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Engineering &
Construction
Bio-research links plants'
defenses to natural cycles
by Johanna Ohm
Thresher Editorial Staff
In the battle between plants and their insect
predators, it's a caterpillar-eat-plant world. But
while plants may seem to be an easy target for
insects, plants have their own mechanisms of
defense, similar in many ways to those of the
human immune system.
Researchers in Rice's Biochemistry and Cell
Biology department have recently found that
the complex system of hormones and second-
ary metabolites which comprise plant defenses
are cyclically activated to follow day-and-night
cycles. According to plants' circadian rhythms,
these changes in plant hormones alter their
state of defense against insects.
Janet Braam, chair of the Department of
Biochemistry and Cell Biology, led the research
that was published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences last week. Grad-
uate student Danielle Goodspeed designed the
experiment and received input and help with
the project from Rice faculty fellow Wassim
Chehab and then-undergraduate Amelia Min-
Venditti (Duncan '11).
Goodspeed said she is excited with the direc-
tion her research has taken, though she never
expected to be working on a project relevant to
ecology and evolution.
"I didn't even want to work with plants when
I first came here," Goodspeed said.
She cited a fascination with circadian rhythms
with sparking her interest in the lab she now works
in, which focuses primarily on plant hormones.
"The circadian clock really fascinated me
because humans have a circadian clock, too,
that controls our eating patterns, our sleeping
patterns and a lot of things," Goodspeed said.
"Plants have something very similar to us that
works in a very similar fashion, but nobody's
done a lot of studies with plants about the phys-
iological relevance of this clock."
Braam credits Goodspeed with the design of
the project and with bringing the idea of testing
the effects of circadian rhythm to her lab.
"It was a collaborative effort but the project
started with a very clever experimental design
by Danielle," Braam said. "She figured out that
she could easily test whether time of day affect-
ed plants' susceptibility to insect attack."
In Goodspeed's experiments, specimens
of Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant species
commonly used in biological studies, were
grown in constant light-dark cycles and then
exposed to cabbage loopers, a type of plant-
eating insect, that were either "in-phase,"
defined as being on the same light-dark cir-
cadian rhythm or "out-of-phase," defined as
being on an opposite light-dark cycle. With
the "out-of-phase" insects, insects were in
their daytime state when exposed to plants
that were in their night phase. The results
showed that, when in opposite phases,
plants are more vulnerable to attack and get
easily decimated by loopers.
"The plant has set up different hormones
to defend against different pathogens at dif-
ferent times when those pathogens are going
to attack," Goodspeed said. "Cabbage loop-
ers attack during the middle of day to dusk.
So jasmonate [a defensive hormone] levels,
which are required for defense against loop-
ers, are highest during the middle of the day
and drop off at night."
Min-Venditti worked on the project during
the 2010-11 academic year, assisting Goodspeed
with her experiments.
"My job was to help with the optimization
experiments, to make sure all the results were
reproducible," Min-Venditti said. "It's kind of
cool. We found that plants raised on a 'normal'
cycle fared significantly better than plants on an
'off' cycle, and the difference was significant."
Min-Venditti said she was excited to hear
that the research was accepted for publication
and thought Goodspeed's project would be im-
portant to the plant biology community for its
broader applications and unique findings.
"It's novel [research]," Min-Venditti said.
"The fact that Danielle [Goodspeed] is working
on circadian rhythms, genomics and ecology all
at once is pretty exciting."
Goodspeed said similar research is being
done with mammalian immune systems to see
if defensive mechanisms become strengthened
at times of the day when the body is more sus-
ceptible to attack.
"A lot of people think this is convergent evo-
lution. [...] Almost all organisms developed this
circadian clock independently but ended up
with something very similar because it was so
important," Goodspeed said.
Goodspeed said she is continuing her re-
search and doing follow-up experiments which
she hopes will be published later this year.
"We believe that these initial studies will
lead to significant later understandings of how
the plant clock works and affects plant fitness,"
Braam said.
A cabbage looper consumes the leaf of an Arabidopsis thaliana. Researchers discov-
ered that when plants and insects were exposed to each other while "out-of-phase,"
or during different biological cycles, the plants became more vulnerable to attack.
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Gupta, Ryan; Brown, Seth & Jordan, Hallie. The Rice Thresher, Vol. 99, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, March 9, 2012, newspaper, March 9, 2012; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth398514/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1&rotate=270: accessed July 12, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.