fRESH BEAT
Huskers defeat creighton 5-3
Lincoln High students form slam poetry club, prepare for state competition page 5 volume 111, issue 136
Pitching stands out as NU wins third straight game PAGE 10 Wednesday April 11, 2012
DAILY NEBRASKAN dailynebraskan.com
walk it out
Student named Fulbright winner
Cornhusker Bank hosts TOMS shoes national event,“One Day Without Shoes”
UNL senior awarded grant to teach in Germany Frannie Sprouls Daily Nebraskan
story by Maren Westra photo by Bethany Schmidt
Five minutes before the start of her statistics class two weeks ago, Kaylee Barber opened her email to see she was accepted into the Fulbright Teaching Assistantship Scholarship Program. “I was super excited and I was trying not to freak out,” Barber said. “I went to my statistics course and it was hard to focus. It was a nice feeling of relief … I could start planning for next fall.” Barber, a senior German and international studies major, is one of four German students who applied for the Fulbright teaching program. The application process began last October, which was the campus deadline for Fulbright application. Barber waited until the end of January to know if she was accepted nationally for the program. And after filling out more forms, this time in German, Barber waited until two weeks ago to know she had a teaching assistantship in Germany. “It’s just been kind of a waiting game,” Barber said. “That’s been the worst part. Just ... waiting.” She will travel to Germany in early September to settle in and won’t return home until the end of June. Barber doesn’t know where in Germany she will be living; she said she could find out as late as June or July. She narrowed down three German states to live in: Brandenburg, Sachsen and Berlin. Of the three, Barber said she hopes to get Sachsen. “I really hope that I get somewhere near Dresden,” Barber said. “It’d be fun to experience another city.” During the spring 2010 semester, Barber studied in Berlin as a part of the Deutsch in Deutschland program. She spent seven months learning the language, taking university classes and traveling throughout the country. “She was just interested in everything,” said Sheri Hurlbut, a graduate student and lecturer for the Modern Languages and Literature Department. Hurlbut traveled to Berlin with Barber and other students as the visiting professor. She taught Barber in the fall of 2009 in German 210, an intensive
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t 11 a.m. on Tuesday, an estimated 55 walkers began the trek from Cornhusker Bank’s Main Bank on 11th Street and Cornhusker Highway to the People’s City Mission on First and Q streets. Cornhusker Bank is in the middle of a two-week shoe drive taking place at more than 60 locations across Lincoln. The two-and-a-half mile walk was organized by Cornhusker Bank associates in coordination with TOMS Shoes’ “One Day Without Shoes” national event. When participants reached the People’s City Mission, they had the option of touring the facility or getting a bus ride back to the bank. Teresa Elliot and Barry Lockard both work at Cornhusker’s Main Bank and helped organize the event. Lockard, president, and Elliot, communications director, said they were inspired to create a Lincoln awareness walk after attending an executive seminar last year and hearing the CEO of TOMS Shoes, Blake Mycoskie, speak about the purpose of the company. Lockard said they decided to bring that purpose to the Lincoln area. “We thought there was no better thing we could do for the community … than localize (it),” he said. Tom Barber, the People’s City Mission pastor, said inadequate footwear causes a variety of problems. He said it can lead to kids getting made fun of at school and can make it hard for someone to find a job. “I think it is a huge unrecognized
Ken Ward shows off his inflatable shoes to Bill Lien and Carissa Bullock at the “One Day Without Shoes” event on April 10 at Cornhusker Bank. The bank held a reception after the 2.5-mile walk to the People’s City Mission. need,” he said. According to Barber, coats in the winter are of higher priority to the homeless than shoes are. Most homeless people rely on walking as their sole mode of transportation, so having ill-fitting shoes or no shoes at all causes more discomfort than people realize, Barber said. The bank invited participants to walk with or without footwear. Lincoln residents Joyce Hansen, 61,
and Janell Schutte, 52, heard about the event at a Jazzercise class they attend together and decided to go. Hansen said she is always trying to find ways to be involved in community. “(I wanted) to help people who are in need and to understand what the needs are,” she said. According to Schutte, having a local walk represented the chance to raise awareness. “I can’t imagine not having a decent
pair of shoes,” she said. During last year’s shoe drive, Cornhusker Bank collected nearly 4,500 pairs of shoes and more than $8,000 in monetary contributions, Elliot said. This year’s drive, which began last Monday and will continue until Saturday, has already seen about as many shoes as last year’s drive and has exceeded it in monetary donations.
toms: see page 2
UNL research may affect data storage efficiency dan holtmeyer daily nebraskan
A hammer and computer memory don’t seem like they’d ever go together. But if that hammer is small enough — say, one-thousandth the width of a human hair — a gentle tap onto the surface of a film, similar to the magnetic film on a hard drive, is enough to encode information and memory, according to a research team with members around the world, including at the University of NebraskaLincoln. Data, they found, can be tapped onto a drive like a typewriter taps letters onto a page.
The finding, recently published in the journal “Science,” could further increase the amount of information a computer can hold and have wider implications for electronics. Memory, like saved term papers on a laptop or music files on an iPod, is made up of the ones and zeroes of binary code. Those are usually written onto a disk with tiny zaps of electricity or bursts of magnetism. But it only works on some films, said Alexei Gruverman, a UNL associate professor of physics in the Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience and a member of the research team, in a Skype interview. He
and the others instead tried a different method that would work on a wider range of materials. When a tiny probe, measuring just 10-billionths of a meter wide, pushes down on a speck of the film’s surface, it nudges charged atoms, or ions, out of the way. Some ions are pushed farther than others, creating what Gruverman called a “stress gradient.” “It has a directionality,” he said, and that direction creates a tiny electric field that aligns, or polarizes, the atoms in one of two directions — the one or zero of binary. “This electric field actually leads to the reversal in polarization.”
This effect, called flexoelectricity, has been known for decades, Gruverman said, but it’s much weaker on the more familiar scale of inches and feet. “The advantage we have now is we can generate this stress gradient at a nanoscale level,” where it gets more of a punch, Gruverman said. Another advantage: Spots polarized by a physical tap are more localized and can be packed closer together than spots polarized by a zap, which can spread out and leak to the surrounding area, said Haidong Lu, a physics and astronomy graduate student who was one of the paper’s lead authors along with Gruverman.
Actually, this is a quite easy experiment that no one has ever done. This is just the basic concept.” Haidong Lu
physics and astronomy graduate student
Work on the research began about a year ago, Lu said. Researcher partners at the University of Wisconsin provided the crystalline films while others in Barcelona, Spain provided the model — the experiment’s
physics: see page 3
fulbright: see page 3
Speech team takes eighth place at national tournament elias youngquist daily nebraskan
Poetry, prose and drama took the University of NebraskaLincoln’s speech team to the top 10 in the nation at the American Forensic Association National Individual Events Tournament on Saturday. Of the 22 students UNL
LENZ page 4
drove to Texas State University-San Marcos, three made it to the finals, and one of those students took the gold medal in his event. “The team actually made it to eighth place,” said David Tuck, assistant speech and debate coach and graduate communication studies
student. “An eighth-place finish, we’re talking like top 5 to 10 percent of all forensics programs in all the country.” According to Tuck, about 200 to 300 universities attempt to qualify for the AFA tournament, and only 85 are able to qualify. Leading the team in placing
arts & entertainment page 5
was Nick Herink, a senior secondary speech and English education major who took first place in program oral interpretation; Josh Planos, a sophomore advertising and public relations major who won fifth place in program oral interpretation; and Jesse Sladky, a sophomore
criminal justice major who took sixth place in communication analysis. “It’s been really good,” said Herink. “My birthday is actually today so it’s been like an early birthday present. I’ve gone (to nationals) all four years of college, that’s what I went out on. I’m as happy as
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speech: see page 2
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anyone could be.” Herink has placed second for the last three years of his speech career at nationals. According to Herink, he put more than 100 hours into his piece for this year.
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