Hey guys,

I would appreciate any feedback you have about this submission of mine. If you don't mind, please leave that feedback as a comment on National Geographic's website here...



http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/2012/entries/164118/view/



Please also share it with anyone you believe would have some good insight as well. Thank you!

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting all of our entering A&S students during the University’s K Week events, wherein we welcomed our largest undergraduate class ever. The official numbers are not in yet, but the University was set to enroll as many as 4700 new first-year students, up from 4100 last year. The total number of A&S majors is also set to achieve an enrollment high. As the College teaches 85% of all UK Core and 60% of all undergraduate students credit hours we will see almost all these new first-year students in our courses this fall. Educating such a large number of students can be exhilarating. On this issue, I am continually impressed, at the innovation and dedication of the A&S faculty. Over the last several months many departments have taken on curricular revisions. For just a few examples I offer the following: the Department of Mathematics offered a calculus boot camp for incoming students two weeks before classes started. Dubbed FastTrack, first-year students came to campus in early August for an intensive, two-week, 8-hour a day calculus study, and by all measures this pilot program was a success with plans for further expansion next year. The Chemistry Department has completely reimaged their General Chemistry courses, which is the most populous course in the entire University.

The start of the new academic year has arrived.  I am pleased to welcome our returning students back to UK’s College of Arts & Sciences.

And I am thrilled to have so many new students joining us.

The College of Arts and Sciences is the home of knowledge.  It is the home of Aristotle and Plato.  It is the home of Einstein and Galileo.  It is the home of DuBois and Skinner.  It is the home of Darwin and Goodall.   It is the foundation of all professions, it is home to the scholarship, written communication, and quantitative reasoning of all major discoveries.

And now it is also your home.  For the next four years, you have been granted the time and space to learn to live a life driven by the mind.  Spend the time wisely.  It is the biggest investment you will ever make.  Use it to explore some of the most pressing questions of our time, challenge major assumptions, adopt new opinions, investigate long-standing theories, discover new worlds, dream big dreams, and sharpen your critical thinking skill sets.  Use it to be tested and tasked, to define yourself for yourself and to begin your professional and personal life.

Chicano art is not a well-known genre, perhaps becasue the form is usually viewed as political, folklore, too vibrant, unrealistic, and abrupt.

The A&S Podcast team is diligently working on an audio tour of campus! Designed to be smartphone and web-compatible, the tour is run through an app called AudioBoo. It allows you to record stuff wherever you are and share it (much like other audio sharing apps), but it also has a handy geotagging system integrated into its interface. This means we can upload stuff and make sure the file is associated with the right spot on the map! So far we only have a couple of locations on campus up, but we're making good progress and hope to have all of our entries done by K-Week. I wonder if other Colleges at UK will do this, too? It could be a great navigational/informational resource for freshmen, newcomers and visitors!

This circle is closing awfully quickly:  1 week away from completing a full year of living in Toulouse; 1 week away from leaving Toulouse.  It has been a year of adapting to life in a country with a different language and different culture.  It has been a year of travel.  And it has been a year of professional development.

Click Here to learn more about these photographs, and how they were created using the Power of the Sun.

Some of you may have noticed a new little piece at the end of each podcast listing that looks like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

These little boxes with letters in them are Creative Commons Licenses - meaning that we, as the A&S Podcast team, have decided to indicate clearly what type of copyright we would like to exert over our own work. The "Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike" license means that people may use the podcast for non-commercial purposes (ie, to share for free, for educational purposes, remix for whatever purposes they wish, etc), they must attribute the work to its originator (whoever is listed as the producer for the podcast), and is obligated to share their derivative work under a similar CC license. 

Roughly a year ago, the primordial nebula of A&S administrators, designers, podcasters, videographers, instructional designers, software developers, and help desk support workers was tasked with coming up a name to reidentify and unify our staff. Prospective names came and went. Finally, it was decided - the Hive. As you may have heard from some of our podcasts, the Hive is A&S' newly unified team of both creative and technical services which provides the College with support on web and print media projects, public relations, and computing and information services. We are organized into 13 structured, yet fluid teams. We are a higher education-multimedia-information-technology-powerhouse.

I have been doing a lot of research on whether household items can actually be used for developing film or not. There is a large debate on this topic for alternative process photographers. Below is an article written by Roger K. Bunting, who argues that you can use Coffee, Tea, or Vitamin C in the Darkroom, to successfully develop film. Soon I will be putting this to the test, and will post any results from the instructions below. Stay posted.

Love,

Dana Rogers

Coffee, Tea, Or Vitamin C

Kitchen Chemistry In The Darkroom

By Roger K. Bunting • Posted: Sep 1, 2003