With all the arrogance of youth, Danny was busy explaining that his father was a “dull academic,” Homan said.

Danny jokingly accused Homan, who has published 10 books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, of simply feeding off the creativity of others and challenged him to write something original.

As for himself, Danny was at that point inexperienced and unpublished, yet convincingly unconcerned, Homan said. He would sit amid publishers’ rejection letters and confidently tell his father that someday, someone would want to read his work.

Fast forward about two years. A son’s good-natured challenge has materialized into his father’s first book outside the scholarly realm, and Danny’s self-assured perseverance has paid off in the form of a soon-to-be-published fantasy novel debut.

“A Fish in the Moonlight,” a collection of stories from Homan’s childhood as told to pediatric cancer patients during his participation in the Shands Arts in Medicine program, is due for release from the Purdue University Press in June.

Danny’s “The Queen of Hearts,” a fantasy novel rife with allegorical undertones of current events ranging from the war in Iraq to the Pinochet regime in Chile, will be released by Prime Books in November.

Ever since that day in Central Park, the father-son pair has profited from a symbiotic creative rivalry.

“I never would have tried ‘A Fish in the Moonlight’ if it weren’t for the kid saying I was a dull academic,” Homan said. “When you’re challenged by your kid, you respond.”

But it wasn’t all competition. Homan and his son have provided valuable perspective for each other as co-editors.

“You need someone else to be a critic of your own writing,” Homan said. “We agreed from the beginning that we would be honest with each other.”

The two spent many hours reading each other’s work aloud, taking turns reading each new paragraph to stay focused.

“A Fish in the Moonlight” isn’t fiction per se — the events Homan talks about did actually happen. For example, his beer-bellied, black-sheep Uncle Eddie really did show up drunk to Uncle Arthur’s funeral and jump into the coffin with his dead brother while the family looked on in horror. But Homan isn’t about to pledge that every detail and quotation is exactly accurate. There may be some embellishment. These are stories, after all.

Homan said writing a book like this required him to fundamentally change the way he thinks and writes compared to his scholarly approach to books on the theater.

“It demands a different kind of language, a different kind of vocabulary,” he said. “When you are writing for yourself, the options are tremendous.”

Homan’s effort, however, has paid a handsome wage.

“’A Fish in the Moonlight’ gives me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done,” he said. “As thrilling as it is to work in the theater, it’s so pleasurable now to just sit in front of my computer and create my own worlds.”

Where to go from here? Homan isn’t sure, but he has a sequel in the works and no plans to retire.

“You go in one direction your whole life, and then you change,” he said. “I have no idea where this book is going to take me.”

The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta kicked off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discussed in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

The difference lies in the “raunch” factor.

Proof that true love never dies shows up in the song lyrics of today’s generation, which match the romantic pantings from the songs of their baby boomer parents’ youth, said Chad Swiatowicz, who did the study for his master’s thesis in sociology at UF.

“American culture is in love with love,” he said. “War may be a national concern today as it was three decades ago, but in both eras it’s the subject of love and relationships that dominates pop music.”

The most notable difference between the song lyrics of the two eras was the prevalence of bad language in today’s songs, Swiatowicz said. Many of the words, particularly in rap songs, are blatantly sexual and would have been considered obscene in the 1960s, he said.

“The tolerance for offensive language in pop music has drastically increased in the last 30 years,” he said. “Older songs like ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ are G-rated compared to today’s lyrics.”

Exactly what the raw verbiage reveals about today’s generation is difficult to ascertain, Swiatowicz said. “It’s often the case that young people want to distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation and the use of language is one way to do so,” he said.

Swiatowicz analyzed the lyrics of the year’s 10 most popular songs listed in Billboard’s online archives for two eras, 2002-2005 and 1968-1971. He found that 24 of the 40 songs in the modern era — 60 percent — and half the songs of the classic era were devoted to the subject of love and relationships.

From “Sunshine of Your Love” in 1968 to “Crazy in Love” in 2003, and “I Can’t Get Next to You” to “I’m With You” from 1969 and 2003, the songs are variations on similar themes.

Some were cheerful and celebratory of love, while others sounded a more pessimistic tone, addressing the temptation of infidelity or the insecurities of being at a lover’s beck and call, Swiatowicz said. The subject of infidelity came up far more frequently in the modern era, perhaps because younger people were more likely to grow up in families where parents had divorced, he said.

Despite wars marking both eras – the conflict in Vietnam in the late ’60s and early ’70s and the confrontation in Iraq more recently – few of the most popular songs of either era protested American involvement in these conflicts

“For as much unrest taking place during the Vietnam era, only one top 10 song of the four-year span was explicitly detracting of the war,” he said.

This 1970 song, “War,” protests sending young men to fight and possibly die, Swiatowicz said. “War has shattered many a young man’s dream, made him disabled, bitter and mean,” bemoan the lyrics.

“This doesn’t deny that other anti-war songs achieved popularity; they just weren’t big enough to reach the top 10,” he said.

There also was only one hit song from the modern era that was clearly anti-war, but that’s not surprising since the draft no longer exists, Swiatowicz said.

Another difference between the two eras is that songs from the classic period address broader social issues, as with “People Got to Be Free,” “Indian Reservation” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Swiatowicz said. These older songs convey the importance of it being in everyone’s interest to get along peacefully and live a life free of hatred and oppression, as in “Joy to the World” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” while only one song from the recent era was more global in addressing current events, he said.

“In the modern era, a lot of these songs were more individualistic, treating subjects like self-esteem and personal issues, such as depression or anxiety,” he said.

Deena Weinstein, a De Paul University sociology professor and author of the book “Heavy Metal,” said she is not sure “love” is the operative word with pop music. “Most pop and popular rock songs have been focused on sex and romance,” she said. “In 1967 the Rolling Stones agreed to change the words to ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ to ‘Let’s spend some time together’ because Ed Sullivan’s TV show demanded it; it was the same year as the summer of love.”

The movie’s inaccurate portrayal of a great white shark as a vengeful predator bent on massacring swimmers and boaters ironically helped set into motion the determined slaughter of sharks themselves, said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File, which is housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

“Back in 1975 when the movie came out, many of us who studied sharks sort of gasped at some of the inaccuracies and pooh-poohed it,” he said. “But as the years have gone by, my perception has softened, partly out of a realization that it was a victim of its time.”

After “Jaws,” dozens of shark fishing tournaments began popping up along the East Coast, part of a growing shark-hunting trend that dramatically reduced nearly all shark species over the next three decades, Burgess said. Not only was catching sharks cheaper than reeling in billfish or tuna, but in 1975, recreational fishing was still largely a male phenomenon, and the prospect of conquering the giant marine animal excited numerous fishermen, he said.

“Shark fishing became a popular blue-collar recreational fishing activity for testosterone-bolstered males who wanted to have their pictures taken with their feet on the heads of ‘maneaters’ and to have jaws on their mantles,” he said. “’Jaws’ greatly pushed the recreational fishing sector into a mindset of fishing for sharks. The later-developing commercial shark fishery further impacted the sharks.”

In the waters off the U.S. eastern seaboard, many species of sharks have dropped by 50 percent and some have fallen by as much as 90 percent, he said.

But as shark populations began to decline precipitously, scientists became aware of the need to learn more about sharks. That resulted in increased funding for shark research over the past 15 years and improved understanding of shark biology, he said.

“Jaws” was based loosely on a deadly rampage by a rogue white shark on swimmers along the New Jersey shoreline and in a nearby creek during the summer of 1916, Burgess said.

One of the movie’s most blatant errors was attributing one attack to a shark of the genus Squalus, which in reality is a spiny dogfish shark with tiny teeth that grows no bigger than 3 feet long and almost never attacks a human, Burgess said.

“We have one attack in the International Shark Attack File where somebody was washing his hands over the side of a boat and a shark came up and probably thought it was a piece of filet going overboard and nipped a guy’s finger,” he said. “This is the generic equivalent of your pussycat being accused of consuming a human being after nipping a finger.”

Burgess said when he played this “Jaws” segment to a group of shark scientists in Pennsylvania several years ago during a presentation on how sharks are portrayed in the media, “everyone got a big kick out of it and it brought the house down.”

Another humorous episode in the movie involved the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss single-handedly performing an autopsy on one of the shark victims, Burgess said. “It’s very interesting that a marine biologist would be doing an autopsy at all,” he said. “As a guy who studies shark attacks, I’m frequently involved in autopsies, but I don’t perform any. I only consult with the medical professionals.”

But the movie’s major mistake is to portray sharks as vengeful creatures that can remember a particular human being and go after it, he said.

Although “Jaws” deserves accolades as an exciting piece of cinema, Burgess said, most of the sequels lack the original movie’s artistic content while still reinforcing unflattering stereotypes about sharks. In one recent televised movie, a monstrous school of sharks attacked spring breakers off a mountainous beach that was supposed to be Florida, he said.

While some of the educational programming, such as National Geographic and the BBC, represent sharks realistically, “in the end, it still seems that certain producers and certain channels feel obliged to pull out the scare card when it comes to sharks,” he said.

Humans have always held sharks in special awe, as they have lions, tigers, elephants and other ferocious animals, Burgess said. “The difference is that a high-powered rifle in the hand of a human being equalizes all land critters, even charging elephants, while humans are no match for sharks in the sea,” he said. “The irony is if humans sit in a boat and put a hook in the water, sharks, which as efficient predators are quick to grab the bait, are highly vulnerable.”

Unchanged are portrayals of white characters, who are depicted as noble, wise or heroic folks no matter whether they encounter rampaging blacks in old, silent flicks or oppressed blacks in color features almost a century later, said Andrew Gordon, a UF professor of English and one of the authors of the book published this month.

The book, “Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness,” co-written by UF sociology Professor Hernan Vera, analyzes the images of white protagonists interacting with people of another race or ethnicity in American movies from 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” to “Black Hawk Down” in 2001. The authors see the portrayals of whites in movies as “sincere fiction” fed to society through means such as the media, with minorities assigned secondary roles to advance the fictions of the white self.

Gordon said there have been many studies of minority images in film - African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos - but most ignore the obvious: About 95 percent of Hollywood movies are made by, for and about white people.

The portrayal of leader-like whites and backup blacks has a powerful influence on the world’s image of the United States, Gordon said. “We tend to dismiss cinema as mere entertainment, yet it has profound effects in shaping our thinking and behavior,” he said.

Early films portrayed blacks as vicious upstarts, such as the black soldier who tries to rape a white aristocrat’s daughter in “Birth of a Nation,” or as faithful servants, such as Mammy, the motherly maid in 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” Gordon said. Today it is not uncommon to see movies like “Save the Last Dance,” in which a black teenager not only teaches a white girl he romances how to hip hop but also straightens out her life, he said.

“On the surface it seems to be a role reversal - a kid from the ghetto who incorporates middle-class values and upward mobility more so than the white characters,” he said. “But it’s a substitution of one set of stereotypes for another: that is, the minority figure is still functioning to prop up the white identity.”

The same is true in the “Lethal Weapon” movies, in which a black Los Angeles cop, played by Danny Glover, is an older, wiser middle-class family man who rescues a reckless and suicidal white cop, played by Mel Gibson, Gordon said.

“Even though white characters no longer automatically demand black characters be subordinate and faithful followers, they nonetheless still expect them to prop them up psychically,” he said. “(Director) Spike Lee objected to what he saw as a proliferation of recent movie characters he called ‘magical Negroes,’ who seemed to exist only to serve the white heroes.”

Whites are persistently represented across time as brave, kind, firm and generous; natural leaders worthy of the loyalty of slaves or subordinates of color, Gordon said.

“We can say minorities today are portrayed through a far greater range of characters than the obnoxious stereotypes of such early movies as ‘Birth of a Nation,’ a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “But the portrayal of whites doesn’t change much despite all the gains of the civil rights movement, which seems to fly in the face of common sense.”

Even well-intentioned films considered progressive for their time fuel these stereotypes in their magnanimous treatment of whites, Gordon said. “Amistad” (1997), for example, affirms the fundamental goodness of white American civilization by romanticizing the institutions that made it legal and possible for slavery to exist, he said.

Another example is “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), the story of a white patriarch coming to terms with his daughter’s intention to marry a black man, which ends with a long speech reaffirming the father’s wisdom and tolerance, Gordon said. As it appears a newly integrated American family is about to form, its members continue to be served by a black maid, he said.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same,” he said.

Blacks remain secondary characters even when they are the center of a story, Gordon said. In “Mississippi Burning” (1988), which looks back to the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, blacks are primarily passive, suffering victims incapable of fighting without the help of whites, he said, while in “Glory” (1990), which dramatizes black soldiers’ service to the Union Army, the hero is a white abolitionist - the only actual historical figure among the principal characters - who controls the film’s narrative in the form of letters home.

The work already has received praise. “This book reveals the diverse, often disturbing ways in which movies manufacture the ‘white self’ - the image and story of whiteness articulated by white filmmakers,” said Daniel Bernardi, a University of Arizona media arts professor and an expert on race.

Appropriately, “Dancing Beyond Boundaries,” which will rely on the ultra-high bandwidth Internet2 network and other emerging technologies, will be based at the SuperComputing Global conference in Denver. An annual fixture of the conference, which draws engineers and scientists from around the world, is the temporary construction of one of the world’s fastest computer networks. “Dancing Beyond Boundaries” creates a network of another kind, using the latest technology to craft a performance based on the talents of choreographers, dancers, musicians, computer scientists, engineers and others across the nation and in South America.

The production is being spearheaded and coordinated by the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute, which is devoted to nurturing collaborative research and education in engineering and the arts to develop digital technology and culture.

“My hope is to exponentially expand both the notion of ‘network content’ and ‘network collaboration’ with an experimental arts experience,” said James Oliverio, director of the institute. “While many have been talking about collaboration at distances, we are going to do it in such a way that it will be a complex, evolving process, much like what happens when artists get together in one place and really start to work.”

The dozens of people recruited in advance for the production will “meet” Monday morning via Internet2 access points in Denver and at the University of Florida, the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the University of Campinas near Sao Paolo, Brazil. Mestre Boca, a world-renowned percussionist in Brazil, will provide what Oliverio called the artistic and metaphorical foundation of the project: the drum beat.

“The drum has been a means of communication at a distance since time immemorial,” Oliverio said. “Call and response, music, movement and dance evolved from this marking of rhythm, and so, for this production, we’re beginning with this same primal expression and expanding its reach across two continents.”

Minneapolis-based choreographers Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith will guide the shaping of the production with assistance from Florida-based classical guitarist Welson Tremura and dancers in each city. The piece will culminate with a premier on Thursday, the last day of the conference, by two Denver-based dancers in conjunction with “virtual” dancers participating in real time from Minneapolis and Gainesville. Conference attendees will be able to see the Denver dancers in the flesh, but anyone with an Internet connection can watch not only the production, but also rehearsals, through a dedicated Web site at www.digitalworlds.ufl.edu/sc2001.

Oliverio said engineers and computer scientists at each location have already built the technical infrastructure for the production, using a new multipoint video-conferencing system called the Access Grid as the backbone. Contributors include Florida’s Northeast Regional Data Center, which will provide network services, and the Partnership for Global Learning, which has provided cultural linkages between North and South America.

Television production studios at WUFT at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications are geared up to receive, mix and process streaming video during rehearsals and the performance. Additionally, Minerva Networks of California also has contributed video networking products to enable the delivery of broadcast-quality audio and video service.

The work of the scientists and engineers will continue during the production. They and other technologists, such as animators and videographers, will help shape the final work, contributing as equals with the artists, Oliverio said.

“Both the technological infrastructure and the artistic content of ‘Dancing Beyond Boundaries’ will be a unified vessel,” Oliverio said. “And this vessel will be filled with the potential of what can be done when we really collaborate with one another all around our spinning planet.”

To help regain control and contend with her uncertain future, Brenda turned to painting, covering hundreds of pieces of paper with splotches and swirls of color. Painting comforted her. She began to feel the paper and paints were her friends, with whom she could express her deepest thoughts, feelings and fears.

Just as a major motion picture featured Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams’ unique use of humor to heal, University of Florida College of Medicine Professor John Graham-Pole advocates the therapeutic powers of other art forms.

In a new book called “Illness and the Art of Creative Self-Expression,” Graham-Pole uses the story of Brenda (not her real name) and others he’s met or cared for coupled with creative exercises to teach people with chronic illnesses — and those who care for them — how to explore their artistic, imaginative and intuitive sides. Doing so will help them better deal with their maladies and increase their health and happiness, he says.

Adams, who authored the book’s foreword, says creativity is great medicine for everyone because it prevents disease and promotes wellness. “Art uplifts, educates, brings beauty and facilitates social change. Bringing imagination to our every endeavor makes us happier and healthier,” Adams writes.

Graham-Pole’s 201-page how-to book, to be released this month by New Harbinger Publications, suggests a dose of art can help people work through times when they feel powerless. The book advocates a move toward a holistic approach emphasizing health instead of illness, one that partners science with art and makes well-being a shared effort.

“Living in our busy lives we don’t take time to do art — language arts, musical arts, visual arts, performance arts. But when we’re confronted by illness, suddenly the rug is pulled from under our feet. We sort of lose our way; we can’t make sense of it,” Graham-Pole said.

“But people are helped enormously to be able to really improve their mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health individually and collectively if they are given the opportunity to turn to art, not just as a diversion or for fun, but to help them understand why this is happening to them.”

Historically, healers and shamans, who provide health care to the majority of the world’s people, have used art as part of their craft. But until recently, its use in modern medicine has not been widely accepted. That’s changing, however, as the international movement toward the healing arts expands and more scientists recognize the benefits. For example, British law requires that 1 percent of its national health-care budget must be spent on art in hospitals - not just for art on the walls, but for art and artists, Graham-Pole said.

To help him better deal with his life’s difficult and challenging work caring for children battling cancer, Graham-Pole turned to writing poetry a decade ago. He is a professor of pediatric oncology affiliated with the Shands Cancer Center at UF, an affiliate professor of clinical and health psychology, and medical director and co-founder of UF’s Arts in Medicine program, which brings in specially trained artists to help patients at Shands at UF medical center and their families focus on the body, mind and spirit.

Graham-Pole’s poetry about his work with ill children won an award in May from the National Association for Poetry Therapy and will be published next year in a book called “ER Exit.” His poems also have been set to original music and released recently on a compact disc called “Where Do All The Young Ones Go To?”

An estimated 100 million Americans suffer from some kind of chronic illness or medical limitation. Millions more family members and health professionals care for them.

“The aim is to bring imagination, creativity and art back into life in order to maximize our health no matter our situation — however old we are, however sick we are, however close to death we are — being as healthy as we can be whether we’re doctors and nurses, or whether we’re patients or family members,” Graham-Pole said. “Art is simply a tool to help fulfill ourselves in the larger sense individually and collectively.”

Getting started is easy. The supplies are inexpensive. You don’t have to be an artist to do them.

Among those included in the book is an exercise directing the reader to scrutinize the contours of an object several times before trying to follow them with pen on paper without looking. Another guides people back to their natural creativity by directing them to remember all the artistic things they liked to do as a small child.

Several journalizing exercises are included, one of which requires dredging up the worst, most upsetting experience and spending a full 15 minutes writing down one’s deepest feelings about it, without pausing. The benefits of journalizing are not new. Studies have shown that keeping a journal, writing about the most traumatic events in life and trying to problem-solve can improve physical symptoms for conditions as diverse as rheumatoid arthritis and serious chronic asthma in adults, Graham-Pole said.

Group art-making activities such as the story telling, collage making and quilting that are part of UF’s Arts in Medicine program also have been effective, he said.

Adams sees the importance of art and creativity and said he will share the book with other doctors and patients.

“You’ll like where it takes you, so make creating a part of your life,” Adams writes. “This is not just a primer — it’s a kick in the pants.”

The root of the problem may be the automated garbage trucks that are proving increasingly popular statewide and nationally, said John Schert, director of the UF center that conducted the study, the Florida Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management at the UF College of Engineering. Although the trucks reduce labor costs and injuries to garbage workers, they often result in more litter because they tend to have a sole driver/operator who may not see and respond when pickups result in litter, Schert said.

“I think that in general, the men on the back of the truck were cleaner, but the labor costs were higher and there were more injuries to the workforce, especially back and ankle sprains,” he said. “The waste management industry is trying to respond by redesigning newer trucks that spill less litter when the trucks empty the cans using the automated arm.”

The first phase of the ongoing study found that the amount of litter in a Gainesville subdivision substantially increased after garbage and recycling trucks made their rounds on garbage pickup day. On some weeks, the amount of loose paper, packaging, bags, cups and other litter more than doubled after the trucks came through, the study found.

“Our major conclusions are that people are fairly sloppy in the way they put out their garbage, but also that lots of litter is spilled when the cans are emptied and the recyclables are picked up, and that lots of litter comes out of garbage and recycling trucks,” Schert said.

Bubba Bussard, district manager of Boone Waste Management, the company that collects garbage in Gainesville, attributed part of the problem to old garbage and recycling trucks, which he said the company had largely replaced with cleaner models since the study was conducted. “We’re pretty aware of how the litter problem has been,” he said, adding that the company had spent a total of $5 million replacing the old trucks.

But Bussard added that some blame also may rest with residents.

When residents overfill containers or fail to bag their garbage, the frequent result is that some items escape when the truck picks up the garbage, Bussard said.

“One of the biggest litter problems is loose Styrofoam packaging peanuts,’” he said. “If people don’t bag those, I don’t care what kind of equipment you have, if you tip the trash container, they are going to get out.”

The study focused on a middle-class subdivision consisting of slightly more than 100 homes. The main researcher was Stephen Bissonnette, a UF graduate student and an research assistant at the Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management.

Canvassing the neighborhood on a bicycle, Bissonnette counted and collected all litter larger than 4 square inches on the street and right of way on the morning of trash day before the garbage and recycling trucks arrived. He made similar forays after the recycling truck made its rounds and after the garbage truck came through the neighborhood.

The amount of litter varied considerably from week to week during the study, which lasted from last March through June. But after 15 weeks Bissonnette’s records showed he had collected a total of 229 pieces of litter before the garbage trucks arrived — litter that had been accumulating for a week since his last collection. In his post recycling truck rounds, he collected an additional 108 pieces of litter. The garbage truck, meanwhile, left behind 283 pieces of litter, meaning the litter after the trucks did their pickups totaled 391 pieces.

“There was more litter after the garbage and recycling trucks than there was from the whole week before they came through,” Bissonnette said.

Schert said the center plans to broaden the results of the study and collect additional data in more neighborhoods over different seasons, as well as do a larger project aimed at scrutinizing the litter problem resulting from commercial trash pick up.

A University of Florida communication science professor is using a UF College of Engineering-designed computer program to sort out the myriad qualities that make singers’ voices shine. The goal is to identify signs of trouble in time to help singers correct them.

“With a singing voice, I’m interested in trying to objectively determine what makes up an exceptional voice,” said Howard Rothman, professor of communication sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “If I knew that, I might be able to identify and help singers who are having difficulty early enough that their careers could be saved.”

Fans of opera or other vocal musical forms, such as liturgical Jewish music, may think they know what makes singers’ voices good, but impressions are misleading, Rothman said.

One of his studies showed singers, speech pathologists, voice coaches and other experts in speech and music could not collectively identify singers’ vocal techniques. For example, more than 100 experts sampled had different opinions on whether singers were using vibrato — slight and rapid variation in pitch — or other techniques such as tremolo.

There was a little more agreement on whether a singer sounded good or bad, but opinions remained far from unanimous, Rothman said.

“We’re really not sure what the dimensions are that define these terms,” he said.

Currently, when singers want to correct problems with their voices, they must rely on coaches or others whose prime tool is their subjective listening abilities. The computer program opens the possibility singers one day will have an additional, objective tool to gauge their problems.

“It’s opening the voice up to minute inspections that are not human biased,” said Tony Arroyo, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of UF’s Machine Intelligence Laboratory. Arroyo supervised a recent UF graduate, Jose Antonio Diaz Avila, who designed the program for his dissertation in electrical and computer engineering.

Singers’ voices are composed of tones with different frequencies, and the computer program separates the tones from one another and renders them as separate waveforms.

The program then allows Rothman or other researchers to pick the waveform they are most interested in and dissect it on a computer screen. By examining many samples, researchers can identify the mathematical characteristics of each singer’s voice, Arroyo said.

“For example, we could come up with a formula that describes Pavarotti’s vibrato,” he said.

Rothman said the program allows him to examine 149 parameters of the human voice, though he so far has confined his investigation to just six. It also has made the process much faster, he said. “In less than five minutes, I can get information that used to take me hours and hours and hours to develop,” he said.

Movies from “Birth of a Nation” to “Interview with a Vampire” have difficulty portraying slavery, so instead they turn it into monstrous characters, a Gothic horror tradition, says Keith Brown, a master’s student in English.

“We look at slavery through language drawing from the imaginative character of the monster, the creature or the vampire. Images of slavery in movies are drawn from this rich tradition of horror figures,” Brown said. “The dominant media looks at slavery in different ways, but basically projects onto marginalized people, such as blacks or homosexuals, these horrors of slavery.”

Since “Birth of a Nation,” the first full-length feature film produced 82 years ago, movies have created characters to represent the horror of slavery. The first was Gus, a black rapist in “Birth of a Nation.”

“Gus allowed whites to project their fears, anxieties, desires and repressions onto this figure,” Brown said. “There were no black actors in these early movies; the actors were in blackface so the actor could deny these negative characteristics within himself and create a monster.”

Even movies that didn’t actually depict blacks as monsters tended to portray stereotypical views of blacks, said a UF sociology professor who is a nationally known expert on race and racism.

“I have never seen a movie which a good historian would say was an accurate picture of slavery,” said Joe Feagin, author of “White Racism” and more than 30 other books. “In fact, I would be hard pressed to find a movie since Gone With the Wind’ which even deals with slavery at all.”

“The media played a critical role in reinforcing racist images from the beginning,” Feagin said. “In movies like Gone With the Wind,’ there is the image of the happy slave, the fat mammy or the servile, shuffling black servant. Uninformed Americans buy into this portrayal.”

Brown’s studies of such portrayals include several horror movies from the 90s, including “Candyman.” The recent thrillers differed from earlier movies in many ways, yet still created monstrous characters representing slavery.

“In Birth of a Nation,’ society wanted separation of the races; there was no crossing of the boundaries. To show that there could be no contamination of this white purity, Flira Cameron committed suicide rather than submit to Gus,” Brown said. ” Candyman’ moved from this 1915 idea into the 90s era of postmodernism, a movement characterized by intermixing, hybridization and creating alternative cultures, leading to an identity crisis.”

In the “Candyman” movies, the lead character is an invincible, murderous slave spirit who Brown interprets as a symbol for the white majority’s fears of contamination or intermixing and losing racial identity.

Mainstream movies also have difficulty portraying slavery and related events properly.

“Even in breakthrough movies like Glory,’ the first movie about black regiments in the Civil War, the central character was the white colonel, even though the story was about a black regiment,” Feagin said. “Black men were of central importance in the movie, yet they were not the central character.”

Brown says there are movies that depict slavery accurately, but usually they are not mainstream motion pictures.

“Haile Gerima’s Sankofa,’ which literally means One must go back to the past to go forward,’ really gave some thought-provoking ideas about slavery,” Brown said. “But again, this was independent cinema.

“Depictions of slavery in cinema need to be more powerful, more sophisticated and deal with this issue in more honest ways,” Brown said. “There needs to be more evaluation of slavery, so we can come to terms with the past, accept it and move on.”

Through simulated viewing group responses, UF marketing Professor Steven Shugan can predict an upcoming movie season’s hits and flops, based on the film makers’ past performances and responses to factors such as trailers, or film clips, that promote the films.

“The big hit will be “Lost World,” which is not a big surprise, and it will be way ahead,” Shugan said. “The new Batman movie, Batman and Robin,’ may be somewhat of a disappointment. Our studies show that it won’t do as well as the last Batman.’ In fact, our study showed that people were slightly less likely to see the movie after watching the trailer. The distributor might change this through massive advertising.”

Shugan’s predictions are based on a study launched about a year ago in which UF students met before each movie season and watched trailers for upcoming movies. They then answered questions on how likely they were to see the movie based on the trailer. The most recent group consisted of 60 respondents watching 16 trailers. So far, 419 people have evaluated 64 trailers.

The survey can be used as a model for other businesses to predict the success of new products and could be used by movie studios to determine which movies to produce.

“This study will add to the literature on new product development,” Shugan said. “We hope industry will use this to predict the success or failure of new products.”

The age range of the students, 18 to 25, is the favored demographic for most movies, which might have an effect on some of the predictions.

“These are college students, which is the main target market for movies. This could explain why Mortal Combat 2′ tested so badly. What could save it are the 7- and 8-year-olds,” he said. “One of the worst movies will be McHale’s Navy,’ a Universal release, which might be aimed at an age group that remembers the TV series. This looks like a disaster.”

The study found that predictions based only on a large group’s average intent to see a movie do not always predict how successful a certain movie can be.

“When we just look at the average intent, we found that the average is not correlated with the box office,” Shugan said. “For example, Beavis and Butthead Do America,’ which did fairly well at $63 million, had terrible average intent. But a small group of people really wanted to see it. The key is to market to some percentage of people. Although the average number of people who say they are going to see a movie is important, it is not as important as having a number of people very interested. That is how we do our forecast.”

The study also identified what influenced people to see movies. One of the most important factors was the people involved, especially the screenwriter, who was identified as more important than the director or even the cast, Shugan said.

“We found that the screenwriter was the most important person in the movie,” he said. “From 1980 to 1996, we found how well the screenwriter’s best film did, and this tells the potential for their current movie. This is a really good predictor of a movie’s success.”

Other summer movies predicted to be hits include Tri-Star’s “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney, and “Con Air,” an action movie about the hijacking of a prisoner transport plane, starring Nicholas Cage and distributed by Buena Vista. Other than “The Lost World,” big-budget science-fiction movies are not predicted to do as well this summer.

“The science-fiction movie The Fifth Element,’ starring Bruce Willis, didn’t test well at all, and after watching the trailer even fewer people wanted to see it,” Shugan said.

This is the third phase of the study. Results from the first groups of movie watchers accurately predicted the hits for previous seasons.

“We predicted Liar, Liar would take in over $100 million, so far it is at about $150 million,” Shugan said. “Out of all the movies in that period, which was about 30 or 40, we knew that this would be the biggest. Liar, Liar’ had the most positive responses, people reacted positively to the story line even before watching the trailer.”

The lights come up, the dancer moves and his motions and gestures create music. As the melody expands, other dancers on stage move in synch with the music. The lead dancer conducts not only the sounds but the dancers as well.

The suit formally referred to as the MIDI Movement Module, or M3 contains electronic sensors that transform the dancer into a living electronic keyboard. The suit is being developed by a trio of University of Florida researchers professors of music, theater and engineering. The futuristic look of the suit is not coincidental, as it was originally developed for a ballet based on Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game.

While it doesn’t actually make any music, the M3 sends information via radio signals to computers that do, says electrical engineering Professor Mike Lynch.

“The suit itself produces control signals,” Lynch said. “The program on the receiving computer transforms those control signals into what we want them to be.”

UF Assistant Music Professor James Sain said the suit is the next step in the evolution of the computer-based music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface devices that tell computers how to create different sounds.

“We were starting to get students interested in these alternative MIDI controllers,” Sain said. “We started to think it would be neat to have something that allowed the dancer to create, control and work within the sound environment.

“The dancer would be the instrument, the conductor, the composer and the performer all in one,” he said.

Watching the dancer put on the suit is reminiscent of seeing an astronaut don a spacesuit before liftoff. Numerous sensors are zipped into parts of the suit covering the dancers arms and legs. The sensors read the amount of bend at the elbow or knee. Bending the right arm controls pitch; the left leg controls volume. Buttons in the suit and gloves allow the dancer to play pre-recorded sequences or select a different instrument.’

“The trick is taking the sensors from the dancer and being able to then translate that into something that’s useful,” Sain said. “A computer program enables us to take those joint positions and trigger buttons and map those to musically significant parameters.”

So far, the suit has been used to produce music that sounds like a cross between New Age and Modern Jazz. But its creators say the techniques can just as easily be turned to the classics.

“The idea is to be where the dancer can take a set score and can conduct that score in real time,” Sain said. “So if they need a little more time to do a specific gesture or perform a specific movement they can do that.”

“Imagine the freedom the dancer has,” he said. “He could be doing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake’ and be conducting the orchestra from his movement with complete control over the slowing down and speeding up of the piece or the specific tempo of the piece.”

Sain pointed out that recorded music rather than a live orchestra often accompanies performances, especially in small communities. Using the music suit, the spontaneity of a live performance can be added to the experience.

To date, only a few performances with the music suit have been presented locally and during a conference in Utrech, Holland. The researchers Sain, Lynch and theater Associate Professor Richard Rose, the dancer of the group have been paying expenses out of their own pockets for past the four years, and they need funding to continue the suit’s development.

“We’re trying to give the suit the full gamut of musical capabilities,” Sain said. “That’s how we’d like to see it go forward in its next incarnation.”

“The younger audiences may be jaded a bit by the saturation of science fiction movies and special effects epics from the last two decades,” said Andrew Gordon, a University of Florida professor and noted expert on the George Lucas film. “But, if I had to guess, I would say those who have not seen Star Wars’ on the wide screen will want to experience it in the way it was meant to be seen.”

With the re-release of “Star Wars” and subsequent re-releases of its two sequels, “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” attention and interest once again have turned toward Gordon’s detailed analysis of the movie, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time” that was first published in the Fall 1978 issue of Literature/Film Quarterly.

When “Star Wars” launched into the American pop culture landscape 20 years ago, it revealed more about our society’s past than its future, said Gordon, an associate professor of English at UF.

“I had studied science fiction films for some time and was sparked right away by Star Wars’ and its immediate audience appeal,” Gordon said. “My article on Star Wars’ is the most cited piece I have ever written.”

“Star Wars” and its fast-moving scenes of star ships thrusting into hyperspace and dogfight gun battles taking place in far-away galaxies paved the way for a new crop of successful science fiction films including the “Star Trek” series.

But “Star Wars” actually is more a nostalgia movie than a movie set in the future, Gordon said. It combines influences of mythology with traditional American pop culture placed in a storybook setting, he said.

” Star Wars’ is a modern fairy tale using early forms of movie-making from the 1930s and 1940s,” Gordon explained. “It is a combination of a multitude of old stories, such as The Wizard of Oz’, Flash Gordon’ and old Westerns, blended together to create a myth of its own.

“In the theater, people would gasp during certain scenes, hiss at the villian and cheer the hero in the end,” Gordon said. “I hadn’t seen this level of audience participation since the kiddie matinees from the 1950s.”

Gordon said the characters in Lucas’ classic represent the conventional, well-defined roles of good and bad that are reminiscent of older films and traditional stories.

Luke Skywalker is the reluctant young hero primed to take over for the old and wise Obi-wan Kenobi. Darth Vader clearly is the villain, clothed in black and surrounded by evil. Princess Leia is the beautiful and brave heroine, while Han Solo is the likeable, wise cracking warrior who in the end reveals his goodness.

” Star Wars’ took us back to a previous generation at a time when Americans had lost heroes,” Gordon said. “The country wanted to return to an earlier age that was simpler. When we knew exactly who the heroes were and who the villains were.”

When it was released, “Star Wars” largely was dismissed by many critics as a childish movie that was “corny or hokey, strictly kids’ stuff”. Gordon argues that the movie appeals to young and old precisely because of its old-fashioned plot.

Although the 1997 version includes some new characters and enhancements to sound and visual effects, whether young viewers will head to the theaters for the return of “Star Wars” is uncertain.

When UF sophomore Kelly Koukos was 4 years old, her mother sometimes would arrange her hair like Princess Leia’s, with braided buns on each side of her head. Still, she has no plans to see “Star Wars” in the theater.

“I’ve seen it on TV and I liked it,” said Koukos, 19. “But I’d rather go see a love story.”

In fact, children catching on fire after playing with matches or falling out of trees and dying were common images in books designed to teach children moral and social lessons into 19th century also, said John Ingram, chairman of the special collections department at the University of Florida libraries, which houses more than 93,000 volumes of children’s literature.

While today’s scary stories are meant to entertain, horror themes were used in the Victorian Age and earlier to teach children etiquette, restraint and responsibility by showing terrifying examples of the price of misbehaving.

“One of the oldest cautionary books in our collection is from 1789, titled Vice in its Proper Shape, or the Melancholy Transformation of Several Naughty Masters and Misses into Contemptible Animals,’” Ingram said. “In this book, the children behave like animals and then slowly turn into animals representing these characteristics, almost like the werewolf or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Such literature was thought to be an effective way of instilling moral lessons and proper behavior.

“These stories represent the ultimate pragmatic world,” Ingram said. “Nothing is free, and nothing is without consequence.”

Frightening elements can also be found in earlier stories, especially fairy tales handed down through the ages. For example, “Little Red Ridinghood,” originally penned in 1697, tells of a wolf eating a little girl’s grandmother.

Stories during that time, however, used horror to empower children, said UF English Professor John Cech, author of five children’s books.

“Children had to cope with the ogre, the giant or the witch in a way that unvictimized the child,” Cech said. “These stories spoke to an older psychological necessity, which was more ancient and, in a sense, more vital than the Victorian stories.

“In the late 19th and early 20th century, we began to realize that children were much smarter than they were given credit for being,” Cech said. “We didn’t have to sacrifice children to these horrors to get them to learn moral lessons.”

Part of the violence in children’s stories can be attributed to the time period in which they were written, Ingram said. In the days before vaccinations, there were examples of physical “horror” on display every day, sometimes from disease, sometimes from physical abuse.

“These were very rough times,” Ingram said. “Millions of people suffered from terrible disease and ignorance. Education was not universal, literacy was not universal. This was a harsh, harsh existence with much untreated sickness and disease.”

Horror stories meant to educate children gradually died out in the mid-19th century, with the advent of new technology, modern medicine and progressive social movements that improved living conditions and helped prevent many physical signs of disease. Another factor was a change in literature — for example, Edgar Allen Poe’s use of stories of terror as entertainment.

“Poe transformed the period. This was the beginning of the end of horror as functional literature,” Ingram said. “Poe raised terror to an art form.”

“These sites had to be of international historic and cultural significance and also had to be under some danger, such as the walled city of Dubrovinik, which is right in the middle of the fighting in Croatia,” said William Tilson, associate professor of architecture. “The World Monument Fund selected the top 100 most endangered sites and we assisted them in developing a visual data base that funding agencies around the world can access and use for information on restoration.”

Countries sent photographs, maps and information on monuments they wanted protected. The list was narrowed down to the 100 most endangered, and UF geoplanning graduate students spent three weeks scanning and digitizing the information into a data base.

“We scanned over 2,000 images and organized the data base, working 12 hours a day for about three weeks,” Tilson said. “We tried to make it a very visually appealing system.”

The information is now on an in-house data base for the World Monument Fund, and will be used for raising funds for restoration. This data base is planned to go on the World Wide Web within six months, making this information available to anyone interested in any aspect of these monuments.

“You can use this data base to see the surrounding geography, the damage to the monument, and what organization is in charge of the monument,” said Frank Chang, a geoplanning doctoral student who helped program the data base. “You can click on different parts of the monument and get artwork, maps and other information. In the future we would like to get some animation or live-action camera tours.”

These monuments have been damaged in different ways. Some have been in the middle of war sites, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Others have been victims of neglect and decay, like the Taj Mahal in India, Pompeii in Italy, or the adobe missions in New Mexico.

“Researchers from all over world will have access to this information, with pictures of the site, maps, and other data available to them,” said John Alexander, director of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning’s GeoPlan Center. “This is very helpful because some of these sites, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, are virtually inaccessible.”

The data base will be used by the World Monument Fund, a private foundation which attracts funding through governments and international philanthropic groups, then gives money to the endangered sites to use for restoration. UF was selected to install the data base because of the combination of resources and expertise available.

“UF has a unique combination of expertise through the colleges of planning, architecture and landscaping, ” Tilson said. “All of these colleges have an interest in these sites. We also have a very high level of technological expertise. Few colleges have this combination.”