Panel to discuss Measure 37 effects

"Measure 37: What are the Impacts?" is the topic of a panel discussion to be at noon Friday at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library.

Annabelle Jaramillo, chairwoman of the Benton County Board of Commissioners, will join Oregon State University political scientist David Bernell, OSU resource economist Andrew Plantinga, and Kate Kimball, staff attorney for 1000 Friends of Oregon, to provide perspectives on where things stand regarding this important property rights legislation.

Sponsored by the Linn-Benton DemoForum, the event is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dick Johnston, dnjohnst@msn.com or 753-8321.

Balsa wood bridges face weight tests

The 38th Annual CH2M-Hill/OSU Holly Cornell Model Bridge Contest will take place at 9:30 a.m. Saturday in Owen Hall 102 on the Oregon State University campus.

The contest requires high school students to make a balsa wood bridge to a specification with the intent to carry as much load as possible. Many of the bridges tested in previous years carried more than 1,000 times their own weight.

The contest is intended to promote interest in engineering and provides an opportunity for high school teachers to include the concepts of design and testing of engineering structures in their curriculum. Also, a considerable amount of skill is required to construct the models, and the students learn the importance of working to a specification.

The contest is staffed by students from OSU's Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering Department, many of whom are members of OSU's American Society of Civil Engineers student chapter. The OSU students deal with registration, weighing, measuring, testing, recording, conducting tours of campus and supervising distribution of refreshments.

In the 2006 contest, 136 bridges were tested from students of eight different high schools.

The most efficient bridge meeting the weight restriction of 30 grams carried more than 37 kilograms (more than 2,250 times its own weight of just over 16 grams).

- Gazette-Times