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Making bricks from sweat, soil and soot	NMSU's first woman Ph.D. in civil engineering builds solid reputation	Editor has bases loaded from hard news to sports	From NMSU to 'Toy Story': Alvy loves pictures	Need to downshift? Riding to the rescue

JUAREZ, Mexico - A university chemistry team aims to reduce air pollution from brick oven fires here using cheap and available materials Ñ simply, clay and water.

"(The brick makers) are not going to take anti-pollutant measures if they're going to be painful," said Robert Marquez, '81, an NMSU graduate student in chemistry. "We have to work with what is already here - the ground, the sun, the water - and not devise expensive and complicated technology to clean the environment."

Marquez is one of a trio planning this summer to build an experimental, cleaner-burning brick oven in a Mexican colonia, one of the many squatter neighborhoods built along Juarez landfills. Antonio Lara, '71, '77, '90, assistant professor of chemistry, received a $3,500 grant from the El Paso Community Foundation and a private health and community development organization named FEMAP (Federacion Mexicana de Asociaciones Privadas de Salud y Desarrollo Comunitario) for the project, which also involves graduate student Alba Corral.

Lara said that once perfected, the research could be applied in industry to improve air quality: "The beauty of the idea lies in its simplicity."

Juarez has about 400 brick ovens, which are ranked as the third-largest contributor to pollution along the El Paso-Juarez border after traffic and industry, according to FEMAP. Most bricks are produced in backyard operations rather than factories here. To heat the ovens, the people burn any available combustible materials - wood pallets, saw dust, tires or other wastes. Juarez has outlawed the burning of tires, Lara said, but most officials will agree that the practice will continue in secret as long as the brick makers are desperate for inexpensive fuel. For the past several months, they have been required to burn sawdust, which is purchased from lumber mills around the city.

About a decade ago, FEMAP and Los Alamos National Laboratory created a school in Juarez to study ways that brick makers could eliminate pollution and improve the brick making process. Natural gas was the answer, said Marquez, who worked briefly as a student researcher for the laboratory. Natural gas burned cleaner but was more expensive. When the peso devaluated in 1995, the brick makers returned to burning trash.

The NMSU oven will attempt to clean the majority of air pollutants from burning, assuming that brick makers will continue using the cheapest fuel available. It will send its noxious fumes through a pipe from its hood to a hole in the ground. Most of the soot will become trapped in the dirt and clays. Another pipe will travel into the hood of a neighboring oven, emptying most of its remaining emissions here. Only one oven will be burning at a time. They will take turns sending emissions from one direction to the other, Marquez said.

The polluted clays gathered from the hole eventually will be used to make more bricks, and tests have shown no difference in strength in these new blackened "soot bricks," Marquez said.

Marquez already had a mechanical engineering degree when he decided to work on pollution problems. He describes a flash of inspiration one morning when he looked out upon a yellow haze of pollution following a religious ceremony on the Navajo Reservation near Shiprock, N.M.

"How does Mother Earth help heal herself?" Marquez recalled thinking. "With whatever she has available to her. I decided to look for what's already available in nature to heal nature."

The team has a deep commitment to the project. Corral, whose home is Chihuahua, Mexico, said: "I want to help with the problems of my country. This project is a special opportunity for me." Lara, a native of Berino, N.M., has watched smog in the El Paso-Juarez area grow along with the region's burgeoning population. "Pollution doesn't respect international borders. It's not a Juarez problem; it's a world problem" Lara said.

Catherine Lazorko, '95

Making bricks from sweat, soil and soot

"They say when the smoke moves near you, it means you're pretty," said Alba Corral, turning to avoid it.

On a spring day in Juarez Colonia 68, the smoke is thick, as usual. Music blares loudly from a nearby factory into the colonia, where the only people around this afternoon are women, children and the brick makers. The smoke from making bricks follows a girl coming home from school, wafts near three little children next door who sing to the factory music and trails across the muddy path to a woman who washed clothes outside her cardboard house.

Corral, along with NMSU colleagues Antonio Lara and Robert Marquez, ask questions of brick makers Jose Contreras, 40, and Teodoro Molina, 68, as they feed an oven fire with a mound of sawdust. The oven is about eight feet underground and the men below appear buried as they feed the fire.

Contreras began this work when he was seven years old and prefers it to punching in hourly at the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories located mostly in the border areas of Mexico.

Molina, who has worked at the brick ovens for 30 years, says there are few jobs for an old man. Sawdust is the only new thing, and he doesn't like it as well as other faster - and hotter-burning trash like tires. When tires and plastics are used to raise the temperature, he describes the air as "repugnant."

Idriss Bombs exploding in the night kept Rola Idriss, '86, '91, awake counting the supporting walls of her Beirut apartment building during civil war.

"I inspected the building in my mind, asking `How much protection would it give us?'" recalled Idriss, who was an engineering student in 1976.

She put her newborn son's crib in a storage room by an elevator shaft, which she calculated to be the most reinforced part of the building. Several weeks and frightening bomb raids later, Idriss, with her husband and son, left Lebanon to make a new home in the United States.

The memory is both haunting and interesting to revisit, says the NMSU professor of civil engineering, because it illustrates the direct application of engineering - what to her has become a vital aspect of the field. Instead of large apartment buildings, Idriss now studies bridges but asks the same fundamental question: How strong?

To monitor strength, Idriss is developing a "smart bridge" system that is receiving national notice. This spring, Idriss was honored at a New York City gala as one of the top 25 news makers of 1996 by Engineering News Record (ENR), a weekly news magazine for the international construction industry. The magazine noted that Idriss implemented the first fiber-optic bridge monitoring system on a full-scale bridge.

Idriss receives support from the Federal Highway Administration, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the New Mexico State Highway Department. In 1994, Idriss received the Young Investigator Award from the NSF.

She was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from NMSU's civil engineering department in 1991, the same year she was hired as a professor. Since then, Idriss has received the Patricia Christmore Teaching Award, the Bromilow Award for Teaching and the Roush Award for Teaching.

Idriss follows a long history of bridge research excellence in NMSU's civil, agricultural and geological engineering department, which has inspected New Mexico's 3,500 bridges since the late 1960s. The department is recognized internationally with recent inspection projects in South Korea following a major bridge collapse in October 1994 that killed 34 people.

Editor has bases loaded from hard news to sports

	Julie Aicher, '89, is the new sports editor for the Albuquerque Journal, the first woman in the newspaper's history and one of only a few nationally to hold such a position. Aicher, who was raised in Albuquerque, grew up reading the Journal's sports section. "I'm very close to my father," she said. "That was one of our ties - sports."
Aicher

Aicher received her bachelor's degree in journalism and immediately began working for The Associated Press (AP). During her six-year career with the AP, she worked in Albuquerque, Madison, Wis., Milwaukee and Los Angeles. She joined the Albuquerque Journal staff in Santa Fe in 1995. She became sports editor about a year later.

"I've never looked at sports as just a game, it's news," Aicher said. "Sports is becoming more popular nowadays because it has glamour, suspense and money. It's becoming more news oriented."

While only 30, Aicher is a seasoned professional at hard news. In Milwaukee she supervised AP coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer serial murder trial and as AP assistant bureau chief in Los Angeles, one of her assignments was supervising coverage of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial.

"My favorite part of journalism is courtroom coverage," she said.

Aicher also has covered California wildfires, the Northridge, Calif., earthquake, and Big Ten football and basketball.

"My journalism background is in hard news, but I also have some sports experience sprinkled in there," she said.

The rapid growth of the Internet is changing the way newspapers operate, Aicher said. More people expect newspapers to provide breaking news on a Web page. "Newspapers want to get their foot in the door," she said, "but exactly what they want to do (on the Internet) still needs to be decided."

Part of Aicher's job as sports editor is giving readers what they want. "My mission as sports editor is to provide sports coverage that the majority of our readers are interested in. The fact that I graduated from NMSU doesn't necessarily mean that we'll run more stories on NMSU athletics," she said.

Dan Trujillo, '92

From NMSU to 'Toy Story': Alvy loves pictures

	Computer graphics guru Alvy Ray Smith, '64, fondly recalls falling in love at NMSU. Falling in love with rock climbing in the Organ Mountains, that is - and with the elegant logic of computer programming. Smith, who blazed a trail that led to the first completely computer-generated movie, Disney's "Toy Story," today is Microsoft Corp.'s
Alvy

Graphics Fellow. Back in the '60s, he was a young fellow from Clovis, N.M., majoring in electrical engineering and climbing in his spare time, when the computer bug bit him.

'I learned that computer languages could be elegant. I fell in love with computation and I haven't gotten over it yet," Smith recalled during a recent visit to his alma mater to speak to the Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Smith did his first computer graphics at NMSU, working as a student in the Physical Science Laboratory's electromagnetics section. "They asked me to draw an equi-angular spiral antenna. I said, `You can get a computer to do that,' and I did."

After graduating from NMSU with high honors and earning a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford, he spent about a decade teaching and conducting research at universities. Then he signed on as a director of computer graphics research with the Computer Division of Lucasfilm Ltd., where he directed the first use of full computer graphics in a successful motion picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

When George Lucas sold the computer division, Smith co-founded a company named Pixar. The team he formed there went on to create Tin Toy, the first computer animation ever to win an Academy Award, and Toy Story, the first completely computer-generated film.

"Toy Story was the completion of a 20-year dream," Smith said. "It took 800,000 hours to compute."

Smith initiated and negotiated the Academy Award-winning CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) project between Pixar and Disney, the hardware and software system that Disney now uses for the production of its traditional animated feature films, including Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas.

In 1991, Smith left Pixar to start a company called Altamira Software, developing sophisticated "paint" algorithms for the personal computer market. His product, Altamira Composer, introduced image objects called sprites, based on the alpha channel concept, which he co-invented and for which he shares a technical Academy Award.

Microsoft acquired Altamira in 1994 and named Smith the company's first Graphics Fellow. "I am trying to bring aesthetics to the place," he said with a grin.

Karl Hill

Need to downshift? Ridings to the rescue

	Did you know that a U.S. postal card, with postage included, costs the same as a post card stamp alone? That your local public library may save you money on CDs, videos, even Internet user fees? That adjusting the temperature gauge on your water heater can add up to big savings over time? Pennywise tips like these are the stock in trade of Kelley Ridings, '88, '91. His new business is an expense reduction service called Money Savers. In addition to personal consultations with clients, Ridings offers a monthly newsletter chock full of advice on every facet of life that costs
Ridings

money. From banking to interior design services, from grocery shopping to investing, Money Savers Monthly reports from the skinflint's perspective.

Ridings, who earned a bachelor's degree in secondary education and a master's in history from NMSU, says he hit upon the idea for the service last year when he returned home to Truth or Consequences, NM, after a four-year stint teaching at an American high school in Mexico. He decided that helping people out of their financial pickles could be a growth industry.

Besides, he realized, you don't need a poverty-level income to be concerned with watching expenses. "Downshifting" and lifestyle simplification are becoming popular, even trendy, these days. The no-frills, back-to-basics approach can seem like a tonic to consumers who've lived for years with maxed-out credit cards.

"The psychology of it is that once you're in a spending pattern, it becomes a way of life," he notes. "Even if people really need help, they don't necessarily realize it."

Ridings says his initial client consultations are free, and he offers a money-back guarantee on all services.

This evangelical tightwad says he hasn't always been so fiscally virtuous himself. During his years at NMSU-where he edited The Round Up and served as ASNMSU vice president-he was a credit-card junkie. Today he doesn't even include credit-card payments as an option for his clients; payment is by check or money order only. Ridings finds this only fitting: "I don't want to set a bad example."

Connie Kallman