‘WanderNebraska' expands to promote more than 200 museums, tourist attractions and sites of interest
The John Phillip Falter Museum in Falls City is among the many attractions promoted by the WanderNebraska program. (Courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation)
LINCOLN — A Nebraska charitable foundation is stepping up to promote lesser-known museums and historical sites in the state.
'WanderNebraska,' a project of the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, is promoting visits to 213 museums, libraries and notable attractions this year via brochures, billboards, bus tours and prizes for visiting.
The program, now in its fourth year, has grown from an idea spawned over plates of pasta to an effort that has generated 7,000 requests from 18 states this year for WanderNebraska booklets. Initially, it promoted 27 sites.
'We think it's a neat program,' said Leslie Fattig, executive director of the Historical Society Foundation. 'We're teaching people about Nebraska history and getting more people involved.'
At Chimney Rock National Historic Site, more than 20,000 visitors have traversed the 'Walk to the Rock' trail since it opened in the autumn of 2023, tourism increases that Fattig attributes, in part, to WanderNebraska's marketing.
The WanderNebraska program is similar to the 'Nebraska Passport' program operated by the Nebraska Tourism Department, which beckons tourists to visit 70 eateries, breweries, wineries, bed and breakfast inns and other commercial attractions.
Both programs beckon people to discover new places and qualify for prizes. But Fattig said that WanderNebraska is more focused on nonprofit attractions that highlight history, and those in small towns with smaller staffs and budgets.
Tourism advocates have long argued that Nebraska — which ranks as one of the least-visited states — spends too little to promote its sites of interest, so the WanderNebraska program is filling a void.
About 35% of all tourism spending is for historical attractions, she said, so it makes sense to give historical sites a boost.
'A lot of these small museums are really challenged,' Fattig said, adding that many lack the funds or staff to market programs or write tourism grants.
So WanderNebraska promotes sites like the log cabin courthouse in Callaway, the Old Poor Farm Historical Site and Animal Sanctuary in Nickerson and the Furnas Prairie Shelter in Brownville. The program also features several county museums and small-town libraries.
'WanderNebraska invites people to connect with the state's past in fresh, meaningful ways — whether by visiting a small-town museum, discovering a hidden landmark, or exploring a piece of forgotten heritage,' Fattig said.
By visiting 10 sites, a WanderNebraska participant can get a free koozie. By visiting 25 sites, you get a free T-shirt.
The program, funded by donations and grants, also includes training sessions for small museum operators on how to use social media to increase attendance.
In addition, historian Sara Crook, a professor emeritus from Peru State College, leads a series of bus tours to historic sites across the state, such as a 'Wild West' tour that includes a stop at Fort Robinson.
Fattig said that the Historical Society Foundation, which had for decades raised money for the State Historical Society, was confronted with a dilemma in 2019. That's when the then-director of the agency, Trevor Jones, formed a new fund-raising foundation to replace the 83-year-old foundation. Long-established Historical Society fund-raisers were told that their services were no longer needed.
So, Fattig said, the foundation pivoted, and launched a statewide grant program to help sustain and develop mostly small museums across the state. The grant program has grown from $15,000 in the first year to $83,000 this year.
Promoting sites via Wander Nebraska remains an outgrowth of that effort, she said, though the state Historical Society has since restored the foundation's role as its official fundraiser.
None of the promotional efforts would be possible without donations from supporters of history, Fattig said. For more information about the foundation and WanderNebraska, access the websites www.nshsf.org or wandernebraska.com.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AP Top Extended Financial Headlines at 12:44 a.m. EDT
Leaders of some of the world's biggest economic powers arrive in the Canadian Rockies for a Group of Seven summit that's been shadowed by an escalating conflict between Israel and Iran and U.S. President Donald Trump's unresolved trade war Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Your boss is probably using AI more than you
Leaders use AI around twice as much as individual contributors, a new Gallup Poll finds. Gallup data indicates AI adoption has risen, especially in white-collar roles, with tech leading at 50%. 16% of employees surveyed who use AI "strongly agree" that AI tools provided by their company are useful. There's a good chance your boss is using AI more than you. Leaders are adopting AI at nearly double the rate of individual contributors, a new Gallup poll released Monday indicates. The survey found that 33% of leaders, or those who identified as "managers of managers," use AI frequently, meaning a few times a week or more, compared to 16% of individual contributors. Gallup's chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, Jim Harter, told Business Insider that leaders are likely feeling added pressure to think about AI and how it can increase efficiency and effectiveness. "There's probably more leaders experimenting with it because they see the urgency and they see it as a competitive threat potentially," Harter said. The data point was one of several findings from Gallup's survey on AI adoption in the workplace, including: The number of US employees who use AI at work at least a few times a year has increased from 21% to 40% in the past two years Frequent AI use increased from 11% to 19% since 2023 Daily use of AI doubled in the past year from 4% to 8% 15% of employees surveyed said it was "very or somewhat likely that automation, robots, or AI" would eliminate their jobs in a five-year period 44% of employees said their company has started to integrate AI, but only 22% say their company shared a plan or strategy 30% of employees said their company has "general guidelines or formal policies" in place for using AI at work 16% of the employees who use AI "strongly agree" that AI tools provided by their company are helpful for their job While AI adoption has increased overall in the last two years, that increase isn't evenly distributed across industries. The Gallup report said that AI adoption "increased primarily for white-collar roles," with 27% surveyed now saying they use AI frequently on the job, a 12% increase from last year. Among white-collar workers, frequent AI is most common in the tech industry, at 50%, according to the survey, followed by professional services at 34%, and finance at 32%. Meanwhile, frequent AI use among production and front-line workers has dropped from 11% in 2023 to 9% this year, according to Gallup's polling. Concerns that AI will eliminate jobs have also not increased overall in the last two years, but the report indicated that employees in industries like technology, retail, and finance are more likely than others to believe AI will one day take their jobs. The most common challenge with AI adoption, according to those surveyed, is "unclear use case or value proposition," suggesting that companies may not providing clear guidance. The report said that when employees say they "strongly agree" that leadership has shared a clear plan for using AI, they're three times as likely to feel "very prepared to work with AI" and 2.6 times as likely to feel comfortable using it at work. "In some cases, you've got to have the training to be able to use AI as a complement with other text analytic tools that are more precise," Gallup's Harter told BI. Harter said that while organizations are increasingly developing plans around AI usage, "there's still a long way to go," and it may not be a one-and-done approach. "They're going to have to continue to be trained in how to use it because it's going to evolve itself," Harter said. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Chinese scientists claim AI is capable of spontaneous human-like understanding
Chinese researchers claim to have found evidence that large language models (LLMs) can comprehend and process natural objects like human beings. This, they suggest, is done spontaneously even without being explicitly trained to do so. According to the researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, some AIs (like ChatGPT or Gemini) can mirror a key part of human cognition, which is sorting information. Their study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, investigated whether LLM models can develop cognitive processes similar to those of human object representation. Or, in other words, to find out if LLMs can recognize and categorize things based on function, emotion, environment, etc. To discover if this is the case, the researchers gave AIs 'odd-one-out' tasks using either text (for ChatGPT-3.5) or images (for Gemini Pro Vision). To this end, they collected 4.7 million responses across 1,854 natural objects (like dogs, chairs, apples, and cars). They found that of the models created, sixty-six conceptual dimensions were created to organize objects, just the way humans would. These dimensions extended beyond basic categories (such as 'food') to encompass complex attributes, including texture, emotional relevance, and suitability for children. The scientists also found that multimodal models (combining text and image) aligned even more closely with human thinking, as AIs process both visual and semantic features simultaneously. Furthermore, the team discovered that brain scan data (neuroimaging) revealed an overlap between how AI and the human brain respond to objects. The findings are interesting and provide, it appears, evidence that AI systems might be capable of genuinely 'understanding' in a human-like way, rather than just mimicking responses. It also suggests that future AIs could have more intuitive, human-compatible reasoning, which is essential for robotics, education, and human-AI collaboration. However, it is also important to note that LLMs don't understand objects the way humans do emotionally or experientially. AIs work by recognizing patterns in language or images that often correspond closely to human concepts. While that may appear to be 'understanding' on the surface, it's not based on lived experience or grounded sensory-motor interaction. Also, some parts of AI representations may correlate with brain activity, but this doesn't mean they can 'think' like humans or share the same architecture. If anything, they can be thought of as more of a sophisticated facsimile of human pattern recognition rather than a thinking machine. LLMs are more like a mirror made from millions of books and pictures, reflecting those models at the user based on learned patterns. The study's findings suggest that LLMs and humans might be converging on similar functional patterns, such as organizing the world into categories. This challenges the view that AIs can only 'appear' smart by repeating patterns in data. But, if, as the study argues, LLMS are starting to build conceptual models of the world independently, it would mean that we could be edging closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a system that can think and reason across many tasks like a human. You can access the study in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
