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(04/23/14 3:11am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>All campus bus routes will get a makeover by the time students return to campus in August. The Student Transportation Board presented five major concept changes during a public meeting Monday, IU Campus Bus Service operations manager Perry Maull said. Four were approved unanimously by the STB. All buses are adding stops to their routes. The X Bus will add stops at Woodlawn Avenue and Seventh Street; the B route will add stops at the Maurer School of Law and Jordan Hall; and the A route will return to an earlier route system, for which bus stops will be restored at the Sample Gates, the Indiana Memorial Union, Collins Living-Learning Center, Woodlawn Field and the Kelley School of Business, in that order. The A bus is returning to the route that preceded the expansion at the Kelley School. The re-routing brought on by the expansion resulted in decreased ridership, according to the agenda of Monday’s meeting. But the D and E routes are seeing the biggest adjustments. The two will be combined and go by the E route name, according to an April 21 notice to students from the STB. This change has caused some controversy. Some think the combination of the two routes will fill buses too quickly, leaving a large chunk of the route to be denied service because of full capacity. Shannon Foley, an IU Campus Bus driver, has been giving students rides along the D route for years. She said in an email to the IDS and the STB that to combine the D and E routes would mean cutting service to many stops in the latter half of the route. “The E route can’t adequately service Evermann, Red Bud, Campus View, Cedar Hall and Willkie, Rose and Forest,” Foley said. “You have to keep in mind that any one bus alone can only hold a maximum of 75 students. During the busy times on campus, that number is reached before the E route even makes it to 10th Street. That’s where the D bus picks up the slack.”Once the bus gets to Cedar Hall of Union Street Apartments, she said, the bus is already packed. There, she often has to ask people to move closer together to let new passengers on. After that, fitting more becomes almost impossible, she said. “You can take 13, maybe 15 if you plead with everyone to move, which is like herding cats in a thunderstorm,” Foley said. “You have now left 12 to 14 people at the bus stop who are going to be late to class or just can’t make it without the bus.”She said the rest of the people still waiting just won’t be able to get on. “Now what do you do about those at the next stop at Seventh and Union?” Foley said. “Who gets to tell those at the Willkie bus stop you can’t get on the bus? What about Forest?”When the D and E routes are combined, she said, she believes there simply won’t be enough buses to go around. More buses would have to be added, which might not be in the Campus Bus Services’ budget. The budget is already tight. The Campus Bus Service receives $200,000 a year from Parking Operations. It’s supposed to go toward bus replacement, but replacing just one bus costs $380,000, according to a statement from Maull.“The only way the E route can handle the D route added is if there are four buses, two running behind each other all the time,” Foley said. “With the proposed changes, the E route will be covering the largest population distribution of all the campus bus routes. It will be covering even more than the A or B routes, and those routes have five buses each.”Foley said she believes the current D and E routes are about as good as they can get and call for no change. “The current routes, the E with one full-time bus and one busy-time bus, and the D bus with two full buses is as minimal as you can get and still maintain adequate services to all the students living on the north east and south east of campus,” she said.But the D and E route combination is the only change that is expected to save the Campus Bus Service any money. The merge would save one bus a day, which would reel in about $38,000 of savings annually.In the agenda, the Bus Services acknowledged this would most likely cause a decline in ridership.The last concept of the five on the agenda proposed the E bus that runs during breaks should stop. That item was tabled and will be reviewed by the STB at a Sept. 15 meeting, Maull said. If approved, it will take effect during the 2014 Thanksgiving break. This would mean students who stay on campus during breaks will have one less major mode of transportation. The STB could not be reached for further comment about the adjustments. More detailed information on the changes is available online at go.iu.edu/aNN.
(04/11/14 4:09am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Time travel and academic advising were on the meeting agenda for the Board of Trustees Thursday.Informatics professor Bernard Frischer presented to the board the latest in 3D modeling and what it means for the academic world.“The goal is to build up a virtual time machine,” Frischer said. “For education, for the visualization that supports education and for empirical research by scholars and scientists.”Frischer is a virtual archeologist in the new field of virtual heritage. He and his team scan the remnants of statues and entire villas in Rome to recreate them as they would have been when the villas were being used and the statues first created.“It’s very interdisciplinary by its nature, because we are involved, not in making pretty pictures, but in modeling information,” Frischer said. “And to model information we have to collaborate with specialists in really all of the fields that pertain to human behavior.”These fields include informatics, anthropology, archeology and game design.Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel, Vice Provost for Research Sarita Soni and Vice President for Research Jorge Jose looked at IU-Bloomington research more broadly. “At IU-Bloomington we define research to include creative activities and scholarship,” Soni said. Three categories are used to measure IUB’s excellence: National and international awards, publications, performances and exhibits and sponsored research activity, Soni said.“External funding for sponsored activities is important as a means of producing high-impact publications,” she said.IUB faculty have been earning more and more American Association for the Advancement of Science awards during the past few years, Soni said.“This is not an accident,” she said. “We have actually developed a concerted effort, working with the department chairs, to nominate our faculty for these awards.”The trustees also discussed developing academic advising. A new system called the Interactive Graduation Planning System is under construction, which presenters said will help expedite students’ graduation.“Advising is one of the most important aspects of student success,” said John Applegate, executive vice president for University Academic Affairs. “The role of the University is fundamentally supporting that in a variety of different ways.”Applegate led a presentation of the new system, which will include degree mapping as a key element in streamlining the graduation process.The degree map will allow students to create their own path to degree completion, but it’s designed to work best when an academic adviser is there to help steer the wheel, Applegate said. He said too many students forgo academic advising, thinking they can do it themselves, and it has set IU behind in on-time graduation rates. But the new system won’t rid students of their independence as they plan courses, Applegate said. It looks to aid them. He said the degree maps will be available as a template, but each student is in charge of their own development plan.“For every student we take at random, they will complete their degree in a different way,” Applegate said. “We don’t want to get in the way of that.”Students aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the new system. With the IGPS, Applegate said scheduling meetings will be smoother, career advising will be more efficient and advisers will have more time to actually have a discussion with students, rather than navigating the software, as they do with the present system. An exact time for the launch of the system wasn’t disclosed. Applegate said across campuses, career services are also in the works. The trustees said career advising at the Kelley School of Business is the best University-wide, and that it should be used as a model for other colleges. Improving career services has been a major project in recent years, Robel said.She said the University has spent around $1.4 million recently, trying to do just that. “It’s really been a laser-like focus for the last year and a half,” Robel said.
(01/23/14 4:50am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>An IU biochemist has discovered two protein traits that could keep cancer at bay. Assistant professor Matthew Bochman used a yeast protein called Hrq1 in his study to model the human protein cell RecQ4. Yeast cells lacking Hrq1 were especially susceptible to cancer, Bochman found.Cells low in Hrq1 were hypersensitive to toxic lesions on DNA strands called DNA interstrand crosslinks and to an enzyme substance called telomerase, which protects the ends of chromosomes and keeps them from fraying.The new work found that Hrq1 affected several aspects of telomerase biology, according to a press release.This includes inhibiting over-growth of the substance at the tips of chromosomes, and at locations where lethal breaks in both strands of the DNA double helix had occurred.While not enough telomerase can promote aging, too much can give way to uncontrollable cancer growth. In addition to inhibiting telomerase, Bochman and fellow researches discovered Hrq1 promotes genetic integrity by advancing inter-strand crosslink repair. This suggests Hrq1 cells’ strong sensitivity to inter-strand crosslinks may be a first line of defense against the dangerous lesions, the release said.Continued research may show why mutations of human RecQ4 lead to unstable genetic info and, in turn, disease. Three syndromes are already known to be effects of RecQ4 mutations — Bloom syndrome, Werner syndrome and Rothmund-Thomson syndrome.Each are associated with an increased predisposition to cancer.“We want to continue exploiting yeast as a simple model to spread our net wide to learn more about Hrq1’s genetic and physical interactions in the cell, how Hrq1 inhibits telomerase, when and how it functions during crosslink repair,” Bochman said in the release. — Ashley Jenkins
(12/05/13 5:55pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Two high-resolution, microscopic photos of cells captured in the midst of mitosis are among 30 finalists in the GE Healthcare Life Sciences 2013 Cell Imaging Competition. Voting is open until Dec. 20. Jim Powers, manager of IU’s Light Microscopy Imaging Center, and Amber Yount, a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Biochemistry Graduate Program at IU, each took one of the photos.“At this point, it’s a public popularity contest, so we need all the votes we can get,” Powers said. Powers’ photo, which was taken as part of a collaboration project with Joe Gall at the Carnegie Institution, shows a newt chromosome in a cell process called splicing. Splicing means a strand of mRNA is splitting apart into two different strands. After that, one quickly degrades while the other becomes a mature strand of mRNA, ready for translation into an amino acid that will later fold into an active protein. The folding process is what Powers and Gall were studying when the photo was shot with a $1.2 million super-resolution microscope camera called the DeltaVision OMX.Five lasers and three cameras work within the OMX to record faster than 400 frames a second. Powers said it has twice the resolution of any other light microscope at IU.“This has made a huge difference in what we can see,” Powers said.When Powers snapped the photo, he said he saw a heart. The RNA splicing factor, dyed red, was dispersed in the shape of a heart, while a blue-dyed RNA-producing enzyme called Polymerase II surrounded it.Powers said it’s that kind of image that gets him excited about his job after 25 years of practicing microscopy.“I am a visual person, so for me, seeing is a big part of believing,” he said. “I still get very excited by the images we create every day. We see new things that are part of us or the world around us, how things fit together, how things move, how we — our cells — work.”Yount’s photo shows a HeLa cell, a type of cervical cancer cell that’s been widely used in developing drugs and vaccines since the 1950s. In the picture, purple, orange and blue-dyed proteins cluster around green-tinted DNA to create a multicolored orb. The two photos are from a collection of Powers’ favorites, which line the walls of the imaging center. “When I see images that are especially visually pleasing, I add those to my collection images,” he said. “I print many of these to hang on the wall in the LMIC, and it’s from this collection that I chose images to submit to the contest.”They’re now among 30 from around the world that can be voted for online. Last year, IU research associate Jane Stout won the competition. In its entirety, more than 15,000 votes were cast.Powers said he hopes to continue the winning streak. The prize is a trip for two to New York City, and the winning image will be featured in GE’s next Cell Imaging Calendar as well as on the cover of a 2014 issue of science magazine, BioTechniques.There’s one drawback though, Powers said. Since IU has two photos that made it to the finals, votes might be divided.“We’re a little worried that a split vote will hurt our chances of winning this year, so a big IU vote in general would really help,” he said.Photos can be viewed and voted for at gelifesciences.com.Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga
(11/22/13 2:14am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Second-century Rome has gone virtual.An ancient Roman site called Hadrian’s Villa has been recreated as a computer simulation by IU archaeo informaticist Bernie Frischer and is an interactive online world that will soon be available for public use.Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project is a 3-D model that includes 30 buildings across 250 acres of land. It will come to life in its public unveiling Nov. 22 in Washington, D.C.“Hadrian’s Villa” refers to a small town where Roman emperor Hadrian reigned from 117 to 138 A.D. It was located near Tivoli, about 20 miles east of Rome, and was home to classic architecture, gardens and sculpture revered in ancient Roman studies. “This project offers a test bed for experiments in Roman cultural geography, but just as important is the opportunity for virtual world projects like this to become the new textbooks for evidence-based learning,” Frischer said. “What you are experiencing is an immersive learning environment created through the integration and deployment of commercial products, custom software and the knowledge offered by some of the world’s leading experts on Roman history and culture.”The project was a collaboration between the Institute for Computing and Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University and Frischer’s Virtual World Heritage Laboratory at IU School of Informatics. The finished product will be available as a 3-D multi-user environment online in the next 12 to 18 months.Visitors can select from a range of avatars that can walk through gardens, temples, bedrooms and libraries. Avatars are sorted based on class, gender and ethnicity, and users can play as characters who are courtiers, soldiers and slaves, among other occupations.“This avatar system was based on scholarly studies of the circulation and flow throughout the villa,” Frischer said. “The goal was to make everything evidence-based, from the avatars’ costumes to their gestures.”The academic research behind the digital world comes from collaboration between dozens of academic institutions, museums and the Archaeological Superintendency for Lazio, a unit of the Italian Ministry of Culture, according to the release.The virtual side was sculpted by the Ball State team at Digital Intermedia Arts, which used the cross platform game engine, Unity, to portray the villa.“The simulation shows how the site looked during the reign of Hadrian,” Frischer said. “It can be freely explored and used to support teaching and research.”More than 800 unpublished survey drawings were used to help put it together. The finished product is eerily accurate, Frischer said.But he said it’s only made him want more.“It is not only emotionally exciting and satisfying to be able to walk around the sites I have studied, but it also means that my imagination and curiosity have been stimulated to raise new questions or have new insights that never could have occurred to me if I had been limited to just reading the scholarship about the sites,” he said.He said a related website documents the state of the site today and gives the scholarly background needed to understand the digital simulation.“The website makes it possible to study the state of the ruins today, including many sites on private land or in parts of the archaeological park closed to the public,” he said.Frischer said building the virtual villa wasn’t inexpensive. When they started the project, Frischer said it typically cost more than $10,000 just to make a digital 3-D model of a statue. There are more than 150 statues on the virtual site. At their high price to recreate, Frischer said the sculptures were the biggest challenge.But advancements in technology have made it more and more affordable over the years. Eventually the virtual re-sculpting of a statue came at no cost.“By the time we finished the project, new breakthroughs in computer science gave us new software that make it possible to model a statue for free,” he said.After all the money and work it took, Frischer said he has high hopes for the virtual world. He said he’d like to see it become the next revolutionary classroom tool.“We learned that there is no better way to teach kids about the past than to let them travel there virtually and play historic roles constrained by evidence they collect,” he said. “This is the way to make children engage with history and take ownership of the past.”Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/21/13 4:49am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A recent IU study revealed new insight into how people with autism direct their attention. The study, led by IU researcher Dan Kennedy, found participants with autism looked toward brighter pixelated areas on a TV screen, while subjects without the disorder were more interested in characters’ faces.Three hundred times per second, an eye-tracking device recorded where each subject looked while watching an episode of “The Office.”Kennedy said the gaze of participants with autism differed from that of the participants without the disorder about 10 percent of the time. The data shows that people with autism are less stimulated by social cues, like faces, than “neurotypical,” individuals, Kennedy said.But there are a few questions researchers are asking to confirm the patterns. “Is there a reduction in social interest and social motivation in autism, or is there just greater interest and motivation to examine low-level visual features such as brightness?” Kennedy said. “Is something happening in the scene that predicts when this will happen?”Kennedy said a brain scan could help explain what is exactly going on when an autistic person’s attention strays.“We’re interested in using functional neuroimaging methods to examine what brain regions and networks underlie these differences in attention,” he said. “We can scan participants while they watch this same video and see which systems of the brain are differentially engaged in the two groups.”The number of children with autism is up 78 percent from the last decade, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.If researchers test subjects at young ages, results could tell more about how autistic people develop attention to social stimuli over time, Kennedy said.“An important question would be to ask whether young children with autism, or infants prospectively studied even before they receive a diagnosis, show a similar pattern of attention to low-level visual cues,” he said.Though the findings imply a lot, Kennedy said it’s a small step. “This research is just the beginning of trying to understand a very complicated neurodevelopmental disorder,” he said.Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/21/13 3:55am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Travel back centuries into a more classic Cuba tonight.“De la contradanza al son: The Predecessors of Latin Dance Music,” a concert celebrating Cuba’s musical history, was collaborated on by the Jacobs School of Music Latin American Popular Music Ensemble and the La Casa Latino Cultural Center.It will be held at 7 p.m. tonight at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Performing Arts Center.Tickets are available for free at the Waldron Performing Arts Center two hours before the event.“Since it’s a historical take on music, it’s different from concerts we usually put on every semester,” LAPME resident arranger Guido Sanchez said. “It’s what we call a lecture concert.”Between musical performances, there will be three intermissions where a musicologist will discuss the styles of the music and their historical context.Chronicling back to the mid-19th century and through the 1950s, Sanchez said the concert honors musicians that graced the ears of our ancestors. Some of the most recognized styles born from contradanza include the Rumba, ChaCha and Son, the predecessor of salsa.“This is the stuff our grandparents danced to,” Sanchez said. “It’s all very nostalgic.”Growing up in Costa Rica, Sanchez said he remembers hearing contradanza on the radio. Even then, he said some of the songs were old.But they’ve become a standard of popular Cuban music, and though people won’t be found dancing to them today, they’re widely known and still loved. Everyone is invited to dance.“It’s not just a show,” Sanchez said. “The last two sets will be especially dance-able, and we hope everyone will try it out.”It’s too good to keep on campus, he said. That’s why they chose to perform downtown.“We don’t want to keep it within the walls of the school,” Sanchez said. “We look forward to sharing all the work that we’ve done with the students, and we want the whole town to see it.” The concert is part of a celebration of the 40th anniversary of La Casa. “Our 40th anniversary isn’t just about celebrating La Casa but all the Latino contributions and involvement on campus,” the center’s director, Lillian Casillas-Origel, said. “We include everybody in our celebration to make it an educational opportunity.”Getting introduced to new things is the ultimate goal, said Latin American Music Center Director Erick Carballo.“This is particularly important to us because it teaches the students in the ensemble how to play this classic kind of music, and it makes the community more aware of it,” Carballo said.Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/19/13 5:15am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Academic advising is being taken for granted on a national level, and students are paying for it, recent surveys show. Results released this month from the National Survey of Student Engagement show 60 percent of college students say they don’t use their academic adviser as their primary source of information and guidance to get through school.Though IU didn’t participate in the survey this year, the University’s 2012 results revealed IU students are on level with most of the country’s college students who forgo their adviser, NSSE’s Associate Director Jillian Kinzie said.“I was most alarmed by the one in 10 that never go,” Kinzie said. “There’s just so much advisers have to share with students, and they’re not taking advantage of it like they should.”Some students register for classes they don’t need and miss out on those they do, which leads to the loss of time and money, Kinzie said. According to research group Complete College America, Indiana students spend an average of 18 credit hours at college that don’t count toward their degrees. That equals the cost of a full semester’s worth of classes.Though students who get off track can catch up before it’s too late to graduate on time, most don’t, CCA has found. Fewer than half of students receiving a bachelor’s degree earn the credits they expected to in their first year, according to CCA’s results, and only 14 percent of students in Indiana graduate in four years. Erin Ritchie, a senior at IU who isn’t sure if she will graduate in the summer or next fall, said advising has become especially crucial in her last year here.Though she’ll graduate late because she switched her major at the end of her junior year, she said her adviser has helped her minimize the extra time she would have to spend finishing her degree. “They know shortcuts that can help you get done earlier,” Ritchie said. “They know which classes count for two kinds of requirements, tricks like that.”She met with her new adviser three times before registering for spring classes.“I need all the help I can get now,” she said. “I need to be done.”But Kinzie said students realize much too late they should have talked to an adviser. She said too many get by for too long on just talking to friends.About a third of freshmen and 18 percent of seniors use friends and family for advice, and another 18 percent rely on other university faculty, according to NSSE.Kinzie said though consulting with peers in similar fields of study is a good idea, students are missing out on the expert advice their advisers are paid to relay.The national average expected salary for a college adviser is $41,785, and CCA says the national ratio of advisers to students is 1 to 367.But when 60 percent —220 of that 367 — aren't showing up, advisers can do only a fraction of the work they’re paid to do.Justin Otten, undergraduate advisor for the School of Fine Arts, said the lack of attendance is frustrating.He said about a quarter of his appointments never show up, and most no-shows aren’t even courteous enough to cancel ahead of time.“I’ll prepare for a student to show up, pull out their file and then they don’t come,” Otten said. “It’s a waste of my time, and it’s irresponsible on their part. Not to mention that it’s time gone that another student could have come in to talk to me.”Otten sends a weekly “Studio Art Digest” email to his students, packed with information about job, volunteer and internship opportunities.But students also don’t get the response Otten wishes for, he said. “A huge issue is students just don’t check their email. I know they don’t,” he said. “We’re not holding hands here. This is the way I let students know of things going on. If they don’t read or choose to ignore their email, they miss out. And it’s just too bad.”Statistics suggest the reason students skimp on advising is not because of a lack of advising efforts. “Seventy-five percent of students reported their advisor was readily available and they were happy with the services they received,” Kinzie said. “For some reason, it’s just getting them in the door. That’s the problem.”If students would just go, Kinzie said they’d find out their advisers’ assistance can reach above and beyond typical class planning.“We just want students to take ownership of their education and the opportunities available to them,” Kinzie said. “They could achieve a lot more if they took the time to get help.”Follow Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/18/13 4:35am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Irene Reyes’ sister was swept from her house by a wave of water 10 days ago when Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines.The three days that followed were what Reyes describes as the longest three days of her life, trying to track her sister down. Her sister finally called on the Monday after the typhoon to let Reyes know that she and her 8-year-old daughter were still alive. She had walked to the airport, bruised from the debris that slammed into her as she walked through neck-deep waters just to reach safety. She had to sell her jewelry to buy a plane ticket to get her and her daughter a flight from the city of Palo to Cebu, where damage was less severe. “I answered the phone, and it was her, and my body just started shaking,” Reyes said. “I almost dropped the phone. We were so relieved, so happy.”Reyes and her husband Sonny were among many on Sunday who gathered to raise money for Haiyan victims, despite an afternoon full of tornado warnings and heavy rain in Bloomington.A benefit concert and auction sponsored by the Asian Culture Center was held last night at St. Paul’s Catholic Center to raise money for the victims of the typhoon that left half a million Filipinos homeless.Several students and alumni from the Jacobs School of Music performed songs in the church’s nave, and a silent auction took place in the lobby. Although anyone who has lived in the Philippines is used to severe storms and typhoons, this one caught Filipinos off guard, Sandra Bajamonde, co-organizer of the benefit, said.“We expect storms all the time,” she said. “We prepared ahead of time, but what we didn’t expect was all the water.”A 20-foot-tall storm surge broke concrete houses on Nov. 8. Most evacuation centers were destroyed, Reyes said.She said that if her sister hadn’t thought to open the front of her evacuation center, she and everyone in it would have died. “The pressure was just too much,” Reyes said. “Opening the front door to let the water through saved her life.”Mass graves have been dug and filled. More deaths are expected, especially without a continued surge of donated water, food and money. The auction raised $4,173 through the sale of art, theater tickets and designer bags. The money will be donated to American Red Cross in partnership with the Philippines Red Cross.The concert was part of a pair of events the Asian Culture Center planned for their “Bayanihan for Haiyan.” The second event will be a Typhoon Haiyan teach-in, forum and fundraiser at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Solarium of the Indiana Memorial Union.Bayanihan means “in a spirit of unity” in Filipino.“In Filipino culture, we literally move houses together with our bare hands, and it’s called a Bayanihan,” Bajamonde said, pulling up a picture of one on her phone. “Dozens of people slide a foundation under the house and pick it up and move it. It’s a sign of community coming together, and that’s why we’re calling this a Bayanihan.”She said though Filipinos in Bloomington lead very separate lives, it takes no time at all for them to connect in a time of need.“It’s not just about raising money,” Bajamonde said. “It’s about the sense of togetherness. We’re used to storms in the Philippines, but when a disaster like this happens, we all suddenly become one.”Hilary Martel came with her husband, who is from the Philippines, and still hasn’t heard from several family members there.They’ve started a separate fundraiser at Hartzell’s Ice Cream, where a five dollar donation to the Red Cross earns a coupon for a free scoop of ice cream.“Every little bit helps in a time like this,” she said. Reyes’ sister has since moved again to the city of Manila to stay with another sister, but her daughter has nightmares about the typhoon. “It’s a miracle she even made it out,” Reyes said. “They’re going to need help for a long time.”Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(11/18/13 3:40am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>IU’s National Center for Genome Analysis Support received a $4 million RNA research software grant.The software, called Trinity, processes the measurements of different types of gene levels. The grant is specifically intended to improve the ability of Trinity to assemble graphs that show the presence of prospective cancer cells.“By optimizing Trinity, researchers can now do four times as much science,” NCGAS Director Bill Barnett said in a press release. Trinity is currently used by IU, the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University — who helped develop it — and the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at Technische University in Dresden, Germany. The software processes high-quality RNA sequence assemblies, a code scientists use to determine how active certain genes are in different tissues, which can hint at how likely cancer is in the area being studied. Scientists can use this data to discover which cells to target and watch out for. Given by the National Cancer Institute, the grant will pay to optimize aspects of the software like coding, memory and data storage. Ultimately, the improved research could lead to more effective cancer treatments. But Robert Henschel, manager of Scientific Applications and Performance Tuning at NCGAS, said the memory needed to run Trinity demands a lot, and the cost to provide it is high.A transcriptome is the small portion of the genetic code that is transcribed into RNA molecules, and it consists of less than five percent of a human’s DNA code. The amount of memory it takes to put together a transcriptome is too big for a normal computer, Henschel said. Some of the grant money will buy two new servers to run Trinity and to help take on some of the burden.“Trinity requires very large amounts of main memory to assemble a transcriptome, thus requiring special servers,” Henschel said. “If we can reduce the amount of memory needed during computation, we can allow more people to run Trinity, broadening the user base of the software.”With the new servers, more researchers will be able to measure more information.But despite the large figure the grant boasts, Henschel said the portion of the money IU will receive pays for little more than one person to work on making Trinity more efficient. It’s not a small workload, he said.“Our optimization work involves understanding the computational performance of Trinity across the runtime of the various components that make up a complete Trinity execution,” he said. “We will be looking at all the different components, understanding their runtime behavior and devising ways to make them run faster or, for example, consume less memory.”The rest of the software optimization will be done by the Broad Institute and the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing.The grant comes with a five-year benchmark plan, where refinement of the computer program will be checked each year.The software has already increased four-fold in speed since 2011, according to the release. But even after the increase in speed, Henschel said it can still take Trinity longer than a week to produce a transcriptome.More timely results and a smoother run will happen over the next five years as developers work to make Trinity more efficient.“In this process, we mostly rely on best practices in the field of software engineering and development of scientific applications,” Henschel said.Researchers are hopeful cancer care will see a boost in efficiency after the software is improved.“It’s important that the result will be in advancing therapies for treating cancer,” Barnett said.Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/11/13 4:11am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>An asteroid causing an explosion with the power of thousands of tons of TNT is more likely than some people may think, and it could happen in this lifetime.In fact, it’s the most likely threat against life on Earth as we know it, astronomer Philip Plait said.In honor of Carl Sagan day, Plait, author of the new book, “Death from the Skies: These Are the Ways the World Will End,” gave a lecture Saturday at the Whittenberger Auditorium.The talk was about the danger of asteroids on their way to Earth right now.“The chance of impact is 100 percent if we don’t do anything about it,” Plait said.A chunk of rock called the Chelyabinsk meteor destroyed parts of Russia this February. Although nobody was killed, Plait said the meteor was big enough to make scientists reassess how seriously asteroid impacts need to be taken.Chelyabinsk was 19 meters in diameter, a small threat compared to some of the asteroids swirling around our solar system.Plait said some are bigger than Mount Everest.“When you think of something that big just floating out there around the sun, you don’t want it anywhere close to your planet,” he said. “You have to find a way to knock it out of the way, slow it down or speed it up so it misses Earth.”It’s a task that costs hundreds of millions of dollars at least, he said.Senior scientist for NASA David Morrison visited campus in October and also spoke on the possibility of asteroids striking Earth. He said with enough warning scientists can change the orbit of an asteroid to keep it from making contact.Plait said when scientists and satellites discover a meteorite whose trajectory crosses Earth, Congress has to give permission to send a pricey probe out to either blow it up or push it over.And despite the millions of dollars of rockets and probes sent to do the job, it’s a lot harder than it seems.Some asteroids are actually so large they have enough gravity to hold a moon in place. Plait said blowing up an asteroid that big could result in it breaking into several pieces, and if it’s not done far enough away from Earth it will result in more widespread damage.“It’s like a nuclear blast without the radiation,” Plait said. “It will kill everybody.”Just last month Russian scientists spotted an asteroid that could be dangerously close to Earth by 2032.It’s called 2013 TV135, and is 40 meters long.It’s predicted to miss Earth by almost 2 million kilometers, but if calculations are off and it does end up hitting the planet it will explode with an estimated force equivalent to 2,500 megatons of TNT.But Plait said there is a bright side.“Asteroid impacts are the only natural disasters that are 100 percent preventable,” he said. “You just have to spend the money to do it.”And he said that’s really what the end of the world revolves around.“Pick your disaster,” he said. “It all depends on where you invest the dollars to prevent them.”Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashley_morga.
(11/04/13 2:34am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The name says it all: secrecy, underground, low-key.Gallery Sub Rosa had its opening Friday at its new space in Suite 105A at Fountain Square Mall.“Our gallery is a home for the artists you wouldn’t normally see in a big name gallery,” co-owner Jeremy Sweet said. The name “Sub Rosa” is Latin for “secret.”And customers won’t find “high art” there. It’s a place for artists whose work might stray from what’s considered popular to the common eye.Owned by tattoo artist Colin McClain and printmaker Sweet, the gallery’s walls are littered with tiger masks, tattoo flash art and paintings of gore. “There’s a visual saturation going on here. The imagery just takes you over,” Sweet said. “There’s a lot of stuff to look at, and your eye is just very engaged.”He said the network of genres they show, from sculptures and paintings to brooches and jewelry, offers something for everyone. Customers’ budgets are also considered. Framed mini-collages of old-fashioned photographs and jewelry start at $20.Small to large pieces of wall art range from $40 to $700.Catherine Johnson-Roehr, curator of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, went straight from work to the opening. She’s been a customer since the gallery was still at Fourth and Rogers streets, its previous location.“It’s a lot of exceptional stuff in a really small space,” she said.Hung on the wall were two paintings from one of her favorite artists, Sophie McMahan, whose work has also been exhibited in Kinsey shows.“What I’d really like to take home is Miss Virginia and Indiana,” she said, pointing to a McMahan drawing of two beauty contestants holding up a couple of bloody blue and purple human hearts.Sweet said unusual work like that is revered as highly as anything else at Sub Rosa.“Here, tattoo artists are displayed right next to ceramics professors,” he said. “We put every kind of artist on the same playing field.”And although Sub Rosa has already made a home in its second piece of real estate, the gallery spawned from something a lot less permanent.“It’s actually based on a one-day show I wanted to put on for me and my friends,” Sweet said. “But I wanted to make it a show people wanted to stay at. Not just an art show but a party.”After that, he realized he could make the party last a lot longer. “You add music and food and people find themselves sticking around, and although they think they’re just hanging out, they’re also taking in all the art constantly and almost subconsciously.”Though the gallery is open to any artists who want to display their work, McClain said the gallery exhibits the best art that’s locally available.“We try to be selective,” he said. “We put a lot of consideration into who we choose to show, and this is what we think is the best in the region.”Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/31/13 3:45am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s been almost two decades since South Africa was under apartheid, where racial segregation was upheld by law. Now, a celebration of the photojournalism that captured the dark part of the country’s history is happening at IU. A symposium led by photojournalists dealing with the topic “Documentary Photography and the South African Experience” will take place at 9 a.m. Thursday in the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. The event is free and open to the public.“I hope it will grab the attention of people who want to think about how visual culture links past and present,” said Alex Lichtenstein, associate professor of history at IU and organizer of the symposium. “It should certainly be of great interest in anyone who pays attention to South African affairs.”Speakers will include Santu Mofokeng, a prominent contemporary South African photographer, and John Edwin Mason, a historian of South African and United States photography from the University of Virginia.Claude Cookman from the IU School of Journalism will also be present.Cookman has researched and written about photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, who documented the dangers of apartheid in South Africa in the 1940s and ‘50s.Her work will be featured in an exhibition curated by Lichtenstein, titled “Photos in Black and White: Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa,” also in the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. “The beauty of the exhibition is it shows us all the work she did in a larger context than her work for Life Magazine,” Cookman said.He said Bourke-White’s tenacity for exposing the raw truth helped her get the shots that catapulted her into social documentary fame.“She was pushy, and she normally got what she wanted,” Cookman said. “She was a role model for many photojournalists, especially women.”Lichtenstein said the symposium will be a meeting of some of the best minds on the subject of social documentary in South Africa.“It’s really an effort to put these folks in dialogue together, to bring the visual representation of the apartheid past together with the visual representation of South Africa today,” he said.Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/30/13 2:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>After 20 years, it’s time for a younger generation to take over the Lotus Foundation. Lee Williams, who has been executive director of the foundation since its inception, will step down from the position in January.Sunni Fass, an IU graduate involved with Lotus in the past, will fill the spot. “I’ve been looking for opportunities to hire Sunni for years,” Williams said. “But she always had an excellent job somewhere else.”Currently, Fass is executive director of Pentangle Arts Council in Woodstock, Vt.She has worked for Lotus Music Festival for two years as artist liason and on “backline,” where she was responsible for providing instruments to musicians.“But really, she has the skill sets to perform any of the staff positions,” Williams said. Fass, who graduated with a doctorate from the Department of Ethnomusicolgy, wrote her dissertation on the festival.Williams said that gives her a knowledge of the foundation making her the best candidate available. For her thesis, Williams said Sunnilearned exactly how the foundation ran. She interviewed the board, volunteered and got to know the inner workings of it all.“We need someone who is connected to Bloomington and knows Lotus,” Williams said. “That’s Sunni.”When Williams steps down, he will continue his work as artistic director. His full-time job will become part-time. But he said his workload isn’t getting smaller, as he will be working on a full-time schedule mentoring Fass. He’ll spend a year teaching her the ropes.Though he said he won’t be getting paid full-time, the work is necessary, and he doesn’t feel bad about it. “I’m OK with it,” he said. “After all, it was my idea. It’s what makes this whole transition work.”He said he looks at it as a moral duty. “When you’re a founder and director for 20 years, you have an emotional and historical investment,” he said. “You want to see the foundation be the best it can be.”He said hiring Fass will make that happen. “Having someone as brilliant as Sunni is the way to do it,” he said.Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/28/13 1:53am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Sometimes getting away with murder depends on the culprit’s charm.The Wells-Metz Theatre transformed into “Chicago” this weekend, where 1920s’ murderesses wooed the jail warden, the jury and the audience.Tickets for the show sold out two weeks before opening night. Complete with heavy perfume and fog wafting through the air, the preview performance Thursday was different than ones staged in the past because of the small space.“The intimacy makes it incredible,” said Kathy Aiken, an IU Theater season subscriber of several years. “This is way better than the one we saw at the auditorium.”The cast of 26 weaved between audience members and sat in their laps, fanning them with feathers. “The small stage really lets us interact with the crowd,” said Colin Schreier, a senior who played the infamous lawyer, Billy Flynn.The play, based on a true story, is the oldest American musical in Broadway history.Director George Pinney said his actors are plenty good enough to fill the role.“It’s a professional program, and they know what they’re doing,” he said. Almost half the cast were underclassmen, but Aiken said it was impossible to tell.“They’re young, but they’re the best at what they do,” she said.Aiken is an IU graduate. She and her husband have been coming to see every theater performance the school puts on.Having just retired, Aiken has traveled all over the country in recent months, but she said she made sure she was here for “Chicago.”“In New York, we can see it for $200, which we’re willing to pay,” her husband, Charles Aiken, said. “But we can see it here for much cheaper.”Aiken blocked her traveling schedule around the performance but learned too late that tickets had sold out. “I was so disappointed, because this is not something you’d want to miss,” she said.She was invited to Thursday’s performance the day of. But for some actors, it was a big night for their careers. “It was the most exhilarating experience of my life,” Assistant Stage Manager London Borom said after the show. The homicidal adulteress Roxie Hart was played by Kayla Eilers, a sophomore theater student.Her first lead role, she said keeping up with Roxie was a challenge. “She’s so fast paced and intense,” she said. “I kept a journal every day just to practice the character.”She said she’s craved to play Roxie for years.“It was my dream role, my dream show,” Eilers said. But getting the characters down to a tee wasn’t the only hard part. The dance routine proved to be especially difficult, Schreier said.“George has most of the cast on the stage for about 75 percent of the time,” he said, wiping eyeliner from under his eye. “Stamina is so important. It’s really hard to keep going.”Despite the more than two hours of run time, he said traveling up and down the runway-shaped stage was his favorite part.Pinney said they all owned the stage as much as they could.“I couldn’t be prouder,” he said. “It couldn’t have turned out better.” Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/23/13 12:35am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The flesh market is growing in Afghanistan, and drugs are fueling it.Investigative reporter Fariba Nawa discussed the interaction between human trafficking and drugs in a talk Tuesday as part of IU’s “Human Trafficking Awareness Week” at the Center for the Study of Global Change. Trafficking victims’ stories often start in poppy fields, Nawa said. Ninety percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan. Farmers are lent seeds by drug lords, and the harvest of millions of dollars worth of drug ingredients begins.But if a crop fails, whether because of drought or a disease on the farm, trouble ensues, Nawa said.“The international mafia will come after you,” she said. “You’re in debt to them before your first harvest.”And a payment has to be made. But many farmers in Afghanistan are poor. If there’s no gold or money to give the mafia to reimburse them for the wasted seeds, family members become part of the deal, Nawa said.Women and girls are first to be traded off. Nawa calls them “opium brides.”But if none are available, boys come next.“Boys are prime around the borders especially,” she said. “Everything bad, everything you can think of, happens along the borders because that’s where the drugs first come in.”In January 2013, Afghanistan’s High Commission approved a plan that monitors human trafficking, and two officers were assigned to the task force in each of 34 provinces. But those officers were later temporarily assigned to other duties, according to the State Department’s 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report. Meanwhile, sexually transmitted infections are spreading. The more users, the more people are trafficked to trade for drugs.Nawa said one million people in Afghanistan are addicted to heroin. About 2,000 cases of HIV were reported in recent years, and Nawa said she expects the prevalence has risen since.She said educating boys is the future solution.“Behind every successful woman in Afghanistan, there is a man,” she said. “So they are a very important component in solving this problem. They have to know this can’t be allowed.”But she said an answer could also be found in Islamic scripture the culture has had all along. “More classical Islam needs to be taught, too,” she said. “1,400 years ago this wasn’t a problem. The Koran is against these crimes and is a feminist text in a lot of ways. If women are reminded that God doesn’t want this to happen, it could be the first step for many of them.” Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/16/13 2:20am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The health of IU employees needs improving, and plans are underway to make that happen.Experts in health formed the new Wellness Steering Committee, which plans to offer resources and incentives that will make a healthier IU staff, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer MaryFrances McCourt said in a release. “Through this initiative, we’re seeking to give employees new resources and incentives to take greater control over their personal health and the costs associated with health care,” McCourt said. IU will spend $230 million to provide health care to its employees this fiscal year, Mark Land, associate vice president of IU Communications, said.As the employee population gets healthier, the costs should decrease, McCourt said.After winter break, the committee will offer proposals on the programs they will offer, Land said.Incentives could include discounts at fitness centers and health workshops. “The goal is to give our folks as many tools as possible for the least amount of money,” he said. President Michael McRobbie has already pledged to fund the program out of “existing related reserves,” McCourt said. She said money will not come out of student tuition.The Fairbanks School of Public Health and the IU School of Public Health will also contribute funding and research. “We’re using their expertise,” Land said. “They’re excited about this, and I know they want to contribute.” Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/16/13 2:17am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Changes might be made to the Media School proposal before trustees vote Friday, based on faculty recommendations.At a Bloomington Faculty Council meeting Tuesday at the IMU, faculty shared complaints regarding short deadlines and word choice used in the proposal. Provost Lauren Robel released the proposal to the public Sept. 23, and Oct. 7 was the deadline for comments to be submitted by faculty. Some faculty members protested that the three weeks weren’t enough time to come up with an adequate response, BFC president Herb Terry said. “We got one especially passionate response from the journalism school about the short deadline,” Terry said. Fewer than 10 faculty submitted responses. Faculty from communications and culture as well as telecommunications responded quickly, but it seemed the School of Journalism needed more time, said Edward Hirt, a psychology professor on the College of Arts and Sciences committee for the merger. He said the main complaint from CMCL was the new media school wouldn’t have enough room for its three defining areas of study: rhetoric and public culture, performance and ethnography and film and media. One telecommunications staff comment expressed concern about whether the merger was “an artist’s rendering of the new school or an architect’s plan,” Hirt said.Terry said he feels the merger has been, largely, a top-down process, and it needs to be bottom-up.“Faculty will be, for the most part, who implement this,” Terry said. The School of Informatics and Computing also raised a concern that IUPUI Media Arts and Sciences is too close a concept to the merger, and the similar names will be confusing, Hirt said. Hirt said the informatics school aims to make sure language of the merger policy is well-defined.Mike Conway, an associate professor on the School of Journalism committee, said the proposal treated the journalism school too much like a vocational lab.“Scholarship needs to be emphasized in language of the document,” Conway said. “There was an undue emphasis on technology at expense of fundamentals.”Robel gave the complaint a brief response.“There does seem to be a disconnect between betrayal of the journalism school in the proposal and the wish that the school could be appreciated for what they are right now,” Robel said. “The nature of the document is looking around that, but each of these schools bring incredible scholarship and thinking that has to come together for us to build the best thing we can build.”If the proposal is passed, the merger will take place July 1, 2014.Robel said she knows the move will be hard. “People will have to balance their interests and personal trajectories against those of the community at large,” she said.
(10/14/13 3:06am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When former University president William Lowe Bryan built the first psychology lab at IU in 1888, he established a 125-year legacy of the study of the mind. Nearly 300 faculty, alumni and students gathered in Franklin Hall Friday for the 125th Psychology Anniversary Banquet.It was the largest event ever held in the history of the Department of Psychology, department science writer Liz Rosdeitcher said. “I think it’s really important for the people who have worked here a long time to see this all come together,” Rosdeitcher said. Plaques were given to 16 emeritus faculty, many of whom were praised for hardly leaving the school after their retirements.Their combined time of service to the department added up to 547 years, department chair Bill Hetrick said. Thirty-eight years is the average time a full-time faculty member has spent at IU during his or her career, he said. “We’re standing on the shoulders of some amazing professors and researchers,” Hetrick said. “When we say the department is excellent, we’re really saying the faculty is excellent.”He presented a slideshow of photos chronicling back to the department’s 50th anniversary in 1938, when it had six faculty members including the department’s father, B.F. Skinner, the founder of modern behaviorism. One of the photos showed late IU psychology professor Phillip Summers in his IU attire. He was pictured with a Psychology 101 class on a field trip to a Little 500 race. The room burst with in-memoriam applause for the professor, who died of a heart attack Oct. 1.Hetrick said young minds are keeping the department alive, too. “If we don’t train our students, our legacy only lives as long as we do,” Hetrick said.He said it was special to see alumni and professors of all ages connect in the same place.“It’s remarkable to have the alumni back,” he said. “They’re fresh into the field, and it’s invigorating. You can feel their energy.”After dinner, forks clinked glasses and the room grew silent as Hetrick stepped back to the podium. As the oldest psychology department at a university in the country, Hetrick pointed out the responsibility that comes with the long history. “After all this, we have a lot to be proud of,” he said. “But we don’t stop here. We should never, ever hesitate to further our cause.”Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.
(10/11/13 4:09am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Talk of the government shutdown had Indiana party chairs treading lightly Thursday. The SPEA Civic Leaders Center sponsored a talk with Indiana Democratic Party Chair John Zody and Indiana Republican Party Chair Timothy Berry speaking about the topic in Briscoe Quadrangle. “The Republicans believe they can forge progress by holding their position today,” Berry said. “We have to make compromises, but I think we’ll all be OK.”Earlier this week, Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-3rd District, defended the party’s persistence by saying “(they) won’t be disrespected,” by President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to budge on the Affordable Care Act, and his angst has gone viral.Berry said Republicans feel they were cheated out of a fair discussion.“I don’t think that’s really what he meant to say,” Berry said of Stutzman. “The Republicans just want to sit down with the president so he understands the perspective they have on the issue.”Obama has been persistent in his “no negotiation” stance on the Affordable Care Act, and Berry said it’s not the way to do business. “It’s not an easy discussion, we know that,” Berry said. “It’s about the direction the country is going, and we can’t move forward if we don’t sit down at the table and work it out.”Zody is a proponent of Obamacare. He said he considers it a debt the government owes the country. “It’s a baseline service,” he said. “People need to be taken care of.”A stroke four years ago put Zody in the hospital. He said the $60,000 hospital bill made him realize what a disservice it is to deny people health care.“What about the people who can’t afford to go to the emergency room?” he said. “What happens when the nonprofit clinic is closed? The Affordable Care Act takes care of that.”Zody said he knows it’s not perfect. “We all agree it needs to be reformed,” Zody said. But the Affordable Care Act is the best solution we have, he said.“If I didn’t have good health care, I’d be bankrupt,” Zody said. “I’m lucky that I’m paid well, but I’m especially lucky I had insurance. The Act is a good thing.”Paul Helmke, director of the Civic Leaders Center, monitor of the talk, said the argument about the shutdown has him frustrated. “The job of these people is to pass bills, and they can’t even do that,” he said.This week is the second of the shutdown. Helmke said it’s unacceptable. “There’s no excuse they don’t have this done by now,” he said. “Even if you don’t agree with topics at hand, it has to be dealt with.”He said the debt ceiling should never be an issue. “It’s like a credit card,” he said. “The ceiling is your ability to pay the bill. You don’t deal with the problem by refusing to pay the debt. You just stop spending.”Helmke said his son-in-law is stationed at a U.S. Embassy in Europe. His military housing may not be paid for because of the shutdown. While 3.3 million government workers like members of the military are considered “essential” and still at work, 800,000 other government employees are still furloughed.“I hope calmer heads prevail,” Helmke said. “It affects everybody, and it’s just unnecessary.”A clear solution wasn’t discussed. “I’m just going to leave it up to my bosses and trust what they decide,” Zody said. Follow reporter Ashley Jenkins on Twitter @ashmorganj.