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(10/29/12 1:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Clear sunlight and a crisp breeze flooded a vacant Memorial Stadium Saturday morning, illuminating and chilling more than 250 individuals gathered on the north side of the football field. Around them, tents ruffled and stirred in the breeze. They belonged to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, To Write Love on her Arms, IUSA Culture of Care and more. They all gathered for one purpose and to acknowledge one fact: by the end of the day, 105 Americans would have taken their lives, and every 13.7 minutes, someone in the United States dies by suicide.This was Bloomington’s fourth annual Out of the Darkness Suicide Prevention Walk, a three-and-a-half mile walk around the IU campus to raise awareness and support for suicide prevention efforts. Outside of the IU Art Museum, participants stopped to write chalk messages for lost loved ones and words of encouragement for those currently in distress.Out of the Darkness walks take place across the country to raise money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to fund research, education and advocacy efforts to better understand and prevent suicide.Cindy Moore, an adviser in the kinesiology department of the School for Public Health, co-chaired the event with Jen Altheide, a senior in journalism and the president of the IU campus chapter of To Write Love on Her Arms. Moore, who lost her nephew to suicide in 2010, became involved with Out of the Darkness in part to find comfort with a community of suicide survivors, a term used to describe those who have lost a loved one to suicide. “I hope that all of us here find some comfort, some healing and some wellness in all of our journeys and that we recognize that none of us is alone,” Moore said.Caroline Walters, a junior microbiology major, lost her mother to suicide in February.“Struggling with mental health is not embarrassing and not something you should be ashamed of,” Walters said. “It’s something you should seek help for."Denise Fontaine lost her 28-year-old son, Norm, in April following his 10-year battle with depression. Norm smiled broadly from a photograph pinned to her lapel.“He was handsome, gifted, terribly intelligent and funny,” Fontaine said. “He had the biggest heart of anyone you know ... but he couldn’t see in himself what everybody else saw.“If love would have kept him here, he would have lived to 104,” she said. “When someone takes their own life, it doesn’t take just theirs.”Around her stood 32 individuals — Norm’s family, friends, neighbors and pets, all wearing blue shirts that read, “I’m Norm’s Buddy.” Nearly all of the 239 registered participants had lost a loved one to suicide. Many, like Fontaine, believe if there were more societal awareness and acceptance for depression and suicide, fewer people would take their own lives.“If maybe help was available out there as readily as those with cancer, if it was that easy to acquire, that accepted, that known, he would have been able to get the help that would have made a difference,” Fontaine said.The Centers for Disease Control report depression affects nearly 10 percent of Americans ages 18 and older in a given year, or more than 24 million people. This is more than coronary heart disease, which affects 17 million, cancer at 12 million and HIV/AIDS at 1 million.The event raised more than $22,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Half of the money raised will fund national research, and half will fund state-wide education and awareness programs, said Lisa Brattain, founder and chair of Indiana’s AFSP chapter. “Ninety percent of those who die by suicide have a diagnosable and treatable illness,” Brattain said. “It is preventable as long as we are armed with the knowledge necessary to intervene.”Currently, two out of three people with a mental illness don’t seek treatment, Brattain said, though depression is among the most treatable of psychiatric illnesses. This is due in part to the social stigma that surrounds it, a response that the AFSP and its supporters hope events like Out of the Darkness might change.“There’s a certain shock factor when you talk about depression and suicide, but it’s an illness,” Brattain said. “It should have the same compassion as every other illness.”
(10/11/12 3:43am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When Hoosier Games released Warp Shooter to the Xbox Live Indie Market on Aug. 29, the student organization quietly celebrated an accomplishment nearly one year in the making. As of Wednesday, the game had received 650 trial downloads and 55 purchases. Destructoid.com’s Saturday Morning Hangover, a live show on the popular site for game reviews, reviewed the game Sept. 8.Brendan Wood, a recent MS graduate of the IU telecommunications department’s audio and game design program, first pitched the game idea to Hoosier Games at the beginning of the 2011 academic year. “I had the original idea to build off the dual stick shooter, similar to Geometry Wars, by adding warp movement and adding the appeal of a new type of movement,” Wood said.Each semester, Hoosier Games brings students together from different schools and majors to assemble finished video games on a zero-dollar budget.“Generally, making video games costs many thousands of dollars and can take years to produce,” Hoosier Games Executive Producer Nathan Finley said. “Hoosier Games makes everything without getting paid and aims to finish a game within a semester.”Last year, Warp Shooter was one of the games selected to be developed.Warp Shooter is a multiplayer dual stick shooter that allows players to jump through space using a warp beacon and emergency thrust during attacks.The game is also three-vector, which allows players to move across three planes of movement.“For some people this may be a little too complex at first to consider x, y and z (because) three-way movement has never been done before,” Wood said.Players choose from a menu of customizable weapons, including an assortment of lasers, death rays, rockets and other power-ups, to destroy their opponents.The game was developed by a team of eight Hoosier Games members during a 10-month period with Wood acting as the project’s creative director, document writer and audio lead.“We had a lot of ideas of what we wanted to do with this design, but I had to choose what I thought was best for the game,” Wood said. “We brainstormed a lot of cool ideas, but I was concerned with getting a project done.”By the end of the first semester the team had established a promising prototype, which Wood and three others then refined.“Developing games is incredibly challenging,” Finley said. “It requires a lot of different, very specific skill groups. To make a game you need designers, artists, sound engineers and programmers. Very few games can be made without a group that collectively has all of these skills.”In July, the game was published on the Indie online forum App Hub, where it was peer-reviewed by other independent developers. Wood said independently developed games must receive eight passing reviews to be released.Wood said the first version of the game included a few bugs, which were fixed, and the game was republished and passed reviews in August.Wood, who said he has not seen any game like Warp Shooter before, considered leading a kick-start campaign to raise awareness for the game. He believes that if Warp Shooter gets more downloads, the game could be developed further and have the potential to be picked up by Microsoft.“With the amount of downloads so far, there’s not a critical audience here to keep up with developing the game,” Wood said.Warp Shooter is available for download on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 80 Microsoft points, the equivalent of $1, with proceeds going to Hoosier Games to help fund projects, technology and marketing.Wood said the game is difficult to find from the Xbox Live Dashboard, but to download the game just click on Games, Game Marketplace, Indie Game Marketplace and search for Warp Shooter.Hoosier Games meets at 6:30 p.m. Mondays in Ballantine Hall 118, and Finley welcomes all interested students to attend. “The group is still young and we are always looking for interested students who are either experienced in, or would like to learn programming, art, sound and/or design,” Finley said.
(10/09/12 3:34am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When 26-year-old Alfred Kinsey arrived in Bloomington in fall 1920, he was a virgin. Recently recruited from Harvard University by zoologist Carl Eigenmann, Kinsey had never dated a woman or masturbated without a sincere sense of shame, according to “Sex, The Measure of All Things,” a biography of Kinsey’s life. The only sex he studied was in the variation of gall wasps’ reproductive organ sizes. Eighteen years, 160,000 galls, six articles and two books later, Kinsey was reputable in the scientific world and an esteemed faculty member. He was also a successful lover to his wife, Clara Kinsey, and adamantly sexual. It could have ended there, but in 1938, two events altered the course of his life. Herman B Wells became president of the University and “Forbidden,” a sex education film, stimulated strong student interest in an honest and accurate sex education course. The pro-sex education course tack was taken strongly by the Indiana Daily Student in the form of decisive editorials. The Association of Women Students approached the new president and persuaded him to ask Kinsey to teach the course. Without IU students, Kinsey’s controversial sex research and the wave of sexual liberation that followed might have never happened. The students who had rallied for the course packed the classrooms, promoted Kinsey’s unconventional teachings and were the first sexual history interviews Kinsey conducted. The nonprofit Kinsey Institute in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, established in 1948 and largely funded by the University, is linked to his relationship with IU students.Kinsey died in 1956, and what followed was nearly 40 years of detached, closed-door research at the Kinsey Institute, said Catherine Johnson-Roehr, the curator of art, artifacts and photography at the Kinsey Institute.Nestled in the upper floors of Morrison Hall since 1967, the Kinsey Institute lulled into a period of quiet sex research and publication, a stark contrast to its public heyday when the sexual behavior books were published in 1948 and 1953, Johnson-Roehr said.“We had a little desire to be hidden because some people didn’t like what we do,” she said. But as the conservative movements to denounce Kinsey waned and public discourse about sex increased, the Kinsey Institute’s role in informing the discourse once again became important, Director of Communications Jennifer Bass said.During the mid-1990s, John Bancroft became director, and the Kinsey Institute began to reconcile its relationship with the Bloomington campus, Johnson-Roehr said. “John Bancroft had a British philosophy that being more open is a good thing for the institute,” Johnson-Roehr said. “Opening the institute would be demystifying and show its personable nature.”The Kinsey Institute’s social liberation began in 1996 with the online presence of its first website. Bass had recently joined the Institute, and like Bancroft, she believed a public presence and inclusion, especially with IU students, was necessary. Working with the online site, Bass developed The Kinsey Institute Sexuality Information Service for Students, an online resource for IU students and the precursor to Kinsey Confidential. “We had all this information and all these students on campus, and we had the opportunity to give back,” Bass said. “There is a need for and a lot of information about sex on the Internet, but not all can be trusted. We knew we could give a trusted source.” The administration helped establish a campus presence in 2000 with the opening of the Kinsey Institute to public tours that continue to this day, The Institute also opened its extensive library and collections to students and faculty. Johnson-Roehr began at the institute in 2000 and was assigned to showcase the institute’s vast cultural collection of 100,000 sexual and erotic items in exhibitions, the first of which opened in 2002 to great public interest. “Kinsey began the collection thinking that someone made it, someone bought it and someone kept it, so these items had importance to society and says something about human beings,” Johnson-Roehr said.Though the institute does not offer courses to students, receptionist Pat Lacy sees students, faculty, researchers and classes walk the institute’s three floors daily. “We have tremendous archival materials in the library and art departments, and today, a lot of IU classes from all studies come to see the art, or faculty members use our resources as a teaching tool,” Lacy said.Following the release of the 2004 Hollywood documentary “Kinsey,” the institute strives to be involved in panel discussions, Themester events and IU Cinema screenings. “Today, we are actively trying to convince students we are here for them,” Johnson-Roehr explained. However, this has become increasingly difficult for the institute that long ago outgrew the space in Morrison Hall, Johnson-Roehr said.The people who run the institute feel a connection to the University and have no plans to take it from Bloomington, Johnson-Roehr explained, but with fewer grants and University funds due to the recession as well as no funding allocated for advertising, its physical presence can be lost on such a large campus. While those at the institute wait and hope to one day secure enough private funding to build a new location, it remains open for students every week day. It’s a subtle reminder that without student interest, Kinsey’s legacy could well be limited to the shadow boxes of gall wasps he cherished for 18 years.
(09/07/12 4:27am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Nea onnim no sua a ohu, a symbol meaning “knowledge comes by learning” in the language of the Asante people of Ghana, adorned the ceremonial pins presented to freshmen Thursday evening at the Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center.Neal-Marshall directors organized the freshman pinning ceremony as a rite of passage from high school to university life.It was not a typical night at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center’s Grand Hall, as ushers stood at the door and welcomed students, faculty and guests to a backdrop of live jazz saxophone. Professors and members of the Neal-Marshall community arrived to show their support for incoming freshmen. George Taliaferro, a three-time All-American football player at IU and the first African-American drafted by a National Football League team, was one of the guests.Though the tradition of the freshman pinning ceremony is only in its second year, nearly 40 students participated.The ceremony began with an introduction delivered by Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs Edwin Marshall. Marshall addressed the freshmen about the opportunities they will have at the University.“Congratulations on being here,” he said. “You deserve and have earned the right to be here, and you have an opportunity to do something not many people your color or your age have.”President of IU’s Neal-Marshall Club and IU alumnus Vernon Williams, discussed what he learned from his own freshman experiences. Junior Leighton Johnson, a Hudson and Holland Scholar and history and African American and African Diaspora studies major, followed with additional tips for ensuring academic success.Audrey McCluskey, director of African American and African Diaspora graduate studies, and Stephanie Power-Carter, director of the Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center, led charges. Students and faculty promised to uphold values of the cultural center.“The idea is that we want to welcome our freshmen and give them a sense of determination and responsibility in their path of excellence, and we would like them to show that they are determined to achieve academic excellence,” Power-Carter said. “We would also like to show students that the faculty is here to support them as well as the Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center.”As the ceremony reached its zenith, faculty members stood and made their way to the front of the room to distribute the pins to each student in attendance.Freshman Kamyron Williams, a cello performance major, was among the freshmen who participated in the ceremony.Though Williams had not visited the Cultural Center before the ceremony, he said he was drawn to the event by the sense of community it offered. “I know I want to be involved with Neal-Marshall,” he said. “Not just on campus but in the Bloomington community.”
(09/04/12 2:26am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Since 1969, IU’s main library has provided a safe haven for the strong-willed and academic-minded students on campus. Today, about 7.3 million items can be found in the IU libraries system, which includes branches outside the main hub, the Herman B Wells Library.The IU libraries system has been consistently ranked one of the top research libraries on a college campus by the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries. However, the library system offers another invaluable resource — recreational reading directed toward the student population.Emily Okada, head of the Reference Services Department,has helped bring leisure reading to students since she first started working at Wells 30 years ago.“In all the years I’ve been working here, since 1982, I’ve noticed more students who just want to read for pleasure,” Okada said.Okada buys for the core collection, the selection of books available in the upper levels of the West Tower. She said she tries to choose books in which undergraduates would be interested, such as those about controversial topics as well as classical fiction, self-help books and multicultural literature. “In the core collection, we focus on what students need to know,” she said.Okada said she and other librarians see students in the West Tower’s second and third floors for recreational reading.But as the students turn right to the elevators, Okada said, they often miss the most concentrated selection of leisure reading in the entire IU libraries system.Nestled between group computer pods, to the back left of the first floor Information Commons, are two low bookshelves laden with paperbacks. Some of the books’ spines are worn, broken from heavy use by decades of readers. Books by J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King have not aged gracefully. Others, like those from Jodi Picoult and Chuck Palahniuk, shine with fresh, new binding.This is the browsing collection, a unique collection of mass market paperbacks bought for the purpose of recreational consumption.Chanitra Bishop, the reference department’s instruction and immersion technologies librarian, selects and maintains this collection. “When I first started to look at what books were in the collection and what to add, I looked for trends in young adult literature, what people were talking about, books that had been turned into movies or appealed to diverse groups of people,” she said.Today, the browsing collection has 1,100 books and adds 100 to 200 books annually. “We’d like to make students aware that leisure reading is there and for them to use,” she said. “It’s open for them 24/7 in the Information Commons, so students can pick up the books when they want them. It’s a great way to take a break from studying and relax at any time.”For students who have a specific book in mind, Okada said, the East Tower’s stacks, IU libraries outside of the main library or Bloomington, or the RPS libraries may carry the item. Using the online library catalog, IUCAT, at libraries.iub.edu or asking a librarian in person may help the student locate and request the book for easy pick up at Wells. However, if the book is not available within the system, Bishop suggests sending an email with the name of the item to libref@indiana.edu. Recreational requests are ordered about every two to three months, while required readings can be available within two to three weeks.“The main point is that people should come and ask,” Okada said. “It doesn’t have to be for studies and heavy duty research. Our ‘Ask a Librarian’ team will help you find any item you need.”