Author: wmf008

Nick Salvo
Writer

Over 40 students crammed into the Lewisburg Council Chamber on Oct. 15 to ask questions and express concerns about the Borough Council’s continued discussion of downtown housing ordinances on social gatherings.

In an hour long discussion of the issue that occasionally became contentious, students raised questions about the purpose, specifics, and implementation of housing ordinances that are currently being discussed by the council. Though the council’s discussion is still in its infancy, the police commission provided council members with a sample of the town of Bloomsburg’s social gathering ordinances as an example of steps which could be taken in the hopes that they will provide a safer and quieter atmosphere in downtown Lewisburg.

Bloomsburg’s ordinance, issued in 2010, required any student at Bloomsburg who is hosting a party involving alcohol and more than 150 people to obtain a permit from the town. The ordinance also instituted strict rules concerning time, security, restroom facilities, and post-party clean up.

Though exchanges between the Lewisburg Council and University Students were at times hostile, both students and municipal leaders expressed approval of the level of student participation.

Henry Gabriel ’14, who resides off campus and attended the meeting, expressed disappointment at some aggressive approaches at the meeting and hoped that ongoing dialogue would be helpful for both the town and students.

“I was disappointed that some students were so confrontational. I think that it was good that the council listened to our concerns and hopefully there is room for compromise,” Gabriel said.

Rachel Franz ’14, who also attended the meeting, said she hopes that a productive dialogue can develop between students and the borough.

“We are really grateful that the council gave us a voice in the matter. It is really nice that they are considering working with us,” Franz said.

Lewisburg Mayor Judy Wagner acknowledged the importance of communication between students and the borough, and stressed a group effort in ensuring public safety rather than a divisive dispute between students and the municipality.

“I don’t want it to be us against them,” Wagner said. “We need to work together–we may not always see eye to eye, but we can compromise.”

Wagner said at the meeting that the council will not make a hasty decision. She said that the council has debated ordinances for the past six years, but have been unable to reach a consensus on the best plan of action. She recommended that students nominate a University student to participate in the police commission that is currently discussing the specifics of an ordinance.

Wagner could not speculate on a specific timeline for voting on any ordinances.

The Bucknell Student Government (BSG) is currently forming a group of 15 members that will attend future meetings, Class of 2014 Representative Kelsea Alderman ’14 said.

Alderman said that BSG will organize the selection process, but that representatives will be a diverse population of University students, and BSG involvement after the group is formed would be limited. Alderman hopes the committee will be formed in time to attend November’s council meeting.

“Our goal is to help the council make an ordinance that benefits the town but keeps the students in mind,” Alderman said.

Buffalo Valley Regional Police Chief Paul Yost, who originally proposed the institution of ordinances for safety and budgetary concerns, was not available for comment.

Madeline Diamond

Writer

The University no longer plans to build a new wrestling center and athletics leaderships facility. University President John Bravman made the announcement on Oct. 8 in his fall trustee update.

The project was originally planned after the University received a $9 million donation from two trustees. The construction plans were first revealed in the May 2013 trustee update.

Bravman stated that the cost of operating and maintaining the new building, which would have been built next to the Kenneth Langone Athletic and Recreation Center (KLARC), would not be financially sustainable or practical at this time.

The construction and maintenance would also add to the University’s budget. As of now, the University is still unsure of the fate of the original monetary gift, pledged by trustees Bill Dearstyne ’62 and Bill Graham ’62.

“It is still being discussed with the donors whether there are other areas where they might want to direct these resources or how their original intentions might be satisfied,” Andy Hirsch, director of media communications, said.

The trustee update also addressed the issue of the wrestling program’s need of a new facility.

“We are proud of our wrestling program and the way in which the team represents Bucknell,” Hirsch said. “We recognize that the program is in need of new practice facilities, and we will continue to look for ways in which we can address those needs.”

Aside from finding new ways to facilitate the needs of the wrestling program, the administration is seeking a way to incorporate the values that would have been emphasized by the leadership facility.

“Student leadership programs are so important to the student experience and the future of our campus climate,” Bravman said.

By Hannah Paton

Writer 

The University received a $1 million grant from the Kern Family Foundation to continue its work as a member of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network, or KEEN program.

The grant marks the second given to the University for this program, the first being a $75,000 scholarship received in the Fall of 2011, according to Dean of the College of Engineering Keith Buffinton. This grant will continue to further the KEEN program’s goal of providing entrepreneurial skills and techniques to engineering students.

“The grant will fund four main aspects of the engineering program: it will continue competitions and workshops, promote course development and changes to the intro course Engineering 100, and involve more faculty,” Buffinton said.

According to Buffinton, the grant fosters extracurricular opportunities such as K-WIDE, the KEEN Winter Interdisciplinary Design Experience, and various competitions and workshops designed to give students 48 to 72 hours to create a new and efficient gadget. Buffinton said that in the last competition 10 teams of two to four students had 48 hours to create the most efficient beverage cooler.

In addition to competitions, changes to engineering courses in general will be made to create interdisciplinary classes and promote entrepreneurial thinking in engineering majors.

One example of such a change is the “elevator pitch” that several biomedical engineering classes now require, which tasks students with convincing a professor of their design in the short time span of an elevator ride. This exercise seeks to promote communication skills, persuasive qualities, and preparedness to speak confidently at any time.

The University is one of just over 20 institutions affiliated with the KEEN program. Buffinton said that he and other members hope that the grant will provide engineering students with a unique and useful set of career skills.

Gigi Flynn 

Writer

The University will offer a new summer course called “New Orleans in Twelve Movements” starting in 2014. The class will be three weeks long, from May 19-June 8; the first and last week will be spent at the University and the second in New Orleans. Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering Kevin Gilmore, Assistant Director of the Teaching & Learning Center Brian Gockley, and Assistant Professor of Music Barry Long have been planning the course for two years.

The course will use the geographic information systems (GIS) application on an iPad to create a map of history through different layers. During the first week, in addition to learning how to work the app, the class will learn about the background and the history of New Orleans.

“Katrina is an interest point, but we want to tell the whole story,” Gockley said.

Students will spend the second week in New Orleans. In the morning, the class will do Habitat for Humanity work at St. Bernard. The afternoons will be spent touring social engineer attractions such as the rain pumping systems. Finally, the nights will be spent meeting musicians and watching performances.

“This is an integrated course. New Orleans is so rich in history,” Gockley said.

During the third week, students will spend time creating their projects on the GIS app and presenting them.

Applications are on a rolling basis until the course is full. New Orleans in Twelve Movements is accepting 18 students.

Kerong Kelly

Writer

Associate Professor of Chemistry Karen Castle received a $178,000 grant in March from NASA to study the planet Mars.

Castle will study Mars’ middle and upper atmosphere using a quantum cascade laser that was purchased with the grant. NASA’s Mars Fundamental Research Program awarded Castle the grant, which focuses on atmospheric and climate research.

The quantum cascade laser, which was purchased in August 2013, will be used to measure the kinetic energy created by the collisions between CO₂ molecules. The laser allows a high degree of precision and variability needed to study Mars.

In addition to the purchase of the quantum cascade laser, the grant will be used to provide supplies such as research grade gases, optics, and liquid nitrogen. A portion of the grant will also be used to support student research at the University.

Prior to 2002, before working as a professor, Castle was a postdoc at the Air Force Research Lab and worked on several studies involving the upper atmosphere particularly, Earth’s upper atmosphere. Previously, Castle also was a co-principle investigator on another NASA grant.

Castle is currently collaborating with student researchers and several graduate students on the new Mars research.

“I hope we can offer, even if we don’t have full courses, being able to plug units into existing courses. I also hope that this work will help us build a bridge between departments and foster new connections across programs,” Castle said.

Cooper Josephs

Contributing Writer

Engineering students are preparing to compete in the Susquehanna Valley Pumpkin Challenge held later this month and in November at a local farm. The trebuchet will compete in multiple events based on the machine’s accuracy and power.

“We first attended this event in 2011, and this year will be the second year Bucknell students are competing,” said Nate Siegel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering who is supervising the project.

The trebuchet was funded through the University’s College of Engineering, and students began building in September. Siegel came up with the initial design for the trebuchet over the summer.

“From testing this past weekend, we were able to shoot the pumpkin 108 yards,” Kyle Montgomery ’15, a mechanical engineering major who is one of about 15 students actively participating in the project, said. “We are predicting the catapult will be eventually able to shoot 150 yards.”

Montgomery has put in about 40 hours designing and constructing the catapult. The team was able to predict the catapult’s maximum distance through a program called Working Model, a physics assimilation that was able to roughly estimate the maximal distance.

“The students did all the hard calculations and heavy lifting for this project,” Siegel said.

There is a $250 and trophy prize for the group that comes in first place, but money is not an influential incentive in for the students.

“We are doing this because it’s fun, we want to win, and it is educationally valuable,” Montgomery said. “We learn a lot through trial and error, and have utilized many things learned in class.”

There are relatively few extracurricular engineering activities on campus, but Siegel has been trying to add more due to their tremendous educational and real life value.

“Folks don’t usually come to college with the hands-on types of skills they used to,” Siegel said. “There is not a whole lot of opportunity to do these projects in the classroom at regular hours, so we have been trying to create more extracurricular opportunities to give students the skills people normally associate with engineers. We are trying to create a maker space, which is similar to the craft center and has equipment like 3D printers, laser cutters, and 3D scanners so students can make prototypes of their ideas. We are in the planning stage right now for this, and are hoping to move forward with this next year.”

By Shannon Beauregard

Writer

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Katelyn Allers published the discovery of a new rogue planet in the Journal of Astrophysical Journal letter last week in conjunction with a  group of international astronomers.

Allers was part of a team that discovered a free-floating planet approximately 80 light years from earth. The international team of astronomers that discovered rogue planet PSO J318.5-22 has been tracking it for two years. Allers and her team found this planet when they were searching for brown dwarfs, or failed stars.

The planet does not have a star to attach it to a single orbit, and it is roaming at the slow speed of 20 km per second. They estimate that PSO J318.5-22 is 12 million years old.

“Imagine a firefly,” Allers said. “They are super easy to see by themselves, but hard to see under a car’s headlights. We have found a firefly that is not in the headlights, and can now study planets without light from a sun.”

This rogue planet has six times the mass of Jupiter and is the nearest free-floating planetary-mass object ever seen.  Allers and her team have two hypotheses explaining how the planet ended up free-floating.

According to a study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a planet can become detached from its star when a passing star exerts its gravitational pull and yanks the planet out of orbit. It’s also possible that the parent star, upon ending its hydrogen-burning life and expanding into a red giant, could push a planet out of its system.

The second possibility is that the planet has been a loner from the beginning. It might have formed in isolation from a cloud of collapsed matter, one that did not have enough mass to ever reach the stage of fusing hydrogen, at which point it could have become a star.

Now that the team has found PSO J318.5-22, they can use its infrared signature as a model to find other rogue planets in the catalogues collected by Pan-STARRS.

Allers is leaving for Hawaii in less than two weeks to continue working her research with the rest of the team.

 

Ethan Zubkoff
Assistant News Editor

The University’s Chief of Public Safety Stephen Barilar spoke to the Bucknell Student Government (BSG) on Oct. 6 and addressed rumors about the situation in downtown Lewisburg.

Barilar said that although the local Buffalo Valley Regional Police Department (BVRPD) is worried that the decision to cancel House Party Weekend will move student activities downtown and into BVRPD’s jurisdiction, they have not increased their patrols and are actually down an officer.

Though students have claimed it seems that enforcement has increased, like the recent night in which BVRPD officers raided four student-leased houses, Barilar attributed those incidents to “students drawing attention to themselves,” and not a change in policy.

This previous weekend three University students were hospitalized due to high-risk consumption of alcohol, Barilar said.

“This keeps me awake at night,” Barilar said.

After hearing from Barilar, the BSG Congress voted to approve funds for 500 magnets to be given out at the homecoming football game.

Ben Kaufman
Editor-In-Chief

Q: You began your career in writing as a journalist for The Washington Post. How did you wind up writing about technology? 

A: I started at The [Washington] Post and then worked for a number of magazines. I became basically a journalist who writes about the media–a media critic. I realized around the turn of the century that the devices themselves were becoming more important than the content of journalism. I realized that the digital revolution was the big story. I got a fellowship out of the blue at Harvard in 2006 for a semester–very open-ended–and I could write about any topic I wanted. I decided to write about a little piece of the digital revolution which fascinated me: the claim that print is about to become obsolete.

I wrote an essay arguing that paper as a media is not going to go away. That was a controversial thing to say amidst the digital revolution, so I got some attention for that and I was on National Public Radio, and this led to publishers asking me if I wanted to write a book.

 

Q: How did you go about writing the book?

A: I feel like we spent the first few decades of the digital era living by a stupid philosophy that I called ‘digital maximalism,’ where the more connected you are, the better. I think that’s a dumb way to live and run a society because the more ways we get connected by these devices, the more we get fractured and divided into slim slices and never go into deeper conversations with our focus and relationships. It is something that everyone is talking about now, but in 2006 nobody was talking about it.

My family invented a ritual to leave behind our ‘here and now’ called the ‘internet Sabbath,’ where every weekend, my family would unplug from the internet completely. We didn’t know anyone else was thinking of doing this, we just made it up.

 

Q: Was it hard to break away from the digital world?

A: In the beginning it was so hard that it was comical. The first few weekends we felt like we were stranded on an alien planet. It was like an existential crisis because the internet was removed. It was tears and frustration and panic. That told my wife and me that we were really on to something and that we needed to do this because we had become so codependent. After about two months, we eased into it, and at the very end of the day we unplugged, and it became very natural. It became our identity, like we were that family.

It got to the point where a few weekends in the first year, it was Monday morning and we realized that we forgot to unplug. But we never bothered to look. We stopped the habit of making our way to our screens because we stopped that habit. The ritual ended two years ago, but because we did that for five years, we all now have our personal rituals, like I stay offline on Saturdays and some days during the week. It’s a little bit of a risk; you know you could miss something, but often is something truly urgent?

 

Q: Do you think that in the future the dependence on technology will get better or worse?

A: I’m really an optimist; I think that we’re just in the early stages of this. I think we’re going to look back at these times and realize how primitive these devices are because they are going to involve. Newer applications don’t feel that way because we are learning.

 

Q: You’ve seen technology usage in other countries, how do they compare to the United States in dependence to technology?

A: We’re not the most digitally addicted. Most famously is South Korea. South Korea is really intensely into gaming, so much so that there are internet addiction centers all over the country. I’ve also heard that Australia has the highest capita use of Facebook than any other country. We’re not the most extreme, but we’re also leading the revolution. The inventions are almost all ours. So in that sense, we are defining the future, even if we are not the biggest users of technology, which means that we have a big responsibility that we need to be thoughtful about.