SLIPPERY ROCK - While students returning to Slippery Rock University for the fall semester may have noticed a few physical changes to the campus exterior, the most visible changes have occurred on building interiors and student's computer screens.

The most noticeable of all exterior changes that occurred over the summer was the demolition of the former Kraus Hall. Built in 1966, the hall, located on Main Street, was originally known as "The Riviera," a privately owned facility belonging to Stanley Kraus. Kraus donated the hall to the University in 1982. The hall, valued at $4.5 million at that time, was the largest gift ever received by the University. It continued to house students until 2009. It was demolished at a cost of approximately $150,000.

The now empty lot will be used as a staging area for materials and trailers when the renovation projects for SRU's performing arts buildings - Miller Auditorium, East Gym and West Gym - begin later this year. Long-term plans for the former Kraus Hall space are undetermined.

Projects that either started during the summer or were scheduled to start, including a $6.5 million renovation to the Strain Behavioral Science Building, will continue during the fall. However, according to Scott Albert, assistant vice president of facilities, planning and environmental safety, the value of completed improvements on campus during the summer was estimated at $6 million.

"It was one of our busiest summers because of the timing of projects," Albert said. "Overall, if you look at the volume of construction that's been ongoing, year to date and, with the BSB and performing arts projects kicking off, it'll be close to one of our busiest overall years in the past 20 years."

The first phase of a $4 million improvement project for Bailey Library was completed during the summer, which included the renovation of the second and third floor restrooms that were closed during the summer. Ongoing improvements, which will continue through the fall, include an additional computer lab and study spaces, a redesigned entryway and an expanded caf. The project is scheduled for completion in December.

"From a cost perspective, Bailey was the biggest project of the summer," Albert said. "When all the projects are completed, it'll provide an exciting and modern look to the campus. Until then, we appreciate everyone's patience."

Other significant changes from the summer included second floor renovations to Rhoads Hall; improved accessibility to the Gail Rose Lodge; the replacement of the Swope Music Hall loading dock; and asphalt maintenance and seal coating to several parking lots. An underground condensate line, that returns water from the McKay Education Building to the boiler plant, was also replaced. Restoration work from that project continues near Old Main.

There were also considerable upgrades related to classrooms, technology and sustainability:

Students may notice changes in lighting, as the University continues to switch completely over to LED lighting, which uses less energy and lasts longer.

Eight classrooms were upgraded with new technology, including items such as laser projectors and digital audio controls. The upgraded classrooms included two each in the Eisenberg Classroom Building, the School of Physical Therapy Building, Spotts World Culture Building and the Advanced Technology and Science Hall. A "Concepts of Sciences Lab" was created in Room 130 of ATSH while Room 103 of Spotts was converted from a classroom to a computer lab.

More than 700 computers were replaced in academic buildings, making this year one the largest-scale overhauls in recent years as most computers are replaced on a three-year cycle.

As part of yearlong upgrades, 350 Wi-Fi access points were replaced in various academic buildings and the Smith Student Center that will give students stronger connections with more bandwidth. An additional 250 access points are scheduled to be replaced in other campus buildings this academic year.

See a gallery of photos at: http://www.sru.edu/news/083117a

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SRU completes busy summer of campus improvements - Allied News

Photo: Matt Rourke

The Philadelphia mayor's office has unveiled an expansive plan to clean up Filthadelphia, and they're enlisting Penn's help.

The Zero Waste and Litter Action Plan, initiated by Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, aims to reduce litter in the city and end the citys use of landfills and conventional incinerators by 2035. To implement the plan, the Kenney administration partnering with various local institutions including Temple University, Swarthmore College and Penn.

Litter is an issue that has plagued Philly for a very long time, Nic Esposito, the director of Phillys Zero Waste Plan said. Being that we have so much crossover with [Penns] sustainability office and now with some of their research, were exciting to be working with Penn on this issue.

Penn political science professor Dan Hopkins has been enlisted as an academic partner to work on the reduction of litter.

As a member of the projects behavioral science subcommittee, Hopkins conducts experiments throughout the city to better understand what motivates people to recycle and how the placement of trash cans in public spaces can reduce littering.

Ive been excited to see behavioral science integrated in this work from the ground up, Hopkins said. The city had the foresight to bring us in not just on the back end to analyze what happened afterwards, but from the very beginning so we can provide advice about what policies would be more or less useful.

The Kenney administration devised the Zero Waste 2035 campaign late last year, but Penn has been working to clean up its campus for several years now.

In 2014, Penn launched the Climate Action Plan 2.0, which aimed to divert more than 90 percent of Penn's away from landfills. The initiative also aims to increase student awareness on sustainability and climate change, promote sustainable design and reduce solid waste.

College junior Karen Chi is a member of the Eco-Reps program, which engages students to work on small projects that advance the goals of Climate Action Plan 2.0.

Chi said while Penn keeps its campus fairly litter-free, she thinks more trash cans could be placed near food trucks since they generate a large amount of waste. Chi isn't alone; several other student groups on campus say more needs to be done to make Penn a truly clean and green campus.

The Penn Environmental Group advocates for the establishment of a green fund, which would set aside a portion of University revenue for future, large-scale green initiatives such as increasing the use of solar panels around campus, and adding gardens and water-collection technology to buildings.

We want to make sure its targeted and doesnt become another research fund that students dont know about or understand, but specifically a fund that will be making Penn more sustainable and innovative, said Susan Radov, political director of the Penn Environmental Group and College junior.

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Mayor Jim Kenney wants to clean up 'Filthadelphia' and he's enlisting Penn's help - The Daily Pennsylvanian

So you fell asleep easily enough, but now it's 3 a.m. Your mind is spinning, and rest is elusive. You're reliving every foolish or embarrassing thing you did in the past 24 or 48 or 72 hours, and that is a lot of material to run through. And you simply can't stop.

Except maybe you could, if only you knew how to be mindful.

"When you're caught in that loop of rumination, that's very real, and it creates very intense feelings," explains psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, who reported on brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. "If you're mindful, you realize it's just a thought. You don't have to believe your thoughts. You can question them, and that changes them. It takes energy from the brain that creates the heaviness. Looking at it in a different way makes the rumination less intense."

You might think, on hearing such praises of mindfulness a form of meditative practice that it will solve just about every problem in your life. Meditation can halt the late-night rumination cycle, right? So can't it also make you into a better person? Enlarge your brain? Make you taller and thinner and richer?

Well, no, says Goleman, who's also the author of the best-selling book "Emotional Intelligence." Some claims of meditation's power are overblown. Some studies are less rigorous than they should be. But science has proven that meditation can induce healthy and important physical improvements, such as lowering your blood pressure, decreasing relapses into depression and managing chronic pain.

Which leaves us with a question: As our interest in meditation grows, how do we know what's too good to be true?

Goleman has some answers. With Richard J. Davidson, who directs a brain lab and founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goleman has just published "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" (Avery, $27). The book separates truth from fiction, debunking studies and highlighting truth about meditation's startling effects on the brain.

"Altered Traits" also chronicles the authors' decades-long friendship and lifelong interest in the subject of meditation, which began at a time during which scientific circles had little patience or interest in the subject.

The book is important because it represents "the coming together of two very important voices," says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law. He will be in conversation with Goleman at Miami Dade College.

Rogers, co-founder of UMindfulness, the university's inter-disciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, notes another benefit: Not only are Goleman and Davidson experts in their fields, they're also meditation practitioners.

"We need responsible, reasoned voices speaking from a variety of perspectives, and here we have the hard science and the journalist, and both are practitioners. We need a book we can look to as a reliable source of information," Rogers says. "They both practice and have for a long time. A lot of researchers have been interested in this over the last 10 or 15 years, but they haven't historically practiced mindfulness. There are a bunch of people practicing, but they're not scientists."

"Altered Traits" examines scientific studies on meditation and the benefits of intensive retreats, learning to view our selves and our brains in a whole new light and the importance of a good teacher ("I feel strongly the quality of the teacher is important," Goleman says). The book also challenges notions we (or at least our bosses) hold dear, such as the idea that multitasking is a positive endeavor.

"Multitasking is a myth," Goleman says. "You can't really do two things at once. What happens is your brain switches rapidly. As it switches, you lose the power of your concentration. You do many things at once, you do them less well."

But there is good news for multitaskers, according to "Altered Traits": Cognitive control can be improved. One test of undergrad volunteers tried short sessions of focusing or breath-counting. "Just three 10-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially," the authors write.

Which brings up another important question: If the benefits of meditation expand the deeper a person's practice goes, is meditating in short sessions still useful?

"Casual practice helps you in surprising ways, but the deeper you go and the more you practice, the more benefits you get," he says. "The research shows that right from the beginning mindfulness practices counter the ill effects of multitasking. We're all doing so many things a day. But the improvement in attention starts at the beginning."

And if you can only spare 10 minutes at a time for meditation, Goleman suggests spreading your practice throughout the day.

"Intersperse it through the day. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten at lunch. Ten at night. The effect is prolonged. If you can do 20 minutes, even better. If you can do it for a year, that's good. Five years is even better."

Link:
Meditation expert tells us what the science really says and why multitasking is a 'myth' - Southernminn.com

Over the years, Robert Kushner has seen many obese patients get tripped up trying to keep pounds off because they rely on fast food, juggle too many tasks and dislike exercise.

So Kushner, an obesity expert, began helping patients plan diet and physical activity around their lifestyles and habits.

We dont necessarily put people on any specific diet; it really gets to what is their life, what are their struggles, he said. We believe obesity care cant be inconsistent with culture, family or how you lead your life.

He recently suggested that a patient split meals with his wife when they dined out, rather than each having large portions or avoiding restaurants entirely. When the man said he was uncomfortable sharing a meal with his wife when the couple was out with friends, Kushner said to do it anyway.

I said, Its a strategy that works whether youre with other people or not. ... Be assertive, said Kushner. I think people dont think about it because they just arent raised to share.

The patient kept track of the foods he was eating, learning to avoid larger portions and fattening dishes. He has lost 15 pounds in six months, cutting about 500 to 700 calories per day.

More than a third of U.S. adults are obese, according to a 2015 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kushner, who directs the Center for Lifestyle Medicine at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said he realized in the 1980s that obesity was a looming problem. He started combining diet, nutrition, exercise and behavioral changes into a plan for patients.

Since then, whats changed is the maturity of the area, understanding more about the effects of stress and sleep on body weight, and some of the behavioral-change techniques have expanded, he said.

In addition to promoting good sleep habits and stress management techniques such as meditation, Kushner and his colleagues suggest bariatric surgery for patients with a body mass index of 40 or more and for some who are less obese but who have medical problems such as Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea and heart disease. They also recommend medication for patients with BMIs as low as 30 who have additional medical problems or have failed to lose weight despite lifestyle changes.

Kushner said patients often have trouble shedding pounds unless problems like stress are managed.

Kushners approach proposes gentler, moderate changes. Rather than tell patients to cut out every unhealthy food they love, Kushner suggests focusing on alternatives with higher fiber and water content but fewer calories. (Think beans, vegetables, salads, fruits, broth-based soups and whole grains such as oatmeal.)

For the couch potato who finds exercise overwhelming, Kushner advises walking for short periods, building up to three 10-minute brisk walks daily to boost your energy level and mood while you also burn calories.

He also suggests that dog owners walk their pet for 30 minutes daily rather than leave Fido in the back yard. Kushner found that dog-walking helped overweight and obese people lose weight in a study, and he wrote a book about it Fitness Unleashed!: A Dog and Owners Guide to Losing Weight and Gaining Health Together with veterinarian Marty Becker.

I call it an exercise machine on a leash, Kushner said. It is a way for people to think about moving their body around in a fun way.

Most of his patients lose about 10 percent of their body weight (some more than 20 percent) after six months and keep it off during the program, Kushner said.

Patients say they feel understood and more motivated as they are given personalized direction to make positive changes in their lifestyle, he said.

Kushner created a questionnaire to screen patients for traits that prevent weight loss such as eating whats convenient rather than planning healthy meals or having an all-or-nothing mentality traits that Kushner and colleagues found in a study to be strongly linked with obesity.

Once you take the quiz and know your factor type, I can personalize a plan to help you lose weight and keep it off, Kushner said.

Another way Kushner hopes to help patients tackle obesity is by teaching medical students about treating and preventing it. He found in a recent study that the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination was focusing much more on diagnosing and treating obesity-related illnesses, such as Type 2 diabetes and sleep apnea, than on how to counsel patients on diet, physical activity, behavior changes, the use of medications and bariatric surgery.

But Kushner said his approach isnt only about weight loss.

We know that as little as 5 to 10 percent weight loss will improve the health and well-being of individuals and can also improve blood sugar, blood pressure, the fats in your blood, arthritis or reflux symptoms, as well as your mood and energy level.

Read more

Changing your perspective about weight loss may change the outcome, too

A weight-loss expert changes his tune: Focus on enjoyment, not perfection

Weight loss, especially with surgery, tied to lower risk of heart failure

Read the original:
Losing weight for the couch potato and others - The Washington Post - Washington Post

What do you need to build a self-driving car? Roboticists and computer scientists have generally settled on similar requirements. Your autonomous vehicle needs to know where the boundaries of the road are. It needs to be able to steer the car and hit the brakes. It needs to know the speed limit, be able to read street signs, and detect if a traffic light is red or green. It needs to be able to react quickly to unexpected objects in its path, and it gets extra points if it knows where it is on a map.

All of those skills are important and necessary. But by building from a list of technical requirements, researchers neglect the single most important part of real-world driving: our intuition. Using it to determine the motivations of those around us is something humans are so effortlessly good at that its hard to even notice were doing it, nonetheless program for it.

A self-driving car currently lacks the ability to look at a personwhether theyre walking, driving a car, or riding a bikeand know what theyre thinking. These instantaneous human judgments are vital to our safety when were drivingand to that of others on the road, too.

As the CTO and cofounder of Perceptive Automata, an autonomous-vehicle software company started by Harvard neuroscientists and computer scientists, I wanted to see how often humans make these kinds of subconscious calls on the road. I took a camera out to a calm intersection near my former lab at Harvard with no traffic signals. It is not by any stretch of the imagination as congested or difficult as an intersection in downtown Boston, let alone Manhattan or Mexico City. But in 30 seconds of video, it is still possible to count more than 45 instances of one person intuiting whats in the mind of another. These non-verbal, split-second intuitions could be that person is not going to yield, that person doesnt know Im here, or that person wouldnt jaywalk while walking a dog. Is that bicyclist going to turn left or stop? Is that pedestrian going to take advantage of their right-of-way and cross? These judgments happen instantaneously, just watch.

We have lots of empirical evidence that humans are incredibly good at intuiting the intentions of others. The Sally-Anne task is a classic psychology experiment. Subjectsusually childrenwatch a researcher acting out a scene with dolls. A doll named Sally hides a marble in a covered basket. Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, a second dollAnnesecretly moves the marble out of the basket and into a closed box. When the first doll comes back, children are asked where she will look for the marble. Its easy to say, Well, of course shell still look in the basket, as Sally couldnt have known that the marble had moved while she was gone. But that of course is hiding an immensely sophisticated model. Children have to know not only that Sally is aware of some things and not of others, but that her awareness only updates when she is able to pay attention to something. They also have to know that her mental state is persistent, even when she leaves the room and comes back. This task has been repeated many times in labs around the world, and is part of the standard toolkit researchers use to understand if somebodys social intuitions are intact.

The ability to predict the mental state of others is so innate that we even apply it to distinctly non-human objects. The Heider-Simel experiment shows how were prone to ascribe perceived intent even to simple geometric shapes. In this famous study, a film shows two triangles and a circle moving around the screen. With essentially no exceptions, most people construct and elaborate narrative about the goals and interactions of the geometric shapes: One is a villain, one a protector, the third a victim who grows courageous and saves the dayall these mental states and narratives just from looking at geometric shapes moving about. In the psychological literature, this is called an impoverished stimulus.

Our interactions with people using the road are an example of an impoverished stimulus, too. We only see a pedestrian for a few hundred milliseconds before we have to decide how to react to them. We see a car edging slightly into a lane for a half second and have to decide whether to yield to them. We catch a fleeting glimpse of a cyclist and judge whether they know were making a right turn. These kinds of interactions are constant, and they are at the very core of driving safely and considerately.

And computers, so far, are hopeless at navigating them.

The perils of lacking an intuition for state of mind are already evident. In the first at-fault crash of a self-driving vehicle, a Google self-driving car in Mountain View incorrectly assumed that a bus driver would yield to it, misunderstanding both the urgency and the flexibility of a human driver trying to get around a stopped vehicle. In another crash, a self-driving Uber in Arizona was hit by a turning driver who expected that any oncoming vehicles would notice the adjacent lanes of traffic had slowed down and adjust its expectations of how turning drivers would behave.

Why are computers so bad at this task of mind reading if its so easy for people? This circumstance comes up so often in AI development that it has a name: Moravecs Paradox. The tasks that are easiest for people are often the ones that are the hardest for computers. Were least aware of what our minds do best, said the late AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Were more aware of simple processes that dont work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly.

So how do you design an algorithm to perform a task if you cant say with any certainty what the task entails?

The usual solution is to define the task as simply as possible and use what are called deep-learning algorithms that can learn from vast quantities of data. For example, when given a sufficient number of pictures of trees (and pictures of things that are not trees), these computer programs can do a very good job of identifying a tree. If you boil a problem down to either proving or disproving an unambiguous fact about the worldthere is a tree there, or there is notalgorithms can do a pretty good job.

The only way to solve these problems is to deeply understand human behavior by characterizing it carefully using the techniques of behavioral science.But what to do about problems where basic facts about the world are neither simple nor accessible? Humans can make surprisingly accurate judgments about other humans because we have an immensely sophisticated set of internal models for how those around us behave. But those models are hidden from scrutiny, hidden in the black boxes of our minds. How do you label images with the contents of somebodys constantly fluid and mostly nonsensical inner monologue?

The only way to solve these problems is to deeply understand human behaviornot just by reverse-engineering it, but by characterizing it carefully and comprehensively using the techniques of behavioral science. Humans are immensely capable but have opaque internal mechanisms. We need to use the techniques of human behavioral research in order to build computer-vision models that are trained to capture the nuances and subtleties of human responses to the world instead of trying to guess what our internal model of the world looks like.

First, we need to work out how humans worksecond comes training the machines. Only with a rich, deep characterization of the quirks and foibles of human ability can we know enough about the problem were trying to solve in order to build computer models that can solve it. By using humans as the model for ideal performance, we are able to gain traction on these difficult tasks and find a meaningful solution to this intuition problem.

And we need to solve it. If self-driving cars are going to achieve their promise as a revolution in urban transportationdelivering reduced emissions, better mobility, and safer streetsthey will have to exist on a level playing field with the humans who already use those roads. They will have to be good citize
ns, not only skilled at avoiding at-fault accidents, but able to drive in such a way that their behavior is expected, comprehensible, and clear to other vehicles drivers and the pedestrians and cyclists sharing space with them.

Follow Sam on Twitter. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Self-driving cars still can't mimic the most natural human behavior - Quartz

Scientists studying human behaviour and cognitive brain function are up in arms over a plan by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to classify most studies involving human participants as clinical trials.

An open letter sent on 31 August to NIH director Francis Collins says that the policy could unnecessarily increase the administrative burden on investigators, slowing the pace of discovery in basic research. It asked the NIH to delay implementation of the policy until it consulted with the behavioural science community. As this article went to press, the letter had garnered 2,070 signatures.

Every scientist I have talked to who is doing basic research on the human mind and brain has been shocked by this policy, which makes no sense, says Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who co-wrote the letter with four other researchers.

The policy is part of an NIH clinical trial reform effort started in 2014 to ensure that all clinical results were publicly reported. The policy is scheduled to go into effect in January 2018. Its definition of a clinical trial included anything involving behavioural interventions, such as having participants perform a memory task or monitor their food intake. Such studies would need special evaluation by NIH review committees and institutional ethics review boards; and the experiments would need to be registered online in the clinicaltrials.gov database.

But many researchers believe that studies of normal human behaviour intended to discover new phenomena rather than alter them should not be classified in this way. Among other concerns, small institutions that do not normally perform clinical trials may not have the resources or knowledge to fully comply.

These concerns are overblown, said Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research at a 1 September NIH advisory council meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. The only regulation were talking about is reporting that the trial exists and telling the world about the results. It is as simple as this and as profound as this. He said that his office would work with behavioural scientists to ensure their studies were getting the proper review and that their research could be properly registered.

But advisory council member Terry Jernigan, a cognitive scientist at the University of California San Diego, told Lauer that it was not as simple as that. She said the policy has already caused problems for a study shes leading that tracks normal brain development in adolescents. When her group had the parents sign the required clinical trial consent form, some expressed concerns that the language indicated that something was being done to their children, rather than just having researchers observe them.

The NIH, in response to some of those concerns, will release a list of study examples that qualify as clinical trials under the new policy next week. The NIH definition of a clinical trial may be broader than other clinical trial definitions because it reflects NIH's mission, encompassing biomedical and behavioral outcomes as they pertain to human health, said the NIH in a statement to Nature News. This definition does not encompass all psychological and cognitive research that is funded by NIH.

Jeremy Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, says he is encouraged to hear Lauer say the NIH plans to work with researchers in his field, but says that the details of the policy will be key. Were worried about whether those details can be worked out by the January deadline, he says.

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Brain researchers in uproar over NIH clinical trials policy - Nature.com