30 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
12 candidates will run for the open alumni position on the IU Board of Trustees. The election begins at 12:01 a.m. June 1 and ends at 10 a.m. June 28.
President Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2021 proposes a 12% increase in overall funding to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The budget introduces several notable changes to NASA’s funding, including a 46% increase in space exploration to land a crewed mission on the moon by 2024.
The newly constructed Metz Carillon, an instrument made of bells in a tower that cost $7 million, will be rung on Monday in celebration of IU’s bicentennial.
IU professor Elinor “Lin” Ostrom was a woman of many firsts: the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the first person honored at IU-Bloomington with an Bicentennial Historical Marker for her achievements and the first woman to have her own statue at IU.
The path to working at a rare books library is not as simple as enjoying books. The Indiana Daily Student sat down with librarians in the Lilly Library’s Slocum Room to talk about what schooling and experience can help one get a job at with a rare books collection.
Like many other freshmen, I’ve gone through my fair share of major-related existential crises. At one point during the fall, I became so stressed about practicality and post-graduation job prospects that I nearly switched from studying English to biology. Recently, there’s been a huge cultural push to encourage students to develop an interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
When people think of autism, some make an unfortunate connection with vaccines. But a recent breakthrough in autism research will allow scientists to start answering questions about the disease’s causes — and vaccines aren’t one of them.
Attendees who arrived too late to get a seat in the auditorium crowded around monitors to listen to President McRobbie’s speech.
From IDS reports
IU’s Vice President for Research Jorge José and Vice President for International Affairs David Zaret took the first steps to creating collaborations with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
A new IU study has tracked links between early language skills and subsequent behavior problems in young children.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The word “phantom” can describe an illusion, but there is no mistaking the results of the Phantom, a force feedback virtual reality device that helps treat youth with Developmental Coordination Disorder. It was developed in part by professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science Geoffrey Bingham.“The technology that we use to train these kids is a computer graphics display that is connected to a phantom-omny,” Bingham said. “And that’s a desktop robotic arm, essentially.” Bingham likens the Phantom to a virtual version of a toy commonly seen in pediatric waiting rooms, one that contains a board with wires and beads.“The task is like that except you have to do the pushing of the beads using a stylus, like a pen or a pencil,” Bingham said. “So, the idea is you’d be placing it on the wire behind the bead and then pushing the bead along the wire.”Bingham got the idea of using the Phantom from Andy Hanson, a former chair of the computer sciencedepartment, who introduced him to the device.Winona Snapp-Childs, a member of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, has worked with Bingham in testing the Phantom.“It immediately became obvious to us when we were allowed to play with it for the first time that this could be a very nice therapeutic tool given the right circumstances,” Snapp-Childs said.The Phantom is hooked up to a computer screen that displays the virtual wires and beads. Each move the Phantom makes is seen on the computer screen.The goal is to keep the bead, controlled by the Phantom, on point with the diagram on the computer screen, which looks like a roller coaster. The test lasts about 10 seconds, but it can be increased in difficulty. The magnetic attraction can be made stronger or weaker, the latter making it more difficult to keep the bead on point. “The point of the test is that children with developmental coordination disorder would never be able to do this,” Bingham said. “They’d be coming off the wire all the time and then having to find it again, and it would be incredibly frustrating.”Bingham said 5 to 6 percent of children are affected by the disorder, which is similar to autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. After he began research on the subject, Bingham said he had a revelation.“When I encountered this, I recognized myself right away, I’m DCD,” he said. “I flunked handwriting all the way through grade school, and I didn’t read my first book until I was in junior high school. It was torture.”Bingham said studies have linked reading and writing, as children with poor handwriting tend to also have reading issues. The disorder can also ramify, creating social and emotional problems, though it does respond to therapy and remediation.“There’s no known cause for it, which makes it hard to diagnose,” Snapp-Childs said.That may be the next task in addressing the issue of DCD, she said, as diagnosing seems more plausible than curing it. “Generally these kids are intelligent,” Bingham said. “There’s no known physiological basis for the problem. Their problem is that they’re clumsy.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Shaking its head from left to right, a small robot makes a scratchy noise every few seconds. “That’s Dewey,” Selma Šabanovic says, laughing and reaching her hand out to pull on one of its elastic spikes. Created from a plastic bath caddy and rubber ball, both from Target, placed over a mesh of Arduino-brand microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, Dewey has a light in its belly that turns from cool blue to striking red when it is “hungry” for the set of “fruits” – smart cards slotted into decorated pockets of colored paper – lying beside it. Šabanovic is cofounder and current director of the R-House Living Lab, an on-campus laboratory on East 13th Street designated for research in human-robot interaction and development of robotic technologies that cater to everyday human life. Šabanovic gets us as close as we can to actually speaking with the bath caddy-clad robot. Who is Dewey? I would call it a socially interactive robot, or maybe an assistive robot. We were interested in helping people who work on computer jobs to take more regular breaks, because what we realized was that when you’re working on a computer job you can kind of forget that you have a body, basically. And so the question is, how can you remind people that they have bodies, and about their bodily needs? The idea is to have something that’s embodied. How does Dewey interact with humans? Dewey feeds on fruit cards, which are radio frequency identification tags, that have unique IDs associated with them. Generally, the idea would be you’d have a Dewey on your desk, and then these cards would be at the water cooler. There had been studies about how often you would need to take a break, so we used those studies to make kind of a timer for it. So it would say you’ve been sitting for 30 minutes, ‘let me remind you to take a little breather,’ and it would move. You would come back with a card, which would reset the timer, back to the work mode. In some ways, Dewey could be looked at as a little more advanced egg timer. The first prototype didn’t have any interactive components. For the second iteration, we actually gave it a behavior, so if you want to play with it while it’s sitting on your desk, it responds. So we kind of made it more social. The idea was, maybe if you don’t care enough about yourself to get up and go take a break, maybe you’ll care if you have to go feed your little creature. Each person had one robot, but the cards were in a common place. One thing was that you had to get up to get a card, so it was forcing you to do that, but also when you were up you might bump into your friend or something, or your colleague, and have a little chat. How do these robots function if they’ve been made with such simple objects? Most of them are not really made with “simple objects,” but with specialist prototyping equipment and platforms. The simple objects are sometimes used for the “shells,” partly because they are easily available and also because we want the robots to fit into homes and be somewhat familiar to users, even though they are a novel technology. Why did you choose to use such hardware? We use prototyping parts like Arduino because they are widely available and relatively cheap, as one of our goals is to make robotics accessible to the public. We also are interested in designing robots that are socially robust and fit well into their contexts of use. For this we need to build and test out many design ideas through prototypes that we do not get too attached to. We need them to be cheap, reconfigurable, and not take too long to build, so that we will be fine with changing them when we learn new design requirements through studies. Using these parts also makes it possible for other researchers to replicate our robots and do studies with them, which is good for science, and also any others who are interested can build them and improve on the designs and applications. Readers can actually make their own. The parts are all available for purchase online or in stores like Target or Hobby Lobby. We are planning on putting up construction directions for the various robots on our website sometime soon. How much do they cost? The first Dewey prototype cost $120, while the second cost $100. The main goal was for the first prototype to be an education and research tool, we intend to put the second iteration in the market. Mugbot, which costs $600, was designed by visiting Japanese scientist Seita Koike, and is available for purchase. Katie and MiRAE, $250 and $300 respectively, were made as research tools.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Shaking its head from left to right, a small robot makes a scratchy noise every few seconds. “That’s Dewey,” Selma Šabanovic says, laughing and reaching her hand out to pull on one of its elastic spikes. Created from a plastic bath caddy and rubber ball, both from Target, placed over a mesh of Arduino-brand microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, Dewey has a light in its belly that turns from cool blue to striking red when it is “hungry” for the set of “fruits” – smart cards slotted into decorated pockets of colored paper – lying beside it. Šabanovic is cofounder and current director of the R-House Living Lab, an on-campus laboratory on East 13th Street designated for research in human-robot interaction and development of robotic technologies that cater to everyday human life. Šabanovic gets us as close as we can to actually speaking with the bath caddy-clad robot. Who is Dewey? I would call it a socially interactive robot, or maybe an assistive robot. We were interested in helping people who work on computer jobs to take more regular breaks, because what we realized was that when you’re working on a computer job you can kind of forget that you have a body, basically. And so the question is, how can you remind people that they have bodies, and about their bodily needs? The idea is to have something that’s embodied. How does Dewey interact with humans? Dewey feeds on fruit cards, which are radio frequency identification tags, that have unique IDs associated with them. Generally, the idea would be you’d have a Dewey on your desk, and then these cards would be at the water cooler. There had been studies about how often you would need to take a break, so we used those studies to make kind of a timer for it. So it would say you’ve been sitting for 30 minutes, ‘let me remind you to take a little breather,’ and it would move. You would come back with a card, which would reset the timer, back to the work mode. In some ways, Dewey could be looked at as a little more advanced egg timer. The first prototype didn’t have any interactive components. For the second iteration, we actually gave it a behavior, so if you want to play with it while it’s sitting on your desk, it responds. So we kind of made it more social. The idea was, maybe if you don’t care enough about yourself to get up and go take a break, maybe you’ll care if you have to go feed your little creature. Each person had one robot, but the cards were in a common place. One thing was that you had to get up to get a card, so it was forcing you to do that, but also when you were up you might bump into your friend or something, or your colleague, and have a little chat. How do these robots function if they’ve been made with such simple objects? Most of them are not really made with “simple objects,” but with specialist prototyping equipment and platforms. The simple objects are sometimes used for the “shells,” partly because they are easily available and also because we want the robots to fit into homes and be somewhat familiar to users, even though they are a novel technology. Why did you choose to use such hardware? We use prototyping parts like Arduino because they are widely available and relatively cheap, as one of our goals is to make robotics accessible to the public. We also are interested in designing robots that are socially robust and fit well into their contexts of use. For this we need to build and test out many design ideas through prototypes that we do not get too attached to. We need them to be cheap, reconfigurable, and not take too long to build, so that we will be fine with changing them when we learn new design requirements through studies. Using these parts also makes it possible for other researchers to replicate our robots and do studies with them, which is good for science, and also any others who are interested can build them and improve on the designs and applications. Readers can actually make their own. The parts are all available for purchase online or in stores like Target or Hobby Lobby. We are planning on putting up construction directions for the various robots on our website sometime soon. How much do they cost? The first Dewey prototype cost $120, while the second cost $100. The main goal was for the first prototype to be an education and research tool, we intend to put the second iteration in the market. Mugbot, which costs $600, was designed by visiting Japanese scientist Seita Koike, and is available for purchase. Katie and MiRAE, $250 and $300 respectively, were made as research tools.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Randy Hubach has vivid dreams.Frequently, the 29-year-old IU doctoral student lives an entire day while asleep.He imagines himself going to class; he takes exams and he solves specific statistics problems. Living in his dreams are the people he was last with before going to bed, possibly a classmate or family member. On one occasion, Hubach recalls sitting at the cluttered wooden desk inside his small, one-bedroom apartment. Only mentally, he wrote an entire essay.Unlike some, this dream did not end in violence. Sometimes, he suddenly loses recognition of the characters in his mind. Then he kills them. “It’s not like when you think of a horror film where you see the chainsaw come out and do it,” Hubach said. “You don’t really go through that process.” Usually ending his dreams by waking up at about 4 a.m., he thinks “Oh, that was kind of screwed up,” falls back asleep and later forgets most of the specific details. When he first started having the vivid hallucinations in 2008, he thought they were only nightmares, something everybody experiences. But he soon realized they mean something more. Instead, the dreams are a common side effect of his $3,000-a-month medication. Every day, Hubach goes to class, sometimes as a student and other times as the instructor. He strives to find his place in this world, to find success. But he never forgets that he lives with an incurable, and sometimes deadly, infection.In 2002, he tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus. ***Worldwide, an estimated 33.3 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, more than 1 million of whom live in the United States, according to Center for Disease Control and Prevention statistics. An estimated 56,300 new HIV infections are reported in the U.S. each year, with one new infection every nine and a half minutes.As of December 2011, approximately 10,225 Hoosiers are living with HIV/AIDS, 212 of which live in Monroe County.New HIV diagnoses are most prevalent in individuals between the ages of 18 and 24, Hubach said.“People who are college-age, emerging adults, only about 50 percent of those living with HIV actually know their diagnosis,” Hubach said. There is no cure.“How many people know somebody who is living with HIV?” Hubach asked, standing at the front of a lecture hall in the IU School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation building.None of the students raised their hands.“You all said that you probably know nobody with HIV in your circle,” Hubach said. “Well, I’m in your circle now.”Hubach taught two classes spring semester: human sexuality in the psychology department and stress management for HPER. But on this occasion, he was a guest lecturer for Alexandra Marshall’s human sexuality course.“He disclosed his HIV status to the class,” said Marshall, who is a Ph.D. candidate and associate instructor at IU. “I think that adds a personal component and some exposure that students may not have had before.”Before his lecture, Hubach taped large sheets of paper on the walls of the lecture hall, each including the name of one STI. The students were asked to walk to one of the sheets of paper and write everything they knew about that specific STI.“I haven’t had this talk in so long,” one of the students said to another, who agreed.“Who wants to go first?” Hubach asked.A woman in front of the paper marked for HIV/AIDS volunteered.“How do you get it?” Hubach asked the woman.“Mothers to infants, drugs, sex, blood transfusions, bad needles basically,” she responded.“Oh,” Hubach said. “So, you have the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll type of thing, and then your mom.”All transmissions mentioned were correct, he said. But he later explained other ways someone can become infected. “It is in saliva, it is in tears,” Hubach said. “However, the amount that is in it is so minuscule that if we look at saliva, you would have to drink about five gallons of someone’s saliva to get enough concentration of the HIV virus to where you would be even remotely at risk for the virus. So technically, your stomach would explode and you would die, and then maybe you would be at risk for HIV.”Hubach continued through the other STIs. “If you’re going to get one of these, if you had to choose, the two I would pick are chlamydia and gonorrhea,” Hubach said in his typical deep, nonchalant voice. “You take some pills, you do two weeks of doxycycline, you go through it, you’re as good as gold, go fuck some more.”Although Hubach disclosed his HIV status, he excluded his sexual preference.He does not want to perpetuate the stereotype that only homosexuals contract HIV, he said. Anybody — straight, gay, male, female — can become infected. He just happens to also be gay.***Hubach said he always knew he was a little different. Born in San Diego, he and his family moved a lot when he was younger. His father was in the Navy. “Even as a child, you wouldn’t meet your best friend,” Hubach said. Though reclusive, he said he developed tight relationships with his family.When Hubach’s father retired from the Navy in the mid-’90s, they moved back to southern California. Hubach met his first girlfriend in eighth grade. She was a sophomore in high school, he said. Throughout high school, he had three other girlfriends. Hubach said he was attracted to them. He enjoyed the relationships. He was still unaware of his homosexual status.“Going through the struggles in junior high and high school where you’re quote and quote (sic) attracted to your girlfriend, but you’re also attracted to some guy in your class and you don’t really know what to make of it,” Hubach said.Instead of finding guidance, Hubach drove himself harder academically. Hubach wanted to become a politician. He said he even interned as a page for a Republican congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives.Preparing to graduate high school, he hoped to go to Stanford but never applied. He settled with Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he studied political science and history and played trombone in the marching band. While at a bowling alley his freshman year, he first came out to another gay member of the band.Back in California for fall break, he first told his mother.His mother, he said, was sitting on the couch in the living room. He walked into the room, sat down on another couch and told her outright. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about,” he remembers telling her. “I’m gay.”Next was his father.Leading up to the conversation, he said he was nervous, but if they reacted adversely, he knew he would return to Texas in only a few days.“How are people going to react?” he said he asked himself at the time. “What is going to happen when they take it?”Turns out, he said, they handled the news quite well. During his freshman year at SMU in 2000, he found his first boyfriend. But during his sophomore year, he found the boyfriend who would eventually give him HIV.After dating for about a year in what Hubach thought was a monogamous relationship, he started getting sick. Eventually, he went to the doctor.“You might want to get your affairs in order,” Hubach said he recalls his doctor telling him. “Just so you know, we ran an HIV test and you’re HIV positive. I don’t know how much longer you are going to live.”At first, Hubach said he got angry.“You have these thoughts about ‘Oh, I want to kill so-and-so,’” Hubach said. “For me it was like, ‘Oh my god, am I going to die?’”But he quickly went back to his daily routine. To him, he said, the news did not seem real. He ignored the virus’ existence until he went back to California. For several years he went without taking any form of medication, until his infection progressed. Then, for the first time, his infection felt real.His mother was the first person he told, Hubach said. Though shocked, Hubach said his mother still remained calm.“It was almost like a dual coming-out process because sometimes when you meet people you have to first come out as a gay individual, but then you have to say you’re a gay individual who is living with HIV,” Hubach said.He said he still struggles to determine when it is appropriate to disclose his infection.***Outside class, Hubach brings his condition with him everywhere he goes, more than just physically.At the Indiana Memorial Union, Hubach and Margo Bennett, a colleague and fellow doctorate student with Hubach, spoke to a group.Hubach and Bennett, who are both volunteers at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, have decided to form a networking group of IU students interested in issues surrounding sexuality and gender. On the balcony at the IMU, they had their first meeting on March 21.“I think it is just a nice social outlet,” Hubach said. “Our social lives are usually research or hanging out with people in our program, so it is kind of nice to meet people with similar interests.”Although no plans were finalized, the students brainstormed the details of their soon-to-be student organization. Among the attendees was sophomore Jenny Agostino, who took a human sexuality course taught by Hubach Fall semester.“One day he brought in dildos and stuff and showed us how to put condoms on them,” Agostino said. “He did a lot of demonstrations that really got the class to interact.”Although she learned from him for a semester, Agostino said she was unaware of his HIV status. “You don’t go up to somebody and say, ‘Hi, my name is Randy or so-and-so, and I have high cholesterol, so I might die by the age of 40,’” Hubach said.And when he has told people he has HIV, he has received negative reactions.In an Italian restaurant in Orange County, Calif., in 2006, Hubach went on a date with his partner of two months. They ordered their food, and then Randy disclosed his HIV status.“It looks like this relationship might be going farther,” Hubach recalls saying. “I respect you and so before we do anything else, or even go down that path, I’m HIV positive.’”Hubach said the man immediately reacted negatively.“‘Oh my god, you’re trying to kill me,’” Hubach recalled the man saying. “‘You’re such a fucking asshole.’” Then the man walked out of the restaurant.When the server arrived with their food, Hubach told the server that his friend was not feeling well. He asked to get the meals to go, paid the bill and left.“I think there’s a time in all of our lives when we want to be in a relationship and we seek a relationship,” Hubach said. “I think for myself, that was the turning point of focusing more on ‘What do I want to do with my life?’”***Hubach sat alone at the desk in his apartment. On his laptop, he checked his email for the last time that night. With a quiz scheduled in one of his classes the following morning, his students had last-minute questions. Procrastinating, he checked Facebook. On his desk, the date on his wooden Mickey Mouse calendar had already been changed. Standing from his large wooden desk, Hubach walked into his bedroom. On the nightstand was an assortment of pill bottles.For the last four years, he has taken the pills every day except two. But just to be sure, he set the pill on the lid of the bottle, left his bedroom and began unpacking his overstuffed backpack. All prepared for his next day of school, he poured a glass of water and choked down the pills in one gulp.In a matter of minutes, his eyelids began to droop. Sitting at his desk, he began to feel loopy, drowsy. It was time for Hubach to go to bed.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Twenty-one IU-Bloomington faculty members received Collaborative Research and Creative Funding awards by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.The awards, each $10,000, will accelerate projects and initiatives regarding faculty, museums, institutes and IU centers.“The projects receiving this year’s CRCAF awards represent an impressive and exciting range of collaborations,” IU Vice Provost for Research Sarita Soni said in a press release. Soni’s office oversees various research funding programs for faculty.“I’m confident that these collaborations will help to stimulate new ideas and spur these projects toward further success,” Soni said.DogCam: An Accurate Eye-Tracker for Naturalistic Social Cognition in Dogs Colin Allen, history and philosophy of science; Nicholas Port, optometry; Center for the Integrative Study of Animal BehaviorIndiana Iron-Gall Ink Study of 17th-Century Hand-Written Manuscripts Using Raman Spectroscopy Analysis Amar Flood, chemistry; William Newman, history and philosophy of science; Wallace Hooper, Chemistry of Isaac Newton Project; Cherry Williams and Douglas Sanders, Lilly Library; Mathers Museum of World Cultures; Glenn A. Black Laboratory of ArchaeologyThe Southeastern Native American Collections Project Jason Jackson, folklore and ethnomusicology; Glenn A. Black Laboratory of ArchaeologyVirtual Commons for Commons Research at the Ostrom Workshop Michael D. McGinnis, political science; Emily Castle, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy AnalysisExpanding Access to HIV Testing Through Rural Pharmacies Beth Meyerson, applied health science; Stephanie Sanders and Marlon Bailey, gender studies; the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction; the Rural Center for AIDS/STD PreventionDeveloping and Implementing 21st-Century Ideas on Optometry Through Area Studies Partnership Samuel Obeng, African studies program; Douglas Horner, optometry; Borish Center for Ophthalmic ResearchCovering the New India: Media Portraits of a Nation in Transition Radhika Parameswaran, journalism; John Bodnar, Center for the Study of History and MemoryProviding Online Access to Annotated Multimedia Materials on Ivorian Immigrant Performance Daniel Reed, folklore and ethnomusicology; Institute for Digital Arts and HumanitiesMusical Collectorship in Italy in the 18th and 19th Centuries Giovanni Zanovello, musicology; Massimo Ossi, Jacobs School of Music; Giuliano Di Bacco, Center for the History of Music TheorySource: IU News Room— Michael Majchrowicz
Elinor Ostrom condensed four decades of tireless economic legwork to 30 minutes in her Nobel Lecture.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Great. Now can we please, as a society, move on? There are five other Nobels given out each year to people who have actually done good work in the service of mankind.Perhaps most importantly for IU-Bloomington was the economics Nobel, awarded to Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to snag the Prize in economics in its 40-year history. The committee pointed out that her work has moved analysis of nonmarket institutions “from the fringe of economic analysis to the very center.” Ostrom’s recognition is great news for her, as well as for the United States and the IU community.Was Obama’s award important? Absolutely. But there are other things going on in the world. Here’s a breakdown of the other Nobel Prizes given out this year:Chemistry: Awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for their studies elucidating the structure and function of ribosomes using advanced crystallography techniques. This work has practical applications in genetics, medical science and several other fields.Physics: Awarded to Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith. Kao received his award for the development of low-loss optical fibers that are currently used in a wide array of communications and other devices. Boyle and Smith were awarded for the development of charge-coupled devices that are currently used in optical instrumentation of various kinds.Physiology or Medicine: Awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Jack W. Szostak and Carol W. Greider for their research on how chromosomes are protected from degradation during repeated cellular division. They also discovered the existence of the long-predicted enzyme telomerase that carries out this function.Literature: Awarded to Herta Muller for her works criticizing the oppressive dictatorial regimes that ruled Romania for much of the later half of the 20th century. Her commitment to free speech and refusal to assist the secret police made her a social and political pariah for much of her young life, but informed the rest of the world of the situation in Romania.Economics: Awarded to Oliver E. Williamson “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm” and Elinor Ostrom, an IU-Bloomington professor in the political science department, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”
With his new book “Play,” Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has thrust playtime back into the national spotlight. but why is it so important? To find out, we sought out IU experts to talk about the benefits of a playful life at every age.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>IN HIS EMPTY ART STUDIO on Woodlawn Avenue, senior Troy Mottard is repainting the walls a fresh hue of white. His jeans and navy sweatshirt, splattered with bits of paint, are characteristic of the rest of his wardrobe. He takes a break from stirring paint and fiddles with the black iPod sitting nearby. It, too, is splashed with a drop of red. A fine arts student in oil painting, Mottard believes creativity isn’t something you can touch, but something you can feel. “I think of creativity as a physical place that keeps changing,” he says. “It’s an opinion, it’s how you feel a certain way, and it keeps changing.”To Mottard, art isn’t just interesting. It’s a part of who he is, as essential as sleep or breathing. Strip him of his canvas, paints, and brushes, and he might burst, spewing creative energy out around him. “When I’m making something, I get a sense of euphoria, and if I stop, I don’t have that feeling anymore,” he says. “It’s not exactly an addiction, but it is a craving.”Artists everywhere talk of the allure of their craft – this need to be creative – but what is creativity? Psychologists say it’s the generation of ideas, insights, or problem solutions that are new or meant to be useful, or as an elusive quality waiting to be tapped and unleashed, but those definitions only go so far. How is creativity generated? Is it innate or fostered by time, environment, and experience? And is it something we’re all capable of? Finding answers to those questions is, in a sense, IU professor Jonathan Plucker’s raison d’etre. Plucker, a professor of educational psychology and cognitive sciences, specializes in creativity research. He says the word “creativity” has been wrongly defined in the past. “Some say it’s only originality, but different doesn’t always mean creative,” he says. “It’s a trap we’ve gotten into.” Plucker defines creativity as originality and usefulness, but only within a specific social context, since these terms are difficult to define. “It’s very relative, very situational,” he says. He says he believes that though some people are more creative than others, everyone has the potential. Unfortunately, he says most people don’t even begin to tap into their creativity. “For all intents and purposes, the nature versus nurturer argument is irrelevant because we can all be more creative,” Plucker says. IU graduate David Schneider hasn’t had any trouble tapping into his creative side thus far. A classical music composer, he’s spent the last 10 years devoted to his music. When he began working on the piece that would complete his master’s degree in composition from the Jacobs School of Music, he was sure of two things: First, it would not be written for an orchestra, and second, it would be unusual. He centered it on two Shakespearian sonnets that drew him in: the well-known Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”) and the lesser-known Sonnet 65, which begins “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea.” To Schneider, the poems shared a common thread. Both, he says, comment on the transitory nature of life, and the ability of art not only to preserve, but also to persevere when everything else is lost.The end result is something Schneider says he feels particular affection for. Though time and effort are surely a factor — from start to finish, it took him two years to complete — it’s more than that. When he first tried his hand at composing, he found it was mysterious, romantic, even, and hearing a finished composition such as this one reacquaints him with those early moments of magic. But more importantly, perhaps, it’s another reminder of his long-realized desire to create. “There was no particular moment that I decided I would be a composer,” he says. “I just always knew that I would do something creative.” One way to unhinge creative abilities is to silence the inner critic, says Ken Weitzman, a professional playwright and visiting professor in IU’s playwriting program. Weitzman describes creativity as the “reordering of the status quo.” Though he says everyone has the ability to be creative, he also believes it must be nurtured. He teaches his undergraduate students this by encouraging them to not only develop their voices, but to feel comfortable with what they have to say.During a recent class, he gave an exercise to help free the mind’s natural impulses. He handed out two note cards to his students. On one card, they were told to write a cliche, and on the other, something specific. After passing the cards around, Weitzman told them to use the phrases as the opening and closing lines of a monologue. His only stipulation was that they write continuously for 10 minutes without lifting their pens from the paper. He didn’t care how vulgar, absurd, or silly their writing became, just that they not stop. “You have to turn the inner sensor off,” he says. “You can judge everything you write to the point where it never makes it on the page.”Emma Vaughn, who graduated from IU in December with a degree in psychology, wrote her honors thesis on creativity, paying particular attention to mood. Psychologists say mood is perhaps the most widely studied and least disputed predictor of creativity. Though many studies propose that positive moods do improve creative problem solving, there are few theories explaining just how it happens. Perhaps one explanation is that in some cases, it is a negative mood that actually increases creativity. Psychologist Carsten De Dreu, of the University of Amsterdam, published in 2007 an oft-cited article theorizing that creativity is the function of both mental flexibility and persistence. Through various studies, he found that while positive moods led to higher levels of mental flexibility, tasks that required problem solving within a narrower framework were better facilitated by negative moods.Vaughn says she wanted to explore the correlation between negative mood and creativity after studying artists such as English novelist Virginia Woolf, who suffered breakdowns and recurrent depressing periods while her creative and literary abilities remained in tact. “With this evidence in mind,” she says, “it makes it easy to question the generally accepted conclusion that positive mood states produce more creativity versus negative mood states.”Vaughn conducted two studies using introductory psychology students. At the start of the experiment, each person was told they would be participating in a linguistics task. They were then shown a randomly assigned film clip, which induced either a happy, sad, or neutral feeling. Vaughn was interested in exploring the things that came to people’s minds spontaneously, so participants were asked to list and rate modes of transportation as being commonplace (bus or car) or out of the ordinary (a magic carpet). One of her primary goals, she says, was to find whether happy participants would be more flexible information processors versus sad or neutral participants.What she found was that sad participants generated more creative responses overall. Though they demonstrated less mental flexibility, they showed greater numbers of ideas or insights. Vaughn says the negative mood participants tended to dig deeper within fewer categories whereas the positive mood participants had a broader range of responses. Similar to De Dreu’s findings, she concluded that negative moods could facilitate more creativity, but only within a narrower focus.Junior Keane Rowley, president of the IU break dance team, says his mood definitely affects how he dances. Having never danced before college, it was during his freshman year that the sounds of music drew him to the crowd gawking at the group of students spinning on their heads and hands. “When I’m mad, I dance tough. When I’m sad, I dance sad. When I’m happy, I dance silly,” Rowley says. He describes creativity as taking everything you’ve learned and experienced and changing the format. “Every minute is a new minute,” Rowley says. “Every day is a new day. It’s all about trying new things, taking risks.”WHILE VAUGHN ADMITS that more evidence is needed to support her findings, photographer Sara Baldwin, a junior majoring in journalism, would say she’s right. Sitting in Soma coffee shop, Baldwin, dressed in tight black jeans and a dark purple shirt, recounted her experience studying abroad in Paris this past summer through the School of Fine Arts. Upon arrival, she says the first thing she noticed was the number of bicycles in the city. Thinking that the bike culture in Paris would be similar to that of Bloomington’s – trendy, she says, with cycles reflective of owners – she decided to visit various Parisian neighborhoods and photograph people with their bikes in the hopes that the personality of each would change from place to place. What she found, though, was that the bikes didn’t say much about the areas at all. They weren’t telling or different, but rather “mode de vie,” a part of life and an essential form of transportation for many Parisians. Because of this, she had to turn her project, which every student had to complete by the end of the program, into a broader expression of transient life and culture in Paris.The project, “Les Velos de Paris,” or “The Bikes of Paris,” was successful in the end, but not without frustration and disappointment along the way. Though Baldwin says she loved being in Paris, she felt unhappy most of the time. “I was really lonely and frustrated most of the time,” she says, “but because of that, I worked really hard.”She says her negative mood drove her to devote all of her attention to the bike project. “The whole time that I was angry and lonely, that’s when I got the best work done because I was trying to prove everyone wrong.”Baldwin, who self-describes as being “obsessed” with photography (she owns 12 cameras), thinks of creativity as the manifestation of ideas that must be made into reality. And as she advances in her skills, she says she finds more opportunities to get creative with her photos by playing around with angles or lighting. She likes that photography changes the reality – and, as a result, the memory – of a situation. “I like the idea that photography is a mirror of reality. The lens distorts it, so it is different, but also exactly how you first saw it.” Professor Plucker says he believes there should be more talk about creativity, especially in today’s global world. “We need to put our money where our mouth is, and focus on innovative problem solving, ” he says. He worries that if we don’t, countries that do put attention on creativity, such as China and Taiwan, will eventually dominate. This, he says, is one reason why he keeps researching this area with such a passion. “Creativity really is the study of human potential,” he says. “Are we doing enough? Are we helping college students be creative? That should be priority number one.”
