Thursday, October 28, 2010
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107th year, issue 110
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ES / COLLEGIATE TIM SPENSER SNARR
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Study targets students downtown Former Attorney General visits Tech MEIGHAN DOBER news staff writer
Every weekend, the streets of downtown Blacksburg are alive with Virginia Tech students. Recently, however, on Thursday and Friday nights, a research team from a Tech psychology lab has been observing the effects of alcohol on people’s behaviors and perceptions. Past studies have shown that 80 to 90 percent of college students consume alcohol and participate in risky behavior related to alcohol. Ryan Smith, a graduate student at Tech, is the brain behind this experiment. As a member of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems at Tech, he is continuing his eighth year involved in this alcohol study. Smith and his research team survey up to 200 people every night. “You see some pretty interesting things,” Smith said. With two teams posted outside the Lyric and Big Al’s, the researchers are able to survey random students walking by and study the effects of intoxication. Working downtown is the safest place for Smith and his research assistants, and they are able to interact with the community, rather than in a specific laboratory setting. Smith’s research team is composed of undergraduate psychology students who must apply for the position. Many of the students have personal reasons that drove them to participate in alcohol research. Random passersby are asked if they would like to take a free Breathalyzer. If they agree to participate, they give their verbal consent and state they are more than 18 years old. All participants in the study remain anonymous. The participant is shown a picture and then completes a survey about the emotion that the picture is conveying, a test designed to gauge the emotional recognition of the participant. The Institutional Review Board must approve all the surveys used by the researchers. Surveys cannot be used until all changes from the board are implemented. After survey has been completed, the participant swishes a sip of water around his mouth to get all of the residual alcohol out and make the Breathalyzer accurate. “If I took a shot, then a Breathalyzer, it would look like I was about to die,” Smith said.
KATIE NOLAND news staff writer Former U.S. Attorney General, defense attorney and Marine Ramsey Clark will be speaking at Virginia Tech’s Holtzman Alumni Center tonight at 7 p.m. His speech, titled “Perspectives on Peace,” will focus on his life experiences and highlight an anti-war message as well as the work he has done to promote human rights. Clark worked as a defense attorney for Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. The Collegiate Times caught up with Clark before his speech.
DANIEL LIN / SPPS
Zena Melaku, a senior majoring in psychology, prepares to conduct a Breathalyzer test on a volunteer subject as part of an ongoing psychology study in front of the Lyric Theater last Thursday evening. The participant then takes the Breathalyzer and gets a mark on his hand so he cannot participate in the survey that same night. The Breathalyzers used are accurate to a 0.005 blood alcohol content. All participants are surveyed separately. “We can’t have friends help, that would bring a bias into the project,” Smith said. After the participant takes the Breathalyzer, the researcher provides feedback to show how safe the participant is being in regards to alcohol. If the participant’s BAC is over 0.05, the participant is advised not to drive. With the research acquired, the researchers look for a correlation between the accuracy of emotional facial recognition and the BAC of participants. With a high BAC, participants are less able to pick up on social cues, and have an overall lower accuracy in distinguishing emotions. Right now, the research team is studying the effects of alcohol on emotional recognition. In the past, Smith and his team have studied sexual assault, drinking intentions and motivations, alcohol advertising influences and the effect that the April 16, 2007, shootings on the Tech campus had on students’ drinking habits. The research project will end as soon as the temperature is regularly below freezing at night. The Breathalyzers do not work as well
when the temperature is that low, and it would interfere with the accuracy of the project. Smith and his colleagues have traveled to multiple conferences to present their work. Recently, Smith has presented to the Virginia Psychological Association in Norfolk and the American Psychological Association in San Diego. Smith works under Tech psychology professor Scott Geller, who founded CABS. Geller has been involved in this type of alcohol research for more than 20 years. Recently, the alcohol consumption of college students has increased dramatically. The average BAC of a person used to be 0.08. Now, the average BAC of Smith’s participants’ downtown is more than 0.1. In addition, the gap between men and women’s BAC used to be very large. Now, that gap is becoming smaller while the BACs of men and women are both increasing. Women are more at risk than men for becoming intoxicated quickly because of their lower weight. In the past, Geller has worked in numerous situations where alcohol has been present in order to observe how to persuade students to drink responsibly. “Can we have controlled drinking?” Geller asked. “Can we control drinking so that you don’t have to get out of control?” Geller and Smith have worked with fraternities in the past and observed
environment and peer pressure have a huge influence on how much people drink. “Fraternity members have tried to be proactive and work with us in the past,” Smith said. Geller said fraternity members had a higher intoxication level at their own fraternity parties than at nonGreek parties, demonstrating the environment’s influence on drinking habits. While working in the fraternity setting, Geller and his researchers tried an incentive program, where the people with the lowest BAC were eligible for a cash prize at the end of the night. “Lots of students who didn’t want to drink had an excuse,” Geller said. Geller said advertising also has an effect on alcohol habits. In states that disallowed alcohol advertising targeting minors, there was a 32.8 percent decrease in the number of alcohol-related fatalities. Likewise, each year more than 3,000 students turn 21 on campus. The mindset of this milestone is often “drink as much as you can drink.” “Students have come into my office asking my advice about their 21st birthdays, knowing that their friends want to take them out,” Geller said. Because of this, Geller and Smith have taken on the task of encouraging positive partying and drinking rather than excessive drinking and negative partying.
CT: Why do you think it is important for you to come to Tech and give this speech? CLARK: Well, there are three reasons. This is a very important university and my granddaughter (Tech student Whitney Clark) is there. But the most important reason of all is knowing the role human rights plays in peace. It’s important to carry the message wherever you find people that want to hear it or are willing to hear it. CT: What is something you would like for students to take away from your talk? CLARK: Well, I think the inescapable challenge that our future, which is more importantly young people than the old people, has is peace. We’ve come to a time when our capacity for total destruction is at an all-time high because our research and advancement, if you think of it as an advance, in technology is giving us weaponry that can threaten all life and it’s out of control. There’s still the threat of proliferation, more nuclear weapons and there is still research for more nuclear and deadlier weapons. Our own country spends more on military and force than all these other activities combined, housing, health care, schooling and education. Imagine what it would be like if we could reorganize our priorities so we spent our money on those things that are good for children. Like a good breakfast, good food all day long and good schooling, made to really want to learn. It’s exciting for them, the information that they need for life and that they could
have good health care from inception and throughout their lives. If they had good jobs that were meaningful and productive and helpful to society instead of spending all of the money on arms. So the United States has a very special challenge, too, because it spends more on arms than the rest of the world combined, which is a stunning fact. And we provide more arms to more other countries than anybody else. So we have a major role in changing value systems and finding better means of preserving peace than the arms, particularly arms of mass destruction, from the United States with arms themselves, the destruction war inflicts on mother Earth on the physical environment we live in and as we race headlong with arming and military budgets, major increases in recent years, it seems like constant war and it creates more hatred and causes more violence. We’re also degrading at a more rapid rate the physical environment, mother Earth. The production of arms is highly harmful to the environment. And the use of arms is highly harmful to the environment. So we’re in a race between peace and our rivals. CT: Would you like to give a general outline or summary and maybe talk about what has inspired this speech? CLARK: Well, you know, I don’t write speeches, so a little of what I do is on my experience. I began in World War II and I was too young to be in the war, but I joined the Marines in the last year of the war. Then Korea came along and we were having our first child so I didn’t go. I was exempt anyway because I was a World War II veteran. Then we had a number of skirmishes and got bogged down in Vietnam, which is one of the real wars in all of human disaster. Millions of lives spent over Korean, Vietnam War. It took millions of lives that weren’t even Vietnamese. Both of those wars were very costly physically and psychologically. Since the Korean War, it seems like it’s been one conflict after another building up into a range of conflicts. We’ve been more or less in a war in Iraq since January of 1991, even during the ‘90s when it wasn’t actual see CLARK / page two
Quidditch flies off page and onto campus sports fields MICHAEL VASQUEZ mcclatchy newspapers MIAMI — Quidditch is part soccer, part basketball, part dodgeball, and all fantasy — or at least it used to be. The hybrid game was invented by author J.K. Rowling and, until recently, only played by the imaginary broom-flying wizards of her popular Harry Potter novels. These days, a version for us lowly humans — or “muggles,” in Potter terms — is popping up at more than a dozen college campuses in Florida alone. “I can’t tell you if there’s flying or not, that’s a secret,” joked University of Miami quidditch player Ally Levy. Truth be told, there are brooms, but no gravity-defying co-eds. Instead, students run around with a broom tucked between their legs. “You have to keep one hand on it at all times because we’re simulating flight,” explained University of Miami quidditch organizer Alex Locust. There are now more than 500 active quidditch teams worldwide. In Florida, most of the nearly 30 quidditch teams that have registered with the International Quidditch Association are colleges.
“Now we’re starting to get adult teams who are interested in joining,” said the IQA’s Alicia Radford. “Whatever age groups want to play quidditch, we will adapt.” Both the University of Miami and Florida International University have launched quidditch clubs this semester. In the most eagerly anticipated match since Slytherin vs. Gryffindor, UM will take on FIU in December. Quidditch players typically grew up reading Harry Potter, and relish the experience of playing even a scaleddown version of a game they dreamt about as children. “Look at how many books have been sold across America, there’s a lot of kids interested in it,” said Bob Beloff, whose 18-year-old son, Sean, plays quidditch at UM. Muggle quidditch might not have any acrobatic broom-flying, but that doesn’t mean it’s for sissies. There’s plenty of bumping and other physical contact. Men and women play side-by side. “I’ve found the girls are more vicious,” said FIU quidditch organizer Chelsea Klaiber, adding that one team practice featured a snapped broom caused by a female student tackling one of the guys. Ah, the brooms. This detail is respon-
MCT CAMPUS
Mike Kerrick, center right, tries to hold onto the ball during an Oct. 9 quidditch club scrimmage at the University of Miami. sible for much of the challenge that comes with playing quidditch: there’s the predictable awkward running, but holding the broom also takes one arm permanently out of play. “To me, it’s a little bit dangerous with the brooms,” Beloff said after watching his son play. So far, the list of official “recommend-
ed” equipment includes goggles, shin guards, and capes. How exactly does the game work? For non-Potter fans, try visualizing an ovalshaped, half-sized soccer field where each teams’ net is replaced by three basketball-hoop-like spheres. The underlying principle is the same — ball goes in, points get scored (with a goalie-type
player standing in the way). In this case, the ball is a partially deflated volleyball known as a “quaffle.” While teams’ offensive players scurry about on their brooms attempting to score goals, defensive players known as “beaters” work to sabotage any scoring attempt by knocking the quaffleholder temporarily out of play. This is done through a method closely resembling dodgeball — beaters toss partially deflated dodgeballs at opponents who are “knocked out” for a moment if they get hit. So quidditch is ... essentially soccer/basketball/dodgeball, right? Except there’s more. As all that quaffle-tossing and pseudo-dodgeball takes place on the field, three other players engage in a game of tag/flag football that also has points at stake. One of those players assumes the role of the “Golden Snitch” featured in Harry Potter’s pages. In the book, the snitch is a small, gold-colored ball with wings — whichever team catches it is rewarded with a healthy amount of points, and the game then concludes. In the land of Muggles, the snitch is an actual person, dressed in yellow or gold, with an ability to run really fast. The snitch is chased by a representative from
each team, with both players attempting to “catch” the snitch by grabbing a tennis ball that hangs from the snitch’s body, housed in a sock. Nabbing the snitch is harder than it may seem. The snitch is allowed to scamper far off the playing field, in and around campus, and can use whatever he or she finds to aid the escape. If the snitch sees a bicycle, the snitch might just snatch it. After finally cornering the snitch during a recent practice at UM, quidditch player Sean Beloff returned panting and out of breath. “He hid in bushes, and then he hid in a family,” Beloff said. “He jumped off a ledge, I followed him, and then I caught up to him a couple seconds later.” Beloff has played volleyball in both high school and college. Quidditch, he says, seems more “strenuous.” While the physical demands of quidditch are very real, players acknowledge their new passion can prompt some rolling eyes from classmates. It’s clear that the game’s core is made up of diehard fans. “You kind of feel like you’re in Harry Potter world,” said Levy. “Imagining that you’re in that setting, and actually going for it, it just feels like you’re really there.”