INSIDE
ACL impresses concert-goers
MILLY designer gives advice
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It’s time for June Jones to go
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Memphis players to watch out for
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Wednesday
October 16, 2013
Wednesday High 64, Low 54 Thursday High 73, Low 54
VOLUME 99 ISSUE 24 FIRST COPY FREE, ADDITIONAL COPIES 50 CENTS
Students compete to build largest toy Jehadu Abshiro Contributing Writer jabshiro@smu.edu The Grand Atrium of Caruth Hall was transformed into a construction zone complete with caution tape, hard hats and guide wires over fall break, as five student teams competed to create the prototype for the largest toy in the world. The winning prototype will be built 120 feet tall, about 11 stories high, in the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. September 2014. The winning team will be given an all expense paid trip to the National Building Museum to participate in the event. The students will also be featured in the Guinness World Records. “We were looking for an event where one of the main focus[es] is to do something big,” General Manager of WABA Shannon Gray said. “What better way than to build the biggest toy?” WABA Fun LLC, a company that creates and sells toys, approached SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering with the task as part of the Immersion Design Experiences. “We knew about Lyle and when we started to mine for schools to partner with, the Innovation Gym came up and it was a perfect fit,” Gray said. The Immersion Design Experiences, ranging from three to 10 days, is part of the Innovation Gym. IDE requires students to design, fabricate, build and test a
ELLEN SMITH / The Daily Campus
Students use the WABA toy Superstructs to build their toy at Monday’s event in Caruth Hall.
prototype that solves their assigned problem. The students then present their solution to a panel of faculty and industry for judging. “We thought it would be a fun event and students will be challenged in a whimsical way,” Innovation Gym Director Greg Needel said. The five teams, Pony.Up, OctaAwesome, Helix Castle, Failing Faster and Ambiguous Case used the WABA toy Superstructs to create three-story-tall prototypes over the course of four days. WABA gave the teams 20,000 toys to construct their prototypes, with each team receiving 4,000 toys. “I had some preconceived notion what it was going to be like based on the students and what was effectively a toy, but it blew my expectations out of the water,” Professor Mark
Fontenot, department of computer science and engineering, said. The winning structure, built by team Octa-Awesome, was built from the top down in a layer process. The team created sections of the tower and then systematically attached them by lifting sections from the balcony of Caruth Hall. “The tower was inspired by structural efficiency,” Caleb Pool, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering and mathematics, said. Pool, along with junior Michelle Kim, sophomores Christina Chase and Andrew Halverstadt will oversee WABA employees construct the toy at the museum’s September 2014 Big Build Festival and they have the option to help. “The experience was overwhelming,” Pool said. “This
Profile
IDE was different. It was challenging because we were taking a kids toy to greater heights.” Team Ambiguous Case only had two engineering majors as part of their team. Josh Oh, a music major, and James Jang, finance major, joined the team because they were available over the break. “They were both really creative,” said sophomore Eileen Guo, a team member and mechanical engineering major. “We were so structural and it helped to have different minds.” The winning team will be required to continue to design their prototype until the build. The remainder of toys will remain in the Innovation Gym for other students to use and may be featured in future projects. All participates of the event were awarded a $200 scholarship.
CLAYTON T. SMITH / SMU
The winning structure was so tall that it had to be built by attaching sections from the balcony of Caruth Hall.
Event
FiR Kerins brings film, children to campus Katy Roden Editor-in-Chief kroden@smu.edu Editors’ note: In August 2014 SMU will debut the Residential Commons on-campus living model. Eleven Faculty-in-Residence were selected to live among students. This is part five of 11 FiR profiles. Film professor Mark Kerins knew he wanted to apply for the Faculty-in-Residence program at the very first development committee meeting years ago, simply because “it sounded like fun.” Kerins earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and math at a small liberal arts college in Indiana where he enjoyed the small classes and interaction with faculty, which he hopes the Residential Commons model will provide. “The times I’ve enjoyed most as a faculty member have been working with students beyond the classroom,” Kerins said. Kerins has a master’s degree and Ph.D. in radio/TV/film from Northwestern University. He thinks his field will give him an advantage relating to students and plans to create resident programming around films, which he said “you can talk to anyone about.” Kerins, his wife, who is a professor at Eastfield College in Mesquite and their two-year-old twins will move into MorrisonMcGinnis RC next fall. Kerins said students are always excited to see his children on campus. “I think on a college campus you get a particular age range of faculty and narrow age range for students,” he said. “It seems to be exciting when there’s somebody from a different age range than you usually see.” Kerins hopes that the RC model
BEN OHENE / The Daily Campus
Stuart Pollak, Richard Mosk, Judge Burt W. Griffin, W. David Slawson and Howard Willens sit at Friday’s panel in Umphrey Lee’s Mack Ballroom. REBECCA KEAY / The Daily Campus
Professor Mark Kerins
will integrate student life. “I think there’s a tendency in college to think of it as two different things,” he said. “There’s the college experience of students’ first time away from home and being out more independently. And then there’s the classroom side. I think those two can get separated. “I’m hopeful what the Residential Commons can do is, not completely erase the fact that there are those two areas. I think that’s true in everybody’s life — a home element and a work or school element. But [I hope the RC] ties it together that the college experience and your academic work are part of the same thing and can influence each other.” Kerins admitted that there may be days he regrets selling his home to live with college students, but that a much larger majority of his FiR years will be a positive experience. “I think like any new program — and let’s be honest this is a massive new program that’s going to change a lot of things across the university — there’s going to be growing pains,” he said. “Part of our job as the first group of Faculty-in-Residence is going to be to iron those out and try some things knowing that not all of them will work.”
Warren commission members visit SMU Lauren Aguirre Contributing Writer lcaguirre@smu.edu Six members of the Warren Commission participated in a two-part panel in Umphrey Lee’s Mack Ballroom Friday. The event was organized by the SMU Tower Center for Political Studies along with the SMU Dedman School of Law and the Sixth Floor Museum. The members discussed their roles on the Commission and its ultimate findings. To an audience of about 300, the Commission members reasserted their original conclusion: that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, carried out the assassination of President John Kennedy and that there was no conspiracy. Formally titled “The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy,” the Warren Commission took its unofficial name from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. President Lyndon Johnson created the Commission in 1963. The first part of the event featured five Warren Commission members. These included three men who had served as assistant counsel, Judge Burt Griffin, Professor David Slawson and Howard Willens;
and two former staff members of the Commission, Justice Richard Mosk and Justice Stuart Pollak. This group discussed the processes of the Commission and how its conclusions came about. “We presided over the most extensive criminal investigation ever conducted in the United States,” Willens said. A total of 552 witnesses provided testimony. This included the sworn testimony of 94 witnesses, 395 depositions, 61 affidavits and two written statements. On the basis of all this, Willens said, “the Commission would shape its conclusions.” In addition to the testimonies, the Commission also examined the plausibility of a conspiracy. Slawson worked on this part of the investigation. Among other points, Slawson researched Lee Harvey Oswald’s possible connection to Russia. After Oswald’s death, the Commission found a private diary that Oswald had kept of his adult life. In the diary, Slawson said, Oswald “recorded that he had made up his mind while he was in the Marine corps” to defect to Russia. Oswald did spend some time in Russia, but eventually came back to the United States.
“We studied all of this as best we could to see if there was anything sinister about it,” Slawson said, “and the final decision was negative.” There was no conspiracy. The Commission’s findings were given to Johnson on Sept. 24, 1964. They concluded that, “there was one shooter, he [Oswald] acted alone [and] he acted without the involvement of any other person,” Pollak said. The second part of the event introduced Jay Vogelson, another former member of the Warren Commission staff, and four SMU professors. This group had the chance to pose their own questions to the Commission members about the Commission’s methods and conclusions. SMU English Professor Tom Stone voiced his concerns with certain procedures the Commission took during the investigation. It was his understanding that no one on the Commission inspected the autopsy X-rays and photos, Stone said. Willens addressed Stone. “The autopsy X-rays and photographs were seen by [Warren],” Willens said. However, he also added, “In retrospect, it was a mistake not to enable those materials to be used by at least one of the autopsy doctors”
during their testimony. This would have given the doctor an opportunity to give a more grounded statement. The Commission’s investigation was not perfect, but “the thoroughness, the intensity and the desire of everybody involved…to serve the truth and to lay out the whole story was unquestionable,” Pollak said. Willens believes that the Commission’s findings have “withstood the test of time.” This sentiment was echoed by several of the panelists. “Nothing, in my judgment, has come to light in the almost 50 years since the report that casts any credible doubt on the ultimate conclusions to which the Commission came,” Pollak said. The main voice of the Commission is in its report, an 889-page volume that lays out the extensive investigation, but seeing the Commission members speak presents a different aspect apart from their conclusions. “[The panel] has been very eyeopening,” SMU senior Brandon Bub said. “The… experience of listening to the people involved, [and] getting an idea of what they did is a humanizing way to look at [the Warren Commission].”