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CAMPUS SAFETY
Operation SafeWalk: A campus necessity The University offers a variety of services to keep students and faculty safe all year JOEY STIPEK
Special Projects Reporter
Sean Abbott, health and exercise sophomore, and Anica Taylor, occupational therapy senior, prepare to walk from Cate Center to the College of Law with students needing an escort on a cool October evening. Abbott and Taylor are SafeWalk resident advisers who make students feel safe by escorting them wherever they need to go on campus. After their walk, Taylor and Abbott settle into SafeWalk headquarters with their homework and food bought from the Cate Center cafeteria in preparation for an evening of
meeting and escorting students, faculty and staff who want someone to walk them to a campus destination. SafeWalk is just one of the safety services offered on campus. Bicycle registration, the emergency command system in the residence halls, emergency blue phones and SafeRide are all examples of programs and services aimed directly at keeping the campus safe, OU Housing and Food spokeswoman Amy Buchanan said in an email. SafeWalk is free to use, according to Housing and Food’s website. The coverage area is from Elm Avenue to Jenkins Avenue east-to-west and from Boyd Street to the Lloyd Noble Center north-to-south. SafeWalk also provides service to the north and south Greek houses adjacent to campus. SafeWalk originated in the early 1990s because the
Housing Center Student Association noticed a need on campus for this type of safety service, Buchanan said in an email. As demand increased over the years, Housing and Food switched from using volunteers to having paid SafeWalk positions. The university pays $24,855 per fiscal year to fund and operate SafeWalk, according to records requested by The Daily. $24,480 of the funding is split among 16 RA salaries, averaging $1,530 per employee. The remaining $375 in funding is spent on SafeWalk’s phone costs. SafeWalk applicants must complete a 16-week class and apply and interview for an RA position, Buchanan said in an email. Abbott and Taylor both cited their desire to give back to SEE CAMPUS SAFETY PAGE 2
CHALK ART
Students bring color to South Oval The homecoming tradition of chalking the South Oval continued this year CAITLIN SCHACHTER Campus Reporter
AARON MAGNESS/ THE DAILY
Student organizations invaded the South Oval armed with chalk to compete in the annual Homecoming Sidewalk Chalk Competition Thursday afternoon. All of the chalk designs were related to this year’s theme, “Drawn Together by Tradition,” said CAC member and microbiology sophomore Johnson Truong. Judges will choose winners who best incorporated the theme, among other requirements, Truong said. Several of the designs were representations of animated Disney or Pixar films, like “Hercules,” which was done by Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. “We chose the movie Hercules as our theme because he proves to his father that he is a hero,” said criminology junior Kadie Waddle. “We wanted to bring the sense of being a hero back to the university.” The Hispanic American Student Association and Delta Phi Omega sketched the characters from the animated movie “Madagascar.” “We chose ‘Madagascar’ because all of the animals come from different species,” said microbiology sophomore Lindsay Barron. “We are such a diverse organization, and we embrace each others’ differences like the characters do in the movie.”
Katie Cooley, Early Childhood Education sophomore, participates in the 2013 Homecoming Sidewalk Chalk Competition on the South Oval, Thursday afternoon.
SEE CHALK ART PAGE 2
VIDEO GAME
Brains and bias: Video game created at OU Virtual world teaches gamers about brain fuction MAX JANERKA
Campus Reporter
You’re pursuing an international terrorist organization around the world, trying to find the group and stop them from doing further harm. With American intelligence agencies on your side, you infiltrate laboratories, workshops, warehouses and mansions in pursuit of the group’s members and leaders and the materials they are smuggling to collect vital data and plan the agency’s next official strike. But you must choose your targets carefully, because faulty reasoning on your part can let the real bad guys slip away. The catch? You’re playing a video game — but it’s more than a video game.
This game, which was created by Norah Dunbar, association communications professor, and a team of researchers and developers, is called MACBETH and it teaches you about the way your brain works and how to be less biased in real life when making decisions. MACBETH’s development started three years ago as a contracted project from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, said Yu-Hao Lee, a postdoctoral researcher at OU’s Center for Applied Social Research. MACBETH is actually the second game of its kind that has been produced at OU, Lee said. The first game dealt with psychological phenomena including bias blind spot, confirmation bias and fundamental attribution error, Lee said.
ART PROVIDED
Even highly trained intelligence analysts have cognitive biases, and this can lead them to making bad judgments that can threaten the safety of the country. So the intelligence community reached out to several universities to help them come up with a training program that can teach about and help mitigate these biases,
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Lee said. That’s where MACBETH comes in. The Daily had a chance to play the video game to see how the game works and how it helps train people to ignore their biases. In the game, the player takes the role of an intelligence analyst and acts as mission control to a field
agent who actually does the investigating. Over a number of stages, the player analyzes evidence found in different locations, such as a lab or a mansion, and checks it for three kinds of cognitive bias: anchoring bias, projection bias and representativeness bias. Any unbiased evidence must then be analyzed to
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decide whether or not the target being investigated was an actual threat. “One of the most difficult parts in designing the game is designing the mitigation strategies into the game mechanics,” Lee said. Since both games were designed as “spy games,” the designers wanted the ingame decisions to reflect the work done by real analysts, but they wanted the game to still be fun, Lee said. To do this, the team created a backstory to the game and made sure each piece of intel, or secret information, the player could collect was relevant in some way to the threat assessment. “We want the players to feel that learning these biases can help them make better assessments and solve the case,” said Lee. SEE VIDEO GAME PAGE 2
VOL. 99, NO. 49 © 2013 OU Publications Board FREE — Additional copies 25¢
INSIDE TODAY Campus......................2 Clas si f ie ds................4 L i f e & A r t s .................. 5 O p inio n..................... 3 Spor ts........................3 Visit OUDaily.com for more
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