Loved ones mourn death Esteban Bustillos Managing Editor
She was getting ready for church when she saw the slew of missed calls from her best friend’s boyfriend. Jaymi Jacob called back, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Once he had finally collected himself, Jacob heard all of it. Her best friend Shifa Mirza had died in a car accident earlier that morning. Jacob, a healthcare studies senior, said she couldn’t believe the news.
// See Mirza, page 16
Mental health workers stress importance of dialogue Miguel Perez Editor-in-Chief
It seemed like just another Wednesday, only the third day of the fall semester, and Alex Miller was navigating his return to college: finding classes and meeting professors and students. It all seemed fine, but by day’s end, it would prove to be one of the most haunting days of his life. After class, he returned home to the sound of screaming. He found his mother distraught, crying and barely able to speak. Amid her garbled distress, he pieced out one phrase: Her boyfriend had died. Miller took the phone and addressed the officer on the other line. The officer said his mother’s boyfriend had been found in his car. There was evidence that indicated he had taken his own life. The following day, Miller, a neuroscience junior, found out he had been offered a position with a 24/7 crisis hotline he had applied for. “I was overcome with emotion,” he said. “If I can’t see somebody right here who is suffering, who committed suicide, how can I take this job and help someone else?” Despite Miller’s internal conflict — justifying a position where he would eventually be helping callers understand their mental health when he felt he couldn’t recognize illness in those close to him — he believed taking a job with an organization that addressed the issue was the right choice. “It would help me understand what could happen if (the hotline) wasn’t around,” he said. “What CONTACT does is help prevent that from happening.” CONTACT is a nonprofit crisis line that offers confidential support via phone for people dealing with anything from relationship issues to suicidal ideation, or suicidal thoughts.
Brandon Willis, CONTACT’s crisis line program director, said the perception of mental health and mental illness is beginning to lean toward understanding and addressing those issues while removing their taboo nature. “Some people can be very depressed and still go through their day smiling and talking to people, but they’re still depressed,” Willis said. “Right now, we’re in a place where people are recognizing it more. We’re talking about it more, and people are learning about how to respond to it.” Still, mental-health issues continue to be prevalent on college campuses, said Kandi Owens, a postdoctoral psychology fellow with the Student Counseling Center. She sees a significant amount of depression, anxiety, distress and general-stress cases, and with a growing population of veterans, the pervasiveness of illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder is also increasing. She said the biggest reason people don’t seek help is because of the stigma associated with it. “When you get into thinking about other cultures that are represented on our very diverse campus, there are a lot of cultural messages around keeping things within the family or keeping secrets, which does include mental-health issues and emotional-health issues,” Owens said. UTDPD is often called in to address reports related to the mental health of students. Chief of Police Larry Zacharias said there have been eight student hospitalizations related to mental health this
// See mental health, page 16
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THE MERCURY UTDMERCURY.COM Volume XXXIV No. 16 Editor-in-Chief Miguel Perez
editor@utdmercury.com
Managing Editor Esteban Bustillos managingeditor @utdmercury.com
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NEWS
THE MERCURY | OCT. 20, 2014
UTDMERCURY.COM
UTDPD Blotter Oct. 6 t " TUVEFOU SFQPSUFE UIBU UIFJS CJDZDMF XBT UBLFO GSPN UIF DMBTTSPPN CVJMEJOH SBDL BU Q N Oct. 7 t 'PVS QFPQMF SFQPSUFE UIF UIFGU PG UIFJS DFMM phones from the outdoor basketball courts in -PU + BU B N Oct. 8 t " TUVEFOU SFQPSUFE UIFJS HSFFO QBSLJOH TUJDL FS XBT UBLFO GSPN UIFJS DBS BU Q N Oct. 9 t "O VOBĂ° JMJBUFE QFSTPO XBT BSSFTUFE GPS ESJW JOH XIJMF JOUPYJDBUFE PO 8FTU $BNQCFMM 3PBE BU B N Oct. 10 t "O VOBĂŻ MJBUFE QFSTPO XBT BSSFTUFE GPS ESJW JOH XIJMF JOUPYJDBUFE PO 8FTU $BNQCFMM 3PBE BU B N Oct. 12 t " TUVEFOU XBT BSSFTUFE GPS PVUTUBOEJOH USBG ĂŤ D XBSSBOUT GSPN 3FE 0BL 1% PO /PSUI 'MPZE 3PBE BU Q N Oct. 13 t " QSPGFTTPS SFQPSUFE UIBU IJT MBQUPQ XBT UBLFO PVU PG IJT PĂŻ DF JO UIF 4DJFODF -FBSOJOH $FOUFS BU B N Oct. 14 t " EPDVNFOU DBNFSB XBT UBLFO GSPN B DMBTT SPPN JO UIF +POTTPO "DBEFNJD $FOUFS BU p.m. Oct. 16 t " TUVEFOU XBT BSSFTUFE GPS QPTTFTJPO PG NBSJ KVBOB BOE ESVH QBSBQIFSOBMJB BU 3FTJEFODF )BMM 4PVUI BSPVOE B N
Contributors
Oct. 9: A student reported that their catalytic converter was stolen from their veIJDMF JO -PU " CFUXFFO Q N BOE Q N Oct. 12: "O VOBĂŻ MJBUFE QFSTPO XBT BSSFTUFE PO 8BUFSWJFX 1BSLXBZ PO B XBSSBOU PVU PG $PMMJO $PVOUZ GPS B IJU BOE SVO BU B N
Oct. 11: A student reported receiving several harassing and obscene phone DBMMT BOE UFYU NFTTBHFT BU UIFJS BQBSU NFOU JO 1IBTF BSPVOE Q N
LEGEND
Pablo Arauz Nicole Brown +FOOJGFS $IJ
VEHICULAR INCIDENT
Duncan Gallagher Andrew Gallegos Nidhi Gotgi
THEFT
Emily Grams 1SJZBOLB )BSEJLBS 'BSBIB )BTBO
DRUGS & ALCOHOL
Samya Isa Abby Lam Ian LaMarsh
OTHER
Lina Moon
MAP: UTD COMMUNICATIONS | COURTESY
Linda Nguyen Sid Patel Saara Raja Timothy Shirley
Severe drought in the United States
Asif Sheik Karena Tsai ,FMDJF 8BMMBDF Yang Xi Mailing Address 8FTU $BNQCFMM 3PBE 46 Richardson, TX Newsroom Student Union, Student Media Suite 46 FIRST COPY FREE /&95 $01: $&/54 The Mercury is published on Mondays, at two-week intervals during the long term of The University of 5FYBT BU %BMMBT FYDFQU IPMJ EBZT BOE FYBN QFSJPET BOE once every four weeks during the summer term. Advertising is accepted by The Mercury on the basis that there is no discrimination by the advertiser in the offering of goods or services to any person, on any basis prohibited by applicable law. The publication of advertising in The Mercury does not constitute an endorsement of products or services by the newspaper, or the UTD administration. 0QJOJPOT FYQSFTTFE in The Mercury are those of the editor, the editorial board or the writer of the article. They are not necessarily the view of the UTD administration, the Board of Regents or the Student Media Operating Board. The Mercury’s editors retain the right to refuse or edit any submission based on libel, malice, spelling, grammar and style, and vioMBUJPOT PG 4FDUJPO G PG 65% QPMJDZ $PQZSJHIU ª 5IF 6OJWFSTJUZ PG 5FYBT BU %BMMBT All articles, photographs and graphic assets, whether in print or online, may not be reproduced or republished in part or in whole without FYQSFTT XSJUUFO QFSNJTTJPO
The Mercury is a proud member of both the AssociBUFE $PMMFHJBUF 1SFTT BOE UIF 5FYBT *OUFSDPMMFHJBUF Press Association.
JUST THE FACTS
Justin Thompson
SG REPORT
100% 86.2% 76.3%
ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS
87.0%
Managing Editor
80.8%
64.5% 56.1%
TX
OK
AZ
KS
NM
Source: United States Drought Monitor, 2014
NV
CA
Residential affairs committee chair Akshitha Padigela announced the committee is looking into rent-aroom services for dorms on campus. This will allow visitors on campus to rent out a vacant dorm room for a short period of time, similar to a hotel service . SG president Brooke Knudtson said the idea arose from the UT System school advisory council during a discussion on how to accommodate commuters on campus. “I do think it’s something to look into long term,â€? she said. “If the residence halls don’t book up completely, lets rent out some rooms ‌ we’re very interested in targeting those commuters with a very long commute or people that need a place to stay.â€? She said residential student affairs
will have most of their research done by mid-November and they will start to have preliminary discussions on the topic after Thanksgiving. t $PNNVOJDBUJPOT DPNNJUUFF DIBJS Molly Vaughan opened a discussion on a rewards system for the senators club, which rewards visitors to SG meetings. Rewards discussed included gift cards and drawstring backpacks. t 3IFUU )JDLT XBT OPNJOBUFE BOE elected as the graduate and international committee chair. t 5JN 4VMMJWBO BOE 3IFUU )JDLT XFSF named the senators of the month for October and September, respectively. t 5SFBTVSFS /JDPMF 8BUTPO NPWFE UP BMMPDBUF GPS UIF SFTJEFOUJBM MJGF 8J 'J survey. t 5IF OFYU 4( NFFUJOH XJMM CF 0DU BU Q N JO UIF (BMBYZ 3PPNT
OPINION
Comets and Craters
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OCT. 20, 2014 | THE MERCURY | UTDMERCURY.COM
Water shortage shouldn’t be overlooked
Fraternity fundraisers: Members of Kappa Sigma stayed in a cardboard box from Oct. 13-17 as part of their Box-a-Thon fundraiser. The event raised money for The Military Heroes campaign, which helps raise awareness for homeless veterans. It’s always good to see students raise money for a good cause, especially in such a unique way. Parking closures: From Oct. 20-24, the main entrance and exit to Parking Structure III will be closed for maintenance. While the south entrance and exit will still be open, this will undoubtedly cause some traffic build ups for those looking to park in the garage. The sidewalk along the northside of Parking Structure III will also be closed from Oct. 27 to Nov. 7.
Pesky pedestrians: If you’ve ever tried to navigate on Drive A between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., you’ll probably find yourself trapped in a sea of people crossing the roads left and right. People walking on campus should be more aware of drivers, for both safety and courtesy.
Radio UTD nominated for national awards: Our colleagues at the university’s student-run radio station have been nominated once again for several awards from the College Music Journal, including Best Use of Limited Resources and Best StudentRun, Internet-Only station. It’s just further proof that they produce some of the best content around. Keep it up, guys.
Free parking gone: Since the last installment of Comets and Craters, the parking meter in Lot K has been fixed. That means no more free parking behind the Student Services Building and more mile-long treks to find a decent spot.
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY? Students can send submissions of 500 - 800 words to editor@utdmercury.com. Letters to the editor must be 250 words or less. Include references for any facts you cite. We ask for your name and contact information. Personal info will not be published. We reserve the right to reject submissions, and we cannot be responsible for their return. We reserve the right to edit for clarity, brevity, good taste, accuracy and to prevent libel. The next issue of The Mercury will be published on Nov. 3. Submit your opinion or letter by Oct. 27 and contact us by Oct. 24.
COMET COMMENTS
MIGUEL PEREZ | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
SAMYA ISA COMMENTARY
The year has been peppered with a diverse array of events, from the Scottish independence referendum to the spread of Ebola. As these events continue to receive heavy news coverage, other issues have been dwarfed. Among these overlooked issues is the global water crisis. We fail to realize that, even today, a large amount of people throughout the world lack access to clean water. Statistics from the World Heath Organization, UNICEF and the United Nations show that approximately half of the people in hospital beds in developing countries are there because of poor hygiene, sanitation and lack of access to clean water. Furthermore, estimated costs for universal access to clean water and sanitation are at $535 billion — or $26.5 billion a year from 2010-2030. Recently, there has been a breakthrough in research to fight the water crisis. Theresa Dankovich, a chemist working with the organization WaterisLife, has created “The Drinkable Book,” which acts both as a filter and an informational guide on clean water. This book contains multiple pages, each of which kills 99.99 percent of the
bacteria in water that is poured through it. Each page provides a family with clean water for a month, and the total book will last 4 years. In addition to all the filtration, each page is printed with safe water, sanitation and hygiene habits, and costs just a few pennies to make. If fieldtesting is successful and enough funds are raised, the book is set for release in 2015. Each page of “The Drinkable Book” is coated in silver nanoparticles, which have antimicrobial properties. The key to the battle against the bacteria is the small size of the silver. “When the metals go into the nano regime…their properties change,” said Amandeep Sra, a chemistry professor in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. “Certain properties that are not visible in the bulk material become much more pronounced in the nano regime.” When asked about how the paper specifically worked, she explained that as the water passed through the filter paper, most of the solids would be removed, and the silver nanoparticles would react with the bacteria. Sra said nanoparticle research is an emerging field. She said there is a lot of potential in it and cited the example of researchers using gold nanoparticles in cancer research. Although “The Drinkable Book” isn’t perfect and cannot filter out chemicals and dissolved solids, it kills bac-
teria that cause diseases such as cholera and typhoid. It is a great and appreciable invention, but according to Sra, the world is far from reaching a solution to the water problem. According to WHO, if people everywhere had access to safe water and sanitation, approximately 2.5 million lives would be saved per year. Researchers around the world work in diverse ways to save lives, whether it is through studying the toxicity of additives to food or finding the best material for bulletproof vests. Fighting the water crisis is just another way countless people can be helped. Lack of clean water is something that is taken for granted in developed countries. It is important to note that the water crisis is not just present in parts of Africa or Asia. Lake Ray Hubbard, a lake in northeast Dallas, is currently at a record low, and only two years ago, the residents of Spicewood, Texas, a small town near Austin, needed water trucked in to meet some of their basic needs. The shortage had reached the point where residents were not allowed to do any outside watering. There is a lot that students at UTD can do to help. According to the World Water Vision Report, the main issue isn’t a shortage of water—it’s how it’s being terribly managed. The best thing to do is to be conscious of water usage. As students wash their hands in the bathrooms or push the button at the water
fountain, they should be careful to use as much water as is needed, without excess. In addition to water-consciousness, organizations dedicated to providing clean water to people are always accepting donations, and some have ways to get directly involved, including WaterisLife, the organization that worked with Dankovich. There is one, non-water related application that students can pull from this drinkable book, and that is inspiration. Students going into any field, research or not, shouldn’t feel overwhelmed or disheartened by the immense amount of complexity or competition in getting into programs or finding ways to distinguish themselves. There are an endless amount of problems present in the world today. Some are easier to solve than others, and some are more obvious than others. Students should follow in the footsteps of Dankovich — take what they’re passionate about, put in the dedication and effort, and they’ll see some amazing results. The supply of water in the world is finite. There is an urgent need for people around the world to keep this statement in mind, and to put in some effort into moving towards water sustainability. The water crisis is heavily overlooked in developed countries, and it’s important to remember that the smallest things can make a difference, as long as they are done consistently and with great ardor.
“Would you be opposed to penalties for over-usage of water?” Do you think residents of a drought-stricken area should be fined for wasting water? Answer our poll at www.utdmercury.com.
“No, because we don’t have enough water in general, and the water we do have we need to care about.”
“No. Aren’t we in a stage 3 drought? It hits home more because otherwise, they know it’s bad, but they don’t actually do anything about it.”
“No. If you just waste water, you should get fined for it, but I feel like if there was a fine, people would try to get around it, so it should be a reasonable amount.”
Sara Kimmich Mechanical engineering junior
Becky Jin Supply chain management junior
Sanjay Umamahesh Biology freshman
RESULTS FROM LAST ISSUE Do you feel that open discussion on sexual assault is tabboo at UTD? Why or why not?
Yes, I think it’s taboo. We should talk about it more.
39%
It’s not a big problem on this campus.
27%
I don’t know.
22%
No, I think people are open about it here.
12%
The online poll was open from Oct. 4 to Oct. 19 and had 41 participants
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THE MERCURY | OCT. 20, 2014
NEWS
UTDMERCURY.COM
New online tool offers data on job prospects, wages ANWESHA BHATTACHARJEE Web Editor
As of last week, current and incoming students at the undergraduate and graduate levels across Texas can use seekUT, a new website that shows expected salaries out of college and expected student loan debt. UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa created the Student Debt Reduction Task Force to study the problem of student debt and its impact on students and their families. The seekUT website was formed out of the task force’s recommendation that UT System provide students and parents with information that would help them decide on a college, said Stephanie Huie, vice chancellor of the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the UT System, or OSI. This is the first website of its kind in the nation, she said.
“Even if I’m not going to UT System schools, say I’m going to Baylor or Rice, I can still find out generally what my income is going to be by my major at the 10th percentile (or) 90th percentile one, five or 10 years out,” said Student Government Vice President Nancy Fairbank. “I can see predicted job growth in my major and my area of interest in Texas as a whole and also by region in Texas. It’s just a new and interesting way to look at data and help students make smart decisions.” The website shifts the conversation to how much students actually make after graduation instead of outcomes defined by graduation and retention rates to how much students actually make after graduation, Huie said. “There has been an emphasis on the first year out,” said OSI Director David Troutman. “As we all know your first job out of college is really your lowest paid job, and we felt it was really important to follow students over time and not only report first year but
fifth year and 10th year, and that’s why (we) provide those ratios of incomes at the end of fifth year and 10th year.” Huie and her team were able to negotiate a contract with the Texas Workforce Commission to gain access to wages and workplace information for students who are currently enrolled in a UT System school or graduated out of one of these schools, as long as they are still in Texas, he said. The seekUT team toured different UT System campuses, including UTD, UT Austin, UT Arlington and UT San Antonio. Students at these campuses were able to use the online tool and provide feedback on improvements after the website’s soft launch with only undergraduate data in January 2014, Troutman said. Fairbank was one of the students who attended the presentation at UTD. Later, she and SG President Brooke Knudtson attended the UT Student Advisory Council meeting in Austin where student govern-
ment representatives from all UT System schools provided feedback on the website. The new version of seekUT was released the second week of October just before the website was to be presented to leaders in Washington D.C., Huie said. Troutman and Huie chose Fairbank to represent the student perspective on seekUT in D.C. Fairbank, Huie and Troutman met with several senators, representatives and reporters from Politico to talk about seekUT. The team’s primary purpose was to show politicians in what could be done with such extensive data that some university systems have but don’t know how to use, Huie said. The other objective discussed in these meetings was the possibility of national-level data from federal agencies that would allow seekUT to include wage information of alumni working outside Texas, she said.
→ SEE SEEKUT, PAGE 15
Students, staff propose sustainable ideas for campus at green fair FARAHA HASAN Staff Writer
Students presented science-fair-style projects displaying green initiatives and environmentally sustainable ideas for the campus on Oct. 9 at the annual Green Fair. The fair was put on by the UTD chapter of Enactus, an international nonprofit organization that utilizes entrepreneurial skills to give back to the community in different ways such as educating people about financial literacy and visiting women’s shelters. Annually, the student group participates in an Enactus competition where the members present all of the projects they’ve carried out during the year. Competition organizers required that one of the projects be related to environmental sustainability in 2012. After having trouble choosing a project, Jeanne Sluder, the adviser for UTD’s chapter of Enactus, tasked students in her business communications class with proposing an environmentally sustainable idea that could be implemented on campus. The students held a green fair, and the club members determined which idea was best for the school, leading to the water bottle refilling stations around campus.
“It amazes me to see how students get involved in it and how passionate students are about green projects here on campus,” Sluder said. “To see that at the fair, to see people actually stop and spend time at each table, looking at what each project was, and then choosing which one they liked the best. We think that students don’t care, but they do care about green projects.” The Office of Sustainability has since started working with Enactus to implement plans students present at the Green Fair. Students were able to stop by the fair and vote on different categories, including most innovative, conserves the most energy, best business plan and green champion. The installment of revolving doors in campus buildings won most innovative. This initiative would prevent air from being let out and save energy, as well as several thousands of dollars on energy bills. “Some of the new buildings are either hot or cold, and it kind of makes it uncomfortable,” said Logan Matamoros, accounting sophomore and one of the students who pitched revolving doors. “It’s kind of distracting. I’ve seen a lot of large buildings that use revolving doors. We kind of just looked into that.” Other propositions at the fair included
the Hummingbird Initiative, a plan to place birdhouses around campus for migrating hummingbirds, and Net Zero, a net-zeroenergy design for the campus where UTD would produce the same amount of energy as it uses. Net Zero received the most votes for best business plan. The students behind Caffeine Green, voted most student involvement, suggested giving a 15-percent discount to students using mugs instead of paper cups. “We were kind of bouncing around ideas, and we thought about coffee. We have an 8:30 class, so everyone’s sipping on their coffee,” said Cherry Srivastava, marketing sophomore and one of the group members of Caffeine Green. Solar-powered trash compactors and reverse recycle machines that receive recyclable items and give back incentive to the recycler tied for green champion. The organizers of the fair hope the event will get students involved in environmental sustainability on campus. “We want a student-led green initiative on this campus, which would basically be a committee that is made up of faculty, administrative staff but also students,” Sluder said. “So, they would get to have input into what projects we pick.”
JENNIFER CHI | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Jasleen Sidhu, business administration junior, gives a passionate pitch about her idea to install solar-powered trash compactors on campus.
LIFE&ARTS
Dance
OCT. 20, 2014 | THE MERCURY | UTDMERCURY.COM
It has been 20 years since the start of the dance program at UTD, and this year’s fall dance performance, “Score,” will commemorate the program’s success in the last two decades. Choreographed by three dance instructors, the dances are primarily contemporary style with one tap dance piece by lecturer Misty Owens. Each dance tells a story that the dancers are able to bring alive on stage. This connection to the dances and their storylines is one of the best aspects of the routines this time around, said literary studies sophomore and “Score” dancer Kathleen Alva. For Alva, who has trained in clogging
since she was seven, the tap dance piece comes very close to her dance style. “I’m very biased toward tap because it’s closest to clogging, and that one’s really fun,” she said. Owens’ two works together are called “Love it, Lyle” and use two songs by Lyle Lovett. The tap number is set to “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossoms.” The violin and the rhythms are synchronous with the joy that radiates from the piece. “Battle,” a modern routine choreographed by clinical professor Monica Saba, is a reflection of internal struggles and battles that people go through in their lives. Fluid interactions and a controlled
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aggression between the dancers across the stage add to the feeling of strife, the desire to partake in things that cannot be done together and the pulls and pushes of trudging through life. “We are struggling against each other going to the same goal, pushing against each other and attempting to reach this place,” Alva said. “The fact that we are able to create these stories and focus on the meaning of the dances, I feel like as an individual in my sophomore year of college, I’m able to connect to those sorts of struggles and looking for goals.” The steps seem to invoke, in the
→ SEE DANCE, PAGE 6
STORY BY: ANWESHA BHATTACHARJEE | WEB EDITOR PHOTOS BY: LINDA NGUYEN | MERCURY STAFF
Twenty years in, first dance prof proud of progress
Dance professor Michele Hanlon (front) teaches Kathleen Alva and Katy Moony a step in the first routine that will involve dancing to live music.
Michele Hanlon’s first solo performance was a strange experience. She was dancing in a piece composed by a graduate student at the University of Arizona as part of her bachelor’s degree in dance. She started with her back to the audience and turned as the music started. She then promptly forgot the rest of the dance. That was the first time she improvised on stage. Hanlon, who has been teaching at UTD for 20 years, has never stopped dancing, instructing or improvising since then. She was the youngest of six children
in a single-parent family and could never take dance lessons as a child. “(It was) a big family, so I think there were some struggles, which made that hard for my mother to provide.” At Tucson, she started out as a business major, a reliable path that her family understood. Her time in the business program didn’t feel satisfying, and she took a semester off from her major to take philosophy and dance classes. She auditioned for the dance program and was accepted. She had to start at the beginner’s level and had a lot of catching up to do. “I really didn’t look back at that time,” she said. “I was where I wanted to be and
needed to be at that time. You hear people say when you’re making a choice like this — to go into a risky field — it’s not really a choice but something you’re compelled to do and you have to do, and that’s how it felt.” She graduated from the University of Arizona, and after working for a dance company in Tucson, she married and moved to Dallas. She then worked for three different dance companies before starting her own dance company, ElleDanceWorks, in 1997. As a dancer, few can succeed in the professional market without adequate training in their childhood, she said. For Hanlon, her lack of training worked in her favor, helping her adapt as required under the guidance of her teachers at the university. Hanlon has performed for several dance companies throughout her career, but she is slowly transitioning into choreographing full time. Last year was the first year she went without a single performance. “I’ve moved into a different role, and I’m really enjoying choreographing,” she said. “The role would have to be right, because, you know, the body doesn’t do what it used to be able to do.” Her style evolves from a concept, and she likes to have her dancers speak to
→ SEE HANLON, PAGE 6
Modern form, fluid movements, strong storylines Saba’s signature Michele Hanlon and Monica Saba had worked together in the Dancers Unlimited Repertoire, a dance company in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, for a couple of years. When a position to teach opened up at UTD in the spring of 1995, Hanlon, already an instructor at UTD, brought Saba in to be a dance professor alongside her. Since then, the program and quality of dancers have grown tremendously, and it has been a beautiful journey teaching, Saba said. “We would take anybody and everybody and create dances on people who had never danced before,” she said. “It was great though; you opened up this whole new world to them.” Saba worked with Dancers Unlimited for 10 years and also worked independently on several projects. Despite working with various dance forms, she truly identifies with contemporary dance. “Modern dance is (the language) where Michele and I
speak the best,” Saba said. “We can teach many, many disciplines, but modern dance is our home.” Her choreography is fluid with several different pieces working in sync to create a cohesive picture for the audience, just like in her Saba’s where she juggles a lot as a mother, teacher and choreographer. “Michele and I joke that without knowing before, she would know if it’s my piece, and I would know the same,” Saba said. “No matter how hard we try to be different, there are some signature moves we can’t avoid.” Saba’s pieces come from a place deep within, she said, and resonate with her feelings strongly, feelings that she is unable to put into words at times. “For a choreographer a lot comes out,” she said. “Sometimes you’re not able to talk about it, but you’re able to get it out (on the dance floor).” Saba’s pieces use a lot of phrase manipulation where she uses time, space and energy to build on a move to a 32- or 64-count music, she said. As a dancer, staying in shape is crucial. Performers have to take as many classes as they can to maintain their body and form. When she was younger, Saba would often head over to dance classes at her alma mater, Southern Methodist University, even after graduating, so she could learn and perfect her moves. Between rehearsals, classes and performances, a dancer’s life can become very
→ SEE SABA, PAGE 6
Dallas-born dancer, New York performer brings versatility, teaches tap, modern, jazz The day she was born, her mother taught a tap-dancing class. Just like that, Misty Owens was tied to the art forever. At least, that’s how she feels. However, she hasn’t restricted herself to tap alone, and her choreography for the ensemble this semester has brought together contemporary and tap into a single character piece, Owens said. “I love dance in every form. I love the social interaction and the way it brings light and energy out of people, and I really wanted to focus on that as the centerpiece of the dance,” she said. Owens was born to an English mother who had been a stage dancer in London. For the past 49 years, her mother has run her own studio, the London School of Dance, in Garland. It’s where Owens learned to dance until she was 15 years old. Growing up in a dancing environment, Owens chose to continue her training as a dance student at the University of New Mexico in 1989. After that, she spent several years in New York and danced for the Peggy Spina Dance Company starting in 1993.
In New York, she taught at Marymount Manhattan College, Long Island University and the Mark Morris Dance Group, where she was a founding teacher of the Dance for Parkinson’s disease classes. Dallas Observer interviewed her in 2000 where she said she was ready to move back to Dallas. Owens has since pioneered a similar class for those with Parkinson’s disease in Dallas called the Dance for Disorders Movement. “Dancing improves their rhythm and timing, which are lost,” Owens told The Dallas Morning News in 2013. “It improves fluidity and balance. They rid themselves of rigidity. Their tremors fade away sometimes. Their capacity for movement changes.” Owens and Monica Saba attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee together during one summer. At the time, Owens was still based out of New York. Later, as the program at UTD expanded, Saba brought Owens on board. “We were lucky (Owens) decided to move back,” she said.
Three years ago, Owens started teaching at UTD, where she brought a huge pool of versatility to the program teaching jazz, tap and contemporary dance to students, Saba said. Through her pieces, she tries to bring some of the knowledge in rhythm-tap vocabulary where dancers play around with the acoustic impact of tapping that she acquired
from Peggy during her time in New York. “Being a part of the ensemble choreography is just such a pleasure because each one of us brings a different flavor to the performance, and I love injecting my style of movement, tap dancing and my rhythmic styles,” Owens said. This year, she has tried something new, using a piece she choreographed in 1993
while still at UNM and setting it to the dancers at UTD. There are six dancers in the mix, but the two men are the gentlemen characters in the piece and don’t tap dance as much, she said. “I like that it was a return to the old me and revisiting it in a new perspective,” Owens said. “There were parts of it I didn’t like at all, and I reworked those.”
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GAME TIME ATEC students, Perot museum collaborate to create educational games for children ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS Managing Editor
Usually relegated to the entertainment industry, video games designed and created by students in the ATEC program have become an educational tool in the Game Lab at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The museum opened the new exhibit two weeks ago in its Mathlab section which features three games made entirely by students in the Special Topics in Game Studies course. The opportunity came about after the museum contacted the program last year to see if there were any students interested in helping develop its displays. “We approached the class and said, ‘Would you guys be interested in creating games for us?’ and they said, ‘Absolutely,’” said Steve Hinkley, vice president of programs for the museum. “It sort of blossomed from there.” He said the museum doesn’t have a gaming department, but it is trying to provide gaming as a learning opportunity for its visitors. He said the museum’s lack of a skill set
when it comes to making games is one of the factors that drove them to talk to the students in ATEC. Hinkley said they gave students a broad list of topics Perot was interested in for its exhibits. The students were able to take advantage of this freedom and propose a wide array of pitches. “Two semesters ago, we were sort of brainstorming ideas with them on what we could do,” said ATEC graduate student Latyon Luckey. “There would be kids running around the museum and they would dig stuff up and they could bring it and 3-D print these dinosaur bones. They were just like, ‘Yeah, do whatever.’ Obviously they’ve scaled all that stuff down.” After narrowing down the list of topics they wanted to cover, the students decided on three they would run with — Gravity Defense, Stop the Hogs and PolliNation. The games were created with middle school-aged children in mind, each with a specific educational focus. Gravity Defense, which uses a Kinect to
teacher. She enjoys choreography, putting together pieces where a dancer makes a move and the other one responds. Her pieces build out of the studio, one step at a time, and over time she has learned what works and what doesn’t. “We learn from all the things we get exposed to,” Saba said. She remembers a time when she felt like she’d fallen flat and run out of ideas. Despite being
a much older student at the time, she went back to school her master’s at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It was a low-residency dance program during the summer semester and the feedback on her pieces helped her get the extra push she needed to find herself back in her element, Saba said. No matter how long a dancer has been choreographing, there are never any new steps, just a dancer’s own interpretation of those moves that make them unique, she said. “We learn from each other, and even if we are repeating what we saw or an idea that we saw, it’s still going to be different because it’s us, not them,” Saba said. “That’s why I like modern dance because it’s your individual self … the individual personality of every choreographer that does it.”
each other and then they go back to being themselves,” she said. Saba has three other dance numbers in the show: an aggressive duet, a modern group piece called “Search for the Unknown” that uses shadows, and “Blind Disease,” a dance her students performed at the American College Dance Festival in Arkansas last spring. “Blind Disease” is about the dilemma born out of love. It puts problems including alcoholism, substance addiction and cheating into the context of a relationship between any two people. The five-dancer piece works through feelings of betrayal, love, trust and frustration in a relationship that breaks over and over again. Alumna Ashley Merritt, who was part of the ensemble last spring, said for her the piece is more than just a dance, and she finds herself acting the part of a troubled person as she works through it. “In ‘Blind Disease’ I had a very specific idea in mind, and I could put a personality to each of my dancers. The movements were set to very specific roles,” Saba said. In “Search for the Unknown” there is a sense of transcending time and space as the dancers play with darkness and light, struggling to capture an elusive thought or goal. The piece is still in transition and has changed several times since she first taught it to her dancers, Saba said. The program’s 20th anniversary was a great time to reach out to alumni who were still dancing
professionally, Hanlon said. Some of the alumni in the group numbers will also perform solos in the show. Merritt’s style is a fusion of hiphop and modern dance forms. Her solo will be a fun, lighthearted performace that reflects on the happy place she is at in her life right now, she said. Alumnus Rigoberto Hernandez, now a medical student at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, happened to take the semester off and joined the show when he heard about it. Alumnae Jennifer Denison and Paige Ghent are dancing in Hanlon’s pieces as well as solos in the show. These alumni are the program’s legacy outside the campus, and it felt like a great way to honor them, Hanlon said. The alumni are equally happy to come back and perform, she said. “They’re really nurturing, and personally for me, it was a great (program) to find my place creatively in a lot of ways — the whole program, not just the dancing,” Merritt said. “The different teachers and professors here that I’ve had classes with have really helped me into my career as an artist and all the crazy things I’d never thought I was going to study or research.” The fact that UTD’s dance program doesn’t limit itself to art and performance majors alone is perhaps the program’s biggest achievement, Hanlon said. There is a lot of bonding among the dancers, and they help each other learn and grow, Duernberg-
YANG XI| STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Students perform a step in “Battle,” choreographed by Saba.
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irregular, so staying in shape can be a challenge. “It’s a discipline of the dance form,” Saba said. “My theory is if you want to do it, you just have to do it. If you don’t, then you don’t want it bad enough.” Saba said she transitioned smoothly from a performer to
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moment, a strong feeling of abuse among the dancers, said dancer and Arts and Technology freshman and dancer Lauren Duernberger. Watching “Battle” evokes strong feelings of frustration and conflict. Toward the end, it leaves the audience with a sense of futility. Then, just as it seems to have concluded, dancers come out from all sides and leap onto other dancers’ backs, holding on tight and leaving the audience with a lingering sense of peace. Professor Michele Hanlon’s first piece, “Scherzando,” is set to music from UTD’s Chamber Orchestra, that will play live at the show. “I hear playfulness in the music and I hope that I was able to bring that into the piece,” Hanlon said. There is a racy energy to “Scherzando” as the dancers seem to leap effortlessly into the air, pushing and pulling at each other to classical music tones. “Michele’s piece has times when we get to play around with the audience,” Alva said. “It’s a little bit more humorous and joking around with them … I really enjoy the humor in that piece.” Hanlon’s other routine, “ … So it goes …,” a trio set on three women dancing to “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas and the Papas. It’s a slice-of-life piece where there are three individuals and one of them acts a catalyst to make them interact, Hanlon said. “Things happen, they relate to
detect the motion of the user, has players defend the Earth from incoming asteroids by moving on the screen and using their movement to show students the basic properties of physics. Michael Stewart, an ATEC senior who helped design the game, said months of research were conducted to discover the mass of asteroids that actually come into contact with the Earth. He said the few that do are often small and burn up if they happen to make it into the atmosphere. That forced the team to take some creative control and make the asteroids in the game range from the size of a whale to the size of Mt. Everest. “The larger (asteroids) are harder to move because they have more mass,” said Brian Chancellor ATEC graduate student and fellow game designer. “If we did it realistically, to a scale and how many asteroids hit the Earth, it would be a very slow, dull game.” Stop the Hogs and PollinNation both use touch-screen tablets to deal with invasive species and the rapid loss of pollinating
bee populations. Luckey, who was one of the lead designers for Stop the Hogs, said the goal of the game was to present players with a realistic situation in which they have to slow down the spread of feral hogs across the country side. He said the hogs spread across a grid that is the gamer’s farmland and they use three different control methods that are accurate to real life. These include trapping, poison, and fencing. The museum wanted the game play to reflect real life scenarios, Luckey said. This means that players cannot actually “beat” the hogs, but only dwindle their numbers. This also means that if players use poison too much, then their land will start to feel the negative effects of the toxins. All of the games were put together entirely by the students in class. While there was oversight of the work they were doing by their professors, it was mostly hands-off. “That’s what’s really kind of cool about it,” Stewart said. “(The faculty) would give reviews about what they see at the museum,
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the audience during her dance pieces. Her routines, mostly modern and contemporary, stretch the boundaries between the performers and the audience. In one of her more recent dances she had her dancers walk off the stage and perform in the audience. She joined UTD in 1994, back when the dance program was smaller and a dance company in residency taught the classes. Hanlon had just received her master’s form TCU, and the dance company had been looking to bring on a teacher. The first classes at UTD were taught during lunch breaks in between the dance company’s rehearsals and in the evenings.
er said. When students found out Hernandez was in medical school, several of the pre-med majors asked him for advice, and it’s almost like he is their mentor, Saba said. “One thing I really love is getting to work with dancers who are more than just dancers,” Alva said. “Dance is not a major here; you have to major in something else. Just the fact that we have a group of people who are doing this because we are passionate about it, it’s something that we love to do and we do it not because we have to but because we want to means that we have a really great relationship together.” When students come to UTD, dance is not the first activity they think they’ll be doing, Duernberger said. So when Duernberger auditioned for the program she was nervous and apprehensive about what she would find, particularly after having trained for 15 years in dance. But her fears turned out to be baseless, she said, and she is grateful that she has been able to dance again. For Alva, who had no contemporary dance training, the fact that she was able to learn a new style was unexpected. “You think when you join some sort of performance group as more of ‘I’m going to be learning dances, and I’m not going to be actually growing,’ but that is definitely not the case here,” Alva said. “Score” will show at 8 p.m. from Oct. 23–25 in the University Theatre and entry is free for students with a Comet Card.
but essentially it’s like, next week, ‘What did ya’ll do? What did ya’ll do to fix this problem?’” The exhibit also served as a way for the students to get their games published, something the team members saw as a huge plus. It gave the young designers the chance to put their name on a developed game that is actually played by people. It also allowed the team to create a game for an actual client with specific standards as opposed to simply one that is just created off of the desires of the developers alone. “Usually, it’s us deciding what we do,” Luckey said. “Working with a client is very good experience.” He said every member in the class wanted to be a game designer. Matthews said this opportunity, as a whole, was a great chance to help in achieving that goal. “The fact that our pictures are in the museum right now is a pretty phenomenal experience,” Matthews said. “We’re actually getting something out there and that, to me, is development.”
When she first came to the university, she was required to combine three techniques in her class: ballet, classical and jazz. With the growth of the program, dance is now an available concentration for arts and performance majors. There are separate classes for each of these techniques, as well as for composition and dance appreciation. Dance is offered as a minor now that is open to students from all majors, making teaching at UTD a unique experience for her, she said. “It’s a blessing to be able to work with a lot of people who are not just focused on dance and aren’t going to go out and become professional dancers,” Hanlon said. “I really like that about teaching here because you get the opportunity to introduce this art
form, this way of thinking and looking at the world to so many people that wouldn’t maybe hear about it otherwise and might not seek it out if it wasn’t here available to them.”
LINDA NGUYEN | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
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SPORTS
Very Superstitious Baseball players take part in game day rituals for good luck
ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS Managing Editor
As he walked to the mound, a phrase was shouted out by his high-school teammate. It was one he was never supposed to hear. “I wanted to mess with him, so I yelled it out,” junior pitcher Tyler Dauer said. “I yelled out that he was throwing a no hitter during the game just so everyone would notice. And I’m not even joking, but the next hitter he got a hit and ruined it.” Even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, Dauer violated one of the most widely spread superstitions in baseball. From not walking on the foul line to abstaining from saying “no hitter,” players in the grand old game treat superstition with an almost religious reverence. Ball players at UTD are not immune to the tradition. Junior midfielder Nick Marti said many players on the team have acts they believe help them perform better on the field. Some of his teammates have specific accessories they have to wear such as armbands and wristbands, he said. Senior infielder Brandon George, for example, has a sleeve he wears during practices. It’s the first thing he puts on before any of his other practice clothes. “For some certain reason, putting on that arm sleeve first gives me some sort of feeling of security guarding
my arm,” he said. “I’ve done it for quite a long time. The first thing that goes on my body is my arm sleeve.” Along with that, George has a pregame routine he said he has to follow in order to be successful. The first thing he does as he prepares is head into the training room and get his wrists taped: white for a home game and black for away. He has to do it before he’s ready to go out onto the diamond. If he doesn’t, he’s sure he won’t do well. “In high school, I used to only tape one wrist because I had an injury, so it stemmed from that,” he said. “One day, I can distinctly remember, I taped both to my wrists just because I did, and I distinctly remember having a good game. So ever since then, I feel just awkward if I don’t have both of my wrists taped.” Along with lucky clothes, members of the baseball team focus heavily on what they put into their bodies, though not always for health reasons. Marti said he has to eat the same meal before every game to be successful. When it comes to what the players drink, there is one beverage in particular Marti and George use to help them improve their batting averages. “Cream soda is a slump buster,” Marti said. “One day I had cream soda and I started hitting good. So I was like, ‘Cream soda is the new slump buster!’” George said they call it slump-buster syrup. The two
→ SEE SUPERSTITIONS, PAGE 9
Taping wrists before games, wearing a special pair of socks and drinking uniquely branded cream soda are just some of the superstitions members of the baseball team have. Baseball has a long history of being one of the most superstitious sports, with members’ traditions being passed down from generation to generation. JENNIFER CHI | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Soccer teams reach season midpoint
Coaches point out highlights, areas for improvement as postseason approaches, playoff race starts to heat up ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS Managing Editor
With the midway point for conference play drawing near, the men’s and women’s soccer teams are aiming to be consistent as they set their eyes on postseason play. Both teams stand near the top of the ASC, with the men (9-3-2) standing in third place and the women (10-2-1) tied for second place with Concordia and LeTourneau. The men’s squad has faced both highs and lows in its season, with the team taking down nationally ranked power Trinity early in the season and then struggling against conference opponents Mary Hardin-Baylor and UT Tyler. Still, as the season starts to come to a close, head coach Jason Hirsch is confident in the way the team is headed. “I think the team is headed in the right direction,” Hirsch said. “You know, our goal at the start of the year is to improve every week and improve each game, and I think we’re at a place now that we’re doing that.”
Hirsch said the team’s closing stretch, which includes Hardin-Simmons, Howard Payne and Concordia, will be a tough six games for the Comets. One thing he focuses on is putting up more shots than the other team, something that he has seen the team be successful in so far. He said the only team that has outshot them this far was Trinity, which at the time was a nationally ranked squad. “I don’t want to be sitting back and absorbing pressure; I want to be dishing out the pressure,” Hirsch said. “And also having an attacking kind of philosophy says we want to score lots of goals. We don’t just want to sit back and try to stop you from scoring; we want to be the one who scores goals.” On the women’s side, the season has been marked with a new and improved offensive attack under head coach Kanute Drugan. Along with that, Drugan said he has seen consistent growth in many of his players. “We’ve seen a lot of individual development. We’ve seen the team come together in a big way,” Drugan said. “We threw something unique and new for them this last game, and they handled it pretty well.”
Even though the team only has four games left in the regular season, Drugan said the fatigue factor has not set in yet. He said they actually have a better fitness level when they’re playing. As the season winds down and the team looks forward to the post-season, Drugan emphasized the need to focus on details. “The difference between us and our opponents in the conference playoffs is going to be a really small, really narrow margin, and that narrow margin can tip the scales one way or another,” he said. Hirsch said that his mindset is on sharpening the minor details of the team’s scoring capability. He said at this point they just want to get into the conference tournament. The confidence and health of the team will be crucial for its success if the Comets head into the postseason. “On the men’s side, it’s crazy this year,” Hirsch said. “Everybody’s beating everybody. Any team could, I’ve always said that, any team could beat every other team in the ASC on any given day. We have to just stay focused on getting in. That’s not a given. They don’t just hand it out; you have to earn it.”
NUMBERS ON THE BOARD
DESIGN BY LINA MOON | STAFF
FILE PHOTO | MERCURY STAFF
As both teams near the end of their season, coaches stress the importance of details in order to reach and be successful in the playoffs.
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buy A&W cream soda, take off all the labels and put pieces of paper with the new slump-buster label they designed, George said. According to him, it has worked so far for the duo. Many superstitions stem simply from a desire to emulate the success of others, Marti said. “If somebody else is hitting good, I want to try their bat. Maybe it’s their bat that’s hitting good,” he said. “If you wear an arm sleeve and you pitched good, I’m going to wear an arm sleeve. Maybe I’ll pitch good.” Marti first started to pick up on the paranormal side of baseball in high school he said, and started to notice certain habits the pros were practicing. The superstitious culture of the pros also had a major impact on George’s beliefs and the beliefs of many others, he said. “The superstition is inherited from baseball throughout the years,” George said. Out of all the positions in baseball, pitchers historically have had some of the oddest superstitions. Turk Wendell, a former reliever for the New York Mets, was known to brush his teeth between innings and chew black licorice while pitching. When Roger Clemens was playing with the New York Yankees, he would visit the bust of Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium before each home game. He would then proceed to wipe his forehead and use the same sweaty palm to rub the face of the baseball legend. Dauer, who is penciled in as the starting pitcher for the Comets’ upcoming season, has a tradition he follows every time he gets on the mound. “One thing I do, everyday I pitch, I actually wear the same pair of socks,” Dauer said. “I really like them a lot and that helps me out a little bit.”
SPORTS
Dauer, who started seven games last year as a sophomore and finished the season with a 2.72 ERA, said he began the tradition after he began to have a successful year and didn’t want to change what he was doing. One of the biggest player superstitions involves no hitters. Whenever someone is pitching and nobody from the other team is getting a hit, the dugout is supposed to go quiet and no one is to talk to the pitcher, let alone make eye contact with him. Most importantly, one key phrase is not supposed to be uttered. “You’re not supposed to say ‘no hitter,’ you’re not supposed to say that at all,” Marti said. “It’s like a big jinx … I don’t even know why announcers do it in the pros; I think it’s terrible. It makes me mad.” Dauer said he has tried to prove this and other superstitions surrounding baseball to be incorrectsuch as when he yelled out no hitter during his infamous high school game. Despite his doubts, he can’t help but concede some belief. The length of the game contributes to the spread of superstitions among pitchers, he said. “You have more time to rest in between pitches, so if you’re not hitting, you have time to think about it,” he said. “So it kind of gets in your head. And then you start to think, ‘Well, maybe this is real.’” Even though there is no scientific correlation between these rituals and being successful on the field, George said a lot of it has to do with the mental aspect of the game and what these routines do to help players succeed. “I think you go through such highs and such lows that when you feel like you’ve finally found something that works for you, it’s kind of like your superstition,” George said. “You’re not willing to give it up because you’ve experienced a certain high with it.”
NOTABLE UPCOMING GAMES MEN’S SOCCER -10.25.14 vs. Hardin-Simmons-Last regular season home game -11.01.14 @ Mary Hardin-Baylor-Last game of the regular season
WOMEN’S SOCCER -10.25.14 vs. Hardin-Simmons-Last regular season home game -11.01.14 @ Mary Hardin-Baylor-Last game of the regular season
VOLLEYBALL -10.25.14 vs. Concordia-Last regular season home game -10.28.14 @ LeTourneau-Last game of the regular season
THE MERCURY | OCT. 20, 2014
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Monster Ball
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FAMILIAR FACES Research prof explores facial recognition, what makes faces memorable PRIYANKA HARDIKAR Staff Writer
Every time someone looks at a face, neurons are at work. They are storing the faces of the friend made at school, the cashier at Macy’s encountered briefly and even the face of the model on the front cover of Vogue. Neurons are the reason you are able to recognize faces every day. “The idea is you code what makes a face different from every other in the world,” said Alice O’Toole, a researcher specializing in visual perception and quantitative models in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. That can’t be done until finding out a person’s average expectation and how the individual deviates from that expectation, O’Toole said. “If I send you off to Japan for three or four days, your expectation of what faces look like would drift toward the average of what you’re seeing,” O’Toole said. “So then when you come back here, faces might look like they’re O’TOOLE expanded outward or like they’re contrasting a bit from what your expectation is.” This is called face adaptation, which happens when you look at something that differs from the usual and it changes your central expectation. In the same way, O’Toole’s theory of face adaption applies to someone who is looking at several abnormally expanded faces. Then, if the person were to see a normal face, he or she would mistake the face as squished in appearance. It seems straightforward at first. A peron’s retina receives two images through both eyes – but then as they look at someone, they see a full three-dimensional structure that depending on the angle, or central prototype, appears differently. For 15 years now, O’Toole has researched what makes a face memorable. She is interested in understanding what people are able to remember about faces ¬— how they build that representation, apply it, and when it fails, what went wrong. “We know somewhere in your brain you have neurons that are storing faces, but what are the neurons storing and what is the nature of the information they have?” O’Toole said.
She said the only way to approach this is by understanding at least computationally how neurons store information. For that reason, computer scientists are working on finding an answer now more than ever. Faces communicate a lot of different information — a person’s gender, age and even whether he or she is happy today. “If at some point you could wake up and understand precisely what it is that makes humans so good at face recognition, that would be a good long-term goal,” O’Toole said. As of now, O’ Toole is solely focused on researching facial recognition. Research in facial recognition allows O’Toole to take many approaches from psychology experiments and functional neuroimaging to observing what computer scientists are doing to recognize faces. “You see the whole thing from a different view and that gives you ideas for your experiments,” O’Toole said. Although computational models and face recognition have always fascinated her, her previous area of study was vision, or human stereopsis. When O’Toole was a graduate student at Brown University, her psychology adviser passed away at the end of her first year. He had been studying faces. After he died, O’Toole spent three years working on human stereopsis until she came to UTD to teach. Another aspect in her research involves comparing computers and people in their ability to recognize faces. At international competitions that O’Toole attends for face recognition computer systems, computers are given algorithms with the task of figuring out the likelihood that two different images are, in reality, the same person. Jonathon Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology runs the competitions every two to three years, and has worked with O’Toole for seven years. He remembers the competition in 2010 to reveal the most surprising results. On a data set of 1.6 million faces in mug shots, the best algorithm created could allow a computer to recognize the correct face 93 percent of the time. “The improvement was astonishing,” Phillips said. “My background is developing algorithms so that computers can understand images, but a natural
→ SEE FACES, PAGE 15
KELCIE WALLACE | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
QUICK STATS Numbers by Gender: Tenured Faculty at UTD
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*SOURCE: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ANALYSIS, UT DALLAS RESEARCH: ANWESHA BHATTACHARJEE| WEB EDITOR , DESIGN: NICOLE BROWN | STAFF DESIGNER
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NEWS
→ EBOLA
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THE PROTOCOL
When a patient is brought into an emergency room for high fever, he or she is required to fill out an intake form, where the patient must state whether he or she has been in any of the West African countries that are suffering a severe Ebola outbreak. These countries include Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where Duncan was from. Starting in August, the CDC has required all hospitals to ask patients if they have been to any of these countries or been exposed to someone sick or are exhibiting symptoms of Ebola, Convery said. Unless a patient has been exposed to someone with Ebola, the patient would be treated for a fever in the usual way, he said. Nurses and health workers coming in close contact with an Ebola patient are required to completely cover themselves while caring for the patient to avoid any exposure to the patient’s bodily fluids such as urine, feces, sweat and semen. They can wear the paper gowns with hoods that come down above the opening of the gown and there are disposable leggings and covers for their shoes, Convery said. They must also spray the gowns with a disinfectant like ammonia before taking them off, as well as follow protocols for taking the gown off without touching anything on it, he said.
The County has imposed travel restrictions on the 87 health workers who have been in contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient in the United States. Duncan died on Oct. 8 at the Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas Hospital. Those being monitored for exposure to Ebola will be asked to stay away from public transit for the 21 days they will be under observation, county officials said at the meeting. “I think what they are doing now is that public health authorities are actively (surveying) these people,” said Paul Convery, health care management clinical professor. “(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) initially asked them to call and check their temperature. Now, I think, (authorities) are sending a nurse out to everyone’s homes twice a day to actively check their temperature.” The CDC should not have allowed Amber Vinson, the second nurse to be infected with the virus, to board the flight from Cleveland, Ohio, with a fever, Convery, a former first chief medical officer for Baylor Health Care Services, said. Yet, if none of Duncan’s family members get infected by Ebola within the 21-day-quarantine that ends Oct. 19, it implies that the disease can be contained provided health workers follow protocol while treating patients, Convery said. “I don’t know what the gap was in the protocol about the protective gowns, but apparently they weren’t as 100 percent as they should have been,” he said. The fact that the Ebola outbreak was successfully contained in Nigeria indicates the spread of the virus can be stopped using contact tracing, said Olufunlola Arowolo, a public policy doctoral student from Nigeria. Contact tracing starts with the first Ebola patient and tracks down and monitors anyone who was exposed to the patient, she said. “They effectively contained and quarantined about 900 people, and no new cases of Ebola have been reported in about a month in Nigeria since the outbreak began. That’s the good news for Dallas because Dallas is implementing the same contact and trace method,” Arowolu said. “Not only that, Dallas also has more in terms of health care workers per capita citizens available, so I know that Dallas can definitely contain the issue.” Student volunteers who work shifts at Texas Health each week are trained in following protocol in situations involving infectious diseases such as Ebola, said a pre-med upperclassman who started volunteering at the hospital in August. The source, who chose to remain anonymous out of concern of retaliation, said she had no contact with the Ebola patients in the hospital and volunteers such her are not allowed to work emergency room shifts anymore. “I don’t feel concerned with in any way being in danger,” she said. “I think we all have had the proper training to know what the protocol is and we all work
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there, so I don’t feel that I am risk in any way.” The hospital staff at Texas Health was not expecting a situation like this, which is why the response was probably slower, Convery said. Even when protocols are in place, it takes some time for a smaller hospital to respond to what is expected to be a rare event, he said, so the CDC should have intervened earlier. The problem lies in the fact that most small community hospitals across the nation don’t have the facilities and the physical space to keep a patient infected with Ebola in an isolated room that is surrounded by two empty rooms as is required, said John McCracken, clinical professor in health care management. Research funding for the National Institute of Health has drastically decreased in the past few years, and the lack of an available Ebola vaccine or research on the virus might be, in some part, correlated to lack of NIH funding, Convery said. “There was frankly not a lot of interest in Ebola in the United States a month ago,” he said. “Congress wasn’t doing a lot of talk about Ebola. I think some medical centers might have reacted differently to a first case that came in, but I would bet the vast majority of community hospitals would have reacted the way Presbyterian did.” There is a possibility that a level-one trauma hospital such as Downtown Baylor or Parkland Hospital might have handled the case better, simply because they are used to seeing patients in extreme conditions in their emergency rooms, Convery said. The roadmap ahead After the initial scare, hospitals across the nation are gearing up to prepare for a possible outbreak ensuring there is sufficient protective gear and adequate training for the hospital staff, Convery said. “I was up in Springfield, Ill., a town of 100,000 (people), and they’re having discussions and drills and beginning to understand how to prepare for it,” he said. Since the first Ebola case developed in Dallas, even pharmacy technicians at the Baylor Hospital in McKinney have started wearing masks, aprons and gloves, said Raisha Shaeef, a pre-med and biochemistry senior who works there. Texas Health is receiving a lot of negative press, and situations are tense at the hospital right now, the anonymous volunteer at the hospital said. The nurse morale is low, and the hospital staff is under the public glare — a situation that is not likely to change any time soon, Convery said. “I begrudge the news, the talking heads, because they always make any event, no matter what it is, sound like it’s the precursor to the end of the world,” McCracken said. The average person in Dallas is not constantly looking over his or her shoulder for Ebola, and there is little panic among the people, unlike what the media would like to project, he said. The media’s reaction is not unexpected, the anonymous pre-med student said. People who work in a hospital environment can understand the reality of the ground-level risks involved, but it can be difficult
for the general public that is relatively unaware of the disease characteristics and risks to stay calm at a time like this. “The problem with Ebola is that it’s a virus, therefore, non-treatable by antibiotics,” McCracken said. “Second, the fatality rate is very high, about 80 to 85 percent. The transmission mechanism isn’t well understood. (Researchers) don’t think that it is transmuting to be transmitted through the air, but they don’t know.” However, a handful of people of the 305 million living in the United States have been infected with Ebola, which is a very insignificant number statistically, he said. “I will say this though: There are fewer than 10,000 reported cases of Ebola (in the world), although, probably (cases in) West African countries are underreported,” McCracken said. “You still have much higher risk of fatality from flu than you do from Ebola. It’s much more important to get a flu shot than it is trying to prevent yourself from Ebola.” Once the disease is contained, the federal government will conduct several investigations into what went wrong at Texas Health, he said. The incident has provided students with several angles for future study, McCracken said. The breakdown of systems and procedures and the breach of protocol at Texas Health is one obvious perspective for analysis, he said. The other is the study of Texas Health’s public response, which will be significant not only for the hospital, but also for other providers, McCracken said. “The biggest lesson that we learned is how to present a disaster like this to the public and how to put a public face on it, and what to say, when to say it and how to say it,” he said. In the meantime, countries in Europe have to figure out how to prevent the large-scale migration from Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast to Belgium, Spain and other European Union countries as people from West Africa attempt to flee the epidemic or travel for treatment, McCracken said. The migration barriers, however, do not provide any premise for discrimination on the basis of nationality in the United States, Convery said. This epidemic is truly a global problem, and every country needs to step up its response to contain it, he said. The United States will soon send several hundred troops to Liberia to help build infrastructure that will be used to contain the Ebola outbreak, and the country will have to plan a contingency for when the soldiers return and situations where they might be infected, Convery said. At the moment, close to 200 people are being monitored across the country for possible Ebola infections, and there has been no further escalation in Dallas, he said. “This is one of those times when you want to wait and see,” McCracken said.
Additional Reporting by: Pablo Arauz, Jennifer Chi, Andrew Gallegos, Duncan Gallagher, Nidhi Gotgi, Priyanka Hardikar, Sid Patel, and Saara Raja.
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Students on what they know about Ebola, how safe they feel & the protocol breach Jason Swayden, molecular and cell biology graduate student Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Oct. 17 Two DART employees have come in contact with someone exposed to or carrying the Ebola virus. Both have been asked to stay away from work although the CDC considers them lowrisk, the statement said. One of the employees, a bus operator, had flown on the same flight as nurse Amber Vinson from Cleveland, Ohio and found out from media reports of the quarantine.
job right now because when the second case happened, the response time was so much quicker and the person was quaran-
Eshita Sharmin, pre-med & healthcare studies senior
Paul Winkler, electrical engineering senior
By then, he had already worked his morning shift, and DART is working to contact the customers who might have taken the bus at the time. The vehicle is now out of service and will be cleaned as per the protocols on hazardous materials, the statement said. UT System Board of Regents The UT System Board of Regents pledged support toward Ebola research and prevention, said Gene Powell, vice chairman for the Board, in a statement on Oct. 16 after an emergency phone meeting. UT Dallas UTD continues to monitor the outbreak but no action is necessary yet, said President David Daniel in an email statement to all students, staff and faculty Oct. 10.
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While there is a possibility for such data to be made available to OSI, there is an ongoing controversy about making such data available to federal institutions and making student data susceptible to attacks, Huie said. There also has been a push for the federal government to acquire student-wage and debt data from across the nation to develop a ranking system using the information, she said. While this data could be used toward developing such a ranking
sions,” she said. Meanwhile, UT System has partnered up with the Texas School Counselor Association to inform guidance counselors in high school is about how to use seekUT to help students decide the university and major they want to choose should they decide to stay in Texas, Huie said. The seekUT team will also conduct system tours where a team will visit different UT System schools and pair up with the career advising centers, financial aid and admission offices to help promote the tool, Troutman said. OSI also is using the data to
spearhead several research projects in different UT schools, he said. One such project at UTSA involves analyzing the correlation between on- and off-campus jobs held by current students and their impact on the students’ GPA and likelihood to graduate on time, Troutman said. The findings of the research will be used to recommend policies to schools on providing more on-campus jobs to students to help increase four- and six-year graduation rates, he said. The project is constantly being evaluated and will continue to evolve as student needs change, Troutman said.
they know well. These are the individuals people can identify quickly from a glance as far as 100 yards away. “The next stage in the algorithms is getting computational models to a level that’s as good as you are with people you know,” O’Toole said. One experiment included getting pairs of images and presenting them to people and computers. Half the pairs of images were non-matches but highly similar, while the rest of the pairs were the same person but highly dissimilar. While the machines identified the images incorrectly, the people were able to identify them accurately.
O’Toole said she recognizes this is a breakthrough, because it sheds light on why humans are able to achieve better facial recognition than computers. This is because the individuals were unconsciously using the body to help match the faces, O’Toole said. After redoing the tasks and measuring the individual’s eye movements, O’Toole and the other researchers realized that when the information was in the body, the individual spent more time on the body to help identify a person. “If they had only the face, they didn’t know better than the machines, but if they had
the body, they did as well as they did on the first one,” O’Toole said. Body recognition is an offshoot of facial recognition, said Matthew Hill, a prior student of O’Toole and current researcher alongside the psychology professor. Hill said there is a list of 27 words that describe a body such as heavyset and petite. A statistical method called correspondence analysis allows Hill to then connect the similarities between the two bodies and decide whether they belong to one person. “What keeps me interested is the way the numbers and the mind can match up,” Hill
said. For O’Toole, it’s how face recognition applies to every day life. Autism, for example, is characterized by changes in the way people look at other people’s faces and how much they can process from expressions and understand intentions, she said. “Face recognition is so important for human communication,” O’Toole said. “We all know we’re being photographed everywhere we go. It would certainly be valuable to know how much better people are at identifying faces than machines and when it’s best to combine the machines with the humans.”
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problem in this area is developing algorithms so that computers can recognize faces in general.” In addition to comparisons between computers and humans, O’Toole has also tested forensic experts against everyday people, including UTD students. Forensic experts from all over the globe including Interpol agents, FBI agents, Australian passport officers and Dutch police officers were tested for their accuracy in recognizing faces. “They’re experts and they’re
trained, but nobody ever tests them against normal people, and that’s surprising,” O’Toole said. It was a high-risk experimentation, O’Toole said, and she was relieved the experts did turn out to be more accurate at recognizing faces than the UTD students. “It almost comes down to the experts operating more like machines than like normal people,” she said. Although machines have proven more accurate than humans in recognizing faces on high quality frontal images, they stand no chance against humans when it comes to identifying faces
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system, Fairbank said she worries that doing so will take the power of inference away from students. “If you rank schools, you take out all kinds of user interpretations,” she said. “More importantly, I think almost no student that I know reads the methodologies behind the rankings, so they don’t understand what the important factors are that are being weighed and maybe those factors aren’t important to them.” As of now seekUT will not be used for a ranking purpose, Huie said. “We’re providing unbiased information with no judgments so that students can make their own deci-
→ SEEKUT
Editor’s note: In our previous issue, we did not include several LGBTQ groups in the terms box. It was not our intention to exclude any groups. We hope this additional information will contribute to your knowledge of the LGBTQ community.
THE MERCURY | OCT. 20, 2014
UPCOMING EVENTS PINKTOBER FEST Kappa Delta Chi is hosting a fundraising event for American Cancer Society. All the money made that day will be donated to ACS.
Oct. 23, 5 PM - 8 PM The Plinth
SCORE dance class was offered by the School of Arts and Humanities.
Oct. 23 - 25, 8 PM University Theatre
SAFE ZONE ALLY TRAINING Held by the Galerstein Women’s Center for LGBTQ people, ask questions, and learn about issues affecting the LGBTQ campus.
Oct. 24, 11 AM - 4 PM Galaxy Rooms
DIWALI: FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
VIVA VOLUNTEER
ORCHESTRA AND WIND ENSEMBLE
Henna, food and performances at the 4th annual Diwali celebration presented by SUAAB, ISA and Hindu Student Association.
UT Dallas’ annual service day that provides students the opportunity to serve the community on national Make a Difference Day.
Featuring the Wind Ensemble under the direction of Greg Hustis And the String Orchestra conducted by Dr. Linda Salisbury.
Oct. 24, 8 PM Student Union Mall
Nov. 4, 8 PM ATEC Lecture Hall
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THE MERCURY | OCT. 20, 2014
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semester; there were two at this time last year. “This is my fifth year here, and every year we see more and more students who have mental-health issues, whether it’s anxiety, depression, long-term or short-term,” Zacharias said. Police officers are required by law to participate in crisisintervention training, which involves recognizing mental illnesses like paranoid schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorder. One of Zacharias’ main focuses is ensuring that UTDPD is trained to recognize and proactively approach students with a mental illness, he said. Both Owens and Zacharias partially attribute the rise of mental-illness cases on campus to enrollment growth, but even so, UTDPD addresses reports of students in some form of distress every week. Changes in a person’s usual behavior, becoming more isolated, missing classes and self-medicating with alcohol or other substances are all telltale signs of a mental health issue, Owens said. Friends and family of an individual with a mental illness should take everything he or she says seriously and assess whether the person has a plan and the means to commit suicide. Offering solutions or using personal experiences as a way to approach the issue is not advised, Willis said. “When you listen to someone, inevitably, you’ll hear the strength they have in themselves,” Willis said. “I can tell you what I’ve been through, what I’ve gone through, but it won’t resonate with you because you and I don’t live the same life. Hearing what they’re saying is the most important.” Explicit suicidal-ideation calls comprise about 6 percent of CONTACT’s total calls. Situations where suicide is imminent make up an even smaller portion of those calls. However, if the program could conduct a suicide-risk assessment on all its callers, most of them would be at some
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“I don’t know; it didn’t hit me. It was more like a numbness,” she said. Mirza, a psychology junior, was driving home from a party with her boyfriend and a friend when their car ran out of gas on President George Bush Turnpike near Preston Road around 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 12. After her boyfriend pulled over to the left shoulder of the highway, a Nissan Altima, traveling east in the left lane, crossed onto the left shoulder and struck their car, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. All three of the occupants were taken to the Medical Center of Plano, where Mirza was later confirmed dead. She was 19 years old. The two other passengers suffered minor injuries.
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UTDMERCURY.COM and that it makes you spiral even faster. If you don’t understand that, it just gets worse.” Following another semester at UT Austin, Miller found it too difficult, so he returned home and worked. He decided to attend the University of North Texas, but his depression re-emerged. During spring break, Miller had a strong verbal fight with his roommate and locked himself in his room, refusing to speak to anyone. It was one of the worst moments of his life, he said, and he considers that period as the point when he was most at risk of suicide. “That’s definitely the time you need to talk to somebody,” Miller said. “That’s the hardest step. If you can make that step to call somebody, I think you’re good, but when you’re in that mindset — not wanting to live anymore — it’s one of the hardest things.” Miller decided to seek counseling and medication in an effort to get better. In retrospect, he said he recognizes communication as a key element in staying healthy. “If you don’t have connections with people, you get lost in your own mind,” Miller said. “There’s a cycle that happens in your mind. A lot of times with my thoughts, I would feel guilty about doing something. Since there was nobody there to tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty, it would get worse. If you don’t have anybody there to support you, you don’t realize that what you’re doing is irrational. You just get stuck.” There is value in creating and fueling a greater dialogue on mental health, he said, and people don’t talk about it enough. “I feel like one of the biggest things is trying to get the stigma out of mental health, and that’s part of the reason I’m here talking,” Miller said. “As someone who has suffered through it, maybe it’ll help others feel like they don’t have to be ashamed.”
Miller has been working at CONTACT for more than a month and a half, and he wants to get the training necessary to pick up calls.
Volunteers go through 42 hours of specialized training: 30 hours in class and 12 hours in the field with a mentor. While he doesn’t have the training, Miller has been on the sidelines of four suicidal-ideation calls since he started working at CONTACT. “Seeing the pain that happens after a crisis or a suicide is really hard,” Miller said. “The suffering that happens is terrible. You don’t realize it’s not just that person who is affected; it’s their family and friends. It’s like a wave of pain.” He said crisis intervention and the work CONTACT does is something he’d like to explore after college, especially considering his own personal experience living with depression. “Understanding it for myself and seeing not only the suffering that I personally had to go through, but also the people around me — my parents, my family and friends,” he said. “I’m trying to help people using (my experience).” Miller said his symptoms of mental illness became apparent 10 years ago during the shift from high school to college. He attended UT Austin for a year before experiencing a particularly taxing depressive episode, he said. “A lot of people are leaving home and they have this freedom, but there’s no support,” he said. “You’re kind of out there without the support you’re used to. With school and social pressures, it can get to be really tough, especially during that time.” Worried, a friend of Miller’s contacted his parents after noticing he wasn’t answering any calls. Miller’s parents drove to Austin to take him home. Soon after, a psychologist diagnosed him with depression. It took Miller time to process and understand his mental illness. He said that even after his diagnosis, he wasn’t ready to accept it. “Once you understand the illness that you have, you have to understand your limits as a person,” Miller said. “When I was deep in depression, I would stay up all night and sleep during the day. I would just isolate myself. You have to understand that just makes the circle even smaller
DPS troopers arrested the driver of the Altima, who did not sustain injuries, on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, according to DPS. The accident is currently under investigation. Jacob and Mirza met while at Ranchview High School in Farmers Branch, but they became inseparable when they both came to UTD. Jacob said Mirza was the kind of person who could go up to anyone and make a friend. Anytime Jacob would introduce herself, the first thing people would do is recognize her as Mirza’s friend, Jacob said. “You have no idea how many friends she’s met just because she thought someone looked lonely and someone needed someone to talk to,” Jacob said. “I’ve never seen someone else like that … Everybody had fun with her.” Jacob described Mirza as extremely close to her younger brother and sister. Her mother, Shoba Mirza,
said her daughter was like a mother and mentor to her siblings. “She would love to counsel them. She would love to advise them from her little experience,” Shoba said. “Whatever she had, she would always try to advise them and show them a different point of view.” Mirza was very interested in poetry and could write about any topic, Shoba said. Mirza, who was born in India and lived there for the first three years of her life, was very connected to her native culture and was one of the few younger members of her family who could speak Hindi. She was the oldest grandchild on her maternal side of the family and an academic role model for her younger cousins, Shoba said. “They looked up to her, especially for her achievements,” she said. “She had set such a high bar for her SAT scores that even now all the kids that are in high
school, their parents are like, ‘You know what? You need to at least come close to Shifa’s scores.’” Mirza’s focus was on psychology, and, one day, she wanted to be a counselor. She specifically wanted to help those who had dealt with domestic abuse, Jacob said. She had always wanted to be a doctor but didn’t start focusing on becoming a counselor until she started taking psychology courses, Shoba said. Mirza, who was a registered organ donor, based her religious views on the idea of helping others as much as possible, Jacob said. “Her view on God was, basically, he’s there,” Jacob said. “He gave you life. He made a beautiful universe, so you have to be a beautiful soul in that universe. That’s her theory. What she saw was right was to help everyone as much as possible. She saw that as her commandment. She did, even to her very last breath, she did.”
risk for suicide, Willis said. He said he believes proactive discussion is an important step. Awareness programs and trainings on suicide and mental health in schools help young adults become aware of the signs and better equipped to approach mental illness, he said. A common misconception regarding discussion about suicide is that mentioning it acts as a trigger for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts, Willis said. “That’s very untrue,” he said. “Letting people know that it’s more common than you think and being in a place where people can get information about mental illness is always helpful from any kind of media source.” CONTACT uses a model of crisis intervention based on American psychologist Carl Rogers’ theory, which stresses a humanistic approach to psychotherapy. “The goal is to make sure the person is heard and that we’re listening to them,” Willis said. “For some people, the power of conversation with someone else is all they need while they’re in a crisis.” CONTACT has cases of college-aged people with suicidal ideation, he said, but the majority of calls CONTACT receives concern troubled relationships, whether they are platonic or intimate. The hotline also receives a significant amount of calls dealing with the Internet and social media. Ultimately, helping people seek treatment is the end goal for CONTACT. “It’s a good start — talking about (mental illness),” Willis said. “Like with anything, we can talk all day about it, but we have to do something about it to make any kind of change. I think that getting people into some kind of place where they can seek help is the bigger goal.” ***
Additional reporting by Karena Tsai