Tuesday, February 28, 2012 I TechNews campus@technewsiit.com UTSAV GANDHI 3 Active Minds presents ‘Heard Speaker: An Open Conversation' By Elyse Doll & Kyle Pancham TECHNEWS WRITERS When you hear the words “Mental Disorder", what comes to your mind? When you hear that someone has a mental illness, how do you view them? Unfortunately, our society paints a negative image about people who suffer from mental illnesses! However, there is a movement to fight against these stereotypes and prove that being diagnosed with a mental illness does not mean that you are or should be considered any less of a person! Today’s reality of the world suggests that discussions on mental illness are strongly in need of a spotlight! The National Survey on Drug Use and Health sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that oneeinefive Americans experienced some type of mental illness in the past year alone! Inthe IIT undergraduate community, that is 460 friends and fellow students who are suffering in silence , and the numbers are getting higher each day Suicide, one of the most traumatic tragedies that can strike a family or community, is the second highest cause of death among the college population! The most dangerous aspect of mental illness, however, is the stigma associated with having been diagnosed! A mental health diagnosis is loaded with judgment and a misinformed public, causing some people to never seek help at all when it is so obviously needed! However, is having a mental illness any different than having a physical illness? It could be lifeelong, or it could be shortelived; you might need to take medication or see a doctor, but those are all the same things you would normally do if you felt that you were getting sick Like any physical illness, if you ignore your symptoms, they are going to get worse! However, being educated about the symptoms of a disease helps to prevent it or detect it early, whether it be physical or mental! Active Minds is a national organization that is committed to the promotion of mental health issues on college campuses (taken from their national mission statement)! As the IIT Chapter of Active Minds, it is our job to spread awareness, support and education of mental illnesses and to provide resources and outlets for any who need help! Currently we’re looking for new members who are interested in and/ or feel strongly about reaching out to students with mental illnesses and to create an overall awareness about mental illness and what people can do to help! For this semester, we’re focusing on not only creating a broader outreach to all students, but we’re also recruiting more members! As such, we’ve got some pretty cool events to look forward to , one of our biggest events this semester is coming up pretty soon! Keep reading for more details! Heard Speaker: An Open Conversation about Mental Health (March 15) The Heard Speaker event is focused on providing an outlook on the college life of an individual who has a mental illness , their struggles, their triumphs, and give a real picture of what it means to have a mental illness while in college! Our speaker will be Active Minds national program manager Margaret Bertram, and she’ll be giving her speech in the MTCC Welcome Center from 7:30pme9:00pm! Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend! Sponsored by SAF and brought to you by Active Minds and GLAM! In addition to that we’ll be hosting a National Stress Out Week (April 15the21st) during which Active Minds will be presenting awesome events on campus , to not only provide information on Mental Illnesses, but to relieve some stress in the face of oncoming exams! Some of our events will include: A Star Iar: Receive some nice quotations/sayings to get you through finals or other stressful moments Playwith Clay (You pretty much get the idea) Movie Night! (This will sum up the week, and we’ll be having a debrief afterwards about the realities of mental illness versus Hollywood) In short, we have some pretty cool stuff planned and we’d like you guys to attend some events and become more aware of mental illness! If you’d like any more information, please email us at activemindsiiit@gmail!com or visit our website at omegaicsriitredul~aml Humanities Department sponsors undergrad writing contest By Lewis Department of Humanities Fulletime IIT undergraduate stue dents are invited to enter the 47th Annual Writing Contest, sponsored by IIT’s Lew, is Department of Humanities! (Fulletime is defined as being enrolled for at least 12 credit hours in the Spring 2012 semester!) Winners will be announced Wednesday, April 4, on the Humanie ties Website at http:/ / gooigl/ KC GyS! Please do not call the Humanities Depart, ment to inquire whether you have won! Contest Rules: . Entries may include fiction, poetry, plays, nonfiction (such as essays, reviews, and technical or scientific papers), and essays by freshman! Nonfiction (includ ing essays by freshman) should be read, able by an educated person with no spe cial training in the subject of the essay . All entries must include an entry form as a cover sheet attached to each en, try Forms are available in 218 Siegel Hall, or you can download one on the Hue manities Website at http://gooigl/Kme3! . All entries must be submitted in duplicate! One should be keyboarded, doubleespaced, on 8.5 x 11 paper! Do not put your name on the paper copy itself or any of its pages! Deliver paper submise sions to Susan Mallgrave at the Lewis De partment of Humanities, 218 Siegel Hall! Prizes will be awarded in four categories: Edwin H. Lewis Prize for Fiction Edwin H. Lewis Prize for Nonfiction Freshman Essay Prize Mollie Cohen Prize for Poetry First $300 $300 $300 $300 Second Third $200 $100 $200 $100 $200 $100 $200 $100 Reception for all entrants, with awarding of prizes: Wednesday, April 11, 2012. Deadline for submissions: 12:00 pm. on Monday, March 26, 2012. The second copy should be submitted as an MS Word IDOC or IDOCX file to iite writingcontest@gmail!comi The file name should be LastnameINonfictiondoc, LastnameIPoetrydoc, LastnameIFiction! doc, or LastnameIFreshmanIdoc, depend, ing on the category it is to be entered into! . You may enter several categoe ries, and you may submit more than one entry in a category Limit of one prize per category to any one student. . You are encouraged to submit work that has been the subject of a class assign, ment, but be sure to send a clean copy, free of any comments, marks, or grades! . Entries will not be re, turned, so keep a copy . All submitted short stories and plays will be considered for the Ed win H! Lewis Prize for Fiction . All submitted poems or groups of poems will be considered for the Mollie Cohen Poetry Prize, which seeks to hone or the effort to master the art of poetry rather than the exhibition of emotions! You may submit all the poems you wish; however, multiple poems by the same student will be judged as a single entry . All submitted nonfiction will be considered for the Ed win H! Lewis Prize for Nonfiction . All submitted freshman es, says will be considered for the Fresh, man Essay Prize! Freshman is defined as any student who is in their first year of fulletime college enrollment! . Authors retain all rights to their works; however, the authors grant IIT, the Humanities Department, and TechNews the rights to pub, lish their works for one calendar year, from April 4, 2012 , April 4, 2013! Academic departments host educational colloquia at IIT By Swasthi Khuntia LAYOUT EDITOR Last week, IIT wit, nessed a series of colloquia organized by various departments like the Applied Math, Chemistry, Physics and Humanities! Kicking off the series of colloquia, the Applied Math Department hosted an in, teresting lecture on “A Study on the Degree, Based Conditions for Hamiltonian Properties" The lecture was delivered by Dr! ShineShin Kao, Visiting Professor at University of South, ern California! In this invited talk, Dr Kao talked about the survey of some welleknown theorems regarding graphs being hamiltoe nian or with stronger hamiltonian properties! Recently, it was found that most graphs satise fying the conditions in these theorems were indeed with the same Hamiltonian properties even when some faults occur! Namely, except for certain cases, these theorems imply graphs with faultetolerant Hamiltonian, Hamiltoe nian connected, or r’teconnected accordingly Graph terminologies which were thought to be jargons were well introduced and audiences without any background were welcome to attend the colloquium! The re, sponse was very good! Dr! Lulu Kang, Assistant Professor in the Applied Math Department co, ordinated the entire event! The Chemistry De partment at IIT presented this week the topic “New CeC, ON, and 00 Bond Formations via the N70 Bond Cleavage and Rearrangement of OeVinyl Oximes and Hydroxylamine Ethers’! The invited talk was delivered by Dr! Laura Anderson, Assistant Professor, De partment of Chemistry at University of II, linois, Chicago! Dr! Laura’s research group is interested in expanding the scope, tolere ance, and application of known pericyclic transformations as well developing and con trolling new types of pericyclic reactions! The goal of her research group is to design new methods to provide general solu tions to practical problems using both physi cal organic and organoemetallic mechanistic studies in order to fully understand, control, and exploit the transformations we investigate! In her talk, Dr! Anderson talked about sigmatropic rearrangements of allyl vinyl ethers that are used extensively for the stereoselective preparation of new CeC bonds! Citing her interest in exploiting the analogous transformations of Oevinyl oximes and Oevinyl hydroxylamines to develop the synthetic utility of these compounds as valuable new intermee diates for the preparation of challenging CeC, ON, and C70 bonds, she presented the use of the sigmatropic rearrangements of Oevinyl ox, imes and Oevinyl hydroxylamines for the facile synthesis of pyrroles and aeoxygenatedketones! A health conscious colloquium was organized by the Physics Department at IIT on “Risks of Cancer Associated with Ionize ing Radiation’! The talk was presented by Dr Otto Raabe, Professor Emeritus, Center for Health & The Environment at University of California, Davis! He talked about his analy sis of the human radium cases and of internal emitter studies with beagles, show that can cer risk associated with a protracted ionizing radiation exposure is a nonlinear function of lifetime average dose rate to the affected tissues with a virtual threshold at low doses! Cancer induction risk for a pro, tracted ionizing radiation exposure is not pro, portional to cumulative radiation absorbed dose! In sharp contrast published studies of about 80,000 Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 characterize the observed increases in population cancer rates as linearly associ ated with ionizing radiation absorbed dose! This linearity has been the basis for assuming that radiation induced cancer fol, lows a linear noethreshold (LNT) dosimetric relationship! The LNT hypothesis has been used in establishing ionizing radiation pro, tection standards and for risk assessment! At the end, Dr! Raaabe emphae sized that an understanding of these ap parently conflicting phenomena leads to a surprising new interpretation of these re, sults with important implications for rae diation safety standards and risk assessment!