STUDENT LIFE AND SPORTS ON CAMPUS

Summer Stories
The UCSD Guardian was on summer
vacation. Look for headlines again in
the January issue. Here are some UCSD stories that caught our eye.

What a Family!
Deborah Goshorn, ’04, will finish her master’s degree in electrical engineering on a Pentagon Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship, which will provide her with a full ride scholarship in 2005-06. And the rest of her family are no slouches either. Six Goshorn children, ranging from 18 to 28 years old, have nine degrees from the Jacobs School.

Standing Up For Homeless Kids
In the United States, one out of seven kids will run away at least once before they turn 18. Thirteen children die each day on the streets. These shocking statistics led Elizabeth Bugarin, ’05, to start the new student organization Don’t Run Away, which works to encourage children to seek help and support when there are problems at home. Don’t Run Away works with children from grades three through eight. For more information, please email squatter@ucsd.edu.

Revealing the ‘Invisible Children’
For 18 years, Uganda has been ravaged by a brutal civil war that left thousands of children homeless and orphaned. It is a tragedy much of the world has ignored. That is, until three young men from San Diego went there to film their documentary “Invisible Children.” Over the past year, the filmmakers, including Laren Poole, ’06, showed the film across the country to raise money for a refuge in Northern Uganda. They returned to Uganda this past summer to finish their documentary and hope to release it in theaters in summer 2006.

Engineering Service at St. Paul’s Senior Home
An alarm in the nurses station sounds,
signaling that Mrs. Smith’s “smart pendant” has registered a possible fall. Throughout the St. Paul’s Senior Home, technology is helping nurses do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. But this isn’t the work of a major tech firm—it’s all done by UCSD undergraduates.

The Jacobs School of Engineering has brought together multidisciplinary teams of students (Teams In Engineering Services) to design, build and deploy technology-based solutions for community partners. The program was launched last fall, and since then over 40 students have worked on projects for nonprofit organizations
in San Diego.

St. Paul’s CEO Sheryl Wilson commissioned two projects from the students when the Jacobs School approached her. “Technology is difficult to get access to in the not-for-profit world,” says Wilson.

The first project, “Smart Furnishings,” created a compact pendant, equipped with an accelerometer and wireless transmitter. Worn on a lanyard around the neck, the
accelerometer detects a sharp increase in speed if the patient falls, and the transmitter sends a signal alerting the nursing station.
The other team project digitized the
24-Hour Nurses Log, developing a touch screen program for cart-mounted laptops. This allows nurses to fill in important information on patients, while keeping the log consistent and up-to-date. Nurses doing rounds now type in the latest patient vitals right at their carts.

“There is no other class like that, which goes through the whole process of designing, prototyping and finally deploying a product,” says Chris Lee, ’05, team leader in “Digital Nursing.”

Creationism a Good IDEA?
Is intelligent design merely creationism masquerading in a lab coat? In 2001, The New York Times Science section ran an article on the shifting evolution versus creation debate.

“Evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against traditional creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism,” the Times said, “but against a more sophisticated idea: the intelligent design theory.” The article went on to mention various groups sprouting up at universities. Surprisingly UCSD, a campus celebrated for its science, was among the first to start such a group: the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club.

Then last April, the scientific journal Nature noted that many in the scientific community “feel that the very presence of intelligent design in universities is legitimizing the movement and eroding the public’s perception of science.” So is IDEA a good idea?

“It is all about being more aware of what others believe, on both sides,” says club founder Casey Luskin, ’00, M.A. ’01. “What traditionally can be a divisive issue doesn’t have to be. We can have friendly, rational conversations about it.”

The club was started in May 1999, soon after the visit to campus by UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson. Known for his books critiquing Darwinian evolution, Johnson is a leader in the intelligent design movement. Following his visit, Luskin and several others founded the IDEA Club and since then meetings have regularly welcomed 50 or so attendees. Twenty other universities have also opened chapters.
The mission of the club is to promote, as a scientific theory, the idea that life was created by an Intelligent Designer.

“There are undergrads, graduate students and even faculty involved,” says Luskin, who remains part of the club as their community advisor. “It is awesome when the faculty get involved, because
it shows they really care about students learning, even if they don’t agree with their viewpoints.”

However, as the Nature article shows,
faculty aren’t the only ones who disagree with IDEA. It remains a divisive issue, among scientists and religious groups alike.
For more information, please visit http://acs.ucsd.edu/~idea.

—Cliff Notes written by Karla DeVries, ’04