May 29, Vol. 24, No. 44                                  

Kennywood Picnic is June 14;
Tickets On Sale Monday  

Carnegie Mellon's Employee Picnic at Kennywood Park, presented by Staff Council, will be held Saturday, June 14. Pavilion 14 will be reserved all day for CMU employees and their families.  

 

A prize giveaway for children 10 years of age and younger will be held at 4 p.m. followed by an adult raffle at 4:15 p.m. You must present your CMU ID to claim a prize. Ice cream will be given away to everyone beginning at 4 p.m.

Employees can purchase one ticket for $10 with their CMU ID (valid on the June 14 picnic day only), up to four additional tickets for $17 each, and up to five more tickets for $22 each. Sandcastle ($22) and Idlewild ($25.99) tickets also will be available. Please note, the $10 and $17 ticket is available to Carnegie Mellon employees only. All individuals with a sponsored ID can purchase the $22 funday tickets.

 

The following are dates, times and locations for the ticket sales. Tickets must be purchased with cash only.

  • June 2, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Cohon University Center
  • June 3, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Cohon University Center      
  • June 4, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Mellon Institute      
  • June 4, 4:30 - 5:30 p.m., Cohon University Center    
  • June 10, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Cohon University Center      
  • June 11, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Cohon University Center      
  • June 13, 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Cohon University Center

If you have any questions, please contact Sharon Cavlovich at [email protected] or Nicole Stenger at [email protected].


"Lucky After Dark" Exhibit To Premiere May 30      
The Pittsburgh Queer History Project, an oral history and media preservation initiative directed by Carnegie Mellon's Harrison Apple and Tim Haggerty, will present its first exhibit, "Lucky After Dark: Gay and Lesbian Nightlife in Pittsburgh, 1960-1990," from May 30 through June 29 at Future Tenant Gallery.

"Lucky After Dark" explores the role that after-hours nightlife in postwar Pittsburgh (pictured at right) played in establishing and shaping gay and lesbian identities.

Apple, CMU's Center for the Arts in Society (CAS) artist-in-residence and a 2013 graduate of the BXA Intercollege Degree Programs, is the exhibit's curator. He founded the Pittsburgh Queer History Project after uncovering a wealth of information during his undergraduate research into queer urban archeology.

Learn more about the exhibit.

Children Distracted by Decorated Classrooms
Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, new research from Carnegie Mellon shows that too much of a good thing may end up disrupting attention and learning in young children.

P
ublished in Psychological Science, research by Carnegie Mellon's Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman looked at whether classroom displays affected children's ability to maintain focus during instruction and to learn the lesson content.

They found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning gains than when the decorations were removed.

"Young children spend a lot of time - usually the whole day - in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom's visual environment can affect how much children learn," said Fisher, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Read more. 

"RoboCrocs" Aid Water Quality Research in Kenya 
Small, autonomous airboats, disguised to look like crocodiles, helped scientists measure water quality this spring in Kenya's Mara River. An estimated 4,000 hippos use the river as a toilet with potentially deadly effects for fish living downriver.

The airboats, developed at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and operated by a CMU spinoff, Platypus LLC, skimmed over the surface of several hippopotamus pools in the river, where they scanned the river bottom for deposits of hippo dung and made various measurements of water quality.

No human would dare venture onto this brown water in which so many hippos slosh around. But the animals, considered among the most dangerous in Africa, generally tolerated the two-foot-long boats much as they do the river's crocodiles. One did give chase, but briefly.

 

"Those were 30 seconds that none of us will forget," said Paul Scerri, an associate research professor in CMU's Robotics Institute and president of Platypus. In the end, the 13-pound boat, made of vacuum-formed plastic and filled with the same sort of airbags commonly used as packing material in parcels, managed to outrun the 2-1/2 ton hippo.

 

Learn more about this research.

See something? Say something. Help ensure the safety and well-being of the CMU community:
University Police: 412-268-2323
Ethics Hotline: 1-877-700-7050

 Calendar Highlights 

 Personal Mention
  

Jared Cohon
Roberta Klatsky
Naoko Taguchi
Kiron Skinner
Danai Koutra
Carl Bajandas

Carey Morewedge and Colleen Giblin
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