Category: Students Page 20 of 42

Hospital Music ‘A Reminder That There’s Life’

On February 5, 2018

When William Dawson took over the Performing Arts program at Duke Hospital, he became the first full-time staff Musician in Residence and Semans/Byrd Performing Arts Coordinator. As a teacher, band director and international performer, Dawson understood the effect music could have on one’s mood and emotions. Still, he had a challenging task ahead of him – Dawson had to prove that music could make an impact in a hospital setting.

In the spring of 2014, as part of the larger Arts & Health program at Duke Hospital, the department administered a survey. Staff had the opportunity to reflect on what programs had improved their hospital experience. As it turned out, live music was one of the top patient satisfiers. Armed with the information, Arts & Health chose to expand the Performing Arts program.

The Performing Arts program differs from music therapy, where board certified professionals work one-on-one or in small groups to achieve a personalized goal. Instead, it is composed of Artists in Residence, Performing Arts Volunteers and Hospital Concerts. Throughout the week, professional musicians are assigned to hospital units to visit patients at the bedside. The professional musicians play for relaxation, company, religious services, and special events including birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and the final moments of life.

Performing Arts Volunteers are students and community members who perform in hospital lobbies and concourses. To assess the musicians’ audience, Dawson used a handheld tally counter and noted that on average, 600-800 people pass through the hospital’s heavily trafficked areas per hour. The instrumental music provides an opportunity for a shared connection, he said.

“It’s like a magic trick,” Dawson said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been playing there piano and a person has cried. It’s beautiful – it’s a reminder that there’s life.”

Hospital Concerts are offered periodically by the Artists in Residence and professional organizations. Recognizing the diversity of the hospital staff and patients, Dawson ensures that performers reflect a variety of backgrounds and can cater to a wide audience.

Since becoming coordinator, Dawson has been statistically analyzing the growth of the program, because potential donors and current financial backers would like to see measurable impact. Dawson has the figures: In the 2016-2017 fiscal year, the number of bedside requests increased by 282 percent, from 109 to 416. To match demand, the number of Performing Arts Volunteers increased by 120 percent and 1,156 hours of live music were performed.

In the future, Dawson looks forward to continued program expansion. Additional funding would also enable the Uke i n Duke program, a hospital in-patient instructional ukulele program, to expand and serve more patients. With Dawson’s leadership and a dedicated team of professional musicians and volunteers, the Performing Arts program has an undeniable impact.

Post by Ameya Sanyal

Researchers Get Superman’s X-ray Vision

By Robin Smith

On February 2, 2018

In Animals, Biology, Cardiology, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Students, Visualization

X-ray vision just got cooler. A technique developed in recent years boosts researchers’ ability to see through the body and capture high-resolution images of animals inside and out.

This special type of 3-D scanning reveals not only bones, teeth and other hard tissues, but also muscles, blood vessels and other soft structures that are difficult to see using conventional X-ray techniques.

Researchers have been using the method, called diceCT, to visualize the internal anatomy of dozens of different species at Duke’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF).

There, the specimens are stained with an iodine solution that helps soft tissues absorb X-rays, then placed in a micro-CT scanner, which takes thousands of X-ray images from different angles while the specimen spins around. A computer then stitches the scans into digital cross sections and stacks them, like slices of bread, to create a virtual 3-D model that can be rotated, dissected and measured as if by hand.

Here’s a look at some of the images they’ve taken:

See-through shrimp

If you get flushed after a workout, you’re not alone — the Caribbean anemone shrimp does too.

Recent Duke Ph.D. Laura Bagge was scuba diving off the coast of Belize when she noticed the transparent shrimp Ancylomenes pedersoni turn from clear to cloudy after rapidly flipping its tail.

To find out why exercise changes the shrimp’s complexion, Bagge and Duke professor Sönke Johnsen and colleagues compared their internal anatomy before and after physical exertion using diceCT.

In the shrimp cross sections in this video, blood vessels are colored blue-green, and muscle is orange-red. The researchers found that more blood flowed to the tail after exercise, presumably to deliver more oxygen-rich blood to working muscles. The increased blood flow between muscle fibers causes light to scatter or bounce in different directions, which is why the normally see-through shrimp lose their transparency.

Peer inside the leg of a mouse

Duke cardiologist Christopher Kontos, M.D., and MD/PhD student Hasan Abbas have been using the technique to visualize the inside of a mouse’s leg.

The researchers hope the images will shed light on changes in blood vessels in people, particularly those with peripheral artery disease, in which plaque buildup in the arteries reduces blood flow to the extremities such as the legs and feet.

The micro-CT scanner at Duke’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility made it possible for Abbas and Kontos to see structures as small as 13 microns, or a fraction of the width of a human hair, including muscle fibers and even small arteries and veins in 3-D.

Take a tour through a tree shrew

DiceCT imaging allows Heather Kristjanson at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to digitally dissect the chewing muscles of animals such as this tree shrew, a small mammal from Southeast Asia that looks like a cross between a mouse and a squirrel. By virtually zooming in and measuring muscle volume and the length of muscle fibers, she hopes to see how strong they were. Studying such clues in modern mammals helps Kristjanson and colleagues reconstruct similar features in the earliest primates that lived millions of years ago.

Try it for yourself

Students and instructors who are interested in trying the technique in their research are eligible to apply for vouchers to cover SMIF fees. People at Duke University and elsewhere are encouraged to apply. For more information visit https://smif.pratt.duke.edu/Funding_Opportunities, or contact Dr. Mark Walters, Director of SMIF, via email at mark.walters@duke.edu.

Located on Duke’s West Campus in the Fitzpatrick Building, the SMIF is a shared use facility available to Duke researchers and educators as well as external users from other universities, government laboratories or industry through a partnership called the Research Triangle Nanotechnology Network. For more info visit http://smif.pratt.duke.edu/.

Post by Robin Smith, News and Communications

Martin Brooke: Mentoring Students Toward an X Prize for Ocean Robotics

By Guest Post

On December 26, 2017

In Climate/Global Change, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Guest Post, Students

We know less about the ocean floor than the surface of the moon. As one of the most unexplored areas of the world, multiple companies have begun to incentivize ingenuity towards exploring the oceans. Among these organizations are the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and X Prize.

Martin Brooke, second from left, and the student team with their giant drone.

Martin Brooke, an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, is presently leading a group of students who are working on mapping the ocean floor in an efficient way for the X Prize challenge.

Brooke said “open ended problems where you don’t know what to do” inspire him to do research about ocean engineering and design.

Martin Brooke

Collaborating with professors at the Duke Marine Lab that “strap marine sensors on whales” was a simple lead-in to starting a class about ocean engineering a few years ago. His teaching philosophy includes presenting the students with problems that make them think, “we want to do this, but we have no idea how.”

Before working on a drone that drops sensor pods down into the ocean to map the ocean floor, Brooke and his students built a sensor that could be in the ocean for a month or more and take pH readings every five seconds for a previous X Prize challenge.

Addressing the issues that many fisheries faced, he told me that he met an oyster farmer in Seattle who wished that there were pH sensors in the bay because sometimes tides bring in “waves of high pH water into the sound and kill all of the oysters without warning.” Citing climate change as the cause for this rise in pH, Brooke explained how increased carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into the water and raises the acidity. Emphasizing how “there’s not enough data on it,” it’s clear that knowing more about our oceans is beneficial economically and ecologically.

Guest Post by Sofia Sanchez, a senior at North Carolina School of Math and Science

Anita Layton: A Model of STEM Versatility

By Guest Post

On December 22, 2017

In Biomedical Engineering, Guest Post, Mathematics, Medicine, Students

Using mathematics to model the kidney and its biological systems is a field of study located at the intersection of two disciplines.

Anita Layton is a math professor at Duke. (Photo by Chris Hildreth, Duke Photography)

But for Duke’s Anita Layton, PhD, the Robert R. and Katherine B. Penn Professor of Mathematics and a professor of biomedical engineering, that just adds to the fun of it.

Growing up, with her father as the head of mathematics at her school, she was always told she was going to be a mathematician just like him. So she knew that was the last thing she wanted to do.

When Layton arrived as an undergraduate at Duke, she began a major in physics, but she seemed rather cursed when it came to getting correct results from her experiments. She settled for a BA in physics, but her academic journey was far from over. She had also taken a computer science course at Duke and fallen in love with it. If an experiment went wrong “things didn’t smell or blow up” and you could fix your mistake and move on, she said.

While pursuing her PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto, Layton was performing very math-oriented computer science, working with and analyzing numbers. However, it would be a while before biology entered the mix

While she was never good at dissections, she told me she was always good at understanding things that ‘flow’ and she came to the realization that blood is something that flows. She thought, “Hey, I can do that.

Anita Layton, Ph.D.

Layton began creating programs that could solve the equations that model blood flow quickly, using her background in computer science. She then started learning about physiology, focusing on the renal system, and making models

It was a journey that took her to many different places, with pit stops and U-turns throughout many different fields. Had Layton stuck with just physics or computer science or math, she never would have ventured out and found this field that she is an expert in now.

It’s her interest in many different fields that has set Layton apart from many other people in the STEM field. In learning a wide variety of things, she has gotten better at computer science, mathematics, biology, physics, and more

When asked about what advice she would give her younger self, or any young person going into college, it would be to do just that: “Learn more things that you’re not good at.” She encouraged just taking a chemistry or biology class once in a while, or a philosophy course that makes you think in ways that you don’t normally. It’s often in those classes that you unearth things that can truly set your life in a completely different direction, Layton said, and she’s living proof of that.

Cecilia Poston

Guest Post by Cecilia Poston, a senior at North Carolina School of Science and Math

Glitter and Jell-O Reveal the Science of Oobleck

By Kara Manke

On December 13, 2017

In Chemistry, Faculty, Physics, Students

A black and white image showing a circular disk dropping into a container of oobleck

Mixing black glitter with oobleck allowed researchers to track the movement of individual cornstarch particles after a sudden impact. A computer program locked onto pieces of glitter and illustrated their motion. Credit: Melody Lim.

What do gelatin and glitter have to do with serious science? For some experiments, a lot! Duke alumna Melody Lim used jiggly Jell-O and a just a pinch of glitter to solve a scientific mystery about the curious goo many like to call oobleck.

To the uninitiated, oobleck is almost magic. The simple mixture of cornstarch and water feels solid if you squeeze it, but moments later runs through your fingers like water. You can dance across a bathtub full of oobleck, but stand still for too long and you will be sucked into a goopy mess. Not surprisingly, the stuff is a Youtube favorite.

Oobleck is an example of what scientists call a non-Newtonian fluid, a liquid whose viscosity – how easily it changes shape and flows – depends upon the force that is applied. But exactly how it is that this material switches from solid to liquid and back again has remained a mystery to scientists.

A piece of gelatin being squeezed viewed through a circular polarizer

This blogger mixed up a batch of jello to see the photoelastic effect for herself. When viewed with polarized light – from an iPhone screen and a circular polarizer – the jello changes color when squeezed.

“Water is simple to understand, and so is cornstarch,” said Lim, ’16, who is currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago. “However, a combination of the two produces this ‘liquid’ that ripples and flows, solidifies beneath your feet if you run on it, then turns back into a liquid if you stop running and stand still. I wanted to know why.”

The question beguiling scientists was whether sudden impact causes the cornstarch particles to “jam” into a solid like cement, or whether the suspension remains liquid but simply moves too slowly for its liquid-like properties to be apparent — similar to what happens if you skip a rock off the surface of a lake.

“There are these two opposing pictures,” said Robert Behringer, James B. Duke Professor of Physics at Duke. “Either you squish the material and turn it into cement temporarily, or you simply transmit the stress from the impactor straight to the boundary.”

Lim did two sets of experiments to find out which way oobleck works. In one experiment, she mixed black glitter into a transparent channel filled with oobleck, and then used a high-speed camera to watch how the material responded to the impact. The glitter let her track the motion of individual particles after the disc hit.

A piece of gelatin changes color when you squeeze it.

The photoelastic effect in gelatin.

Her video shows that the particles near the impact site jam and become solid, forming what the researchers call a “mass shock” wave that travels slowly through the suspension.

In a second set of experiments, Lim placed the oobleck in a container lined with gelatin, the main ingredient in Jell-O – besides sugar and food dye, of course. Gelatin is what is called a photoelastic material, which means that applying pressure bends light that travels through it, like a prism.

“Next time you eat Jell-O, get out your sunglasses and get somebody else’s sunglasses and look between them,” Behringer said. “Because if you give it a shake you should see all these stress patterns bouncing around.”

After the metal disc hit the oobleck, the gelatin let Lim see how fast the resulting pressure wave traveled through the material and reached the boundary.

A black and white image showing pressure waves traveling through a transparent material after impact

The researchers poured oobleck into a clear container lined with gelatin, a material that bends light when a pressure is applied to it. They saw that the force of a sudden impact is rapidly transmitted through the oobleck and to the boundary with the gelatin. Credit: Melody Lim.

They found that when the impact is sudden, the pressure wave traveled to the gelatin boundary faster than the “mass shock” wave. This means that the reason oobleck appears solid after a sudden impact is because the force of the collision is quickly transmitted to a solid boundary.

“If you are running across the water, that actually puts you into an impact velocity range where the pressure wave is significantly faster than the mass shock,” Behringer said. “Whereas if you try to walk across it, the impact speeds are slow, and the system actually doesn’t have the ability to transport the momentum quickly through the material and so you just sink in.”

“If you’d told me when I started that I would line a narrow container with Jell-o, add cornstarch, water, and black glitter, drop a piece of metal on it, then publish a paper on the results, I would have laughed at you,” Lim said.

CITATION: “Force and Mass Dynamics in Non-Newtonian Suspensions,” Melody X. Lim, Jonathan Barés, Hu Zheng and Robert P. Behringer. Physical Review Letters, Nov. 3, 2017. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.184501

Post by Kara Manke

Panic in the Poster Session!

By Karl Bates

On November 28, 2017

In Art, Biology, Science Communication & Education, Students, Visualization

For their recent retreat, Regeneration Next tried something a little different for the time-honored poster session.

Rather than simply un-tubing that poster they took to the American Association of Whatever a few months ago, presenters were asked to DRAW their poster fresh and hot on a plain sheet of white paper in 15 minutes, using nothing more than an idea and a couple of markers.

Concerns were shared, shall we say, with the leadership of the regenerative medicine initiative when the rules were announced.

“People are always nervous about something they haven’t tried before,” said Regeneration Next Executive Director Sharlini Sankaran. “There was a lot of anxiety about the new format and how they would explain their research without charts and graphs.”

There was palpable poster panic as the retreat moved to the wide open fifth floor of the Trent Semans Center in the late afternoon. Administrative coordinator Tiffany Casey had spread out a rainbow of brand-new sharpies and the moveable bulletin boards stood in neat, numbered ranks with plain white sheets of giant post-it paper.

After some nervous laughter and a few attempts at color-swapping, the trainees and junior faculty got down to drawing their science on the wobbly tackboards.

And then, it worked! It totally worked. “I think I saw a lot more interactivity and conversation,” Sankaran said.

A fist-full of colorful sharpies gave Valentina Cigliola a colorful launching point for some good conversations about spinal cord repair, rather than just standing there mutely while visitors read and read and read.

Louis-Jan Pilaz used the entire height of the giant post-it notes to draw a beautifully detailed neuron, with labeled parts explaining how the RNA-binding protein FMRP does some neat tricks during development of the cortex.

Delisa Clay’s schematics of fruitfly cells having too many chromosomes made it easier to explain. Well, that and maybe a glass of wine.

Jamie Garcia used her cell-by-cell familiarity with the zebrafish to make a bold, clear illustration of notochord development and the fish’s amazing powers of self-repair.

Don’t you think Lihua Wang’s schematic of experimental results is so much more clear than a bunch of panels of tiny text and bar charts?

In the post-retreat survey, Sankaran said people either absolutely loved the draw-your-poster or hated it, but the Love group was much larger.

“Those who hated it felt they couldn’t represent data accurately with hand-drawn charts and graphs,” Sankaran said. “Or that their artistic skills were ‘being judged’.”

A few folks also pointed out that the drawing approach might work against people with a disability of some sort – a concern Sankaran said they will try to address next time.

There WILL be a next time, she added. “I had a few trainees come up to me to say they weren’t sure how it was going to go, but then they said they had fun!”

Post and pix by Karl Leif Bates, whose hand-drawn poster on working with the news office contained no data and was largely ignored.

Duke’s Solar Benches Can Charge Your Phone

By Will Sheehan

On November 13, 2017

In Climate/Global Change, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Students

Aren’t the benches at Duke great? They’re nice structures where you can chill with your friends, eat your Panda Express, get homework done, or maybe even nap. But haven’t you ever been working on a bench outside the Bryan Center around dusk, and it’s getting hard to see those Econ notes? Or cursed under your breath because it’s such a beautiful day outside, but your laptop is about to die?

Benches with solar power have been installed in three spots, including the McClendon Bridge.

Yeah, me too.

That’s exactly what inspired Gerry Chen, a Junior here at Duke, to create the “Solar Bench.” With the support of Smart Home and ESG, Gerry adapted an ordinary swinging bench at Duke into one with iPhone chargers and fully controllable LED strip lights. So fear no more! Now you can send all the snaps you want on your phone without worries of draining your battery, or grind out hours of multi homework while watching the sunset. The best part? It’s all solar powered!

November 6-9 was Energy Week, and on Monday mechanical engineer Shomik Verma presented the “Smart Home Demo,” which featured the inception, design, and implementation of the Solar Bench idea (1). The main motive behind the benches is “to increase the vision and awareness of renewable energy around Duke.” In this sense Gerry took something that started off as a cool way to stay outside after dark, and expanded it into a mode of adding renewable energy to Duke’s campus.

Beneath the canopy is a weatherproof box with a power controller and a bunch of dongles.

These benches are a great addition, especially now that it gets dark at like 5:40 (I mean, come on). Right now there’s three of them—one on the McClendon Bridge, one in the Few Quad, and one at the Smart Home (which you should check out, too—there’s tons of cool stuff there).

It kind of seems like these benches can’t do that much, but keep in mind this is still a relatively new project which started in May. One upgrade that could be happening soon is implementing a way to monitor energy and bench usage. But Gerry’s also got some bigger plans in store. With “Gen 2” he hopes to add more durability, Wifi, laptop chargers, and even motion sensing technology. Now that’s a decked-out bench! There’s more solar benches to come, too. Gerry hopes to make the installation easier and ultimately increase production, especially on East Campus.

Right now, it costs about $950 to make one of these solar benches. Each one has a 250 Watt solar panel sitting on the roof that absorbs energy from the sun and stores it in a big battery at one end of the bench. Underneath the canopy, there’s a thing called a “charge controller” that takes the energy from the sun and battery and distributes it appropriately to the lights and chargers. That’s also where the on / off switch is, as well as knobs to adjust the brightness and color of the lights. On a full charge, the battery can last for four days with no more additional sunlight. Even late in the night, the bench has you covered.

Will demonstrates a proper solar-powered chill.

That’s what’s so cool about solar energy. It almost seems too easy. These benches are saving energy while also using a renewable source. In the process, they’re doing their part to inspire Duke to become a greener campus. In Shomik’s words, this is the sort of technology “that will revolutionize the daily lives of people throughout the world.”

Free, clean energy, that just powers this bad-ass bench nonstop? Who knew a star 93 million miles away could be so useful?!

By Will Sheehan

Oral Histories of the Gulag

By Ameya Sanyal

On November 10, 2017

In Faculty, Students

Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile (2011), edited by Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, brings interviews with Gulag survivors to English-speaking audiences. In an interview with Gheith, she reflected on how she began her research on the Soviet forced labor camps called Gulags, ethical complications and different kinds of research opportunities for students.

Dr. Jehanne M. Gheith, Associate Professor of Russian Culture at Duke University and Licensed Clinical Social Worker for Duke Hospice

In the early 1990s, Gheith taught a Gulag memoir to Duke students and realized that while students are aware of the Holocaust, their knowledge on Gulags is limited. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, it was possible for Gheith to interview Gulag survivors. She and her co-editor, Katherine Jolluck, connected ten years later when Jolluck was a professor at Stanford. Jolluck had published Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union During World War II, a book about Polish women in the Gulag, the two embarked on a collaborative partnership. Taking the interviews Gheith had conducted, she and Jolluck added archival sections and reviewed the interviews.

Memoirs and scholarly works differ from collections of interviews. Gheith felt it was important to conduct a project where she and others could hear the stories of survivors. An influential source that she consulted was the The Gulag Archipelago 1981-1956 (1973) by Nobel Literature Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago covers three volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience in the Russian Gulags and his critiques on the Stalin regime.

To find interview subjects for the oral project, Gheith contacted the Russian civil rights organization Memorial. She also interviewed people outside of Memorial using what she described as a “snowball sample.” To piece together the fragmented memories of survivors, Gheith listened and transcribed the stories in the order they were remembered with connecting passages of text. Though time can lead to the misrepresentation of facts, Gheith said, “the facts may be wrong, but you can get to emotional truths.” People may incorrectly recall small details due to numerous factors – nevertheless, through Memorial, Gheith and Jolluck were able to verify key records of camp survivors, showing the years they were in the camps and the kinds of work they did there.

There were ethical complications Gheith had to surmount – participants could be reluctant to speak about their experiences and expressed surprise that audiences were interested in their memories. Some interviewees were fearful of the Gulag re-occurring and needed to be connected to support resources upon being asked about their encounters.

Gheith also needed to be vigilant about the context and history surrounding Gulags. Because Gulag survivors may have been forced to sign false confessions in the labor camps, Gheith had approval from the Institutional Review Board to secure verbal agreements on tape in lieu of consent forms.

For students conducting interviews, Gheith suggested reading an oral history, communicating with experts and beginning with a smaller project. Additionally, she had two key points: 1) it is crucial to gain approval from the Institutional Review Board to work with human subjects and 2) if conducting research in a foreign language, the choice between a translator or transcriber should be carefully made, as a translator may shift the relationship dynamic.

In the future, Gheith will be connecting her clinical work to Russian literature and culture. She believes that for students interested in medicine, the arts and humanities have a significant connection to scientific research. Storytelling is also a key part of law and policy, and as students begin to conduct studies in these fields, they are likely to find that the ability to weave a narrative is an indispensable skill. Gheith said she would be happy to talk about the connections between story and medicine with any interested students.

By Ameya Sanyal

Library’s Halloween Exhibit Fascinates and Thrills

By Daniel Egitto

On November 1, 2017

In Art, Behavior/Psychology, Science Communication & Education, Students

Research is not always for the faint of heart.

Screamfest V combed through centuries of Rubenstein materials to find the very spookiest of artifacts

At least, that’s what Rubenstein Library seemed to be saying this Halloween with the fifth installment of its sometimes freaky, always fascinating “Screamfest” exhibition. With everything from centuries-old demonology textbooks, to tarot cards, to Duke-based parapsychology studies, Screamfest V took a dive into the deep end of the research Duke has gathered throughout its long history.

There’s a lot to unpack about this exhibit, but one of the most unsettling parts has to be the 1949 written exchange between Duke parapsychologist Joseph Rhine and Lutheran Reverend Duther Schulze, speaking about a boy they thought could be demonically possessed.

“Now he has visions of the devil and goes into a trance and speaks a strange language,” Duther wrote.

Anything about that sound familiar? If so, that might be because this case was the basis for the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. (And people say research isn’t cool!)

The Rubenstein also exhibited a pack of cards used by Rhine’s parapsychology lab to test for extrasensory perception. Inscribed with vaguely arcane symbols, one of these “Zener cards” would be flipped over by a researcher behind a screen, and a test subject on the other side would attempt to “sense” what card the researcher displayed.

A pack of “Zener cards” Duke researchers once used to test for ESP

Although the results of this test were never replicated outside of Duke and are today widely considered debunked, Rhine’s research did create a stir in some circles at the time. One of the most interesting things about this exhibit, in fact, was the way it showed how much methods and topics in science have changed over time.

A 1726 publication of the book Sadducismus triumphatus: or, A full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions, for example, was loaded with supernatural “research” and “findings” every bit as dense and serious as the title would suggest. The section this tome was opened to bore this subheading: “Proving partly by Holy Scripture, partly by a choice Collection of Modern Relations, the Real EXISTENCE of Apparitions, Spirits, & Witches.”

A similar book titled The Discoverie of Witchcraft, was also on display—only this one was printed over two centuries later, in 1930.

A Depression-era miniature of the Duke mascot, somewhat worse for wear.

Other historical gems the exhibit offered included an a threadbare ‘blue devil’ doll from the ‘30s; a book made up of a lengthy collection of newspaper clippings following the case of Lizzie Borden, a reported axe murderer from the 1890s; and an ad for the 1844 “Life Preserving Coffin … for use in doubtful cases of death.”

It’s not every day research will leave the casual viewer quaking in their boots, but Screamfest V was quick to live up to its name. Covering a broad swath of Duke materials from several centuries, this exhibit successfully pulled off vibes of education, spookiness, and Halloween fun, all at the same time.

Post by Daniel Egitto

The Internet of Things: Useful or Dangerous?

By Will Sheehan

On October 24, 2017

In Computers/Technology, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Science Communication & Education, Students

The Internet of Things has tons of possibilities and applications, but some of them could be malicious.

This week, the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI) held an open house in the Technology Engagement Center (TEC) where you could go in and check out the new equipment they’ve installed. They all have one central theme: the Internet of Things (IoT). What is the Internet of Things? It’s pretty simple. The Internet of Things “refers to the interconnectivity of devices on the internet.” In other words, if something can connect to things like wifi, social media, or your phone, it makes it an IoT device!

A classic example of an IoT device I’m sure you’re all familiar with is the Amazon Echo. You could ask it to order you something, look up a word, what the weather is like… you get the idea. Echo and Alexa are just one kind of IoT. We’re also talking lightbulbs, outlets, robots, thermostats… Eventually your whole house might become an IoT device. The future is here!

Devices such as the Echo Dot, Philips Hue Smart Lightbulb, Samsung Smart Outlet, Meccano Robot, and Swipe-O-Matic are all showcased in the TEC. It’s part of the DDI’s “IoT Initiative” this year to give Duke faculty, staff, and students a better understanding of the power of IoT devices. As one expert on site said, “the devices are everywhere.”

The Co-Lab had actually hacked the Echo Dot and programmed in some of their own commands, so it was responding to questions like “Who is Maria?” and “Where is this place?”

The Meccano Robot (named “Techy”) was fun to mess around with, and a big hit among attendees. He’s more of a consumer-friendly toy, but just by using voice-commands I got him to give me a high-five and even tango.

Me, cheesin’ with Techy

The smart lightbulb was low-key the coolest thing there. By using multiple lights you can customize different “environments” like a TV watching environment or party environment, and the lights will change color/brightness accordingly with just a tap on your phone. The smart outlets were cool, too. They can be controlled remotely from your phone and even have timers set.

The student-built Swipe-O-Matic added me to the Co-Lab mailing list, just by swiping my Duke card.

One device — the “Swipe-O-Matic”—was actually invented by Duke students, and we used it to add my name to the Co-Lab mailing list just by swiping my Duke Card.

While these devices are all fun and useful, one expert I spoke with noted “there’s lots of consequences to using them—good, and bad.”

As they become more consumer available, if your machine is particularly vulnerable, bad people could hack into parts of your life. Think about a smart door lock. It’s super useful—you can create virtual keys for family members, let someone in remotely, or give your housekeepers access at certain times of the day. However, this could obviously go pretty badly if someone were to hack it and enter your house.

But don’t worry. As technology progresses, IoT devices will eventually be all around us. While security is an issue, these devices have way more good to them than bad. “Snapchat spectacles” are sunglasses that can record video and upload it straight to the Snapchat app. Someone at the TEC had the idea for “smart window blinds” that know when to open and close. Imagine a plant pot that sent you a notification when it needed to be watered. The uses are seemingly endless!

Post by Will Sheehan