University Daily Kansan / Tuesday, September 26, 1989
5
KU engineers swing into design project
By Beth Behrens Kansan staff writer
By Beth Behrens
Three KU engineering students are designing a swing they hope will help disabled children overcome their handicaps.
Bill Beltheimm, Arvada, Colo., senior, said the swing would be called the "Shuttle."
"Just as the space shuttle allows mankind to explore the unknown, this shuttle will allow children to explore worlds unknown to them," he said.
Cheryl Meade, Kansas City, Mo., senior, and Javier Avila, Mexico City, Mexico, senior, work with Bluethmann on the Shuttle, which will be designed for children between the ages of $2\frac{1}{2}$ and at the A cuper Foundation, a Topeka center for the handicapped.
Terry Faddis, associate professor of mechanical engineering, said the project was the last design project the seniors would be given before they
"By this time, the students have had the bulk of their technical and design courses," he said. "I consider them full-fledged engineers."
graduated.
Avilla, Bluchmann and Meade are the only students in Faddis' Mechanical Engineering 629 class. Faddis said this was the first time the class had been this small. He said the class normally had between 20 and 45 students.
The class gives students the opportunity to work with clients to get practical experience on a project, Faddis said.
The project was suggested by Brenna Richmond, a physical therapist at the foundation. The goal is to create a low-cost, low-maintenance environment for children with impairments could operate without adult intervention.
With the current design, the students have kept the cost of the swine to about $150.
The students also have had to consider that the swing should have a safety belt to keep the children
from falling out, that it should be able to be powered by one limb, and that for easy maintenance, it should not have any electronic parts.
Richmond said the main advantage of the swing, apart from improving of balance and muscle tone, was that it allowed children to make choices.
Bluethmann said the swing the three were working on now would be powered by a pulley system. A child placed in the swing would press a bar which would allow him to move his own body weight. Once pressed, the bar would move a weight, causing a change in balance.
"As the weight slides down, it will cause a dynamic-type reaction where it will, hopefully, go into motion and swing." Bluethm said.
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"Children need to assert some control over their lives," she said. "For children with physical challenges, the number of choices they can make are limited. The swing will allow them to assert control through their playing."
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OVERACHIEVING CAUCASIANS MISLEAD WITH PHANTOM PHOBIA
The June 20 Journal-World contains an editorial entitled "The Hamlets Among Us." This piece cites several West Coast sources who think that "Hamlets are generally not fulfilled by their work: but considering the alternatives — which is to join the mainstream society — they stay put ... Hamlets are overthinkers who underachieve." The Journal-World adds that Hamlets are "desperately afraid of success."
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According to the Journal-World, local Hamlets surfaced during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Because many of them were college students, the editoralist in question claims these dissidents were drawing welfare because they preferred demonstrating to working. This effort gloomily concludes "that times haven't really changed that much . . . (as) such Hamlets are still with us."
Why are such miscreants still among us? During the 60s and early 70s these rabble-rouseres feigned concern about the Vietnam War, racial discrimination and grinding poverty and thus managed to avoid earning their keep producing, distributing or selling, say, sugar-laden soft drinks, carcinogenic cigarettes and trashy tabloids. Because our hypersensitive governing units today want more of us to enjoy such upward mobility, they give their respective Chambers of Commerce public money so that these jovial folk can travel, sleep, and feed in comfort while trying to persuade already-established corporations to expand into their districts.
In short, our governing units so wish to bring the good life within almost everyone's reach, they're even using public dollars to create jobs in the private sector. Despite this unprecedented display of governmental compassion, the June 20 Journal-World admits that those decadent Hamlets who "desperately fear success . . . are still with us." About what are these underachievers grumbling today?
Could they be wondering why our governing entities aren't responding to, for example, the plight of the Native American populace? Says the July 19 New York Times, "the devastating effects of alcohol abuse among Indians are reaching a new generation, striking children whose mothers drank heavily during pregnancy and resulting in a population that is physically and mentally disabled . . . Studies on some reservations have found five percent of children affected, while other studies have found rates as high as 25 percent."
One reservation resident says the 80 to 90 percent unemployment rate which exists leaves people living "from one welfare check to another" and drinking has become "an acceptable means of escape." Because this alcohol abuse is producing children, who the New York Times reports "are often mentally retarded and have behavior problems," one woman, who runs the alcohol treatment program at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where some 25 percent of the children are affected, says it threatens "the very survival of the Indian people." While the "free enterprise" system continues to categorize the superficially controlled sale of alcoholic beverages to these people as work, some overachieving Caucasians in power are studiously ignoring this unfolding tragedy.
The foregoing isn't the only public problem overachieving Caucasians are ignoring.
For instance, Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado who now teaches at the University of California's San Francisco Medical School, tells us in the August 2 New York Times:
For instance, the July 28 Kansas City Times notes that because black poverty rates have been two to three times higher than white rates since the 1940s, in 1987, when 20 percent of all American children lived in poverty, this was true of some 45 percent of black children.
"Once people get into the health system, we will spend fantastic amounts exploring a small chance of survival for them, yet 31 million Americans do not have basic health insurance and 30 percent of the kids in America have never seen a dentist . . . (and) 600,000 women gave birth last year with little or no prenatal care."
For instance, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos and University of Kansas Assistant Professor of Business Doug Houston are just two of the many rock-ribbed Republicans who think our government should now, as Prof. Houston puts it in his June 15 Lawrence Observer column: "Let each student decide which school he or she wishes to attend . . . Different and interesting concepts of high school education may emerge . . . as educational entrepreneurs search for innovative programs to satisfy student-client clients."
Prof. Houston considers this allegedly liberating "free choice system" to be an "exciting and promising alternative to an educational system mired in mediocrity" even while admitting he "cannot forecast the sort of education such an experience in openness would produce."
These two gentlemen and their Grand Old Party compatriots obviously have forgotten that our educational system is supposed to produce informed individuals, not interscholastic competition. The May 10 Wall Street Journal reports that the recent improvement on test scores designed to measure reading, math and science skills are illusory.
According to this May 10 Wall Street Journal: "The International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement reports that in 1982 the average Japanese student outscared the top five percent of U.S. students enrolled in college prep math courses . . . (and) advanced science students . . . in chemistry and physics . . . in U.S. high schools performed worse than their counterparts in almost all countries studied . . . (and U.S. high school students) in biology . . . ranked dead last, behind such nations as Singapore and Thailand."
This Wall Street Journal piece by Lawrence A. Uzzell says one 1987 survey "found that all 50 state education agencies, report above-average scores for their elementary schools . . . (this) discovery was soon dubbed the 'Lake Woebegone effect' — after Garrison Keillor's fanciful town where all children are above average."
Says Mr. Uzzell: "Such maneuvers have allowed most public schools to enjoy better reputations than they deserve, enabling them to hike per-pupil budgets by more than 25 percent above inflation since 1982. They have succeeded in selling 'excellence' to parents and taxpayers — but not on delivering."
In the August 21 Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson describes our government as "the mechanism by which we tax ourselves to meet collective . . . needs". Although each of the aforementioned is a public problem in which our governing apparatus should be employing people to help the disadvantaged, unfortunate and dependent, the overachieving Caucasians who control this apparatus increasingly seem to be more worried about the elite's financial health than their constituents' general well-being. Instead of responding decisively to noisy neighborhoods, understaffed nursing homes, ineffectual schools and unsafe streets, our governing entities busy themselves with municipal golf courses, lottery ticket outlets, expanded airports and invasive trafficways in the name of growth.
The July 14 Kansas City Times reports that the population of our prisons and jails is growing at approximately eight percent annually and the number of Americans who are incarcerated is expected to pass one million during the forthcoming year, while in the Aug. 20 New York Times Hyman Bookbinder, executive officer of President Johnson's Task Force on Poverty in 1964 says: "Today, the ranks of the poor are again swelling."
We underachievers, who allegedly overthink while desperately fearing success, respectfully suggest to those overachieving Caucasians in power, who indisputably underthink while enthusiastically embracing success, that they remember, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who already have much; it is whether we do enough for those who have too little."
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