MONDAY,AUGUST 16,2004
OFF THE HILL
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN 9D
SATELLITE: Students work on Kansas space project CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1D
sometime between December this year and February 2005 through facilities located at the Baikonur Cosmodome, in Kazakhstan.
Pathfinder's primary mission will be measuring radiation levels in low earth orbit and taking photographs with the digital camera.
The satellite will perform nothing too complicated, Villa said, but the group still wants to maintain contact once deployed.
Umakanth Mogili Goud, Gadwal, India, graduate student in aerospace engineering, has worked on Pathfinder for two years and is in charge of, among other things, designing the torque coil that will keep the satellite from spinning out of control while in orbit. Pathfinder's tiny stature has made this an especially trying task for him.
As a student at Iowa State University, Tom Kent, 24, helped develop a CubeSat program similar to the University's. Kent's work as an embedded software engineer for Boeing's Integrated Defense Simulation Department in St. Louis has allowed him to understand why projects like Pathfinder are so amazing.
"For me, the most difficult part was, at first, the belief that this was possible," Goud said. "Because it's so small it's hard to believe that it's possible to fit all the pieces inside."
things into space is about $10,000 per pound, the goal of every space program has always been to cut as much weight as possible," he said. "A few short years ago, something like this would have been impossible, but thanks to the rapid miniaturization of electronics it is not only possible but many groups are doing it."
"Because the cost of launching
Not including paid summer workers, Pathfinder's success depends entirely on the drive of student volunteers. The satisfaction that comes from creating something where there was nothing before and the field experience gained is what Villa said drove the students.
"This is great," he said. "They get to do what they're going to do professionally once they leave the University."
Most students who have contributed to the project will see the culmination of their efforts when Pathfinder is launched. Even though Pathfinder will burn up when it eventually enters earth's atmosphere once again, Villa said the opportunity to be a part of such a momentous project was rewarding enough.
"If you have a little passion in space exploration," he said. "If you're intrigued just a little bit by it, the possibility to work on something that's really going to make it in space, that alone is enough."
By Jay Senter
jsenter@kansan.com
Kansas staff writer
Software keeps tabs on tempted Christians
Mark Brown sees students struggle with Internet pornography every year.
Many live in fraternity houses, where the use of pornography is so widespread that it is impossible to avoid.
Others are simply lonely, isolated in their dorm rooms with nothing to prevent them from succumbing to the temptation.
Since the Internet became widely available in the late 1990s, Brown, director of the University of Kansas branch of Campus Crusade for Christ, has counseled college students who struggle to reconcile the temptations of Internet pornography with their desire to lead a Christian lifestyle.
But finding an effective remedy frequently proved a difficult task.
"In some ways a filter just invites a competitive spirit," Brown said.
When he first began counselling students with the problem, Brown would advise them to install filtering software on their computers.
In extreme cases, he would recommend that students get rid of their computers altogether. For some, the temptations of the Internet were just too strong.
Often it didn't work. The students would find ways to circumvent filters and feed their addiction.
But Brown thinks he has found an effective answer to the problem
of Internet pornography addiction in software called Covenant Eyes — a pay-for-use program that would strike many Internet users as unacceptable invasive.
Covenant Eyes is not a filter. In fact, its creators believe that keeping access to the Internet unrestricted is essential to addressing the temptation of Internet porn. Instead, the program provides "Internet accountability" by allowing an outside party to monitor a person's Internet habits.
Once installed on a computer, Covenant Eyes, which gets its name from a verse in the book of Job, keeps a record of every Web page the user visits.
Using the information from those scans, Covenant Eyes assigns an "appropriateness" score to each site visited, and generates a total usage report for the subscriber.
The program then checks each Web address against a database of pornographic sites, and scans the sites' text for "flag" words.
That report is then made available on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to the subscribers"accountability partners."the one or two people subscribers choose to monitor their Internet usage.
Covenant Eyes vice-president Lynn McClurg said the program worked by taking away a key contributor to cyber-sex addiction: secrecy. The Covenant Eyes theory is that the Internet user won't be tempted to visit pornographic sites if they know their Web activity is being monitored.
"You can go to legitimate medical research sites on breast cancer or other things, and they will receive a score." McClurg said.
the program was not perfect.
Covenant Eyes also provides training materials to accountability partners teaching them how to read the reports, and what to do if a user appears to be visiting questionable sites.
But McClurg conceded that
"The whole get is to get people talking," McClurg said. "The accountability partner is going to contact the user and say, 'Harry, John or Sally can you explain to me what you're doing over here at this site?'"
Subscribers pay between $2.50 and $6.95 a month for the service. With some 20,000 users worldwide, that means Covenant Eyes brings in a considerable revenue stream. But McClurg said the pricing structure was devised to cover only basic operational costs and provide Covenant employees with a living wage, not to make a profit.
While leaders on college campuses, like Brown, who has included a link to the Covenant Eyes Web site on the Campus Crusade for Christ's homepage, have endorsed the program for use among students, it's primary users are ministers and church staff members. Brown and another staff member at Campus Crusade for Christ subscribe to the program.
"All of the leaders of church ministry need to be accountable on the Internet because there is a lot of temptation there, and if they stray, it can cause a lot of devastation in
theirministry." McClurg said.
And, as Brown has experienced, serving as an adviser to students who are dealing with the problem of pornography addiction can provide ministers themselves with an unanticipated source of temptation.
Before coming to Kansas, Brown served as a Crusade for Christ leader at Northwestern University. It was there, during the late 1990s, that he first encountered students who were struggling with Internet pornography.
"When you sit down with students who say, 'I'm struggling with this, and this is what I did, and this is how I did it,' you are armed with an arsenal of information that could be self destructive." Brown said.
While it might seem strange that religious men are ones openly confronting the issue of pornography, it is their very religious beliefs that cause devout Christians to view pornography as a more serious problem than their secular peers. Brown said that many Christian men feel heavy pressure to keep free of sin. As such, when they do slip up, they may be more inclined to keep their problems secret — a pattern which can fuel the escalation of a problem.
"Christians have really struggled with secret second lives," Brown said. "With the software program you are saying, 'I really want to bring this thing to light, and I want to deal with my own struggles.'"
— Edited by Miranda Lenning
kansan.com the student perspective
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