THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2007
NEWS
3A
>> STUDENT SENATE
Groups must pay own fees
Exceptions may be made for multicultural, traveling groups
BY ERIN SOMMER esommer@kansan.com
Student groups that get Student Senate funds for conference registration fees may have to find a different way to cover their costs.
Student Senate passed a resolution this summer stating that it will no longer pay registration fees for groups traveling to regional and national conferences.
Riley Dutton, Pittsburg junior and chairman of the Student Senate Finance Committee, said that paying for certain groups' registration fees created a precedent that all groups' fees had to be paid for.
"It was putting a financial drain on our resources," Dutton said. "It cost a lot more than we thought it was going to cost."
Hannah Love, Dodge City senior and student body president, said that the Senate had trouble funding on-
campus events because it was paying the fees for a large number of groups to travel.
Love said this was not the first time the Senate had changed its policy about paying for registration fees.
She said that the Senate had previously stopped paying registration fees when money was low and then reinstated paying the fees during times of budget excess.
The initiative was passed by the Student Executive Committee, which consists of select members of the Senate who make decisions during the summer. The full Senate will have the option to overturn the ruling next week, when it meets for the first time this academic year.
The Black Student Union generally sends about 40 people to regional conferences each year. Ebony Howard, Fort Worth, Texas, senior and president of the group, said that without Senate funding, the group
would have to find alternative funding or take fewer members.
"We wouldn't stop going to these conferences because they are so valuable." Howard said.
There are two Student Senate policies that make exceptions for multicultural groups and groups whose purpose involves travel, such as Model United Nations, Love said. She said the Black Student Union and other student groups could ask for money for one of those reasons.
Ray Wittlinger, student body vice president and Olathe senior, said that in addition to making sure the Senate didn't run out of money, it also wanted to encourage groups to play host to on-campus activities that bring others to the University, rather than sending students to events off campus.
Edited by Kyle Carter
SCIENCE
A research volunteer views the back of his body, as seen from a camera behind him, as part of an experiment in out-of-body experiences at the University College London. The goggles give the sensation that he is observing himself from behind.
Researchers see from new perspective
BY RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Such widely reported out-of-body experiences have long been the territory of theology, philosophy and scary movies.
WASHINGTON — The stories seem strange but riveting. A heart attack victim recalls floating in the air, watching paramedics revive him. A surgical patient remembers hovering, watching the doctors operate.
Now scientists have turned their
Now scientists attention to the topic.
Researchers in England and Switzerland have figured out ways to confuse the sensory signals received by the brain, allowing people to seem to be standing aside and watching themselves.
No, they're not using drugs, legal or otherwise.
"I'm interested in the question of why I feel that my self is located inside my physical body. How does my brain know that I am standing right here?" he said.
Henrik Ehrsson of University College London's Institute of Neurology and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, explained that he was interested in a person's perception of the "self."
The research is described in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
And what would happen to the self if a person could effectively move their eyes to another part of
A researcher would stand behind them and extend a plastic rod which they could see toward the area just below the cameras.
So seated volunteers were fitted with head-mounted video displays that allowed them to view themselves from behind, using a pair of video cameras, one for each eye.
the room and observe themselves from an outside perspective? Would the self move with the eyes, or stay in the body, he wondered.
"I'm interested in the question of why I feel that my self is located inside my physical body. How does my brain know that I am standing right here?"
At the same time another plastic
HENRIK EHRSSON Researcher
They felt "that their center of awareness 'self' is located outside their physical bodies and that they look at their bodies from the perspective of another person," Ehrsson reported.
"The idea is to change the visual input and its relationship to the tactile information," he said. "The brain is always trying to interpret sensory information. The brain can trick itself."
The volunteers said they experienced the feeling of being behind their own body watching. Many said found it "weird" and seemingly real, though not
scary.
In a second test, Ehrsson connected sensors to the skin to measure electrical conductance, which indicates emotional response.
rod, which they could not see, touched their chest.
He then allowed them to watch a hammer swing down to a point
Their skin conductance registered emotional responses including fear, indicating they sensed their selves had left their physical bodies and moved to the virtual bodies where the hammer was swung.
below the camera, as though it were going to hurt an unseen portion of the virtual body.
Meanwhile, a team led by Olaf Blanke, a professor at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland, led a similar experiment using virtual reality goggles.
The research has applications in neuroscience and also potentially in industrial applications involving virtual reality, he said.
In these tests, the subjects could see a three-dimensional representation of their body, the body of a dummy, or a simple object directly in front of them. The subject then saw the back of the image being stroked with a paintbrush, either in or out of sync with someone stroking his own back.
Those whose backs were stroked synchronously with the virtual image of themselves or the human dummy consistently overshot their position in the direction of the image; but subjects who saw no virtual image or a simple object did not.
Then the participants were blindfolded and backed up, and then asked to return to their original position.
The study aimed at determining how senses play a role in self consciousness, Blanke said.
Ehrsson's research was funded by, among others, the Wellcome Trust, the Human Frontier Science Program, Swedish Medical Research Council and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.
Students get more for less
BY DYLAN SANDS dsands@kansan.com
INSURANCE
Plan removes many of the spending limits of past student plans. Malott said the board made the changes to better reflect the needs of students. She said the previous plan allowed $250 per year for spending on pharmaceuticals; the new plan allows
A new student health insurance plan is now available.
The Board of Regents passed legislation last year to allow it to
take control of student health insurance. The Regents convinced universities statewide to band together to create a single, comprehensive health care plan, said Diana Malott, assistant director of Student Health Services at Watkins Memorial Health Center. The board cooperated to develop a plan with lower premiums and more benefits.
"We think we're invincible, but the reality is accidents happen every day."
KIMBERLY GUESS Overland Park senior
The new Kansas Board of Regents Student Health Insurance
$1,000. The new plan does not include the previous $4,500 cap on outpatient surgery.
The insurance will also pay as much as $100,000 per year per illness. There is also no spending limit
on durable medical equipment such as wheelchairs.
Malott said that many limits in previous policies were unrealistic. As an example, she cited the previous limit of $300 per hospital stay.
"I've never heard of a hospital
stay costing less than $300," she said. "We basically removed all of those negative things from the old plan."
Past policies also included separate plans for international students and other groups. The new plan is tailored to cover all students.
"The idea was keep one plan and keep it simple," Malott said.
According to the new policy, the premium for year-long coverage is $960. Coverage also can be purchased for individual semesters.
Kimberly Guess, Overland Park senior, said students needed to be aware of their insurance options.
"A lot of people our age don't even think about it," she said. "We think we're invincible, but the reality is accidents happen every day."
Students can find out more about the plan by contacting Watkins Memorial Health Center or by visiting www.uhcsr.com.
Edited by Jeff Briscoe
》 IRAQ
Senator suggests withdrawal
BY ANNE FLAHERTY ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Sen. John Warner, a prominent Republican on military affairs, urged President Bush on Thursday to start bringing some troops home from Iraq by Christmas.
Such a move would send a powerful warning to the Baghdad government that time is running out, said Warner (R-Va.).
Warner said the president next month should announce the withdrawal of a certain number of troops to send a "sharp and clear message throughout the region and the United States" that the commitment in Iraq is not open-ended.
"We simply cannot, as a nation, stand and continue to put our troops at continuous risk of loss
of life and limb without beginning to take some decisive action", he told reporters after a White House meeting with Bush's top aides.
In the congressional debate, Republicans so far have shown a willingness to back Bush on the politically unpopular war. But they said they wanted to see progress by September, when the top U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, delivers his assessment of the war.
Warner's suggestion of initiating troop withdrawals to induce political pressure puts him more in line with Democrats than with Bush, who says conditions on the ground should dictate force levels.
Warner is a former Navy secretary and one-time chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; he is now the committee's second-ranking Republican.
A White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, declined to say whether Bush might consider Warner's suggestion.
Asked whether Bush would leave the door open to setting a timetable, Johndroe said: "I don't think the president feels any differently about setting a specific timetable for withdrawal. I just think it's important that we wait right now to hear from our commanders on the ground about the way ahead."
Warner visited Iraq this month with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman. Warner said he would not support Democratic legislation championed by Levin that would call for Bush to bring troops home by a certain date.
"Let the president establish the timetable for withdrawal, not the Congress," he said.
ACCIDENT
ACCIDENT More firefighters injured near World Trade Center
NEW YORK — Part of the scaffolding surrounding a condemned skyscraper at the World Trade Center site fell Thursday, injuring two firefighters, fire officials said. It was the same building where two other firefighters died
in a blaze last week
Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon said scaffolding fell from the building. City officials
The demolition work on the former Deutsche Bank sky-scraper had been suspended after Saturday's fire, but workers on Thursday were still busy removing toxic debris from its remaining 26 stories.
gave a different scenario, saying that a piece of equipment, not scaffolding, fell from a high floor.
Gribbon said the two firefighters were hospitalized in stable condition, one with a head injury.
On Wednesday, city officials acknowledged that the fire department had not regularly inspected the building.
Associated Press
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