Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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Russell House false alarm triggered by ruptured pipe BY JENNIFER PRICE THE GAMECOCK An official report from the Columbia Fire Department said the fire alarm that went off in the Russell House on Saturday evening was triggered by a ruptured steam line in the basement, f Fire fighters stood Saturday by until mainte ifance showed up. Facility services officials said Monday that maintenance “did respond to the alarm,” calling the response “a good thing.” When asked if the line had been fixed perma nently, University Spokesman Russ McKinney replied, “We hope so,” and added that while prob lems of the same nature were definitely possible, they weren’t likely to encounter the same prob lem w ith the same line. He said, “From time to time, because of the age of some of the infrastructure on campus... we run into problems of this sort.” aaiu uie ui ici puwci uuiagc uuuuaj evening was related to the same aged infrastruc ture, but that operating on a tight budget made it hard for the school to keep systems upgraded. In response to any student complaints about the Russell House being closed for an extended period of time, although it did reopen later that night, McKinney stressed that such decisions ^ were judgment calls on the part of health and safe P . He said that while such calls might be incon venient at times, they are made based on what’s in the students’ best interest. According to a policy statement issued by the USC Department of Health and Safety and revised Feb.l, 1995: “The determination that an alarm is a ‘nuisance fire alarm’ shall be made by the Columbia Fire Department. If the Fire Departments not present, this determination shall be made by a representative from the Division of Law Enforcement and Safety.” Officials from Health and Safety and USCPD could not be reached. Comments on this story?E-mail gamecockudesk@hotma il. com Professor looks for ADHD explanation BY TRICIA RIDGWAY THE GAMECOCK A USC professor is working on an im portant research project that might shed light on why students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder behave the way they do. Most students have been yelled at by teachers for not paying attention. But can a teacher explain what it means to pay at tention? “What would attention look like if you saw it?” asks Gordon Baylis, a psychology professor at USC. He has been doing re search for the past 12 years trying to an swer the questions of how the brain pays attention as well as what attention is. “It’s difficult to define, and yet we all know what it is. If I said to you ‘Are you . paying attention?’ you know what I’m talk ing about. But what do we mean by paying attention? You’re sort of perceiving at the best level you know how according to the circumstances,” he said. Baylis heads the Attention and Perception Laboratory in Barnwell College at USC. The lab’s research focuses on un derstanding differences in the brains of people with ADHD and of those without. This research also looks at differences in the brain between the three types of ADHD: inattentive, hyperactive-impulsive and a mix of the two. Baylis describes a person with the inat tentive type as someone who spaces out and is unaware of what’s going on. A per son with the hyperactive-impulsive type, however, bounces off the walls but knows what is going on. he says. All of the research is conducted on stu dent volunteers, and about 50 students each semester are used for this project, which has been going on for the past three years. Volunteers with ADHD have either been formally diagnosed by a doctor or infor mally by a teacher or parent, Baylis said. “The best way of knowing if somebody has ADHD is if anyone’s ever said to them, ‘Do you have ADHD?”’ he said. The lab also has a questionnaire to de termine the symptoms a person has and decide which volunteers have the disor der. The research consists of two kinds of scans of brain activity that are conducted while the participants perform attention demanding tasks, Baylis said. The first scan is an EEG, done at USC’s state-of-the art lab, which tells when certain brain ac tivity occurs. The other scan, performed at MUSC, is an MRI, which tells where the activity is occurring in the brain. Although the study is only halfway through, Baylis said “reliable differences” have been found between the brain activi ty of people with different types of ADHD and those without. Significantly, studies have shown that people with the inatten tive type have less processing in the area of the brain thought to allocate attention, and people with hyperactive disorder have less processing in the area involved with inhi bition, he said. The study is primarily concerned with what is happening in the brain to eventu ally find out how to treat ADHD. Medications seem to work, but “we have no idea if they’ve cured the ADHD,” Baylis said. The next step would be to study partici pants on medication for the disorder. “You’ve got to figure out what’s wrong in order to figure out how to treat it,” he said. Comments on this story?E-mail gamecockudesk@hotmail.com | BRIEFLY Merger committee nearing final-report The committee studying a possible merger of the College of Liberal Arts and the College of iviatn ana sciences plans 10 start writing a recommendation as early as next week. Co-chairman Pat Maney said the committee will meet in President Andrew Sorensen’s office. . , . . Plagiarism CONTINUED ROM PAGE 1 $ to check students’ papers against for stolen phrases. McCabe’s sur vey found that 20 percent of facul ty" members surveyed use software to hunt for possibly offenders. "Mary Ann Byrnes is the assis tant dean for USC’s College of Liberal Arts, says it’s not hard to catch plagiarists, but she’s not sharing her secrets. “It’s not rocket science,” she said. “It’s very easy to see incoher ence, disparity of writing style.” Byrnes said she usually sees about 75 cases of plagiarism dur ing the academic year, with the majority being Internet plagia rism. In the days before the »'nternet, Byrnes said students would tear pages out of library books or use other students’ pa pers from previous classes. She said those were much harder to track down because professors had to physically hunt for them. “Now you can sit behind your computer and do it,” she said. Pat Maney, co-chairman of USC’s History Department, said he does deal with plagiarism but that he uses creative assign ments to get around them. For his History 407 class this semester, Maney said he has just assigned a term paper to his stu dents where they have to read specific back issues of The Gamecock and The Garnett and Black and write about the USC college experience fitting the stereotype of the 1950s. “If you can find a term paper on that, good luck, ” he said. Forty percent of students sur veyed also said they had plagia rized from written sources, and 25 percent of the 2,175 graduate stu dents surveyed admitted to some form of Internet or written pla giarism. However, less than five percent of all students surveyed said they had turned in papers where most or all of the text had been downloaded from a term pa per Web site. Comments on this story?E-mail gamecockudesk@hotmail.com Vera Bradley Trunk Show Today • 1 1am - 7pm • at South Tower * g, yaWWADLEV. 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