The Hudson Valley Advanced Manufacturing Center hosts the 3D printing lab on campus at SUNY New Paltz. The 3D printing lab is a campus wide entity that is open to the entire campus, whether you’re an art or engineering major or not, for a small fee to cover the costs of the materials. The lab is home to the most sophisticated 3D printing technology in the country. Its service center supports campus courses, mostly in the art and engineering fields. Daniel Freedman, the Dean of the School of Science and Engineering and the director of the HVAMC program, says the printing lab serves purposes beyond campus courses. With over one hundred customers, the lab creates 3D prints for a large range of individuals, from manufacturers to entrepreneurs to artists. The lab has also partnered with other medical professionals to make models used for educational purposes or visual references before a complicated surgery. The lab is usually open from 9 AM to 5 PM during weekdays and run by its workers and interns, which is located within the Smiley Art Building. More information about the 3D printing lab, including updates, a timeline since the lab’s opening, and an online request form to create within the lab, can be found on www.newpaltz.edu/hvamc.

On April 6th, the Instructional Media Services Center had the pleasure of recording Professor Michael Boms and guest speaker Adam Kalkstein in their talk about climate change and its concerns. While Professor Boms opened up the talk by stating politicians are aware of these climate change issues, but ignoring them for the profit fossil fuel deals bring them, Kalkstein sought to focus more on the science of the issue at hand. The media often distracts from the real facts as it creates hoaxes or exaggerates the circumstances for more viewers, and Kalkstein warns that if the covers of magazines display an emotionally provoking picture of animals, it should raise a red flag. He continued his speech to say it’s hard to blame one event on or for climate change, and it is an accumulation of various problems. A majority of scientists today will agree that global warming is occurring. The discrepancy occurs when it comes to answering why it is happening. It is clear that oceans are warming, plants are budding earlier, and animal migrations are happening sooner than in the past. The warming is a result of the rise in carbon dioxide levels, which prevents heat from escaping the atmosphere, called the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is natural, but its increase due to global warming is concerning. Scientists today are very confident this is due to human activities. Kalkstein proceeded to discount myths and assert factually based conclusions. Hurricanes are not expected to increase in numbers, but increase in intensity. Tornadoes are definitely on the rise, but this may be due to the fact that there are more humans spread across the land, and therefore storms that would have gone unnoticed in the past are now being reported. There is more rain, which causes more flooding because warm air holds more water. Kalkstein claims there is a definite climate change link here, which can be pointed at the spread of construction, leaving less ground to absorb water. In addition, drought and sea levels have increased, which would be detrimental to the coasts. Ocean acidification is also on the rise, putting sea life and coral reefs in danger. Kalkstein attempted to end on a positive note by stating if there is a global movement to reverse these effects there is hope, and we can all contribute by carpooling or utilizing renewable energy sources. This and other talks can be found for viewing on the IMS website at www.newpaltz.edu/ims.

OfficeMix is a free PowerPoint plugin that is useful for professors in their classes, or students giving presentations. The extension offers instrumental features that benefit the classroom that PowerPoint doesn’t already come equipped with. OfficeMix offers interactive features such as recording the slides, where the audio and visual components can be cataloged with the incorporating of any “ink” used in the presentation. Quizzes or polls can be added to the slideshow, while the screen can be recorded or even screenshotted. The plugin also allows for your own videos or audio files to be inserted into the presentation.  Once you have completed the creation your PowerPoint, OfficeMix allows for previewing, editing, or uploading the mix onto the “My Mixes” website, where you can view, save, and share all of your mixes. OfficeMix additionally offers exporting devices that can convert the presentation into a Mp4 format for sharing offline. If you have an Office365 account, the slides can be exported directly to the site. The plugin is user friendly and offers help sections for any questions under the “Using Mix” tab. This quick and free plugin can be downloaded off the https://mix.office.com/en-us/education website.

On March 16th New Paltz welcomed guest speaker Cordelia Fine on her talk in the Cognitive Science Colloquium Series titled “The myth of the Lehman Sisters? Sex, testosterone, and financial risk-taking.” In her presentation she outlined common reasoning as to why men are typically more susceptible to higher risk taking behaviors or decision making. Traditional views asserted the difference in risk taking between male and females was due to levels of testosterone. From this stance, men are genetically more competitive for social status, material resources, sexual opportunities and the acquired defense of offspring. Females are more constrained as far as biological reproduction processes are concerned, and therefore have lower reproductive variance and less selective pressure for risk taking. While these were the common assumptions in the past, Fine’s recent research and data collection suggests that there is not a significant difference between men and women in their risk taking strategies, and this may be because experiments that failed in their original hypothesis were buried. Fine went against this trend as she presented her opposing arguments. While men are conceived to be more financially risk taking, women are more socially risk taking. Counter- intuitively, one sex effect may be compensating for another. Her presentation raised many questions and provided a fresh perspective to her audience.

On March 9th, the Instructional Media Services Center had the pleasure of recording guest speaker Tyrone Hayes and his presentation on how chemicals are affecting the environment and its animals and people. By conducting research of his own for numerous years with frogs, it is clear that pesticides, specifically Atrazine, can be linked to cancer cell promotion, genetic mutations, and sterility. Frogs are able to detect hormones in water because they change color if estrogen is present, and have been living proof that these chemicals are dangerous enough to change the sex of animals. Atrazine is a synthetic that has been banned in all of Europe, but this has yet to take effect in the United States. Even scarier, the chemical is spread all throughout the world to places where it wasn’t even administered through weather and water run off. Its toxicity can be found in water sources, some of which are used for drinking, bathing, and washing clothes, and additionally within areas where we grow most of the country’s produce. Hayes’s passionate and enthusiastic words left the audience in awe and he received a well deserved standing ovation for his eye-opening findings. Hayes and other guest speakers’ speeches and presentations can be found on the Instructional Media Services’ website at www.newpaltz.edu/ims.   

Several classrooms on campus are installed with New Paltz’s lecture capture systems, Crestron Capture. The program allows the recording of lectures using a camera already mounted to the ceiling. Audio is captured with a small microphone that can be attached to a lanyard or clipped to the speaker’s clothing. The students’ dialogue can additionally be picked up by the microphones also mounted on the ceiling. Crestron allows the speech volume to be adjusted, or options to record just the presentation, just the speaker, or the camera and the computer input. Once the recording has started, it can be paused, muted, or stopped. When the presentation is over, it can be easily uploaded online after stopping the recording. All videos are accessible on Blackboard or Ensemble. Crestron creates a platform for education to be more intriguing and easily accessible for later reviewing. Instructional videos can be found on the Instructional Media Service’s website at www.newpaltz.edu/ims.

Ensemble is offered by New Paltz’s IMS Center for screen capturing purposes during lectures. The program allows for your screen movements to be recorded with audio and imported video from a webcam. When the user is done with the screen capture, it can be automatically uploaded onto their Ensemble Video Library to be published in other spaces, including right onto Blackboard. The program is useful for instructors as they can engage students and make their lectures available for review at anytime from any device. Live streaming options are available, and Ensemble also offers a mobile app to make these lectures more accessible. Closed captioning features make video content management and publishing quick and simple. Ensemble makes sharing learning materials easy through the Open SUNY program, where online SUNY courses from all SUNY campuses collaborate and are accessible to students or applicants through the video streaming infrastructure. The Ensemble program creates a platform where SUNY New Paltz can share information with other schools, reducing duplicating efforts, provide educational resources to students faster and on various devices, and make learning more engaging with access to the material even after it has been presented.  

On March 7th, the Instructional Media Services Center was given the privilege of documenting one of many EvoS lecture series talks titled “Animal Hypnosis: The Role of Fear and Predation.” It was hosted by guest speaker Dr. Gordon Gallup, distinguished as an educator, researcher, and speaker. Dr. Gallup spoke to his large audience of faculty and students about a state of tonic immobility animals succumb to, similar to hypnosis, after being restrained. Through research, he has related this to a defense mechanism animals use against predators, and has even traced this to human responses in situations of sexual assault or drowning. He presented this information with data and supplemental pictures during his speech, and ended his demonstration by opening the discussion up to questions from members of the audience. His lecture and slideshow presentation have been recorded by the Instructional Media Services and can be accessed on the SUNY New Paltz website, along with other EvoS presentations in this series.