Among nearly 1,800 recent freshmen at MSU, students who played intramural sports averaged a 3.25 grade point average at the end of their first year compared to a 3.07 GPA for those who didn’t play.

But it’s more than just better grades. Those who participated in recreational sports were less likely to drop or fail any classes their first year and were 40% more likely to move onto sophomore status. They also were 2.5 times more likely to come back to the university.

The findings are published in the Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice.

It takes 120 credit hours to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, and to graduate in four years, you need a total of 30 completed credit hours each school year.

“At the end of the year, students who played sports dropped or failed a total average of six credits compared to 7.7 credits among non-playing students,” said Kerri Vasold, lead author and a recent graduate of MSU’s kinesiology Ph.D. program.

Vasold said that the almost two credit difference each year can have a big effect overall on the time it takes to graduate, and even more importantly, how much damage the pocketbook takes.

The research takes an apples-to-apples approach and brings the most solid evidence to date that intramural sports play an important role in a student’s success. Previous research has relied mostly on survey results, but Vasold dug deeper and was able to pull hard numbers from MSU’s registrar office.

Students were matched based on factors including high school GPA, gender, race, socioeconomic status, if they lived on campus, and if they were a first-generation student. Then they were compared to whether they participated in intramural sports.

“The only thing that was different between these students was whether they played or not,” said Jim Pivarnik, a professor of kinesiology and co-author of the study. “Everything else was matched.”

Pivarnik said the strength of the study was how tightly controlled it was.

“You can’t just say one person was smarter in high school than the other or his or her socioeconomic status was better,” he said. “We addressed all that, with all things being equal.”

So how many extracurricular sports should you do?

According to the researchers, the sweet spot seems to be anywhere between four to seven different activities throughout the year, which is new data discovered in another soon-to-be-published study led by Vasold and Pivarnik.

“Don’t go crazy. Don’t join 20 teams,” Pivarnik said. “Grab some friends, find a moderate number of activities and get involved in something different. The four-to-seven range seems to be effective and is linked to a higher GPA.”

Activities can range from playing an intramural sport like ultimate frisbee a few times a month to taking an aerobics class at a fitness center each week.

Currently, about 10,000, or 20%, of MSU students participate in intramural sports, which is slightly higher than the national average of 17%, according to the American College Health Association.

“There are so many different ways to participate,” Vasold said. “And the best part is you don’t have to be an all-star basketball player or have played ultimate frisbee before. You can still join a team. It’s an inclusive environment and helps students do better and creates a new home.”

In a perfect world, there would be a way to capture water from rivers during storms and other high-flow times and save it for the dry times when it’s needed. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have taken the first step to determining whether this will ever be possible by looking at how much water could be stored underground in depleted aquifers near the Texas coast.

The study, published May 10 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, quantified the amount of water flowing in major Texas rivers during heavy rains and found that there is enough room in coastal aquifers to store most of it. This discovery means that capturing and storing water could be a feasible option for partially mitigating floods and droughts, which are both expected to increase in frequency and intensity as the climate changes, said lead author Qian Yang, a research associate at UT Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.

“We either have too much water or we don’t have enough water,” she said. “And so, what can we do then to manage water resources during these extremes? That is the motivation we had.”

The idea of capturing water and diverting it into naturally occurring, underground aquifers is not new. It is already being done in the Texas cities of El Paso, Kerrville and San Antonio. But skimming off water on a larger level would take a tremendous amount of new infrastructure and planning, said Bridget Scanlon, a bureau senior research scientist and study author.

“This study is the first step, but it looks like the water is worth going after,” she said. “Before this research we didn’t know how much water there was, whether it would be worth investing in, where it was, when it occurred — all these basic questions.”

The bureau is a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The water level in the aquifers along the Texas Gulf Coast has been declining over the years because of agricultural and municipal water use. This has left space that could store about 20 million acre-feet of water, almost as much as can be held in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.

That’s enough space to store about two-thirds of the water that flowed in Texas’ 10 major rivers during high-flow events from 2015 through 2017, according to the study. The researchers differentiated high flow from normal flow by looking at daily average water volumes during the past 50 years, and classifying flows that exceeded the 95th percentile as high magnitude.

Although 2015, 2016 and 2017 were particularly wet years, the study found that high flows occur regularly across the 10 rivers, with a 50% chance of occurring in each river during any given year. The analysis also shows that about 80% of the water produced by high-flow events lasts for a week or longer, making capturing the water more feasible than if they occurred during shorter, more intense storms.

The study also found that capturing these flows would not affect the state’s water rights owners. And researchers referenced environmental studies in the San Antonio and Brazos rivers that showed that 65% of high-magnitude flows could be captured without harming the environment.

Bill Mullican, a former deputy administrator for the Texas Water Development Board who has provided expertise to projects in Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Georgia and Arkansas, said that the research could help support aquifer storage projects in more areas across the state.

“While there has been significant interest from both policymakers and water managers to do a better job of taking advantage of flood flows, there just was not really a robust understanding of the true availability,” he said. “What Dr. Yang and Dr. Scanlon did has filled a very important niche in understanding the opportunity and availability of a potential water resource that we might take advantage of in the future.”

The research was funded by the State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery program and the Jackson School of Geosciences.

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Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“There is increasing use of automated systems in the medical field, where intake is now often conducted through a kiosk instead of by a receptionist,” said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects. “We investigated user acceptance of these ‘robot receptionists,’ along with automated nurses and doctors. In addition, we tested whether the form that these roles took — human-like, avatar or robot — made a difference in user acceptance.”

According to Sundar, the healthcare industry can benefit from increased reliance on automated systems.

“Doctors are limited by their human bandwidth, by their experience, knowledge and even state of mind from minute to minute,” he said. “In contrast, machines can be programmed to ‘think’ of all the possible conditions that a patient’s symptoms could point to, and they never get tired. Some level of automation is clearly needed.”

The researchers recruited participants from the online workforce, Amazon Mechanical Turk, to gain a better understanding of user psychology behind the acceptance of automation in clinics. The results will be presented today (May 8) at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Glasgow, Scotland.

First, the team gauged the participants’ preconceived beliefs about and attitudes toward machines — what is called a “machine heuristic.”

“A machine heuristic involves stereotypes people have about machines, including their beliefs in machines’ infallibility, objectivity and efficiency,” said Sundar.

The team measured participants’ adherence to the machine heuristic by asking them to indicate their level of agreement with statements such as, “When machines, rather than humans, complete a task, the results are more accurate.” The researchers also asked participants a variety of questions to rate their “power usage,” or level of expertise and comfort in using machines.

Next, they exposed participants to various combinations of healthcare provider, such as receptionist, nurse and doctor; and agent type, such as human, avatar and machine. They initiated online chat interactions with the various types of avatars to test the participants’ acceptance of those healthcare providers and their intentions to use those providers in the future.

“We found that the higher people’s beliefs were in the machine heuristic, the more positive their attitude was toward the agent and the greater their intention was to use the service in the future,” said Sundar. “We also found that power usage predicted acceptance of digital healthcare providers. A power user (a person with advanced computer skills) is more likely to accept a robot doctor, for example, than a non-power user.”

The team also noticed a double dose effect of machine heuristic and power usage.

“We found that if you’re high on machine heuristic and you’re high on power usage, you have the most positive attitude toward automated healthcare providers,” said Sundar. “This combination seems to make people more accepting of these technologies.”

This effect was similar across all experimental conditions. In other words, people who had high adherence to the machine heuristic and were also power users had almost equally positive attitudes toward all forms of digital healthcare provider, regardless of whether they were human-like, an avatar or a robot.

“Our results suggest that the key to implementing automation in healthcare facilities may be to design the interface so that it appeals to expert users who have a high belief in machine abilities,” said Sundar. “Designers can direct resources toward improving features such as chat functionality instead of anthropomorphizing healthcare robots. In addition, increasing the number of power users and the general belief that machines are trustworthy may increase the adoption of automated services.”

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Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Sara LaJeunesse. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In a survey, people who had no trouble believing that machines can outperform humans — also called posthuman ability — were more likely to accept the presence of driverless cars on the highway. The findings may help carmakers design self-driving cars, as well as help policy makers better understand the factors behind the acceptance of autonomous vehicles, a concept that has caused considerable debate, according to S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects and affiliate of Penn State’s Institute for CyberScience (ICS).

“There are two camps — one camp is very strongly in favor of these kinds of smart technologies, such as self-driving cars, and the other, which has grave concerns about giving control to machines, especially for vital tasks like this,” said Sundar, who is also the co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.

According to the researchers, some people have a knee-jerk reaction that gives them faith in the effectiveness of computers and machines. That faith carries over to systems that can drive cars, said Sundar, who worked with Andrew Gambino, a doctoral candidate in mass communication.

“In this study, the strongest predictor for accepting self-driving cars was posthuman ability, the belief that computers can surpass humans in this particular task,” said Gambino, the lead author of the study. “We have come to a point now where we should no longer be talking about machines approximating humans in their ability, but, rather, outperforming humans. In the sense of safety, in reliability, in doing tasks without becoming tired, there are many arguments to be made that machines have transcended human abilities.”

Posthuman ability had about twice the effect on the acceptance of self-driving cars as other beliefs found significant in the survey, such as the idea that self-driving cars are cool, or a person’s general openness toward new technologies.

The strength of the posthuman effect may allow designers to re-envision the interiors of self-driving cars, according to the researchers. Steering wheels, which have been standard in cars for more than a century, could be eliminated to make room for interactive devices or interfaces, the researchers suggested.

“Designers may need to think in a different way, for example there’s no need to design in-car and dashboard interfaces based on what a human driver would normally use,” Sundar said. “Keep in mind, the participants also say they like the agency and convenience of autonomous vehicles and they do like the fun aspect as well, so the designer might want to add features on the dashboard that can bump up those things, including gamifying the transportation experience.”

In lieu of traditional features and design elements that involve human interaction with the automobile (e.g., manual transmission clutch, pedals, hand-brakes), this space might be better utilized by systems that improve communication between the user, automobile and connected automobiles, according to Gambino.

“For example, a graphical user interface that is tailored to self-driving cars might include information that visually situates the vehicle within the entire transportation system, showing other vehicles, speed, traffic, accidents and risk areas,” he said.

The ability to communicate driver intent can enhance the individual’s sense of control, particularly in “high-stakes” moments, according to the researchers.

“The removal of traditional features may heighten a sense of danger, but the design of interactive features that enhance driver agency and communicate the ability of self-driving cars may be practical solutions to improving their acceptance,” Gambino said.

The belief in computer superiority has shaped interactions between humans and computers in the past, according to Sundar. For example, most people are no longer leery about using an electronic calculator to find the answer to a challenging math problem because people accept that calculators can perform better than humans at the task, Sundar said.

The researchers, who report their findings today (May 8) at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held in Glasgow, U.K., also found that the men in the survey were more likely to accept self-driving cars than women. They added that liberals, compared to conservatives, were significantly more accepting of self-driving cars.

The researchers also found that certain beliefs and assumptions will lower acceptance of self-driving cars. The fear that autonomous cars are dangerous, or the idea that they are just creepy, significantly increased the likelihood that a person would not accept self-driving cars.

For the survey, the researchers recruited 404 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing website frequently used in studies. The participants filled out a questionnaire that sought demographic information and contained a series of questions about self-driving cars. Participants could also add comments to the researchers’ open-ended questions for additional reasons for accepting self-driving cars.

Despite the variety of schemes used for optical sensing, they all share the same principle: The quantity to be measured must leave a “fingerprint” on the optical response of the system. The fingerprint can be its transmission, reflection or absorption. The stronger these effects are, the stronger the response of the system.

While this works well at the macroscopic level, measuring tiny, microscopic quantities that induce weak response is a challenging task. Researchers have developed techniques to overcome this difficulty and improve the sensitivity of their devices. Some of these techniques, which rely on complex quantum optics concepts and implementations, have indeed proved useful, such as in sensing gravitational waves in the LIGO project. Others, which are based on trapping light in tiny boxes called optical resonators, have succeeded in detecting micro-particles and relatively large biological components.

Nonetheless, the ability to detect small nano-particles and eventually single molecules remains a challenge. Current attempts focus on a special type of light trapping devices called microring or microtoroid resonators — these enhance the interaction between light and the molecule to be detected. The sensitivity of these devices, however, is limited by their fundamental physics.

In their article “Sensing with Exceptional Surfaces in Order to Combine Sensitivity with Robustness” published in Physical Review Letters, physicists and engineers from Michigan Technological University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Central Florida propose a new type of sensor. They are based on the new notion of exceptional surfaces: surfaces that consist of exceptional points.

Exceptional Points for Exceptionally Sensitive Detection

In order to understand the meaning of exceptional points, consider an imaginary violin with only two strings. In general, such a violin can produce just two different tones — a situation that corresponds to a conventional optical resonator. If the vibration of one string can alter the vibration of the other string in a way that the sound and the elastic oscillations create only one tone and one collective string motion, the system has an exceptional point.

A physical system that exhibits an exceptional point is very fragile. In other words, any small perturbation will dramatically alter its behavior. The feature makes the system highly sensitive to tiny signals.

“Despite this promise, the same enhanced sensitivity of exceptional point-based sensors is also their Achilles heel: These devices are very sensitive to unavoidable fabrication errors and undesired environmental variations,” said Ramy El-Ganainy, associate professor of physics, adding that the sensitivity necessitated clever tuning tricks in previous experimental demonstrations.

“Our current proposal alleviates most of these problems by introducing a new system that has the same enhanced sensitivity reported in previous work, while at the same time robust against the majority of the uncontrivable experimental uncertainty,” said Qi Zhong, lead author on the paper and a graduate student who is currently working towards his doctorate degree at Michigan Tech.

Though the design of microring sensors continues to be refined, researchers are hopeful that by improving the devices, seemingly tiny optical observations will have large effects.

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Materials provided by Michigan Technological University. Original written by Kelley Christensen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.