Child Maltreatment Conference Held at UA
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – April 20
April is Child Abuse Prevention month and city leaders are getting involved in trying to get the public interested. Today, they focused on child maltreatment. According to the 2013 annual report of the Alabama Department of Child Abuse and Neglect, the cost of child maltreatment is an estimated $2.3 billion. The most common types of child maltreatment are physical, sexual and emotional abuse, also neglect.
NBC 13 (Birmingham) – April 20
Lack of attention, self-control predict dangerous texting behaviors
MyScience.org – April 20
Texting while driving or walking can be dangerous, but people still engage in the behavior without thinking. A new study suggests that individuals can resist the lure of dangerous texting if they become mindful of their surroundings, have the self-control to focus on one task and not have it as an automatic behavior. This behavior, described as “automaticity,” is the limited conscious attention or awareness of one’s behavior, the researchers said. “Our study underlines the importance of considering the automaticity of a specific technology behavior in combination with self-regulating personality traits,” said Elliot Panek, the study’s lead author and former University of Michigan researcher who now works at the University of Alabama.
Phys.org – April 20
College students aren’t getting enough sleep
Pakistan Daily Times – April 21
The University of California-Los Angeles recently hosted a series of events on campus to raise awareness about the importance of sleep, reports the student newspaper the Daily Bruin. “There’s a weird pride in certain students when they pull all nighters,” Kendra Knudsen, a coordinator with the UCLA Mind Well initiative, told the Daily Bruin earlier this month. “They need to re-prioritise, if they don’t have time for sleep, looking at their schedule and seeing what is really important.” … University of Alabama health science professor Adam Knowlden found last year that while one-third percent of the general population isn’t getting enough Z’s, 60 percent of the college population gets insufficient sleep.
Students create distracted driving bill
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – April 20
Law enforcement officers are not the only ones working to keep Alabama roadways safe. A group of Pickens County students are working to make distracted driving illegal in the state. “Even if we only save one life with this bill its more than anything we could of ever dreamed of doing,” said Maria Manning, who is a freshman at the University of Alabama. Manning, and two former classmates, created a project while in high school to raise awareness about distracted driving. Manning said the project expanded from there. “It grew into more of a distracted driving type of thing instead of just texting and driving because distracted driving kind of includes everything that could possibly happen behind the wheel that would take your attention from the road,” said Manning.
Facing opposition, state parks move forward with hotel hopes
Dothan Eagle – April 20
Two of Alabama’s premier state parks could soon get their own hotels — if they can overcome legal battles, budget cuts and public dissent. Gulf State Park, on the coast, and Oak Mountain State Park, just south of Birmingham, are both planning major upgrades accompanied by multimillion-dollar lodging complexes. … The Gulf State Park project, the larger of the two, has existed in various forms since Hurricane Ivan decimated the 6,150-acre park in 2004. The storm ruined a convention center that two Alabama governors have now spent a decade trying to rebuild. On April 20, 2010, the park and its treasured white sand beaches faced another catastrophe with the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, when millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Along with a new full-service hotel, a master plan for the $85 million project — managed by the University of Alabama — includes restored ecological areas and new educational facilities.
Yellowhammer News – April 20
Lavender Graduation honors LGBT students, supporters
Crimson White – April 21
Lavender Graduation was held Monday night in Shelby Hall to celebrate the achievements of LGBT students graduating from The University of Alabama this spring or summer. The 2015 ceremony featured 26 total graduates of the LGBT community and their allies. Graduates ranged from bachelor degrees to masters and doctorates. The ceremony began with Kirk Walter, the assistant director of Student Involvement, who welcomed the crowd. “We came to celebrate our queer campus community as we are, for who we are and for what we’ve achieved,” Walter said.
MedPass to expand
Crimson White – April 21
A Nashville-based startup company is giving University of Alabama business students the opportunity to work on a program that will streamline immunization forms for incoming students. MedPass Health LLC is a startup company founded in 2014 by UA alumnus Hallett Ogburn, CEO; Jim Wills, president and CFO; and Kevin Bond, adviser alongside students of the UA MIS program. It is an immunization-data collecting technology company that works with health centers to collect and verify health information by digitizing paper-based medical and insurance forms and storing them into a cloud. The company’s focus has mainly been on automating student verification and collecting student immunization forms at university health centers, which was part of the inspiration for working with students to develop the program.