Psy 607: Everything is Fucked was set to be taught by professor Srivastava Monday mornings in Straub Hall.

A common concern among psychology researchers was summed up in a joke syllabus written by University of Oregon associate professor Sanjay Srivastava earlier this month.

The syllabus was never intended to represent a real class, but a number of visitors to Srivastava’s blog jumped at the idea of it.

“I just want you to make sure, this is a fake class,” Srivastava told the Emerald in an interview. “I have talked to some people who actually thought it was real and were disappointed when it wasn’t.”

Srivastava’s class got laughs out of lay people and chuckles from other psychological researchers — the target audience of the blog according to Srivastava— but is facilitating a very real conversation. All of the readings “assigned” in the class are actual papers that deal with the “reproducibility crisis” facing psychology.

A number of researchers are finding that age-old experiments that have been reproduced many times over are now beginning to turn up different results, prompting the feeling behind Srivastava’s course title. Research has been done on top of foundations that are crumbling, because so many factors in recreating past experiments have changed, including confirmation bias and poorly controlled variables.

“A normal, well-functioning science should be producing ideas that after a while don’t pan out. That’s just what happens when you push boundaries,” Srivastava said. “In psychology, really in the last five years or so, there’s been a sense from a lot of people that we may be falling short of the expected amount of dead ends.”

With questions about his profession and livelihood at hand, Srivastava responded with humor rather than despair.

Working off of Michael Inzlicht’s comment in a Slate article that says “meta-analyses are fucked,” Srivastava compiled his own list of potential problem areas.

“I started making a list in my mind of ‘What are all the things that are fucked?’” Srivastava said. “It was just sort of floating in the back of my mind, and at some point I thought, ‘Ok, this would be funny to turn into a syllabus.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize that he successfully planned an entire quarter of readings and discussions about psychological topics that are “fucked.”

Despite the relative ease that Srivastava had in compiling the list, he says that he isn’t pessimistic about the field moving forward. Pointing to evidence that psychology is not the only science that is facing these problems, Srivastava is, “actually very optimistic about these issues.”

“This is a set of real and important issues,” Srivastava said. “Some of them are sort of fundamental issues in science that are never going to be solved.”

As a member of a brand new society, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, which had its first meeting this summer, he is involved in working on the very issues he is joking about.

Srivastava is battling the pessimistic view choking the field, using his undergraduate class, Psy 468: Motivation and Emotion, to explain the problem. Addressing the change in the historically consensual view of self-control as a depletable resource through a scientific lens, he is teaching his students to analyze the self-control experiment from its origins to the point when it was called into doubt.

“If science is about discovery […] about pushing into the unknown, then that means taking risks,” he said. “Maybe this sort of thing is happening too much, maybe there are things we can do to make it happen less likely to happen […] but this is how science progresses.”

The University of Oregon was awarded $237,000 this week as part of a grant from the U.S. Geological Survey. Those funds are part of a greater $3.7 million fund that is dispersed among six universities on the West Coast, according to a press release.

The funding is allotted in order to improve the “ShakeAlert” early warning system, which is designed to give users a chance to get to safety before heavy earthquake activity begins.

Oregon Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden are throwing their support behind the project.

““The Cascadia earthquake has the possibility of being the worst natural disaster in North American history and this funding will help make sure that our West Coast communities have the most up-to-date early warning system,” said Merkley. “We have to do everything we can to prepare for this potential disaster and it’s great knowing that the important work going on at the University of Oregon will help advance this system.”

The UO has stepped up in recent years, taking the lead on a number of aspects of the ShakeAlert project.

“Earthquakes are deadly serious business for the West Coast, which is why it’s crucial that the University of Oregon gets the funding it needs to continue its life-saving research,” Wyden said.“This funding will move the U of O closer to creating a fully developed early warning system that could save untold numbers of lives and give our communities up and down the coast and throughout the state more time to prepare for the worst.”

The Festival of Eugene is coming back after being cancelled last month following an alleged racist Facebook posts on the event coordinator’s page.

The event had been cancelled for the safety of the patrons and the vendors, according to a release sent out following the controversy.

The event will not feature the usual lineup of performers or array of street vendors as in previous years. It will take place on August 19 at Skinner Butte and organizers are asking attendees to bring instruments and food to share, along with their families and pets.

“Eugene, don’t let one mistake end your festival– lets throw a great big party!” the event’s Facebook page says.

New research is pulling back the veil shrouding well-intentioned “ban the box” (BTB) policies across the country. These policies were intended to reduce employment discrimination by not requiring job applicants to list their criminal histories on job applications.

These BTB policies appear to be doing far more harm than good.

University of Oregon associate professor Benjamin Hansen and Jennifer Doleac of the University of Virginia published a study in July, supported by previous data, which points to increased rates of discrimination when job applicants are not asked about their criminal history during the application process.

“Trying to prevent employers from having information actually increases discrimination,” Hansen said. “In many ways, this speaks to the fact that some employers do have pre-existing biases.”

Hansen’s work found that those biases are thrown into the light when employers are not allowed to ask about past misdeeds. So much so that with BTB policies in place, young, low-skilled (no college degree) black and Hispanic men were 2.9 to 5.1 percent less likely to be employed.

While Hansen and Doleac were digging into the numbers provided by the Current Population Survey, another experiment involving thousands of fictitious job applications ate away at such policies in New York and New Jersey.

Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr from the University of Michigan submitted 15,000 online job applications, creating identical resumes but changing the names of employees. The numbers were shocking.

“Before BTB, white applicants to BTB-affected employers received about 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants,” according to their study, “but BTB increases this gap to 45 percent.”

The targeted demographic in Hansen’s study (young, low-skilled, black and Hispanic men) suffer when other pre-employment tests are done away with as well. Policies that were designed to reduce racial disparities in employment such as drug tests and credit checks produce similar results as BTB policies when they are done away with.

Since the first BTB policy was implemented in Hawaii in 1998, 34 states and the Discrict of Columbia have adopted similar policies. In 2015, President Barack Obama “banned the box” on federal government job applications. The practice has been in place long enough for researchers such as Hansen to make a determination about them.

“Based on the evidence we have … the better answers are other policies,” Hansen said.

Ban the box policies were put in place to protect ex-offenders. Hansen and Doleac found that these policies aren’t helping but the issue runs deeper.

“As a country, we have embraced mass incarceration as a primary way to try to reduce crime,” Hansen said, “when you send that many people to prison, eventually you have to deal with that many people getting out of prison.”

Mass incarceration and criminal justice reform has received bipartisan support but tangible steps are harder to pin down. Promoting job-readiness and providing more information to employers as well as ex-offenders are solutions that Hansen proposed.

Job-readiness comes down to, “focusing on trying to make individuals who are incarcerated develop more skills while they are in prison,” Hansen said. On top of typical prison-jobs, skills such as resume writing and how to go through an interview are at the top of the list.

Hansen stressed that the face value of their research is not where they stand.

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t think employing ex-offenders is important,” he said. “Thinking about our own welfare. A course policy like BTB turns out to be poorly targeted.”

The fallout the University of Oregon suffered after an alleged 2014 rape involving three basketball players isn’t over.

The Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners issued a letter of reprimand and fined Shelly Kerr, director of the University Testing and Counseling Center, $2,500, assigning her to take a six-hour course on “professional ethics” for her actions during the events surrounding the 2014 case.

Following the alleged rape in March 2014, the student (Jane Doe) began counseling sessions at the University Testing and Counseling Center, which Kerr is still directing.

The Board investigated Kerr to determine whether she violated the ethics of her position as a psychologist on two counts. The Board asked whether she failed to clarify a conflict of interest when the university requested confidential medical records from her office and if she failed to take steps to protect the information requested.

The university is standing behind Kerr, according to a statement made last month by Tobin Klinger, senior director of public affairs and communications, to the AP saying, “the university has been supporting of Shelly Kerr and that support remains strong.”

What that support entails is unclear; Klinger said it was “general support, just that we are supportive of Shelly as she continues to move forward.”

The notice for disciplinary action was issued last September. The case was heard in May with the fine handed down a month later.

The director of OBPE Charles Hill attached the press release in an email but gave no comment on the case.

Investigator Karen Berry attached the same release and said in an email that all investigations are confidential.

The university settled the lawsuit brought by two former counseling center employees just days before Kerr’s fine was issued. Those employees were concerned with Kerr’s actions when an email sent on behalf of Associate General Counsel for the university, Sam Hill, requested the confidential records of Jane Doe after mediation failed in December 2014.

The Board did not address whether the university’s request for the records was improper, but did note there was not enough evidence to clearly determine if there were any legal violations. However, their interest was with how Kerr responded and determining whether her response was appropriate.

From a university standpoint, Kerr’s activity as a university employee won’t be questioned again after the emergency policy concerning confidential records presented in October last year was ratified in April by University President Michael Schill.

Section two of the policy expressly gives power to the university to subpoena confidential files “in response to an actual or anticipated lawsuit.” This was the action that placed Kerr in a position to choose between her ethical duties as a psychologist and her duties as an employee of the university, acting in accordance with UO’s General Counsel.

The potential sanctions that Kerr faced were far greater than what was handed down. Originally, a fine of $5,000 was proposed and a suspension of her license for at least a year or probation were alternatives to her letter of reprimand. Kerr was unavailable for comment and it is unclear whether she will appeal.

The alleged rape case concerning Jane Doe and three former University of Oregon basketball players continues to haunt the university: Shelly Kerr, director of the University Testing and Counseling Center, was fined by the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners last month.

According to a report, the Board found that Kerr had “acted contrary to the recognized standard of ethics of the psychological profession,” by not identifying and clarifying the conflict of interest that she had when told to turn over the counseling records of Jane Doe to the university’s General Counsel.

Kerr also “failed to take reasonable precautions to protect the Student’s (Jane Doe) confidential mental health information” by not conferring with outside counsel before releasing the records to the university’s General Counsel.

In addition to a fine of $2,500, Kerr is also required to complete a six-hour course on professional ethics.

If Kerr chooses to appeal, the university will support her, UO spokesperson Tobin Klinger told AP.

Below is a timeline of the original 2014 case, with updated information from a release concerning Kerr’s OBPE hearing.

Groundbreaking energy research is taking place at the University of Oregon.

When UO President Michael Schill announced that research is a top priority under his leadership, Shannon Boettcher and a team of graduate students took up the call. Their work on the production of low-cost, high-performance solar panel cells could change the solar energy business as it’s currently known.

Dr. Boettcher and his team received a $225,000 grant from SunShot – an initiative set up by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. SunShot’s main goal is to make solar energy less expensive than electricity from coal by 2020, Boettcher said.

The project that Boettcher and his team are working on has been in place for the last six years. The beginning of the program took place under a grant from the Bridging Research Interactions through collaborative Development Grants in Energy funding program.

“It’s motivated by a big need in solar technology,” Boettcher said about the project. “We are running up against the efficiency [of] performance limits of the current technology we use.”

Annie Greenaway, a graduate student in the chemistry department, latched on to the program because of her interest in making science beneficial and relevant to society.

“I wanted to do this particular work,” Greenaway said. “It was something that was very interesting to me.”

Greenaway was drawn to this particular science because she feels that renewable energy is a way to make science socially relevant. The semiconductors that the team are working on potentially boost the efficiency of solar cells by 50 percent. They will cut costs, improve safety and reduce waste during production.

The current widely-used method makes the crystals in solar cells with gaseous metals. This process creates high volumes of waste as a “significant fraction” of the gas is lost, Boettcher said.

Efficiency is only one item on the list. The gases are also highly toxic and have resulted in deaths in the past, before safety methods surrounding production were refined. Those safety precautions also add to the costs of an already expensive account.

Boettcher’s team is developing a new method that doesn’t use a gas or liquid precursor and instead uses solids, growing the same crystals with significantly less waste.

Jason Boucher, a PhD student in the Physics department, has been working on this project since it was awarded its first grant. While he was an undergraduate at Seattle Pacific University, a course in alternative energy sparked his interest. An internship at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado sent him to Boettcher’s lab.

“I thought it was one of the most important problems that we are facing — the way that we generate energy that is clean and sustainable,” Boucher said.

That attitude runs throughout the team. Each member is passionate about the work they are doing and the effect it is having.

“I choose the research projects I work on because I think, ‘if we can get them to work, will it make a difference?’ ” Boettcher said. “If this works out the way we want it to, will the world care? And in this case in particular, yeah, it will be a big deal.”

Walls crumble, glass shatters and the ground ripples as the subduction zone off the coast of Oregon releases hundreds of years of tension, setting off a chain of catastrophes known as the Cascadia Event: a high-magnitude earthquake causing an estimated 30-foot tsunami along the coast, widespread flooding, power outages, broken highways, ruptured gas lines, fires and thousands of deaths in Oregon.

In Eugene, bridges and overpasses will collapse, crippling highways. On the University of Oregon campus, many buildings will be damaged beyond repair, and occupants will have to leave immediately.

When this event happens, students will need to be self-sufficient, according to Kelly McIver, communication director for UO’s Safety and Risk Services.

For at least two days, UO students will be without internet and cell service. They will face shortages of food, shelter and medical attention. A team of runners will be putting up handwritten signs to direct people to help.

This event could happen at any moment, seismology experts say. The consensus among scientists is that it’s overdue.

This is all according to the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Commission and UO’s emergency management and continuity team.

When Kathryn Schulz’s article “The Really Big One” was published in The New Yorker in 2015, years of research in the Pacific Northwest came to the attention of residents. Earthquake preparedness became for Oregon what it had been for its neighbors to the south for years, according to Leland O’Driscoll, project manager for the West Coast’s earthquake early warning system.

Only a handful of faults in the world are capable of doing the kind of damage that is projected for the Cascadia event, which is expected to affect the entire West Coast. Since accurate tracking capabilities became available in the 1900s, 17 quakes have registered at 8.5 or higher on the Richter scale across the globe, according to the United States Geological Survey. The likelihood of a Cascadia Event in the 8.3 to 8.6 range is 37 percent, according to the Oregon Resilience Plan.

The most destructive quake in the state’s history, in terms of property damage, came March 25, 1963, when a 5.6 magnitude temblor caused $30 million in damages. But further back, it gets significantly worse: more than 250 years ago, the last Cascadia event dropped the Oregon Coast five feet and sent a tsunami as far as Japan.

Officials at UO must plan for an event that is unplannable.

“There is no effective way to plan for dealing with earthquake response,” Krista Dillon, UO director of emergency management and fire prevention said. “We won’t know what we’ve got until it happens.”

UO officials can’t be sure how many buildings will withstand the Cascadia Event. Of the 86 major buildings on campus, 39 aren’t built to current code and could be damaged beyond repair in an earthquake, according to Darin Dehle, the director of the design and construction office at UO.

A window in Fenton Hall shows the steel skeleton and stabilizing system of the building. (Tran Nguyen/Emerald)

The remaining 47 buildings are built so that they don’t collapse in an 8.0, “but they may not be salvageable,” Dehle said.

“That is a big quake,” Dehle said. “The majority of our historic buildings would be un-occupiable.”

Very few buildings anywhere are designed to withstand magnitude 8.0 earthquakes. Emergency response buildings — such as hospitals, fire and police stations — are the only buildings that stand a relative chance of remaining functional after Cascadia hits, according to Dehle.

The Oregon Resilience Plan, however, estimates that health care facilities will take 18 months to return to operation.

Despite the difficulty planning for such a disaster, the UO emergency management team has taken steps to prepare the campus for a major earthquake. It has posted flipcharts around campus with detailed tips for how the public should respond to various emergencies, including power outages, severe weather and earthquakes. The team advises people on campus to “drop, take cover under sturdy furniture and hold on to it” during an earthquake. There are also detailed instructions on what to do before, during and after an earthquake.

Emergency management officials also recommend personal emergency kits with survival supplies.

“You’ll need to be able to take care of yourself for the first couple of days,” Dillon said.

Taking “care of yourself” ranges from basic first aid to ensuring that survival kits include a battery-powered radio, flashlight, clothes and food for at least three days. A reusable water bottle is also recommended by Dillon. Clean drinking water will be scarce until FEMA arrives on the scene an estimated three days after the initial shock.

“Students need to be thinking about the fact that they are almost all adults,” McIver said. “Things like the university … [are] going to be very low on the priority list.”

Hospitals and K-12 schools are much higher on the priority list than the “able-bodied adults” who make up most of the UO community, McIver said.

That means students, staff and faculty on campus will have to exit buildings quickly and congregate in safe areas. But safe areas can’t be designated until after the quake is over.

“We don’t know what places are going to be fine,” McIver said.

Once safe spaces are established, information will be dispersed by volunteer runners organized by the Emergency Response department. A team of about 40 people who have taken courses in emergency response will report to Dillon, McIver and other authorities before spreading out over campus and the city.

“We are going to have to rely on hand-written posters with information,” Dillon said.

Because UO can’t plan for the Cascadia event, staff want to know as soon as possible that an earthquake is coming.

To give people a chance to get to safety before earthquakes strike, O’Driscoll and UO geophysics professor Doug Toomey are collaborating with UC Berkeley, University of Washington and USGS. In the last three to five years, UO has taken on more responsibility in this project, O’Driscoll said.

The face of the program is a smartphone app called ShakeAlert. It’s the brand name for the project, O’Driscoll said. It’s still in the beta stage, but in 2018 the app will use sensors up and down the West Coast to alert users before the quake hits.

ShakeAlert could give Eugene residents up to a minute to evacuate unsafe buildings or drop, cover and hold until the initial shocks cease.

A minute is a relatively short amount of time, but Toomey told a live forum last year that “even one minute of warning would give you time to protect yourself.”

Familiar blue barrels toted on dollys  by members of the UO Zero Waste program can be seen throughout the halls of buildings on campus. These barrels will be conspicuously absent from the Erb Memorial Union moving forward, though their recycling campaign is moving ahead full steam.

Mixed messages about pre-conceived plans and reports that waste left behind by the Zero Waste bins contributed to the change.

“It was a combination of both,” Dustin Jackson EMU custodial services manager said. “We were constantly cleaning up after the barrels they collect the recycling in. That’s been going on for years and years.”

Recycling efforts took on a new face in the EMU as a new relationship between the UO Zero Waste program and the EMU took effect last week.

The new standard operating procedure has moved some of the recycling bins in the EMU to “common areas” in order simplify the cleaning crew’s job. That crew is tasked with taking the waste bins inside, to the loading dock behind the EMU for Zero Waste to collect.

“One of the things that was negotiated early on between the EMU and Zero Waste was that once the newly renovated building opened up, the crews that maintained the floors would take over recycling and collection,” said Donny Addison, Zero Waste operations manager. “The EMU laid out Zero Waste stations [and] the EMU staff, cleaning and maintenance are now managing all inside collection.”

While Zero Waste has said that this new partnership was agreed upon early on, the timing of the change is questionable. The new EMU has been open since May but this plan has only been executed recently.

Recycling is a messy business but no other buildings on campus have had any complaints about Zero Waste’s procedures.

“Pretty much everywhere else we send crews in on foot with barrels and dollys,” Addison said, “That’s been the way we’ve done it in the EMU and everyone else on campus up until this point.”

Despite the complaints, the change is being welcomed by both Zero Waste and the EMU which insists that both sides are benefiting.

“My number one priority is keeping this building clean,” Jackson said, I have to back up my custodial staff. This is a compromise, we still recycle; it’s just that they will pick up recycling at the loading dock. The easier it is, the more effective the program will be for everyone.”

One factor that sets the EMU apart from other buildings on campus is the food vendors that have arrived with the renovation. The to-go containers and drink cups from most of the vendors are not recyclable or compostable, rendering Zero Waste’s services unneeded. This significant change to the type and amount of waste flowing out of the EMU changes the role that Zero Waste plays.

Barred from collecting waste themselves, they are taking on an educational role. The next item on the agenda is to move all of the vendors onto a program which includes a range of recyclable and compostable items.

Police are searching for a man who robbed the Chase bank on West 11th this afternoon at approximately 11:28 a.m.

“The subject displayed a threatening note to the employee,” Eugene Police Department Public Information Officer John Hankemeier said. “He was last seen exiting the Fred Meyer entrance.”

The suspect is a white male, between the ages of 30-40, approximately 5′ 7″ tall with slicked back hair and scruffy facial hair according to a release sent out by EPD.

The EPD is requesting that anyone who has information about the suspect call their non-emergency hotline 541-682-5111.