Gunman On Campus

By: Charlize Woods, Staff Writer

On September 6th, at 9:20pm, an RU Alert was sent out to all students of Regis University notifying students that a lockdown had been placed on the campus. This lockdown was a result of a call about three men who were seen walking towards the field house, and one appeared to have a shotgun. As the lockdown persisted, it was explained that police had been dispatched to the campus and would be clearing buildings one by one. From 9:20pm to 12:39am, Regis remained in lockdown. 

In the little over three-hour lockdown, many students went through a great deal of emotions. Some students who live in Desmet Hall were stating how they have never had to deal with something like this, besides practice drills in high school, so they were at a loss of what was happening. My neighbor on the first floor stated that she was terrified and wanted to go home. She lives out of state so she was even more upset that she couldn’t be in the safety of her own home after the lockdown would end. 

While most were terrified, I talked to a few students who claimed to have been incredibly irritated by the lack of communication that was given. In my first year writing class the morning after, many of my peers were stating how the updates can not even be defined as such; they were redundant reminders to stay in a safe place and not to move. While this is good advice, it wasn’t helpful in knowing what was happening. 

Another issue that people had with the RU alerts the night of the lockdown was the text message alerts that were being sent out. It seemed to be a pattern of the full message being cut off. For example, one text message read, “DPD advises all Regis community members to remain where they are until they have finished clearing the campus. They do not want-” and then it cuts off completely until another message is sent out. 

In the end of this whole mess, none of the men were found, but the campus was cleared to end the lockdown. This experience was, for many people, terrifying, and also frustrating. Towards the end, many students stated that they were just tired, had to go to the bathroom, or were starting to just go to other rooms in their residence hall to talk about the whole situation. The only good thing that could come from such a terrible experience is the RU alerts being improved, God forbid something like this happens again.

The Effect of COVID-19 on Climate Change

By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer

COVID-19 pandemic caused the shut down of the majority of businesses as well as the dramatic decrease of fossil fuels exploitation. Waste-emission was practically ended because hundreds of thousands of factories stopped working, millions of vehicles stopped operating, which helped improve air quality in many places across the planet. Even the carbon emission was dramatically dropped globally. In short, all the measures in an effort to prevent the COVID-19  pandemic have had a positive impact on the climate and the environment within such a short time. But will this pandemic have a positive or negative impact in the long terms? 

Short-term positivity, long-term negativity

COVID-19 was, and is, an obvious catastrophe: overflown hospitals, increasing unemployment rate due to economic recession, etc. This pandemic crisis is also a turning point for another upcoming global crisis, which happens slowly but affects deeply. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterrres stated: “Whilst the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change has been a phenomenon for many years, and will remain with us for decades and require constant action.” 

Our reaction toward this pandemic will be the precursor for the climate change crisis in the upcoming decades. Efforts in recovering the economy – including economic boost policy, aiding funds, and programs for unemployment – will contribute in the shaping of the future economy and stabilize people’s lives. However, the carbon emission amount will undoubtedly remain on this planet for the next thousands of years to come. 

Changes in individual consumerism are not enough

It has been suggested that COVID-19 will be the main catalyst for the shift from consumerism to other concerns regarding climate change. However, quarantine and social distancing even contribute to an increase in consumerism since everyone rushes to grocery stores and stock up necessities. This is an iconic behavior of consumerism – the reason behind climate change.

Changes in individual consumption habits make people think that this is actually a positive sign for the environment. Some thought that after stocking up all the necessities, people might stop buying things uncontrollably. Changes in personal habits, especially in countries that have low consumption per capita, can lead to a lower waste emission. Nevertheless, this could only be a temporary consequence of peer pressures.

To make a better impact on decreasing global waste emission, changes in consumerism should not be limited at a personal scale, it needs to expand to a systemic scale. In China, a 25% decrease of waste emission was not because a person decided not to buy more toilet paper than needed, but because of the shutdown of industrial factories. 

COVID-19 is still a catastrophe to climate

1.     A declination in temporary waste emission.

According to Trafigura, a Singapore-based multinational commodity trading company, COVID-19 could cause the lowest oil demand in history, approximately 10 million b/d. This would have been good news for global pollution, however, it could signal a catastrophe because no one could guarantee whether the waste emission from oil consumption can still be maintained at such a low rate in the future. After such a long period of lockdown and social distancing, the economy will continue to operate, manufacturers will be recovered, and thus the pollution rate will increase again.

2.     A delay in shifting from traditional energy sources to renewable energy. 

The Economic recession due to COVID-19 has delayed the shift from traditional energy sources to renewable sources. Lockdown caused the markets and companies to close, which made some companies unable to maintain their budget for renewable energy projects such as solar panels and wind turbine installation. 

Suggestions for new projects have also been pushed back due to the discontinuation of the global supply chain (the majority of solar panels and wind turbines are produced in China). Bloomberg NEF, a strategic research provider covering global commodity markets and disruptive technologies driving the transition to a low-carbon economy, has lowered their expectations for the year 2020 in regards to the solar energy and electric vehicles market, indicating a deferral in the process of renewable energy shifting from traditional energy sources.

The Meaningless of A Repeated Word

By: Vivian Pham, Staff Writer

You were focusing on a good book when all of a sudden, you got distracted and lost track of the book. You had to re-read the paragraph again, but a weird thing happened. You stared at the words for a minute and suddenly, the word became unfamiliar. After a few minutes staring at it, you believe that it wasn’t misspelled, but it still looked like there was something wrong with it, even after you checked the dictionary. Are there any reasons behind this strange phenomenon?

In “Verbal Conditioning and Behaviour”, Dr. Jagannath Prasad Das defined “semantic satiation” as a loss of meaning of a word following its massed evocation as the word is repeated over and over again. When this study is expanded, it is suggested that this psychological phenomenon is applied for readers as well. In Dr. Leon Jakobovits’s 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University, he pointed out that when we stare at a word for a long time, this psychological phenomenon will be activated which makes the word look strange and unfamiliar, even with the simplest word.

“Unconscious inference” was first proposed in 19th century by a physicist Hermann Helmholtz, where inference refers to the idea that the brain conjectures what might be out there, and the unconscious reminds us that we have no awareness of the process. This process constantly occurs since we were born. An example for unconscious inference is the brain tends to think the Sun moves around the Earth – sunrise and sunset. However, in fact, the truth is the Earth orbits around the Sun, it’s just the brain thinks that what we see is the Sun orbits the Earth. Likewise, when we read and perceive language, our brains are in an unconscious inference state. So, when we stare at a word longer than we should, this state of mind is interrupted, causing the brain to “question” the meaning of that word.

The study “Communication in the Real Word” from Minnesota University dug deep into the essence of language and claimed that the language system is primarily made up of symbols which combine to deliver messages. When we perceive language, we perceive the combination of factors that make a language meaningful, not perceive it separately. Therefore, when we read a word, we don’t just read letter by letter, we read the whole word structurally in order to avoid looking at the words by its letter and break its meaningful structure.