University Room Regulations

Approved and Prohibited Items

    The following items are approved for use in residential (住宿的) rooms: electric blankets, hair dryers, personal computers, radios, televisions and DVD players. Items that are not allowed in student rooms include: candles, ceiling fans, fireworks, waterbeds, sun lamps and wireless routers. Please note that any prohibited items will be taken away by the Office of Residence Life.

Access to Residential Rooms

    Students are provided with a combination (组合密码) for their room door locks upon check-in. Do not share your room door lock combination with anyone. The Office of Residence Life may change the door lock combination at any time at the expense of the resident if it is found that the student has shared the combination with others. The fee is $25 to change a room combination.

Cooking Policy

    Students living in buildings that have kitchens are only permitted to cook in the kitchen. Students must clean up after cooking. This is not the responsibility of housekeeping staff. Kitchens that are not kept clean may be closed for use. With the exception of using a small microwave oven (微波炉) to heat food, students are not permitted to cook in their rooms.

Pet Policy

    No pets except fish are permitted in student rooms. Students who are found with pets, whether visiting or owned by the student, are subject to an initial fine of $100 and a continuing fine of $50 a day per pet. Students receive written notice when the fine goes into effect. If, one week from the date of written notice, the pet is not removed, the student is referred to the Student Court.

Quiet Hours

    Residential buildings must maintain an atmosphere that supports the academic mission of the University. Minimum quiet hours in all campus residences are 11:00 pm to 8:00 am Sunday through Thursday. Quiet hours on Friday and Saturday nights are 1:00 am to 8:00 am. Students who violate quiet hours are subject to a fine of $25.

    In 2016, designer Liz Ciokajlo received a task from the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York: revisit the Moon Boot, a fluffy-looking snowshoe inspired by the footwear used by the Apollo astronauts.

    Launched in 1972 at the height of the lunar missions, the Moon Boot is an icon of the 20th Century's “plastic age” and the museum administrators wanted a new take on it.

    Ciokajlo set out to reimagine it. She knew only a biomaterial would work in a “post-plastic age”, but the designer also wanted a new destination to inspire it. Our generation's space travel obsession is not the Moon, she thought, but the red planet Mars. And Mars allows you to really think outside of the box.

    The task led her to an amazing biomaterial that had already attracted the attention of engineers innovating m building materials and of top space agencies like NASA and ESA. Her final design, a tall, female, rough-looking boot, can be made on board a spaceship with almost only human sweat and a few fungus spores (真菌孢子), ideal for a seven-month trip to Mars with limited check-in luggage.

    This magic biomaterial is mycelium (菌丝体), the vegetative part of the fungus It looks like amass of white thread-like structures, each called hyphae. Collectively, these threads are called mycelium and are the largest part of the fungus.

    Mycelium has amazing properties. It is a great recycler, as it feeds off a substrate to create more material, and has the potential of almost limitless growth in the right conditions. It can endure more pressure than conventional concrete without breaking. It is a known insulator and fire-retardant and could even provide radiation protection on space missions.

    On Earth it's currently used to create ceiling panels, leather, packaging materials and building materials, but in outer space it stands out for its architectural potential, says artist and engineer Maurizio Montalti, who has teamed up with Ciokajlo.

    For her revisited boot, Ciokajlo wanted to use the human body as the source for some of the building materials and decided to employ sweat. Reusing sweat is not entirely new in space exploration but a novelty approach for footwear. She thinks it might make astronauts feel closer to home during the long journey to Mars.

    The design is still hypothetical, because the real boot submitted for Moma and currently in display at the London Design Museum did use mycelium but not human sweat, as their deadline was too tight, but the science checks out.

    Adopting (领养) a new pet should be an exciting and rewarding experience. But just as all families are different, so are all pets. Learn what to consider before you find your new furry family member.

    All pets require their owner's time, so Theisen, an expert in pet care, says how much time you can give to the pet is the top thing to consider. "If you adopt a 4-year-old cat, she's not going to need the same amount of care as a 9-week-old dog". says Theisen.

    Like dating and finding the perfect partner, you want a pet that shares your interests and activity levels, particularly if you're looking for dogs. "Consider activity levels in the family," says Theisen. "If you're a couch potato, or in other words, a homebody, look for a pet that matches that activity level."

    Some dogs, like Dalmatians and Terriers, can be loud and noisy and demand a more active lifestyle and room to be outside; they might not fit as well in close living situations as more sedentary pets. The Humane Society of the United States encourages potential owners to research books and websites and talk to other pet owners when considering adopting a new pet.

    Theisen says that potential owners should go beyond the first impression of loveliness and watch how the animals interact with them. "There are dogs that will jump to the gate to meet you," says Theisen. "And there are dogs that sit there with their sad doggy eyes — you know they're not going to be high-energy dogs".

    Some exotic pets, like tortoises and parrots, are likely to live longer than dogs and cats — and even their human owners. They can also grow to be much larger than they were when they first came to live with their owners. Owners should make sure that their living situations should be continually updated and also prepare for the animal's future.

    A picture speaks a thousand words. And with over a thousand emoji pictures to represent our words, who needs to speak or write any more? According to Professor Vyv Evans of Bangor University, emoji is the UK's fastest-growing language in history. These little electronic pictures started life in Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s and are now hugely popular. They have inspired fashion, like the real-life dress copied from the dancing lady emoji, and are even recognized as art! In New York's Museum of Modern Art you can now see the first set of the 176 original emojis.

    Why do we love them so much? They allow us to personalize text and have fun as we express ourselves, make people laugh and be creative in how we use them. UK teenagers also told us they really appreciated the fact that emojis are quick and easy.

    People have their favourite emojis. In the UK, the most used emojis are ' face with tears ofjoy', ' face blowing a kiss' and 'Iove heart'. Maybe (with emojis at least) the British are more fun and romantic than people think! Companies such as McDonalds have also tried to use people's love of emojis to make advertisement. They used a series of emojis to tell a story of a disappointing day given a happy ending by a visit to McDonalds. Unluckily for McDonalds, most people added the vomiting(呕吐) emoji to the blank space after the story.

    What is the future of emoji? Is emoji developing so rapidly that it will soon compete with English as a global language? Or is technology changing so fast that emoji will soon be forgotten when the next big thing comes along? It is hard to say and even technology and language experts are divided on the subject.

    What do you think? Keep your eyes open for new developments!

    It began as a game: High school and college students studying computer technology figured out they could use personal computers to break into telephone company computers and make free, long-distance telephone calls. These young computer talents soon gained the name "hackers".

    Police arrested a few hackers, but many went on to even more complex hacking. One of them was arrested for making illegal telephone calls and later he used a phone to change a police officer's credit records to get back at the officer for arresting him. He also used a computer to change his college records to give himself better grades.

    As hackers gained experience  they began invading computers at banks, airlines and other businesses. In one case a hacker instructed an airline's computer to give him free airplane tickets.

    The U.S. government is worried that hackers may break into its networks of defense computers. The government's secrets are easily attacked because thousands of government computers are connected by telephone lines that hackers can get into.

    In November 1988, a college student entered a U.S. Defense Department computer network called Arpanet. The hacker injected a computer program that made copies of itself throughout Arpanet. Some hackers use viruses to destroy all the data in a computer. But in this case, government officials shut down the network before the program reached every computer in the system. Shutting down the system angered many researchers who were using the computers. The hacker turned himself in to the police and he was charged with a crime.

    The incident put the spotlight on computer hacking in the United States. Many companies have hired experts to protect their computers from hackers, and many computer experts now advise companies on how to protect their computers.

    The U.S. government believes foreign governments have hired hackers to try to break into top-secret defense computers.

    Experts disagree over whether a computer network can ever be safe from hacking. But in the future, some of the most outstanding minds in the U.S. will be working to frustrate the attempts of computer hackers.

We all know how it feels to get lost in a great book. But what's happening in our brains as we dive into it? How is it different from what happens as we experience real life? Now, a new study led by Dr Leila Wehbe and Dr Tom Mitehell of Carnegie Mellon University have provided partial answers to these questions. 

Since reading comprehension is a highly complex process, earlier studies tried to break that process down and focus on just one aspect at a time: mapping fMRI signatures（特征）associated with processing a single word or sentence, for example. "It's usually not like reading a book, and usually the stimulus（刺激物）consists of out-of-context sentences designed specifically for the experiment"

To address these issues, the researchers developed a computer program to look for patterns of brain activity that appeared when people read certain words, specific grammatical structures, particular characters" names and other aspects of the story—a total of 195 different "story features". In the study, they first asked eight volunteers to read Chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and recorded their brain activity using an fMRI scanner（扫描仪）. Then the researchers fed the volunteers' fMRI data into their computer program and had the program identify the responses of different brain regions to the 195 features mentioned above. 

The result showed that when the volunteers read descriptions of physical movement in the story, there was significantly increased activity in the posterior temporal cortex, the region involved in perceiving real-world movement. Besides dialogue was specifically related with the right temporoparietal junction, a key area involved in imagining others thoughts and goals. "This is truly shocking for us as these regions aren't even considered to be part of the brain's language system," Wehbe says. 

Next, Wehbe and Mitchell hope to study how and why language processing can go wrong. "If we have a large enough amount of data", Wehbe says, "we could find the specific ways in which one brain—for example, the brain of a dyslexic（诵读困难的）person—is performing differently from other brains." And this, the researchers think, may someday help us design individually tailored（特制的）treatments for dyslexia and other reading disorders.