Cuyahoga Valley National Park Volunteer Program

    Building a Community of Park Stewards

    Position Title: Wildlife Volunteer – Butterfly Monitors (2 positions)

    Dates: Mid May to September, 2018

    Hours: 8 ~ 16 hours / week

    Location: Cuyahoga Valley National Park

    Duties: Park staff will train volunteers in butterfly identification and data recording for one week before volunteers work in team of two to help track butterfly monitoring areas. Butterfly monitoring areas are 1 ~ 2 miles in length and are walked one time per week. There are a total of three butterfly monitoring areas within the park. Butterflies are identified by using binoculars （望远镜） or by netting and releasing. Data is recorded on data sheets.

    Skills Required: Applicants must have self motivation and desire to work with others. Volunteers will work during days when temperature is 70 degrees or more, between 10:30 am and 5 pm. Ability to walk a long distance in hot and humid conditions is needed. Skills with basic butterfly identification are not a must but helpful.

    Requirements: Applicants must complete a National Park Service Agreement and have their backgrounds looked into. U. S. citizenship is required. Applicants must be current Kent State University students.

    How to Apply: Please request an application from Mike Johnson at gkovach@kent.edu and send it back to Mike Johnson at gkovach@kent.edu, with the above position title as the subject, by February 15, 2018. If offered an interview, please come to Cuyahoga Valley National Park with your personal resume introducing your education and your previous work experience.

    For further information, please call Jamie Walters at (330) 657-2142 or email jwalters@forcvnp.org.

    Summer vacation is coming. Most of students want to have a good trip this summer. Here is some information about trips for you

    Artificial intelligence (AI) technology may soon be a useful tool for doctors. It may help them better understand and treat diseases like breast cancer in ways that were never before possible.

    Rishi Rawat teaches AI at the University of Southern California's (USC) Clinical Science Center in Los Angeles. He is part of a team of scientists who are researching how AI and machine learning can more easily recognize cancerous growths in the breast. Rawat provides information about cancer cells to a computer. He says this data helps the machine learn. “…You can put the data into them and they will learn the patterns and the pattern recognition that's important to making decisions.”

    David Agus is another USC researcher. He believes that “machines are not going to take the place of doctors.” He adds, “Computers will not treat patients, but they will help make certain decisions and look for things that the human brain can't recognize these patterns by itself.”

    Once a confirmed cancerous growth is removed, doctors still have to treat the patient to reduce the risk of cancer returning. The form of treatment depends on the kind of cancer. Currently, researchers take a thin piece of tissue, put it on a small piece of glass and add color to better see the cells. This process could take days or even longer. Scientists say artificial intelligence can do something better than just count cells. Through machine learning, it can recognize complex patterns, or structures, and learn how the cells are organized. The hope is that machines will soon be able to make a quick diagnosis（诊断）of cancer that is free of human mistakes.

    “All of a sudden, we have the computing power to really do it in real time...We couldn't have done this, we didn't have the computing power to do this several years ago, but now it's all changed.” Agus adds that the process could be done “for almost no cost in the developing world.” He says that having a large amount of information about patients is important for a machine to effectively do its job in medicine.

    A doctor faces a series of critical decisions every day. The best a doctor can do is to make those decisions as informed as possible. Some of them are still hard to make. A doctor can ask people of whom he values their opinions and that's it. Imagine discussing these with an AI system that is even more rational（理性的）than anyone else.

    The University of Southern California researchers are now only studying breast cancer. But doctors predict artificial intelligence will one day make a difference in all forms of cancer.

    Shakespeare's Birthplace and Exhibition of Shakespeare's World

    Welcome to the world-famous house where William Shakespeare was born in l564 and where he grew up. The property (房产) remained in the ownership of Shakespeare's family until 1806. The House has welcomed visitors travelling from all over the world, for over 250 years.

    Enter through the Visitors' Centre and see the highly-praised exhibition Shakespeare's World, a lively and full introduction to the life and work of Shakespeare.

    Stand in the rooms where Shakespeare grew up.

    Discover examples of furniture and needlework from Shakespeare's period.

    Enjoy the traditional English garden, planted with trees and flowers mentioned in the poet's works.

    The Birthplace is within easy walking distance of all the car parks shown on the map; nearest is Windsor Street (3 minutes' walk).

    The House may present difficulties but the Visitors' Centre, its exhibition, and the garden are accessible (可进入的) to wheelchair users

    The Shakespeare Coffee House (opposite the Birthplace).

    At a comedy night at Johns Hopkins Univerity in Maryland, members of the school's comedy(喜剧) club bring lots of laughter to their classmates with funny speeches and humorous body movements. These college student comedian's humour entertains busy, young people and eases their stress.

    Yet the club member Arella Shua says comedy is serious work. Every comedy starts as an individual project-- each member writes their own material. Then they try it out in weekly club meetings where all club members read the material, going joke by joke and seeing what works and what doesnt. Nothing unsatisfactory will be compromised(妥协). In this way comes a satisfying comedy.

    Ariella joined the club last year. Now she does not go anywhere without bringing something on which she can take notes. "Whenever I just have a thought in my head or when I see something or overhear someone saying something in the library, I just put it down, "Arielae explained. "when I'm trying to write my own set, I go through that……to see if there is anything in there that I can use."

    Club president Nicholas Scandura finds writng one of the many skills he has developed since joining the club."Writing jokes takes a lot of critical thinking." he said. The club gives its members a sense of community. When they meet, they share funny experiences. tell jokes and laugh.

    Harry Kuperstein discovered the club was a natural fit. Noticing the funny qualities of different situations improved his way of looking at the world. Becoming an active member also helped him work on the future skills he'll need as a medical doctor. "Having jokes ready to go might help smooth these interactions and make you a better public speaker, " he said.

Vitamin D was recognized a century ago as the cure for rickets, a childhood disease that causes weak bones. Then, in the early 2000s, a pile of studies suggested that low vitamin D levels could be a factor in cancer, cardiovascular（心血管） disease, Parkinson's disease and so on. This simple vitamin seemed to be a cure for whatever troubled us. However, all these observational studies have a fundamental weakness: they can identify a co-occurrence between vitamin D and a disease, but they can't prove there is a cause-and-effect relation.

To look at whether taking vitamin D had curative effects, Manson and her team started the world's largest and most far-reaching randomized vitamin D trial. The study followed nearly 26,000 healthy adults, randomized to receive either 2,000 international units （IU） of vitamin D or a placebo（安慰剂）, for an average of 5.3 years. The volunteers were almost evenly split between men and women, and 20 percent of the participants were black.

The results came as a shock. Not only did vitamin D not reduce rates of cancer or heart disease, but the trial also found that vitamin D did not prevent or improve cognitive function, or reduce the risk of bone fractures（骨折）. The finding about fractures "was a real surprise to many people," Manson says.

In 2011, the Institute of Medicine established an expert committee to conduct a thorough analysis of all existing studies on vitamin D and health. The committee concluded that the bone-strengthening benefits of vitamin D remain steady when blood levels reach 12 to 16 nanograms per millililter. They also found that there were no benefits to having levels above 20ng/ml. According to measurements of vitamin D levels in the general U. S. population, most had levels of 20 ng/ml or more in 2011. Levels have actually risen since then, meaning that most people don't need to take extra vitamin D.

The ups and downs of vitamin D offer a lesson in humility. The relation between the vitamin and disease is far more complicated than it first seemed and a reminder that scientific understanding is always developing over time.