Spring 2022 Park Blocks news briefs

NEW BASIC NEEDS HUB OPENS

WHETHER THEY’RE SHORT on funds or food, students in need can now find resources in one place: Portland State’s Basic Needs Hub. The supports aren’t new, but the easy access is. “It is very confusing trying to navigate all the many services PSU offers,” said Lee Phillips ’08 MSW ’10, PSU’s newly hired Basic Needs Navigator. Phillips was once a first-generation, nontraditional student herself. Her goal is to make it simple for students to get help, so they can focus on their studies. The Basic Needs Hub, which opened in February in Smith Memorial Student Union, offers a mini food pantry, diapers and sleep care kits, complete with ear plugs, an eye mask and other essentials. Phillips connects students to emergency supports like hardship funds, housing resources, and food assistance on campus—such as the PSU Food Pantry, meal vouchers and the Free Food Market—as well as to outside benefits from county, state and federal resources. Funding for the Basic Needs Navigator is supported by House Bill 2835, which provided funding to Oregon’s public universities and community colleges to hire navigators to help students access resources. A 2020 report from PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative showed that 45% of PSU students had experienced housing insecurity in the previous year and 47% had experienced food insecurity in the past month. —KATY SWORDFISK 

BIG GUY HITS THE BIG TIME  

PROFESSIONAL WRESTLERS might soon need to grapple with a lion-sized Viking. Former Portland State offensive lineman John Krahn has signed a promotional deal with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Krahn stands 7 feet tall and weighs 400 pounds. By comparison, the average male lion weighs up to 420 pounds, according to the Zoological Society of London. That also makes Krahn 7 inches taller (and 140 pounds heavier) than another college football player turned WWE wrestler—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Though, Krahn is not quite as imposing as one of the sport’s biggest competitors of all time—André the Giant, at 7 feet 4 inches tall and 520 pounds. Krahn’s two-year career with the Vikings came after he gained national notoriety in high school for dismissing opposing linemen from the line of scrimmage. New NCAA rules allow for “name, image and likeness” (NIL) deals that enable college athletes to receive payment in exchange for promotional work. Krahn signed with the WWE while completing his degree in criminal justice this March. The largest player in Portland State history will travel to the WWE’s training facility in Orlando to meet with executives and discuss opportunities. —JACK HEFFERNAN 

OREGON’S FIRST SATELLITE LAUNCHES 

AFTER MONTHS and months of research, testing and development, the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) sent Oregon’s first satellite into space. The interdisciplinary student group delivered the satellite known as OreSat0 to Seattle-based Spaceflight, which launched the satellite aboard an Astra Rocket 3.3 from Kodiak, Alaska on March 15. OreSat0 is the first in a series of three satellites designed by PSAS and is just about the size of a tissue box. The satellite includes solar panels, batteries, a color camera and an amateur radio system. Andrew Greenberg, electrical and computer engineering faculty and PSAS Advisor, said OreSat0’s mission is simple: “It’s supposed to not catch fire in space.” But OreSat0 also gives PSAS a chance to test its open-source satellite design before building the next iteration. Scheduled to take flight in late 2022 with NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, that satellite will examine cirrus clouds on a climate science mission. See where OreSat0 is in space right now or check out its live data feed. —KATY SWORDFISK

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE…ATMOSPHERE?  

ROCK AND ROLL legend Elvis Presley “left the building” for the last time in 1977. Now another Elvis is gearing up to make an exit in 2023, but this time the journey is from Portland State to the International Space Station. Developed by Jay Nadeau, physics faculty, and her research group, the ELVIS—or Extreme Life Volumetric Imaging System—combines a holographic microscope and light-field microscope. Astronauts on the space station will use ELVIS to watch bacteria swim in three-dimensional space. “The cool part is they’re going to relay everything live and the astronauts will show us a video of what they’re doing,” says Nadeau. ELVIS has the potential to answer some important questions about how being in space changes bacteria. “In theory, microgravity should not affect bacteria. They’re too small,” says Nadeau. “Yet, starting with the very earliest experiments on the space station, people have found the bacteria act very differently when they’ve been exposed to microgravity and that includes things like salmonella becoming much more dangerous.” These changes can be bad news for astronauts who suffer from increased intestinal, respiratory and urinary tract infections in space. Students have been instrumental in developing ELVIS and will help work out the logistics that will make the microscope operational. —SUMMER ALLEN

A NEW WAY TO NAVIGATE CAMPUS

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY is one of the first places in the Pacific Northwest to be outfitted with GoodMaps, a platform that uses scanning technology to map buildings in detail, and provide wayfinding for its users via a smartphone app. The technology, developed by Louisville-based GoodMaps, a startup born out of the American Printing House for the Blind, is especially useful for blind or visually impaired users. GoodMaps and Intel began mapping Smith Memorial Student Union in May 2021. They used Lidar mapping, which is more accurate than GPS and allows someone—in this case, marketing and communications coordinator Randy Mishler—to add labels, common-sense descriptions of each room and formal designations that otherwise wouldn’t be available. Mishler said the entire mapping process took only a few hours and required a rig resembling a backpack to record the building. Once the building was added to GoodMaps’ database in December, the labeling process could begin. Damkerng Mungthanya, a PSU student with a visual impairment, described using the app like walking with friends. “If we have GoodMaps in every building, every place, I can travel with confidence that I will go to the right place,” Mungthanya said. “I will be safe.” —KATY SWORDFISK

3 ALUMNI PODCASTS WORTH A LISTEN 

1. “You’re Wrong About,” hosted by Sarah Marshall ’10 MFA ’12 MA ’13, is a bi-weekly podcast dedicated to taking a fresh look at people, events and phenomena—from Tonya Harding to the McDonald’s hot coffee case—that have been “miscast in the public imagination.” Since it began in 2018, it’s received rave reviews from publications including The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Variety named it (and the next podcast in this list) as one of the 20 best podcasts of 2021. Listen at: yourewrongabout.com
2. “Between the Covers,” hosted by David Naimon MFA ’19 and brought to you by Portland-based publishers Tin House, offers in-depth conversations with fiction, nonfiction and poetry writers about their newest works. Naimon interviews both heavy hitters and debut novelists in these often two-hour-plus long talks. In addition to being named to Variety’s list, “Between the Covers” also made The Guardian’s 10 Best Book Podcasts list and Book Riot’s 15 Outstanding Podcasts for Book Lovers. Listen at: tinhouse.com/podcasts 
3. “Kick Ass Oregon History,” hosted by Doug Kenck-Crispin ’09 MA ’16, offers short, punchy (and sometimes NSFW) anecdotes from Oregon history, from the story of the roughly 9,000 “balloon bombs” Japan sent aloft toward the West coast for six months between 1944 and 1945 to the unusual history behind why The Dalles has a paucity of salad bars. Spoiler alert: it involves a 1984 food-poisoning plot by followers of Baghwan Shree Rajneesh to incapacitate the city’s voters. Listen at: orhistory.com —SCHOLLE McFARLAND

MAKING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SMARTER 

AN INFANT’S BRAIN is able to gradually learn and adapt, often more easily than an adult brain. For example, research shows that before adolescence, children are able to pick up languages much faster than adults. Portland State’s Christof Teuscher, engineering and computer science faculty, uses this same analogy to describe new artifi cial intelligence (AI) technology he helped develop. Current systems suffer from what’s known as catastrophic forgetting. When an existing system is programmed to learn something new, it forgets what it had already learned, forcing the system to essentially start from scratch. “What we developed as a breakthrough in AI technology is a novel type of device and approach to build systems that can be completely changed and reconfigured on the fly for different applications. We can, for example, create neurons on synapses on demand, as the system needs to learn new things,” Teuscher said. “Th is opens up avenues for AI technology that continuously learns, grows as needed, and gradually improves, something that current AI systems simply can’t do.” —KATY SWORDFISK