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CU Bouler’s Letter to student, faculty and staff regarding COVID-19

CU Boulder’s Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano sent the following letter to students, faculty and staff March 11.

Dear students, faculty and staff:

The University of Colorado Boulder has faced many challenges in its nearly 150-year history. Generations of CU Boulder students, faculty and staff have worked together and supported each other. I thank you in advance for all that you have done and will do, and I ask that we show care and compassion for each other as we confront the challenges that COVID-19 poses in our community. We will get through this together.

Today, I am announcing several campus actions to help limit COVID-19 risk on our campus. We will continue to fulfill our mission by ensuring that students are able to meet their educational requirements and faculty are able to continue their research and scholarship, and the campus will remain open to allow that to occur. We will continue to operate campus facilities, including residence halls, dining halls, the University Libraries, student recreation centers, the Center for Community, Wardenburg Health Center and the University Memorial Center. But, as local, national and global public health recommendations shift to include mitigation of transmission, we are proactively taking steps to protect the campus and the community.

The campus is taking the following actions, which will be in effect until further notice.

Remote Teaching and Learning

CU Boulder has already encouraged its faculty to teach remotely. Beginning Monday, March 16, the campus will transition to remote learning for the remainder of the semester. Faculty will determine how best to use technology, such as Canvas and Zoom, to enable students to complete their educational requirements. This is consistent with what several other institutions are already doing.

Remote Work

The campus is encouraging employees to work remotely whenever possible. By Monday, March 16, supervisors should identify student workers, researchers and staff who can work remotely, meaning their work can be done partially or entirely away from campus. Supervisors should determine, in consultation with their employees, whether it is feasible for them to work remotely and, if so, the manner in which they will perform their responsibilities. As soon as a supervisor provides authorization, an employee can work remotely, recognizing that supervisors may need to evaluate campus needs and an employee’s work requirements on an ongoing basis.

Domestic and International Travel

While we previously limited international travel, effective immediately, the campus is suspending all university-funded travel–foreign or domestic. Travel sponsors can apply for exceptions to this restriction by filling out the following domestic and international travel exceptions form. The campus will grant permission when the travel serves a significant need, and the risks of travel can be mitigated.

Education Abroad

Effective immediately, the university is suspending Education Abroad-sponsored programs in the Czech Republic, France, Japan and Spain through the remainder of the spring 2020 semester. Students and their program providers are being notified. Earlier this semester, CU Boulder suspended programs to China, South Korea and Italy through summer 2020. These decisions are based on travel advisories from the U.S. Department of State, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other considerations as needed. Education Abroad has created a list of Education Abroad FAQs on the coronavirus.

Events

Effective immediately, multi-day university-sponsored gatherings or those with more than 150 attendees are suspended until further guidance is issued. Event sponsors may request their events still be held and can request exemptions via the campus events exception form.

We will be providing further guidance and direction about how to implement each of these decisions in the coming days. Please continue to reference the latest information at colorado.edu/coronavirus.

The safety of our community is our top priority. We realize that our COVID-19 policy guidelines will cause disruption—and that you will have additional questions based on the above information—but the risk of not acting outweighs the inconvenience of these temporary measures.

I appreciate your patience and cooperation. We are grateful to staff for their tremendous efforts on our behalf during these challenging times, especially our front-line staff who serve in health care, custodial, food service, transportation and other areas on campus. Your work is critically important at this time, and we greatly value you and your contributions.

Philip DiStefano,

Chancellor

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March 11, 2020
On eve of Super Tuesday, study sheds light on how people make choices

On Super Tuesday, Democratic voters from Colorado and across the United States will face a serious decision: Sanders or Warren? Biden, Klobuchar or Bloomberg?

Now, a new study taps into mathematics to probe how people make those kinds of fraught choices—in particular, how hypothetical, and completely rational, individuals might select between two options as they navigate through a noisy social environment.

It turns out that not making a choice can sometimes be as revealing as picking a side, report researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Houston. When the people around you are indecisive, for example, that can have a big influence on your own choices.

“Say you have a friend who has been a staunch Sanders supporter in the past,” said Zachary Kilpatrick, a coauthor of the new study and an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at CU Boulder. “It’s the night before the primary, and they still have not made a decision about who they’re going to vote for. That suggests that they have received some evidence that’s in conflict with voting for Sanders.”

Kilpatrick will present his team’s results remotely at a meeting of the American Physical Society. (The physical conference has been canceled due to public health concerns).

His team’s research zeroes in on a major question in a field of study called decision-making theory: How people make choices based both on their own, private research—such as watching televised debates—and through their social interactions—say, checking out their friends’ posts on social media.

Kilpatrick compared that goal to the classic battle of wits between Vizzini and the Dread Pirate Roberts in the 1987 film The Princess Bride. In that scene, the pirate claims to have poisoned one of two glasses of wine. Vizzini, a scofflaw of supposedly vast intellect, must choose the one he thinks is safe to drink.

It gets complicated.

“What Vizzini says is that he knows what the Dread Pirate Roberts knows that he knows,” Kilpatrick said. “But he takes multiple loops through what we call a ‘common knowledge’ exchange before he makes the decision on the wine glasses.”

To explore similar kinds of intellectual spirals, Kilpatrick and his colleagues used a series of equations, or mathematical models, to simulate social interactions of varying complexity. Their models didn’t revolve around real-life voters, or even pirates, but “rational agents”—theoretical deciders who always make the right choices based on the evidence available to them.

“We’re both watching the same news show, for example, and I look over to you to see if you’ve made a decision or not,” Kilpatrick said. “We have to account for our common knowledge multiple times until we’ve adequately squeezed all of the information that we can out of the fact that you haven’t made a decision yet, and I haven’t made a decision yet.”

Eventually, it stops. One voter or group of voters in a network might finally receive enough information to feel confident about their choice

Kilpatrick is quick to note that, of course, no voter is perfectly rational. But scientists can still learn a lot by studying where real-life humans fall in line with what theory suggests they should do—and where they don’t.

People should also always try to be aware of the baggage that others in their social networks carry, he added.

“When we’re determining how political leaders or people in our networks make decisions,” Kilpatrick said, “we should think hard about how those individuals are biased in order to figure out what we should take away from their decisions.”

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March 3, 2020
Height limits for Paralympic ‘blade runners’ baseless, study suggests

Before hitting the track to compete in an officially sanctioned race, some elite Paralympic sprinters must do something most runners would find incredibly unsettling: remove their legs and swap them out with ones that make them shorter.

The unusual mandate results from a recent International Paralympic Committee rule change that lowered the Maximum Allowable Standing Height (MASH) for double, below-the-knee amputees racing in prosthetic legs. The rule, intended to prevent unfair advantages, stems from the long-held assumption that greater height equals greater speed.

But a small, first-of-its kind University of Colorado Boulder study published today in the journal PLOS ONE concludes that isn’t the case.

“We found that height makes no difference when it comes to maximum speed,” said senior author Alena Grabowski, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology. “These athletes are having to buy new configurations and go through a lot of hardship and expense for a rule that is not based in science.”

For the study, Grabowski and her co-authors recruited five elite sprinters with double below-the-knee amputations for a series of running trials on a treadmill. The runners sampled three different brands of blades, and five different combinations of stiffness and height within each brand for a total of 15 different tests. In each test, they were asked to start at a jog and push themselves to the maximum speed possible, with some achieving speeds as fast as 10.8 meters per second – about a two minute, 30-second per mile pace.

Meanwhile, the researchers measured how the runners’ biomechanics and pace changed with each blade configuration.

They found the shape of the prostheses undoubtedly made a difference in speed, with runners achieving maximum speeds about 8% faster in “J-shaped” prostheses – think the sleek carbon-fiber blades Oscar Pistorius used in his famous 2012 Olympic sprint – than in “C-shaped” prostheses. But stiffness and height made no difference in runner speed.

“Biomechanically, the idea makes sense: Longer legs equal longer steps, so you would think you should be able to run faster,” said first author Paolo Taboga, an assistant professor of biomechanics at Sacramento State University who worked on the study while a postdoctoral researcher in Grabowski’s Applied Biomechanics Lab. “But we found that while you do take longer steps, you cycle your legs slower so in the end the two even out.”

That reality probably holds true for runners with biological legs, too. “Being taller does not make you faster,” said Grabowski.

The assumption that it does is taking a heavy toll on Paralympic hopefuls.

Since the rule change took effect in January 2018, some athletes have had to spend thousands of dollars on new prostheses and months retraining themselves to run at a shorter height.

Team USA Paralympic sprinter Regas Woods, whose profile states his height as 5’10,” had to lower his standing height inches after the change and expressed his discontent on Twitter: “I’m not 5 foot 4. Thanks for making me more disabled.”

Olympic hopeful Blake Leeper, a double-below-the-knee amputee vying to compete against runners with biological legs in the 2020 Olympics, has also been affected, with the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) prohibiting him from racing in the IAAF World Championships in Qatar last fall due, in part, to the fact that his blades hadn’t been classified under the new standing-height formula.

Some athletes have suffered injuries while trying to adjust to their shorter blades.

The rule could also effectively exclude amputees whose residual limbs are already long from competing at the Paralympic level, noted co-author Owen Beck, now a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology.

“We would like to see fair and inclusive rules and regulations, which is the beauty of the Paralympic Games,” Beck said.

The authors acknowledge that their sample size of five is small. But so is the pool of double, below-the-knee amputees sprinting at the elite level, so very little research has been done to date.

They see the need to do a larger study.

For now, they hope the International Paralympic Committee will take a look at their research and reconsider the height restriction.

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February 21, 2020
Forests bouncing back from beetles, but elk and deer slowing recovery

Two words, and a tiny little creature, strike fear in the hearts of many Colorado outdoor enthusiasts: bark beetle. But new research from University of Colorado Boulder reveals that even simultaneous bark beetle outbreaks are not a death sentence to the state’s beloved forests.

The study, published this month in the journal Ecology, found that high-elevation forests in the southern Rocky Mountains actually have a good chance of recovery, even after overlapping outbreaks with different kinds of beetles. One thing that is slowing their recovery down: Foraging elk and deer.

“This is actually a bright point, at least for the next several decades,” said Robert Andrus, lead author of the study and recent PhD graduate in physical geography. “Even though we had multiple bark beetle outbreaks, we found that 86 percent of the stands of trees that we surveyed are currently on a trajectory for recovery.”

Between 2005 and 2017, a severe outbreak of spruce bark beetles swept through more than 741,000 acres of high-elevation forest in the southern Rocky Mountains near Wolf Creek Pass — killing more than 90 percent of Engelmann spruce trees in many stands. At the same time, the western balsam bark beetle infested subalpine fir trees across almost 124,000 acres within the same area.

If you go skiing in Colorado, you’re usually in a high-elevation, Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir forest, said Andrus.

The researchers wanted to know if these overlapping events, caused by two different types of bark beetles, would limit the ability of the forest to recover. So they measured more than 14,000 trees in 105 stands in the eastern San Juan Mountains, tallying the surviving species and the number of deaths. They had expected that the combined effects of two bark beetle outbreaks would prevent forest recovery, but they found that the forests were quite resilient.

That’s an important contrast from what happens following a severe fire, which can cause forests to convert to grasslands, according to previous research by Thomas Veblen, coauthor of the study and Distinguished Professor of Geography.

“It’s important that we perform these sorts of studies, because we need different management responses depending on the forest type and the kind of disturbance,” said Veblen.

They also found that greater tree species diversity prior to the bark beetle outbreaks was a key component of resilient forests.

Trees killed by bark beetles remain standing in the southern Rocky Mountains. (Credit: Robert Andrus)

Tens of millions of acres across the Western United States and North America have been affected in the past two decades, and Colorado has not been spared. A severe mountain pine beetle outbreak began in 1996, easily visible along I-70 and in Rocky Mountain National Park. Since 2000, more than 1.8 million acres of Engelmann spruce statewide have been affected by spruce beetles in high-elevation forests.

With continued warming there will come a time where conditions caused by climate change exceed the forests’ ability to recover, said Veblen.

Impacts of Ungulates

The study is the first to consider the effects of two different types of beetles that affect two different dominant tree species, as well as the effects of browsing elk and deer in the same area.

Bark beetles prefer bigger, mature trees with thicker bark, which offer more nutrients and better protection in the wintertime. They typically leave the younger, juvenile trees alone–allowing the next generation to recover and repopulate the forest.

But while in the field, researchers noticed many smaller trees were being munched on by elk and deer. Known as “ungulates,” these animals like to nibble the top of young trees, which can stunt the trees’ vertical growth. They found more than half of the tops of all smaller trees had been browsed.

That doesn’t mean that those trees are going to die–ungulates are just more likely to slow the rate of forest recovery.

Avid Colorado skiers and mountaineers looking forward to typical, green forests, however, will have to be patient.

“We don’t expect full forest recovery for decades,” said Andrus.

Sarah Hart, also a PhD graduate of CU and now a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, contributed to this study.

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February 18, 2020