10.19 by Iowa State Daily

Dandiya Dance honors culture Indian Students’ Association hosts celebration in MU By Jake.Dalbey @iowastatedaily.com Memorial Union was ablaze with sound and color Saturday when it hosted Dandiya Night celebration, an event of dance and music put on by the ISU Indian Students’ Association. Attendees of the event learned the importance of the Dandiya Dance, a traditional Indian dance. “[Dandiya] is generally observed in the festivities of Navratri, which is an Indian festival of nine

day and nine nights,” said Nancy Manchanda, graduate in computational biology and public relations officer for the Indian Students’ Association. Sohail Suryavanshi, senior in electrical engineering, said Navratri itself translates to ‘Nav,” which means nine and “Ratri” means night in Hindi. The night featured two forms of dance, Garba and Dandiya. Both dances involve moving in a circular formation in relation to the music being played, and Garba is performed with claps. Dandiya, which is Hindu for sticks, was the featured event during the celebration. It incorporated brightly colored sticks as dancers move from partner to partner, striking each other’s sticks inside two circles. Dandiya is rooted in the cul-

Charlie Coffey/Iowa State Daily

Aparna Ghantasala, graduate student in urban design, performs the traditional Indian folk dance, Dandiya Raas, during Dandiya Night 2015 on Saturday. The night was hosted by the ISU Indian Students’ Association in the Memorial Union to celebrate the Navratri festival.

ture of Gujarat, India, and uses movement to recreate the struggle between the Hindu goddess Durga and the demon Mahishasura. “The demon had the power to not be killed by a male and

had to be slain by a female,” said Vivek Lawana, graduate assistant in biomedical sciences and former Indian Students’ Association president. “Because of this, females are praised during this

[festival]. They have the power over the nine days.” Women during the nine days can be seen sporting colorful

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Let’s talk education

2016 candidates share differing stances on key issue By ISD Politics Team

Almost everyone agrees the cost of college and the mountain of debt that students face once they graduate is problematic — but Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to address the issue. As of 2014, Iowa ranks ninth in the nation for highest average student debt upon graduation, according to a study from the Institute for College Access & Success. The study found that on average, Iowa students graduate with almost $30,000 in debt. Where do the current presidential candidates stand? While the candidates have differing ideas — everything from making public college tuition free, to forgiving some student debt, to incentivizing colleges to keep costs down, to innovation at colleges — candidates’ stances generally reflect their party’s. Illustration: Chelsey Crile/Iowa State Mack Shelley, professor of political science, explained how the two major parties generally talk about education: Daily “[Democrats] typically want to put more money in education. You can also expect them to generally be supportive of things Mack Shelley, professor of politilike pre-kindergarten and back up teacher unions,” Shelley said. cal science, said Democrats tend Shelley went on to explain how the Republicans differ. to want to put more money in

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education, while Republicans want less government involvment.

ISU professor develops new technologies By Alex.Connor @iowastatedaily.com For Ran Dai, the choice of her profession was simple: she was good at mathematics, good at problem solving and knew she wanted to take those skills and apply them to the real world. And now she is. Dai, assistant professor and Black and Veatch Faculty Fellow in aerospace engineering, is earning a five-year $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program. She began research a little more than a year ago on self-sufficient, powermanaging, solar-powered robots. She hopes her current research, inspired by her work while she was a fellow,

will allow a robot to be able to identify its surrounding environment and be able to better adjust its positioning to be able to permanently work outside for long durations of time by charging automatically. “I got inspired by this idea when I worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington. In that job, I was responsible to develop a powermanagement system for 787 Boeing aircraft, the most fuel-efficient aircraft in the world,” Dai said. Dai further begged the next question as a baseline that created the research she is conducting today. “If we have nuclear power supply in a robotics system, which can be worked on the ground or in the air, how can we allocate the nuclear power to different electrical units

and make a robotic system operate longer and have a longer endurance?” Dai asked. Kishan Patel, senior in aerospace engineering, has been working with Dai for the past two years on the solar-powered robots. The robots, which don’t exactly fall in line with Patel’s path of study, originally started as something to put on his résumé, but the more he worked on the project, the more interested he became. These solar-power robots, as outlined by Patel, should accomplish the “Three D’s once they are completed.” “Dull, dirty and dangerous,” Patel said. Patel further explained what each ‘D’ stands for. He said dull means the robots could go for long durations, they could monitor the en-

vironment and they could do surveillance. Dirty entails sending robots or rovers into places humans shouldn’t go, such as radioactive zones. Dangerous means be sending robots or rovers into natural disaster zones or war zones. Because of the solarpowered technology research Dai and her team are conducting, these robots will have the characteristics of the “three D’s,” and subsequently need no human-interaction to tell them what to do, where to go or when or how to recharge. These robots, by the end, should be completely self-sufficient. The motivation, as stated on a poster created by Dai’s team in the lab reads, “We seek to minimize the travel time of a solar-powered unmanned ground vehicle through

an area with negligible net energy loss.” Dai’s team consists of graduate students Adam Kaplan and Chuangchuang Sun along with undergraduate assistants Nathaniel Kingry, Patel and Justin Van Den Top. The team is currently heading its third generation of the land robot and hopes to move its research outdoors. The ultimate goal would be to have air and ground robots that can work together to, for example, have the air robot notify the ground robot of any obstacles in its path. “In the future, we will house solar-powered [unmanned aerial vehicles] and hope that [the air and ground robots] will work in a collaborating way,” Dai said. “The solar-powered UAVs have a wide field of view and they can predict

the power, I will say the solar radiation in a larger area, and they will guide the ground robot and make the robot work more efficiently.” This technology is the forefront of an entire new field. Patel said when they first started the project and looked to see if anyone else was researching the same technologies, not a lot of results showed up. These self-sufficient, solar-powered robots should eventually be able to carry algorithms, microcontrollers, solar panels, wireless connections, voltage current sensors, GPS technology and cameras, according to the team. They will also be able to map solar density, manage power supplies and best plan for maximum efficiency, the team said in a news release last week.