Artificial Intelligence has suddenly and overwhelmingly flooded our online spaces in the last few years. We’ve had to contend with it everywhere: from workplaces, where companies purchase premium access for their employees to utilize; through healthcare, in which medical questions are ‘helpfully’ answered by customer service chatbots; to the classroom, where teachers regularly deal with student plagiarism in AI-written assignments. We cannot avoid interacting with AI in some capacity in our daily lives, and, of course, the research about its benefits and drawbacks lags behind adoption by the tech sector and beyond.

  Through my work collecting and compiling studies about AI, I’ve noticed some troubling trends related to its effects on our critical thinking skills, ability to assess our own biases, and even our writing skills! Now that the first psychological studies on AI are published, here’s what they say: while it seems more convenient, AI is damaging our ability to find the facts in an ever-growing world of misinformation.

 The Restorative Justice (RJ) Campus Initiative fosters opportunities for community dialogue and conflict resolution by providing spaces for healing and finding ways to make the harmed individuals, as well as the wider community, whole. Restorative Justice is a voluntary process that serves as an alternative to punitive measures for conflict, which can expand or deepen rather than alleviate mistrust. Damila Hurn and Evelyn Jaime are the interns for the Restorative Justice Initiative. Both are trained in restorative principles and facilitation of restorative circle practices. Both work under the direction of Dr. Gloria Bradley. Accompanied by the chief advisor, Josh Moore, and the faculty leader, Dr. Sonya Maria Johnson.

  Damila and Evelyn’s presentation aim to inform more campus members about RJ and provide a space for people to openly address questions about RJ, its purpose, and implementation. We will conduct community interviews with Beloit College students, faculty, and staff, and the interviews will take place before the presentation. The interviews will speak to the attitudes of RJ on campus, followed by solutions and outcomes that provide methods to address the concerns that community members have. Amplifying the key principles of restorative justice- dialogue, healing, inclusivity, addressing structural issues, and upliftment of community voices- we hope to address the needs of the Beloit College campus community as a whole. Both Hurn and Jaime will bring their perspectives on their work experience and information from the interviews.

 The psychedelic manifestations produced by DMT within ayahuasca hold cultural significance to South American Indigenous groups like the Kuntanawa of Brazil. Ayahuasca entered the U.S. through Brazilian religious movements such as Santo Daime and União de Vegetal UDV in the late twentieth century. These groups introduced ceremonial practices and theological frameworks that defined ayahuasca as a sacred sacrament. The 2006 Supreme Court decision Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente Uniãno do Vegetal allowed the UDV to import and use ayahuasca under federal religious freedom protections.

 Following this decision, independent ayahuasca churches began to emerge across the United States. The Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth (Soul Quest), founded in Florida in 2015, expanded public access to ayahuasca ceremonies and later became involved in legal disputes with federal authorities, specifically the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The contentious nature of religious freedom and ayahuasca exists within a historical timeline of Brazilian expansion and institutional diversification. Soul Quest’s legal battle embodies the broader pattern of ayahuasca churches developing from the historicity of small immigrant religious communities into a visible and contested presence in American religious history.

 In the field of abstract algebra, a braid group is a variation of a traditional symmetric group. In this talk, we explore braid groups in the context of cable knitting and describe a mathematical framework that is both group theoretic and physically applicable to knitting. This work furthers previous work in this field by providing illustrative diagrams, explicitly explaining the group theory definitions and notation, and code for creating diagrams. Most notably, we proposed mathematical axioms for knitting stemming from practitioners of the craft which provoke interesting mathematical questions for further study.

Link to the online program