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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 1984)
Page 4/The Battalion/Tuesday, August 7, 1984 A&M study shows drug programs help University News Service seem to some chro- Drug treatment programs be successful in helping son nic drug users kick tne habit, accord ing to the results of a 12-vear follow up study of almost 500 drug addicts nationwide. Of the 26 percent of the addicts who reported they had not used il licit drugs for the last year before the follow-up, more than half said they had been on a treatment program when they quit, said Dr. Dwayne Simpson, nead of the Behavioral Re search Program at Texas A&M Uni versity which is conducting the re search — one of the few long-term national studies of chronic drug abusers. Sponsored by the National Insti tute of Drug Abuse, the study shows that drug treatment programs may be the key in disproving the old ad age “once an addict, always an ad dict.” “These results do indicate that drug treatment programs are suc cessful. It is the strongest national indicator that drug treatments are effective,” said Simpson, professor of psychology, who has Been in volved in the research since it began 15 years ago. The study also indicates that more than half of the drug users who were abstinent at the time of the six-year follow-up also were abstinate at year 12. In addition, figures from the study show that 64 percent of the group interviewed had refrained from daily use of opiates for three years or more. “Three years is sort of the magic marker. They’re pretty well on the road to getting beyond the craving at that point,” Simpson said. “These data clearly demonstrate that people can overcome addiction. It is not a lifetime affliction.” Addicts — primarily heroin ad dicts — targeted for 12-year follow up interviews were selected from a group of drug abusers who were ad mitted to treatment in 18 federally- supported and community-based programs in the Drug Abuse Re porting Program during 1969-1972. Of the 697 addicts targeted for the 12-year study, all of them had also been contacted for six-year fol low-up interviews. Seventy percent of the target group were relocated and interviewed, eight percent were deceased and two percent refused to be interviewed. Twenty percent could not be located, Simpson said. Interviews, which were conducted face-to-face by trained interviewers, focused on histories of drug use, drug treatment, alcohol use, crimi nal involvement and employment, he said. Interviewers also questioned the study participants about their rea sons for beginning use of drugs and their reasons for quitting. “Hitting bottom” was the most frequently given reason for deciding to end daily use of drugs. After that decision was made, many of the chronic drug users said they turned to treatment programs, Simpson said. “Drug addicts attribute a great deal of importance to treatment, but there is a need for more treatment than can be provided. We’re still about 40 percent below the 1980 funding level,” he said. Simpson said he hopes the results of this study will influence lawmak ers to give more importance — and funding — to drug treatment and prevention programs. Gay students (Continued from page 1) detail and then make a report to our Board of Regents to determine a fu ture course of action.” After reading the ruling and de ciding if the court’s reasoning is sound, the University will make a de cision about appealing the ruling. Hajovsky said that he thinks there is a pretty good likelihood the Univer sity will appeal the ruling. Roberts said that the group planned to file for recognition Mon day, but the filing was delayed be cause of difficulties arising in getting in touch with GSS board members. The group will file for recognition by Thursday at the latest, he said. Roberts said that GSS is a service, not a social organization. It is de signed to provide services to the esti mated 2,700 to 3,000 homosexual students at Texas A&M. The esti mate is based on reports that about 10 percent of the population is ho mosexual, Lenny DePalma, presi dent of Alternative, said. Alternative is an off-campus orga nization which provides political, ed ucational and social services to the members of the homosexual com munity in the Brazos Valley area. Members include gay faculty, staff, graduate students and residents, De- Palma said. “We’re not promoting homosex uality,” DePalma said, “we are pro moting the acceptance of it.” Alternative and the Texas Human Rights Foundation (THRF) have provided financial and moral sup port to GSS during the seven-year court battle. “This is about public education and overcoming the myths and ste reotypes about gays,” said Thomas J. Coleman Jr., president of THRF. Some of GSS’s programs include the Gay Line, a phoneline staffed with aavisers to give medical, legal and pyschological help. The Gay Line is not a dating service, Roberts said. Other programs include a coun seling service and a roommate serv ice. “Basically, we’re asking for the same thing accorded to any other or ganization,” Roberts said. Organizations that are recognized by the University may have use of things such as University facilities and some University services such as mail and copy services, said Dr. John J. Koldus, vice president for student services. Organizations may have a student account, request to use University vehicles, advertise on campus and use on-campus mail. Recognized or ganizations also may request budget support. But Koldus said organiza tions are not guaranteed funds. In normal circumstances, recogni tion of organizations is based on whether the organization duplicates another group and if it is predomi nately a student organization. Slouch By Jim Earle frog In one an mak< “raining session s up [raining t Maj. N the comp the c; ram are Hardii dents to Ireshmer “It’s lil ^ound he He say ielps cat ind psyc fering ini The p let with lorps lif opportur icience ' ays. Althoi ours of :adets ha ing the a A typi egins ar EARLP £-6*34- “Maybe you should consider being a Jockey In the Olympics.” birth’ Computers marnaj stage ai be buri (Continued from page I) To solve the problem, he created a paper card with punched holes to relay electrical charge. The original card had 45 columns and round holes, and was the size of dollar bill. The card currently used was de signed in 1928 by the International Business Machinery Corp.; it has 80 columns and rectangular holes. It’s the same size as the 1880 card; the dollar bill size shrunk. Punched card equipment caught on, and by the 1930s was widely used for business data processing. The ideas behind Hollerith’s punched cards were not better than those of Babbage or Liebniz, but technology had finally caught up, and the ideas could be implemented. The computer race had begun. The first electromechanical com puter was developed in 1939 by Howard Aiken of Harvard. The problem of financing, which hin dered earlier inventors, was easily solved. IBM financed construction of the Mark I with money from its advertising department. The first electronic computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was devel oped during World War II for calcu lating bombing tables. However, the machine wasn’t finished until two months after Japan’s surrender. Both the ENIAC and Mark I were externally programmed. Techni cally, they were only calculators — a machine must have an internally stored program to be a computer. But external programming, or cod ing, came to mean more than just a technical dividing line for names. It was an almost unbeatable barrier be tween the machine and the math. Even though the ENIAC could add two numbers in 1/5,000 of a second, it was a task to write the addition program. Dr. Bruce McCormick, who heads the computer science department here, was working with the Univer sity of Illinois’ ILLIAC III, when the ILLIAC I, another externally pro grammed machine, was being phased out. He remembers how much trouble it was to code instruc tions in machine language, which was what the ILLIAC I used: “The ILLIAC I’s instructions were punched by hand, with a hole or space for each instruction. With so much information going, people often made mistakes. They soon learned to glue the little punches back in the holes to correct mistakes. instead of starting over. Within a year, though, everyone used assem bly language; it was too hard to glue back those punches.” Besides being difficult to pro gram, the early machines were dan gerous. The machinary for the ENIAC filled a large room with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, and it ran on 140,000 watts of power — enough ? ower to play a stereo for a year. he tube-run machines became more dangerous when the second- generation computers came out. The second-generation machines ran on low-voltage transistors. “The ILLIAC I had 300-volt lines going around it,” McCormick says. “Touching that will kill you. When they switched to transistors, which operate on 10 to 15 volts, the techni cians became used to moving their hands across the new machines. When the technicians switched back to repair the tubes, they forgot to be cautious.” the odd form of self-reproduction. Anothef drawback for computers was their hostile reception, a result of the artificial intelligence labs, he AI, the technology of “ma- says. chines who think,” was the most publicized and criticized area of computer technology. People feared Public opinion wasn’t the only old barrier opposing computer creators; the current technology once again slowed progress. But three major developments in the 1950s helped solve some of those problems. The first development was the magnetic core memory, which allowed lower cost and faster access, and was more reliable than the earlier tube mem ories. Second, the higher level lan guages were developed, such as the Formula Translating system, or FORTRAN, which allowed easier communication with the machines. Now a programmer could type in a language similiar to English, instead of a series of spaces and holes. The computer had to translate FOR TRAN to machine language. The original FORTRAN was difficult to learn; the language contained illogi cal features, much like the irregular verbs and strange spellings in En glish. Another drawback of early languages was their machine depen dency. Each type of computer in stalled needed another form of the language. The third development was the attempt to create an operat ing system that would allow several people to use the computer at once. With these advances, the com puter race was paced faster. The general public, however, was still unaware of computers except for a few Sunday supplement stories about “giant brains.’ 5 “People miss the fact that this field has been crazy since 1946,” McCor mick says. “Tne rate of growth has become more noticable because there are more people in the field. I remember when Jim Snyder, the chairman of the computer science department at the University of Illi nois, held a meeting for the Associa tion of Computing Machinery. The organization was so small tnat he asked them to his house for cocktails afterwards. Now the group has more than 80,000 members.” he cor Wales,’ Burt the field. The first transistor.: orrhagi computer was the IBM 7090.1 grief addition time for the IBM 70 4!/2 microseconds, compared to microseconds for its vacuumti twin, the IBM 709. The Com Business Oriented Languit known as COBOL, which war, signed to handle business pn instead of science problems,also* developed during the second j ation. around Burt said th< Celign* 601 ini tryside : “Thi Wales,’ pie ho the act a year. } peopl field grew, so did the number of cor porations. IBM, which started the field with Mark I, now had competi tion from RCA, UNIVAC, Under wood and NRC. With the growth of the field came the death of the first- generation tube circuitry. By the 1960s the tranistor had taken over He ^ The third generation of com; , ers was announced by IBM ini!'- T a ,B crs ’, Advances were made in the area printed and integrated ciroii which made computers Other advances were made use of time-sharing and multii gramming, which basically a more than one user on a compiit I “ d / c at a time. Not only did electronite r . ate vices become faster, they alsow 3 llr f lln l more reliable, more compacl r less expensive. The third general brought a new public awareness United man w The funera Thursi ments day af CA I IV W C* C/I1V. Cl TT Cll vIIVJJ ' ;.L -m, . what these computers could do,ai i ! « , 1 min i r the fears began to grow. (Tomorrow: The present usa computers.) ULTIMATE CLASS. Experience it at Walden Pond. WALDEN POND APARTMENTS offer a distinctively new design in afforda ble luxury living. With prices starting at only $335, you can enjoy classic features such as a private lake, wooded jogging trails, pool, hot tub spa, exercise room and a showcase clubhouse for entertaining! A unique architectural design gives you the apartment you’ve always wanted including a fireplace, vaulted ceiling, ceiling fan, ample storage, private terrace or balcony, designer interior, washer/ dryer connections and large arched windows. Call or visit Walden Pond today and experience an exciting new lifestyle this fall! For best selection, reserve your apartment now! 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