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Check out how one college is teaching students how to prevent rape: with a video game.

"The ONLY way that we can eliminate power-based violence in our society is to focus on why and how it flourishes and exists in a culture."

A new game developed at Carnegie Mellon University aims to change the way people react when they witness sexual harassment and violence.

The game is called Decisions That Matter, and it follows a group of college-age friends on the night of a party. Along the way, members of the group face a number of challenges and uncomfortable situations that people of all ages might find themselves in every day, ranging from street harassment to unwelcome advances from a stranger or friend.

In each situation involving harassment or assault, the player must choose how to react.

For example, in the street harassment scenario, the player has to decide whether to say something to the stranger, dismiss the stranger, or ignore the stranger.


I spoke over e-mail with CMU's coordinator of gender programs and sexual violence prevention Jess Klein to learn more about the game's history.

Essentially, each semester, a CMU class called Morality Play: Laboratory for Interactive Media and Values Education takes up a cause. Professors Andy Norman and Ralph Vetuccio selected sexual violence prevention as this semester's theme and went to Klein for some assistance.

"They wanted to come up with some sort of multimedia tool that would help students understand and educate them on sexual violence prevention, but also a tool that would be useful to the folks on campus working directly with survivors and violence prevention," Klein said. "I am that person!"

Previous Morality Play classes have examined topics like income inequality and privacy.

So many existing "anti-rape" tools put the focus on the victim, and few address the perpetrators and bystanders. They wanted this to be different.

"I was upfront with them from the very beginning with regards to how I felt about 'prevention products,'" Klein said. "The apps, the nail polish, the 'anti-rape' underwear – it's just all too much, and those products ultimately put the onus of prevention on the survivor."

All else aside, the biggest problem with "anti-rape" products that focus on the victim is that they don't address the cause of rape: people who rape.

"The ONLY way that we can eliminate power-based violence in our society is to focus on why and how it flourishes and exists in a culture," said Klein. "... Instead of risk-reduction tactics, or 'secondary prevention,' we must practice primary prevention —eliminating power-based violence on a cultural and social level through education."

"Being an active bystander is about intervening long before anything can happen, giving folks the tools to have conversations about sexism, the role of masculinity, rape culture, challenging rape myths, and more." — Jess Klein of Carnegie Mellon University

A focus on primary prevention needs to include educational tools for bystanders and witnesses.

"One of the key areas of primary prevention is bystander intervention," Klein explained, "although it must be done the right way. Being an active bystander is not just about teaching someone tools to intervene when an assault is happening. Being an active bystander is about intervening long before anything can happen, giving folks the tools to have conversations about sexism, the role of masculinity, rape culture, challenging rape myths, and more."

According to Klein, catcallers are usually ignored. Because of that, they're not held accountable for their treatment of women and might eventually engage in worse behaviors.

"There is no product on the market that I have witnessed that focuses solely on the bystander experience, especially the way that it is presented with Decisions That Matter."

If nothing else, Klein hopes that players can empathize with the characters and situations shown in the game.

"I hope that people can really see themselves in these situations and think hard about what they would actually do," she told me. "I absolutely believe that it will help people better understand the nuances and the complexities of sexual violence, but also show that sexual violence is on a continuum. Catcalling is a form of sexual violence. Unwanted touching or groping is a form of sexual violence. These things are violations of people's choices and their bodies. I also believe that this will help people understand the importance of intervening or not intervening."


If the game manages to equip even a single person with the tools they need to step in as a bystander in these situations, it will be a huge success.

Decisions That Matter is an innovative tool in the fight against sexual violence that educates without being condescending and is something men and women of all ages should check out. It doesn't paint the perpetrators as cartoonish villains, and it shows that there's not always a right or wrong answer in these situations. It is an eye-opening experience.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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