WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue police have arrested two people for allegedly stealing a vacuum cleaner from the university’s Recreational Sports Center.

Paul. S. Petticrew, 19, a freshman in the College of Science from Zionsville, Ind., and James A. Berg 18, a freshman in the School of Management from Shawano, Wis., were arrested Thursday (Nov. 20). Both face theft charges.

According to a police report, surveillance video showed two men using a student identification card to enter the center’s rear turnstile shortly after 10 p.m. Sunday (Nov. 16). The entrance is near a closet in which the vacuum was stored. The video shows the person believed to be Berg leaving the area followed by the person believed to be Petticrew leaving with the vacuum cleaner, valued at about $344.

Theft is a Class D felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000.

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Long Center for the Performing Arts will host a screening of “Elf” with hot cocoa from Kathy’s Homemade Kandies at approximately 4:30 PM, immediately following Lafayette’s Christmas Parade on Sunday, December 7.

Elf stars Will Ferrell, Bob Newhart, Zooey Deschanel, James Caan, and Ed Asner as Santa, and is the story of a very, very large, misfit elf in Santa’s Workshop who discovers he is not who he thinks, and sets out to find his real family.

Tickets will be available at the door at the Long Center, 111 N. 6th Street in Downtown Lafayette, and are $5 for adults and $2 for children 5-12. Children under 5 are free.

Information is available by calling Long Center Operations Manager Shannon Sabel at 765-742-5664.

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Lafayette based MJV Group, Inc. has been awarded certification under GS-42, Green Seal, Inc.’s environmental standard for green cleaning services that help protect human health and the environment. After a stringent application process and an on-site audit, MJV Group, Inc. is the only Indiana based commercial janitorial service licensed to provide a Green Seal-certified service to their customers.

The GS-42 standard establishes requirements for both in-house and contract cleaning services. Green cleaning encompasses all indoor activities typically required to clean commercial, public, and industrial buildings.

“Certification under GS-42 demonstrates our utilization of products and equipment that have less impact on the environment, and that we embrace processes and procedures that help protect the health of our team members as well as the building occupants,” said James Heck, President of MJV Group, Inc.

Heck added, “Green Cleaning — high performance healthy cleaning that helps protect health and the environment — is in high demand. Many contractors are claiming to offer ‘green’ service. Now, with GS-42 Green Seal certification, building and facility managers can be assured that they are hiring a service that is truly green in every key aspect of its operation.”

MJJ Group, Inc. is a professional building service contractor based in Lafayette, Indiana since 1992, and focuses on providing high performance, healthy cleaning services that protect people and the environment from toxic chemicals, noxious fumes and wasted resources.

MJV offers the Healthy Solutions Green Seal-certified janitorial service 24 hours a day and has more than 400 team members in more than 300 facilities. They are the first building service contractor in the state of Indiana to receive the GS-42 certification.

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — CityBus will not operate on Thursday, November 27 due to the Thanksgiving
holiday. Additionally, the Purdue Campus Loop routes will not operate from 6:00p Tuesday, November
25, through the weekend, including evening and night buses. Campus Loop service resumes on Monday, December 1.

Regular route and trolley riders should be aware that when Purdue classes are not held, as will be the case on Wednesday, November 26 and Friday, November 28, the following changes occur:

1. Route 4B Purdue West/Downtown detours through Purdue Village when inbound. There is no inbound service on State St. between Airport Rd. and S. Martin Jischke Dr.
2. 5 Happy Hollow service is reduced to one bus operating on a 60 minute frequency from 9:30AM to 4:00PM.
3. Route 8 Klondike Express does not operate on days when classes are not held.
4. The Wabash Trolley Line follows the Black Line route. S. River
   Rd., Williams, and S. Grant will not be served.

Route 3A Lafayette Square Detour Expires

The detour on route 3A Lafayette Square, which has been in effect for several months, will expire on Monday morning, November 24. The bus route has been detouring due to the closure of State St. and Earl Ave. These streets are now open.

CityBus will continue operating the detour through Sunday, November 23 in order to allow time for passengers to become aware of the change.

Beginning on Monday, November 24, the bus will follow its regular route. The outbound bus will follow State St., 26th St., and Teal Rd. to 18th St. The inbound bus will follow Teal Rd., 22nd St., and State
St. to 18th St.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University engineering students used a new method to track traffic by monitoring Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other wireless devices carried by football fans as they drove home from a recent game with Penn State.

The method uses the pervasive Bluetooth signals to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another. Harnessing the wireless signals represents a potentially low-cost leap in technology to provide information for everything from the speed of the morning commute to the sluggishness of airport security lines, said Darcy Bullock, professor of civil engineering.

Bullock led the class of graduate students who used the new approach for the Penn State traffic study during the Oct. 4 home game in West Lafayette.

The method picks up the identifying “addresses” from Bluetooth devices in consumer electronics. Because each device has its own distinct digital signature, its travel time can be tracked by detectors installed at intersections or along highways and other locations.

The students used a special antenna to identify 1,520 Bluetooth addresses in the crowd of more than 57,000 fans in attendance. The students then used 13 tracking stations to monitor the Bluetooth signals as fans drove home from the game at Purdue’s Ross-Ade Stadium along two routes leading to Interstate 65: a 4.2-mile southern route and a 5.2-mile northern route.

Data from the study documented which route had the fastest travel time.

“We found that the postgame travel time along the southern route was up to 28 minutes, but the travel time along the northern route was only 12 to 14 minutes, even though the northern route is one mile longer,” said graduate student Mary Martchouk. “And there was also much less variability in travel time on the northern route, much less congestion.”

The researchers concluded that the Bluetooth method was far more effective than two more conventional traffic-tracking techniques. Those techniques typically use spotters with camcorders to manually record individual license plate numbers on cars or “probe vehicles” equipped with a GPS tracker.

“Bluetooth matching is much easier to do than license-plate matching, which is very labor intensive,” said graduate student Ronald Davis. “And you can gather much more data using the Bluetooth signals than you can with both license-plate matching and GPS probe vehicles.”

The Bluetooth method is less invasive than license-plate matching, which identifies the person being tracked. People cannot be identified by their Bluetooth signals, Bullock said.

The students presented their findings on Nov. 18 during an annual dinner of local members of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and will be hosting a national webinar, scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Dec. 3, that is open to the public.