05.28.08

Rodeheaver and PluraGel

Posted in Biology at the University of Virginia, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, U.Va. Patent Foundation, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, pharmaceutical, physical health, technology at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, written by Morgan Ellen Estabrook, outreach and communications manager for the U.Va. Patent Foundation, we look at Dr. George T. Rodeheaver and PluroGel™, his patented gel which reduces suffering and improves the recovery of burn victims and patients with chronic wounds.

The Edlich-Henderson Inventor of the Year award, the highest honor bestowed by the U.Va. Patent Foundation, recognizes an inventor or team of inventors each year whose technology has proven to be of notable value to society. This year, Dr. George T. Rodeheaver was honored May 19th at the UVa Patent Foundation’s annual awards banquet at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville.

Robert S. MacWright, executive director of the UVa Patent Foundation, said, “…Dr. Rodeheaver was chosen for this top honor because of his work to reduce the suffering and improve the recovery of burn victims and patients with chronic wounds. This work has made a big difference for patients at the U.Va. Health System, and Dr. Rodeheaver’s continued efforts will bring its benefits to patients everywhere.”

Dr. Rodeheaver, the Richard F. Edlich Professor of Biomedical Research, said he is especially thrilled to have been selected as the winner of an award named in part for his friend and long-time collaborator. “This award is not only an honor for me but also a tribute to Dr. Edlich, who has made so many contributions to emergency medicine over the years.”

Dr. Rodeheaver’s most notable invention is an ahead-of-its-time antimicrobial gel that has proven significantly more effective than existing therapies in treating severe burns and chronic wounds, such as diabetic ulcers, pressure ulcers and venous leg ulcers.

Trade-named PluroGel™, the topical treatment is unique in that it thickens at high temperatures (such as body temperature) and liquefies at cooler temperatures. As a result, PluroGel effectively delivers healing medication when applied to the body but is easily removed by cool water, making it much less painful to remove than existing therapies.

Dr. Rodeheaver’s innovative technology, for which he received a full U.S. patent in 1997, has been used to treat patients throughout the U.Va. Health System. More than 2,000 patients — some referred from up to 400 miles away to receive the treatment — have benefited from the invention.

Rodeheaver said, “The technology has had a dramatic impact so far. The fact is that in our burn center, we have been able to eliminate infection, which was the leading cause of death 15 years ago. And we have had great success in healing chronic wounds, many of which, with traditional remedies, had not healed for numerous years.”

Because of the level of success achieved within the U.Va. Health System, Rodeheaver has worked diligently to commercialize the technology through a start-up company, PluroGen Therapeutics Inc., which he founded with associate professor Adam J. Katz, M.D., also of the Department of Plastic Surgery. PluroGen is currently seeking Federal Drug Administration approval on the product so that it can be made available commercially to the public, beyond the University hospital.

After 36 years at the University and over 200 journal articles, Rodeheaver, who was filling out a grant application when he received word of his award said, he continues to enjoy pushing forward on the frontiers of science. According to the faculty member-cum-inventor and now entrepreneur, who considers himself to be “old-school. It is a new paradigm for me; it’s unique and exciting. Entrepreneurship in particular is something I see as a brand-new adventure.”

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will well look at Dorrie K. Fontaine, recently named Dean of UVa’s School of Nursing, and her career advocating better care for critically ill patients.

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02.27.08

Privacy & Facebook

Posted in Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, ethics, technology at 12:05 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Andrea Arco, marketing director for the School of Engineering and Applied Science we observe at the research of Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concerning privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms.

Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. According to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.

Felt, a fourth-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at UVa, leads a research project on privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms and is investigating the information sharing that occurs when users download a Facebook application — a program that allows the user to interact with other users in interesting ways, from sharing music to playing games.

Although these applications add variety to a Facebook user’s profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Here’s how: anyone with an account on Facebook can create an application. Although this application appears as if it is part of Facebook’s platform, it is actually running on application developer’s server. When a user installs an application, that application’s developer is given the ability to see everything the user can see — name, address, friends’ profiles, photos, etc.

An experienced Facebook application developer, Felt said, “The Facebook privacy policy always seemed unsatisfactory to me.” It was this unsettling feeling that led her to investigate Facebook’s vulnerabilities. Working with David Evans, an associate professor in UVa’s Department of Computer Science and fourth-year physics major Andrew Spisak, Felt examined the 150 most popular Facebook applications.

She discovered that 8.7 percent of these applications needed no personal information to run, while 82 percent needed only the user’s public information: name, network, list of friends. Still, 9.3 percent require a user’s private information in order to function. Felt said, “since all applications receive access to private information, this means that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications unnecessarily have access to private data.”

Felt said, “there are currently no restrictions on what applications, and their developers, can do with user data. And though the Facebook “Terms of Use” warn developers not to abuse the data they have access to, Facebook cannot enforce this rule. In fact, when a user installs an application, the user’s computer communicates with the Facebook servers and the Facebook servers then communicate with the application developer’s servers. Once users’ private data leave the Facebook servers, the company has no way of knowing what happens to it.

Evans said, “an application developer could easily acquire personal information for millions of users. There is a risk it could be used to launch targeted phishing attacks, exploited by identity thieves or sold to marketing companies.”

Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.

Felt has developed and refined a privacy-by-proxy system and is building a prototype implementation — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name and other personal information.

Felt said, “this is the first step… Hopefully the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be a recent study by University of Virginia sociologist Elizabeth Gorman whose work came to the same conclusion, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.

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02.06.08

Locked-In Syndrome

Posted in Cognitive Science, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, nuerology, physical health, physiology, sensory inputs, technology, visual processing at 12:06 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Linda Kobert, we examine the work of Dennis Proffitt, Professor and Director of the Cognitive Science Program, whose research focuses on creating computer interfaces to help make life more bearable for patients with ALS and other diseases that are the cause of locked-in syndrome.

Up to now, the most iconic connection to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is the famous farewell in Yankee stadium By Mr. Gerhig. Forced to retire from baseball, the profession he loved and was best known for, he became the personification of this devastating disease.

In 2002, Peggy Chun, a popular artist was diagnosed with ALS. This debilitating neurological disorder progressively destroys a person’s motor neurons. As a victim of this incurable disease, Chun can feel, see, smell, taste, think and imagine, but she can no longer move in any way. She is, in the parlance of the medical profession, “locked-in.” ALS is the most frequent cause of locked-in syndrome, which begins with numbness in the extremities and progresses upward until all motor function disappears.

Usually the last thing you lose is eye movement,” says Dennis Proffitt, U.Va. cognitive psychologist and Commonwealth Professor of Psychology. “When you lose that, you are cognitively alert, you can think, you can feel, but you can’t move a thing. As a result, you can’t communicate in any way. It’s awful.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Proffitt, his colleagues at Georgia Tech and a company called Archinoetics in Hawaii are working to develop computer interfaces that may one day make life for locked-in patients more bearable.

Scientists know different parts of the brain are activated when a person performs different functions. For example, moving the left arm activates an area on the right side of the brain, the back of the brain is active with visual imagery and the frontal lobe is active when one tries to focus attention on something. Proffitt’s system simply detects whether or not a particular area of the brain is actively engaged at the time.

With this in mind, researchers are currently testing a technology that allows Chun and other locked-in patients to answer simple yes/no questions. An interface using functional near infrared imaging (fNIR) assesses activity in Broca’s area, a part of the brain where verbal working memory occurs. They strap a device, just above the left ear that projects a light beam through the skull measuring changes in blood volume and oxygenation when Broca’s area is engaged.

With the device in place, subjects are asked to count in their head when they want to activate the verbal working memory and initiate a “yes” response. When they want to say “no,” subjects think of clouds or rest or think “la la la.” It’s a process that most people can engage easily without having to spend a long time training to do it.

Proffitt said, “it was hard for us to think of something we could ask a person to do — something easy to control, something you can turn on and off — that we could measure in this way. What we came up with was sub-vocal speech … talking to yourself. You could be counting, or you could be reciting a poem. We couldn’t tell the difference. We have no idea what you’re doing. We just know the kind of thing you’re doing.”

He stresses, “It’s not reading your thoughts, we can’t do that.”

Proffitt admitted, “at this time the system is primitive, but it’s a start. Right now it’s an on/off switch. What we want to do is to get continuous control so the person is not just activating … Not just ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but small to large, continuous control within some range. If we could achieve that in the next few years, that would be a huge improvement in what we will be able to do with the technology.”

For the half million people in the world with locked-in syndrome, having the ability to communicate, even in this primitive fashion, can make the difference between suffering in silence and a meaningful life.

But Peggy Chun isn’t waiting for the technology to evolve. This future icon of the human spirit refuses to be shut down. She uses the system now as a tool for creativity. With the sensor in place over her left ear, the artist activates Broca’s area to select shades from a palette that show up on a computer screen as horizontal gradations of color. She calls it “brain art,” and it may be simple, but it’s selling like hotcakes.

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business concerning business ethics and strategy, as he looks to answer the questions, “What motivates a company to cook the books? And, what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”

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01.30.08

Before Florida; A History of Voting Technology

Posted in Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, elections, ethics, technology, voting machines at 5:50 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Andrea Arco, Director of Marketing for U.Va’s Engineering School, we examine the work of Bryan Pfaffenberger, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and his study of mechanical-lever voting machines, their history and understanding the interaction between technology and culture that has been going on for more than a century.

For more than a century, voting machines have helped shape American political history. The chaos of the 2000 presidential election in Florida and the alleged election fraud in Ohio during 2004, which led to testimony before congress about computer programs that could rig an election, demonstrate the crucial role that voting machines play in shaping the outcome of an election. Bryan Pfaffenberger, a historian of science and an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, believes there is value in understanding that the interaction between technology and culture has been going on for more than a century.

His ongoing study is part of a larger Democracy and Technology program that he and colleagues are developing within UVa’s Department of Science, Technology and Society. Pfaffenberger said, “this initiative that has already sparked several cross-University collaborations and additions to the curriculum. It’s fitting that this initiative is underway at the university Thomas Jefferson founded. Jefferson strongly believed that engineers need to be good citizens; today, the need is greater than ever, so it’s important for science and engineering students indeed, students throughout the University to reflect on how technologies shape our democracy.”

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, U.S. voters got their ballots from political parties, who printed and distributed them at polling places. Voters would then hand their ballots to election clerks in full view of the public. This led to widespread vote-buying, because the vote buyers could see whether corrupted voters fulfilled their end of the bargain.

Beginning in 1888, a movement favoring the Australian secret ballot system swept the country. In this system, the government prints the paper ballots and voters mark them behind a privacy curtain. This cut down vote buying, but election fraud moved inside the polling place as corrupt officials learned other ways to swing an election. This was especially true in large cities, where political machines such as New York City’s Tammany Hall ran the show.

Because of this, and since New Yorks electoral votes often determined the outcome of presidential elections, these voting machines proved attractive because they kept paper out of the hands of election officials. The machines recorded votes directly on odometer-like counters. Still, not everyone liked the machines. For example, voters could not tell whether their votes were recorded as they had intended — or whether they were recorded at all. Paper ballots might have flaws, but at least there was a record of how people voted

Pfaffenberger said, “there’s an almost exact parallel between the debate we’re having today concerning electronic voting machines and the equally divisive, but completely forgotten, debate that greeted first-generation voting machine technology in the 1890s.” One side says, “trust machines, not people.” The other side says, “trust people, not machines.” Electronic “touch-screen” voting machines are today’s version of 1890s machines — they try to keep paper away from biased, partisan, or overworked human counters.

But voters are concerned that their votes aren’t recorded properly. The verified voting movement wants to put paper back in the process by requiring states to equip electronic voting machines with a printed audit trail. But some voting experts worry that, if the machines and paper continue to come up with different numbers, which has already happened in some municipal and state elections, we could see another presidential election meltdown that might make Florida 2000 look mild in comparison.

Happily, there’s a growing national consensus toward the use of optical scan voting machines, in which voters fill out a paper ballot by filling in bubbles next to candidates’ names. They then feed their ballot into a scanner, which tells them if they’ve made a mistake — and lets them have another chance. Voters can see that their votes were properly counted, and the ballots are kept in case machine malfunction is suspected. Dr. Pfaffenberger said, “After more than a century, the war between those who trust machines and those who trust people seems to be ending, finally. But it’s the voter who’s winning.”

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week as we again delve into the election season, when our topic will be the work of U.Va. cognitive psychologist Dennis Proffitt whose research focuses on creating computer interfaces to help make life more bearable for patients with ALS and other diseases that are the cause of locked-in syndrome.

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