03.19.08
Posted in 19th Century, Art, Relationships, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, slavery at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In last week’s show we examined a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman which said, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men. In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Jane Ford we look at the work of Maurie McInnis and her perspective of class politics, social structures and hierarchies of the antebellum South through the examination 19th century art and material objects.
Myth & Memory [6:12m]:
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Objects and ideas inform both history and contemporary thought and are the basis of the study of material culture. For Maurie McInnis, associate professor of American art and material culture and director of American Studies, understanding the antebellum South in the 19th century encompasses understanding art and objects from the perspective of class politics, social structures and hierarchies.
Working with Angela D. Mack, curator of the traveling show that originated at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., McInnis has spent the last four years creating Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, an exhibition on view through April 20 at the University of Virginia Art Museum. The exhibition focuses on themes of race, slavery and the plantation from the 19th century to today.
McInnis said, this “is an exhibition about ideas rather than an art history exhibit that traces the development of an artist or a stylistic movement. Race, slavery and the plantation do not have a fixed meaning through time.” Working on the exhibit and the companion catalog, McInnis said she was struck by “how much cultural currency the word ‘plantation’ has. The mythology of the South as a place of gentility and refinement is still held by many today.”
For African Americans, however, the meaning revolves around an imbalance of power. According to McInnis, “The two are fundamentally different ideas of what ‘plantation’ means. The reality is that beauty and brutality lived beside each other. The artifacts explore the widely varying ideas of what ‘plantation’ meant then and today.” The themes of protest, politics, nostalgia and identity run through the artists’ works, which represent a wide variety of viewpoints within these topics.
To help clarify the ideas for both the exhibit and catalog, McInnis began by using her research to develop courses. That, coupled with insight from students in her classes, “The ‘Old South’ in Myth and Memory” and “Arts and Cultures of the Slave South,” which she co-teaches with Assistant Professor of Architectural History Louis Nelson — proved invaluable for defining questions about culture and race.
The exhibit includes works by a slave potter named Dave, who worked in Edgefield, S.C., in the 1840s and 50s. He decorated the large storage vessels he made with poetry and signed them. Both the poetry and signing the pots are acts of political protest, since it was unlawful for slaves to read. McInnis said, “His poetry was sometimes funny, spiritual, ironic or obliquely political. Dave is important. His work is an excellent example of an African-American artisan, of which the South was filled, but many are anonymous to us. His work was integral to the economic foundation of the South and at the same time reveals much about slave life.”
Contemporary artist Juan Logan also deals with issues of slavery. His “Foundations,” a sculptural installation, is composed of a series of iron, brick-like structures symbolizing the part African Americans played in building the South. McInnis said, “They not only provided the economic foundation, but also literally built it,” adding that Logan is engaged in an “ongoing conversation and dialogue with the past.”
Both artists show that the heart of understanding the 19th century antebellum South is the understanding of race and slavery. Over time we construct “narratives to serve contemporary concerns and change surrounding these topics. Memories and ideas are not fixed, but changing.” McInnis will explore these shifts in her upcoming book, Remembering the Revolution: Pictures, Politics and Memory. Her interest in the divergent ways in which the North and South remember the American Revolution, especially with the approach of the Civil War, grew directly out of her research for the exhibition. Perceptions of iconic images and representations have changed over time, in terms of how both the image and the event itself are viewed. McInnis said, “that change helps us understand how contemporary cultural politics shaped the evolution of our key American myths.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the work of Karstin Hohl whose research has demonstrated that the encryption used by the now ubiquitous smart card is much easier to break than previously thought.
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03.05.08
Posted in Business, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, happiness at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Anne Bromley, a senior editor/writer for UVa Media Relations, we look at a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman which said, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.
The statement, “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” may not be totally off the mark in the workplace states a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman and Julie Kmec of Washington State University.
The study analyzed five surveys of men and women in Britain and the US, given in 1977, 1992, two in 1997, and 2001. They concentrated their analysis on the two surveys conducted in 1997, both comprising cross-sectional interviews of about 3,500 workers in the US and almost 2,500 in the UK. To yield comparable answers, they evaluated results from the following survey question: “My job requires that I work very hard.” And, according to the results, a gender gap persisted in ratings of the statement. Women were significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed or agreed, than men.
Gorman noted, “The statement in the survey about required work effort is not one in which employees are comparing themselves to the opposite sex, it’s also not asking for a perception of how hard the work is or how much effort they actually exerted. Our focus is on required work effort, the effort that an employee is expected to exert in order to perform her or his job at a level that is satisfactory to the employer. It is important to distinguish required effort from an employee’s actual exerted effort.”
The researchers analyzed the survey data to see if, in fact, women did have more difficult jobs, but that was not the case. Even when the jobs were almost identical, women still were significantly more likely to say they had to work very hard. And, while controlling for physical and mental demands of a particular job, Gorman and Kmec found that neither group of factors explained the different findings about work effort.
Looking for other potential reasons, the sociologists considered domestic responsibilities outside of work. They stated, “Marriage and parenthood had the same effect on reports of required effort for women and men. In the U.S. sample, the researchers matched the number of hours spent on childcare and housework. Between men and women who performed the same amount of time on these tasks, women were still more likely to say their jobs required them to work very hard.”
So what explains the difference between genders and perceived required effort in the work place?
In their paper, “We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in Britain and the United States,” released in the December issue of the journal “Gender and Society” the researchers said, “We argue that the association between sex and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs.”
Gorman said, “A lot of experimental research has shown that people rate the same performance as better when told it was done by a man. People give lower marks to an essay, a painting or a résumé when it has a woman’s name on it. And when a man and a woman work together on a project, people assume the man contributed more than the woman did. Even when a woman’s work is indisputably excellent, people don’t believe she’s good — they think she got lucky.” It follows then, that women have to do better than a man in order to get the same evaluation.
Gorman then added, “This is what women are up against. They have to work harder… And in light of this previous research, it makes sense to conclude that women have to work harder to win their bosses’ approval.”
Some possible consequences of this “effort gap” in the workplace include: the quality of women’s work experience is likely to be lower than men’s; this difference in required effort could also have consequences for women’s careers, making it harder for them to be recognized and promoted. Also, the physical and emotional effects could, in turn, have negative repercussions for families.
Gorman went on to say, “It wouldn’t be fair to use this research to reinforce stereotypes.”
Kmec added, “Instead, employers should take into account women’s hard work when considering who to promote and reward. We do not want to insist that female workers shirk their job responsibilities to make this gap go away. Rather, we hope employers make job performance standards more transparent and be held accountable for their evaluations of women at work.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will look at the work of Maurie McInnis and her perspective of class politics, social structures and hierarchies of antebellum South through the examination 19th century art and material objects.
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02.20.08
Posted in Biology at the University of Virginia, Infectious Disease, Jacob Canon, Parasites, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, biology, biomedical engineering, immune, physical health at 12:10 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Mary Jane Gore, we look at the research of Dr. William Petri, chief of the UVa Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, and his study of a voracious parasite that is said to kill nearly 100, 000 people each year.
Pathogens & Parasites [5:40m]:
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If you have ever contemplated working as a biological researcher then you would probably have considered these questions: what happens when a cell’s life ends? And, what are the mechanisms that control decay?
Contemplating just these types questions during a recent study, a UVa-led research team, directed by Dr. William Petri, chief of the UVa Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, made discoveries which are helping to stop one of the world’s most voracious parasites.
The team included Douglas Boettner (now completing postdoctoral work in Miami), U.Va. graduate students Alicia S. Linford and Sarah Buss and faculty colleagues Dr. Eric Houpt and Dr. Nicholas Sherman of UVa and Dr. Christopher D. Huston of the University of Vermont.
Their work revolved around the hypothesis that identifying molecules involved in the corpse ingestion would provide insight into how the amoebae cause colitis in children. These amoebae, properly known as entamoeba histolytica, cause colitis, or inflammation of the colon. They do this by attacking and killing human immune cells in mere seconds. It then it hides the evidence by eating the cells’ corpses.
In doing so, per data from Dr. Gerald Mandell of U.Va. Infectious Diseases and editor of Mandell, Douglas and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 6th edition, this murderous marauder “on a global basis, affects approximately 50 million people each year, causing diarrhea, malnutrition and nearly 100,000 deaths.
Dr. Petri’s team identified a particular protein on the surface of the ameba called a kinase, PATMK. Their work, published in the Jan. 18 issue of PLoS Pathogens, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science, outlined a special technique called RNA interference, which inhibits the actions of this kinase, thus preventing the amoebae from eating the dead cells.
Dr. Petri, said, “by blocking this kinase, we have for the first time prevented the ameba from colonizing and invading the gut. This means that we are a step closer to preventing this disease, which wreaks havoc among children worldwide.”
The first author of the paper, Douglas Boettner said, “infection and further invasion into the gut require the clearance of dead cells in order to prevent immune recognition of the damaged tissue. PATMK is the first individual member of a large family of proteins to be assigned a function related to the clearance of dying tissue during pathogenesis.”
Boettner added, “this protein may be a pivotal vaccination target because these preliminary studies show that alterations in PATMK function reduced progression of amoebiasis in mice, a vaccine that ultimately would prevent this ameba from clearing the damaged host may draw in helpful immune cells, and thus help to clear this infection.”
Their work has shown how infection depends upon the ameba’s consumption of dead cells. By identifying the molecule that controls this consumption, scientists are one step closer to the ultimate goal of preventing the diseases caused by this parasite.
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be 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 such as Facebook.
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02.13.08
Posted in Business, Fraud, Jacob Canon, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, philosophy at 3:21 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Melissa Maki, we look at business ethics and strategy through the eyes of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and his search for the answers to these questions:
“What motivates a company to cook the books? AND What happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”
Financial Fraud [6:11m]:
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Arthur Anderson… Enron…The Mortgage Loan Crisis, these names and events are synonymous with corporate malfeasance. They symbolize a loss of business ethics that occurred when financial profits were prioritized above all else, even to the long-term detriment of the firm. So, what motivates a company to cook the books? And what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?
Such business ethics and strategy questions drive the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Harris joined Darden’s faculty in 2006 and has taught ethics and strategy courses for the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar on corporate governance and ethics. His teaching responsibilities in business ethics and strategy align with his research interests. Harris said, “at the Darden School, cross-disciplinary work is valued… we take ethics seriously, not only within the classroom but also in our research, it’s a great fit for me.”
Harris recently won accolades for his dissertation research at the 2007 annual meetings of the Academy of Management — one of the foremost professional associations dedicated to the study of management and organizations. His work titled, “Financial Misrepresentation: Antecedents and Performance Effects” won the Best Dissertation Award from the academy’s Social Issues in Management Division and was also one of six finalists in the academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division, an unusual cross-disciplinary accomplishment.
Harris’ thesis builds his academic theory through two related empirical studies. He examined nine years of data from a large sample of publicly traded corporations that were identified by the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, as having misrepresented their financial information.The first study, featured as the lead article in the May-June 2007 issue of Organization Science, focuses on predictors of a company’s propensity toward financial fraud.
In his study, Harris found two factors — relative performance and CEO incentive pay — were highly influential. That is, companies performing below average for their industry are more likely to compensate by misrepresenting their financial data. And surprisingly, the higher a CEO’s stock options as a percentage of total pay, the more likely a company is to cheat — running counter to the notion that incentive pay aligns the individual aspirations of management with the collective ambitions of a company. Harris controlled for other possible predictors, such as increasing board independence by having outsiders on the board and separating the CEO and chair roles in a firm, but he notes that they had “no effect whatsoever on preventing the cheating.”
In the second study, Harris looked at what happens to these companies once ethical violations are announced to the public. Predictably, they see an immediate downturn in their stock prices, but he also found that a firm’s operating performance was severely impaired. This negative impact on profitability was more persistent than market-based effects; even a year or two later, companies were still feeling the effects of their transgressions. On average, the companies’ operational profits dropped by nearly 50 percent. Harris said, “Firms do worse by doing bad. If they cheat, they take a big hit in overall performance.”
But, as with much of life…public perception matters more than reality. Despite his earlier finding that an autonomous board does not deter companies from committing financial fraud, Harris noted that corporations are able to recover from some of this negative fallout if they took swift steps to increase the number of outsiders on their board and replace their CEO. Harris went on to say, “the research shows that stakeholders value these things. Firms get rewarded for making such changes because we all think it is part of good governance — yet in the case of something like board independence, this is ironic, given that the data shows it has no actual preventative effect.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Dr. William Petri who directs a U.Va.-led research team doing research on a parasite said to kill nearly 100,000 people each year.
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02.06.08
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.
Locked-In Syndrome [6:23m]:
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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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01.23.08
Posted in Atherosclerosis, Cardiology, Jacob Canon, MRI, Skalak, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, biomedical engineering, pharmaceutical, physical health at 12:12 pm by Jacob Canon
A new device invented by researchers at the University of Virginia could save pharmaceutical companies significant time and money in screening potential new drug compounds. Brett Blackman, an assistant professor in biomedical engineering and Brian Wamhoff, assistant professor in the department of medicine; cardiovascular division, teamed up to create a novel system, the HemoShear 2.0, which, for the first time, offers researchers the ability to observe the behavior patterns of human vascular cells under a variety of blood flow conditions that occur inside the body’s cardiovascular system.
The HemoShear 2.0 [6:29m]:
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Dr. Blackman said, “We want to help the pharmaceutical industry identify effective therapeutic compounds by allowing them to fail early, fail fast and fail cheap before going to very expensive animal studies.”
Atherosclerosis, hardening or narrowing of the arteries, is considered the most important underlying cause of heart attack or stroke. The HemoShear 2.0 models the early indicators of atherosclerosis by placing actual human endothelial cells, the cells lining the interior of blood vessels, and smooth muscle cells, the cells found in the wall of blood vessels, in an environment that mimics an artery with blood flowing through it. Data from these exposures are recorded and measured to help test the efficacy of therapeutic compounds and aid in early stage toxicity studies. Instead of testing drug compounds on isolated cells, which can produce false negatives, drug companies can use the device to test compounds in a more realistic environment.
This kind of modeling offers unique opportunities to observe the cells and their interaction. This interaction is important because the cells lining the interior of the blood vessels recognize different blood flow patterns imposed upon them and respond by expressing or repressing genes. This, in turn, influences their interactions with the cells found in the walls of blood vessels. The researchers found these cell interactions may lead to the onset of early-inflammation-associated atherosclerosis in certain arteries.
MRI’s were used by researchers to determine the rhythmic pattern that blood flows through different arteries in human subjects. Blackman said, “We are then able to simulate the same flow patterns in those areas that are more or less susceptible to atherosclerosis and observe how the cells respond to these flow patterns in HemoShear.”
Using a synthetic elastic layer that is similar to a real blood vessel wall, endothelial cells are plated on the top surface and smooth muscle cells on the bottom surface. Then, the different blood flow patterns modeled from human circulation are applied to the endothelial cells through rotation of a motor-driven cone system. The findings: the blood flow can influence both endothelial and smooth muscle cell behaviors.
When subjected to atheroprotective blood flow patterns, the endothelial cells aligned with the direction of the blood flow, and the smooth muscle cells aligned perpendicularly to the flow as is true in a healthy blood vessel. In stark contrast, the atheroprone type of flow caused the endothelial cells to move away from their parallel structure while smooth muscle cells moved away from their perpendicular structure.
This remodeling mimics the early phases of the diseased state of the artery; the blood flow pattern associated with atheroprone areas resulted in inflammation in both cells reminiscent of early hallmarks of atherosclerosis. This was confirmed through evaluating gene and protein expression profiles in both cell types.
Thomas Skalak, professor and chair of the U.Va. Department of Biomedical Engineering said, “the results of this study validate the use of this novel co-culture system as a relevant biomimetic vascular model for studying early atherosclerotic events. The cells’ responses to these carefully controlled models of blood flow can now be used to develop therapeutic interventions for detection and treatment of vascular diseases. It has the potential to be revolutionary.”
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 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…
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01.19.08
Posted in Magnetic therapy, Skalak, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, biomedical engineering, physical health at 3:45 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar web site written by Melissa Maki, we examine the continuing studies of UVa professor and chair of biomedical engineering Thomas Skalak and his efforts to develop real scientific evidence about the effectiveness of magnetic therapy.
Magnetic therapy, touted for healing properties since ancient Greece, is still widely used today as an alternative method for treating a number of conditions, from arthritis to depression. Yet, in spite of no scientific proof that magnets can heal, a lack of regulation and widespread public acceptance based on anecdotal evidence, hopeful consumers have created a $5 billion world market as they buy bracelets, knee braces, shoe inserts, mattresses and other products embedded with magnets, hoping for a non-invasive and drug-free cure to what ails them.
Magnetic Therapy [6:05m]:
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Thomas Skalak, professor and chair of biomedical engineering at U.Va., has carefully studied magnets for a number of years in order to develop real scientific evidence about the effectiveness of magnetic therapy. His lab leads the field in the area of micro-circulation research - the study of blood flow through the body’s tiniest blood vessels. With a five-year, $875,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Skalak and Cassandra Morris, former Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, set out to investigate the effect of magnetic therapy on micro-circulation.
Initially, they sought to examine a major claim, that magnets increase blood flow, made by the companies that sell magnet. They first found evidence to support this claim in their initial research with laboratory rats. Magnets of 70 milliTesla (mT) field strength - about 10 times the strength commonly found on a refrigerator - were placed near the rat’s blood vessels. Measurements of blood vessel diameter were taken both before and after exposure to the force created by the magnets. They effect found was significant. The vessels that had been dilated constricted, and the constricted vessels dilated, implying that the magnetic field could induce vessel relaxation in tissues with constrained blood supply, ultimately increasing blood flow.
Since dilation of blood vessels is often a major cause of swelling at sites of trauma to soft tissues such as muscles or ligaments, the prior results on vessel constriction led Morris and Skalak to look closer at whether magnets, by limiting blood flow in such cases, would also reduce swelling. Their most recent research, published in the November 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physiology, yielded affirmative results.
In this study, the hind paws of anesthetized rats were treated with inflammatory agents in order to simulate tissue injury. Magnetic therapy was then applied to the paws. The research results indicate that magnets can significantly reduce swelling if applied immediately after tissue trauma.
Since muscle bruising and joint sprains are the most common injuries worldwide, this discovery has significant implications. Skalak said, “if an injury doesn’t swell, it will heal faster - and the person will experience less pain and better mobility.” This means that magnets could be used much the way ice packs and compression are now used for everyday sprains, bumps and bruises, but with more beneficial results.
A key to the success of magnetic therapy for tissue swelling is careful engineering of the proper field strength at the tissue location, a challenge in which most currently available commercial magnet systems fall short. The new research should allow Skalak’s biomedical engineering group to design field strengths that provide real benefit for specific injuries and parts of the body.
The ready availability and low cost of this treatment could produce huge gains in worker productivity and quality of life. Skalak, who plans to continue testing magnet effectiveness through clinical trials and on elite athletes, envisions the magnets being particularly useful to high school, college and professional sports teams, as well as school nurses and retirement communities.
Skalak said, “we now hope to implement a series of steps, including private investment partners and eventually a major corporate partner, to realize these very widespread applications that will make a positive difference for human health.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show… I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when continue with the topic of biomedical engineering by examining the work of two University of Virginia professors who have created a system, the HemoShear 2.0, which offers researchers the ability to observe the behavior patterns of vascular cells under a variety of blood flow conditions.
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11.29.07
Posted in Asian-Americans, European-Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychology, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, happiness at 12:06 pm by Jacob Canon
Are you happy? Well don’t try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the essence of a multi-cultural study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study was produced by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and his co-authors Ed Diener, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and The Gallup Organization, Dong-Won Choi of California State University, East Bay, Chu Kim-Prieto of the College of New Jersey, and Incheol Choi of Seoul National University.
When Less is More [5:01m]:
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Professor Oishi and his colleagues found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general, more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese. But it is much easier for them to become less happy by negative events. And they tend to recover at a slower rate from negative events than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry. On the other hand, Koreans, Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans, are less happy in general, but recover their emotional equilibrium more readily after a setback than European-Americans.
Oishi said, “We found that as a person experiences more positive events, the more they feel the effects of a negative event, people seem to dwell on the negative thing when they have a large number of good events in their life. It is like the person who is used to flying first class and becomes very annoyed if there is a half-hour delay. But the person who flies economy class accepts the delay in stride.”
Oishi, a social psychologist who grew up in Japan and then moved to the United States at 23, is interested in comparing how people from East Asia and the United States respond to the daily events of life. He and his colleagues surveyed more than 350 college students in Japan, Korea and the United States over a three-week period. The students recorded daily their general state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life, as well as the number of positive and negative events they had during the course of each day. The researchers found that the European-Americans needed nearly two positive events,such as getting complimented or getting an A, to return to their normal level of happiness after each negative event, such as getting a parking ticket or a lower grade than expected. The Koreans, Japanese and Asian-Americans generally needed only one positive event to make up for each negative event.
Oishi said that people who become accustomed to numerous positive or happy events in their life are more likely to take a harder fall than people who have learned to accept the bad with the good. And because negative events have such a strong effect when occurring in the midst of numerous positive events, people find it difficult to be extremely happy. They reach a point of diminishing returns. This is why the extreme happiness people may feel after buying a new car or a house, or getting married, can be rapidly diminished when the payments come due or the daily spats begin. It becomes a problem of ratio, or perspective.
Oishi said, “In general, it’s good to have a positive perspective, but unless you can switch your mindset to accept the negative facts of everyday life — that these things happen and must be accepted — it becomes very hard to maintain a comfortable level of satisfaction.”Professor Oishi’s advice: “Don’t try to be happier.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show… I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be… The research of UVa professor Glenn Gaesser and his work concerning nutrition and what are commonly referred as “BAD” carbohydrates.
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11.15.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:13 am by admin
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