What triggers appendicitis, and why is it more common in certain years and in the summer? SMU researchers have published evidence that a flu-like virus is to blame.

Dedman College Professors Tom Fomby, Economics, and Wayne Woodward, Statistical Science, reviewed 36 years' worth of hospital data on cases of appendicitis, influenza and gastric viral infections. They discovered that appendicitis admissions peaked in the years 1977, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1994 and 1998.

The clustering pattern suggests that appendicitis outbreaks are typical of viral infections. The data also showed a slight increase in the number of appendicitis cases during the summer months.

Fomby and Woodward described their findings in "Association of Viral Infection and Appendicitis," published in the January issue of the journal Archives of Surgery. Since then, it has been the subject of articles in several media outlets, including The Daily Mail Online, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Science Daily and many others.

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Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's record-setting performances have unleashed a wave of interest in the ultimate limits to human running speed. A new study published Jan. 21, 2010, in the Journal of Applied Physiology offers intriguing insights into the biology and perhaps even the future of human running speed.

The newly published evidence identifies the critical variable imposing the biological limit to running speed, and offers an enticing view of how the biological limits might be pushed back beyond the nearly 28 miles per hour speeds achieved by Bolt to speeds of perhaps 35 or even 40 miles per hour.

The new paper, "The biological limits to running speed are imposed from the ground up," was authored by Peter Weyand of SMU; Rosalind Sandell and Danille Prime, both formerly of Rice University; and Matthew Bundle of the University of Wyoming.

"The prevailing view that speed is limited by the force with which the limbs can strike the running surface is an eminently reasonable one," says Weyand, associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

"If one considers that elite sprinters can apply peak forces of 800 to 1,000 pounds with a single limb during each sprinting step, it's easy to believe that runners are probably operating at or near the force limits of their muscles and limbs," he says. "However, our new data clearly show that this is not the case. Despite how large the running forces can be, we found that the limbs are capable of applying much greater ground forces than those present during top-speed forward running."

The researchers found that the critical biological limit is actually imposed by time - specifically, the very brief periods of time available to apply force to the ground while sprinting. In elite sprinters, foot-ground contact times are less than one-tenth of one second, and peak ground forces occur within less than one-twentieth of one second of the first instant of foot-ground contact.

The researchers used a high-speed treadmill capable of attaining speeds greater than 40 miles per hour and of acquiring precise measurements of the forces applied to the surface with each footfall. They also had subjects perform at high speeds in different gaits. In addition to completing traditional top-speed forward running tests, subjects hopped on one leg and ran backward to their fastest possible speeds on the treadmill.

The unconventional tests were selected to examine the prevailing belief that human running speed is limited by how forcefully a runner's limbs can strike the ground. However, the researchers found that the ground forces applied while hopping on one leg at top speed exceeded those applied during top-speed forward running by 30 percent or more, and that the forces generated by the active muscles within the limb were roughly 1.5 to 2 times greater in the one-legged hopping gait.

The new work shows that running speed limits are set by the contractile speed limits of the muscle fibers themselves, with fiber contractile speeds setting the limit on how quickly the runner's limb can apply force to the running surface, the researchers say.

• Read more and review international press coverage at the SMU Research blog

(Above, sophomore sprinter Ebony Cuington of SMU's track and field team.)

In the future, marketing to U.S. seniors will become even more important as the group of those 65 years and older nearly doubles in size - from 37 million to 72 million by 2030.

There are already entire cottage industries marketing to them, whether in consumer goods, financial services or health care. International marketers want to know how to reach seniors as well. New research about segmenting Japanese seniors reveals that chronological age is not the best metric to use in segmenting this group, and this fact holds true for those marketing to Westerners, too.

For over 20 years, Marketing Professor Tom Barry of SMU's Cox School of Business has been researching the senior market segment with co-author Stuart Van Auken of Florida Gulf Coast University, who specializes on the international side. This research builds on their prior work published in top journals. A focal point of the research is the notion of "cognitive" age, the age that one feels or sees oneself as.

"Cognitive age is one's 'feel age,' that is how old you feel, which is both self-reported and scientifically measured," says Barry. "You can measure this notion of cognitive age well both domestically and overseas."

Generally those with a younger outlook than their actual age should evidence better health, which influences personal economics, life satisfaction, attitudes toward aging, and activities and level of participation in organizations.

The two groups which emerged from the study - the cognitively younger and the cognitively older - display tendencies geared toward these top activities: reading books, social club membership, shopping in department stores, dining out and taking photographs. A next level of popular activities were visiting art galleries or museums and using computers. The cognitively younger seniors were engaged in more activities than were the cognitively older seniors.

The message to marketers is to focus on feel age, not real age. "This study says natural age is not a good descriptor or discriminator upon which to base segments," Barry says. "You see it all the time in varied demographic groupings like 29-40 year-old females, 55- 64 year-old married couples, etc. But there are so many psychological variations of age within those segments. We segment in this way because it is easy and we can."

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The Early Cretaceous sauropod Paluxysaurus jonesi weighed 20 tons, was 60 feet long and had a neck 26 feet long, according to the scientists who have prepared the world's first full skeletal mount of the dinosaur.

The massive mount, prepared for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Fort Worth, was unveiled Nov. 20 when the museum opened in a new $80 million facility. It enables Texans to see their state dinosaur in three dimensions for the first time.

The reconstructed skeleton is yielding clues to the biology of the animal and its relationship to other similar dinosaurs, says Dale Winkler, lead consultant for anatomy and posture on the skeletal mount. Winkler is director of SMU's Shuler Museum of Paleontology and a research professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College.

Winkler has worked with Paluxysaurus bones since crews from SMU and the Fort Worth museum began to unearth them in the early 1990s. The bones assembled for Fort Worth's Paluxysaurus mount were recovered by students, faculty, staff and hundreds of volunteers over the past 16 years.

In preparing the mount, Winkler said he was surprised at how extremely long the neck was - at 26 feet - compared to the tail, and he found the head especially striking.

"It was really exciting to see what the head looked like," Winkler says. "Paluxysaurus had very high cheeks compared to its relatives. Once the bones defining the opening of the nose were connected, it showed that the nostrils were turned up on top of the snout, instead of out like Brachiosaurus."

A relative of Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, Paluxysaurus lived about 110 million to 115 million years ago. The dinosaur was identified and named in 2007 by Peter J. Rose. The Fort Worth skeleton was assembled from a combination of actual fossil bones from at least four different dinosaurs found on private ranch land in North Central Texas and from cast lightweight foam pieces modeled on original bones. The mount enables scientists to better understand the animal's anatomy, size and stature on questions like "How were the legs situated, and how did the shoulders relate to the hips?"

From the skeletal mount, the scientists learned that Paluxysaurus was more than 6 feet wide and nearly 12 feet tall at the shoulder, although built fairly light, Winkler says. Its teeth are a lot slimmer than those of its closest relatives, indicating Paluxysaurus gathered and processed food differently, using its teeth not for chewing, but to grab food, he says.

Paluxysaurus had a long neck like Brachiosaurus, and a tail almost as long, but wasn't quite so gigantic. Scientists also learned Paluxysaurus had relatively long front arms, making its back more level. The dinosaur's shoulder turned out fairly high, and the hips were wide, Winkler says, and it had reached a more advanced stage of evolution than Late Jurassic sauropods.

Paluxysaurus' massive pelvis and its sacrum have never before been viewed by the public, he says. Its ilium, the largest bone in the pelvis, is similar to that of titanosaurids of the Late Cretaceous, mainly found in South America. However, one titanosaurid, called Alamosaurus, entered North America and is known from Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas.

(Above, the skeletal mount of Paluxysaurus jonesi. Photo courtesy of Ralph Lauer Images.)

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New high-energy particle research by a team working with data from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory further heightens the uncertainty about the exact nature of a key theoretical component of modern physics - the massive fundamental particle called the Higgs boson.

Analysis of data from particle collisions resulting in two leptons helps improve measurements of the mass of another heavy subatomic particle called the top quark, says SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, who led the team that calculated the measurement.

Improving the measurement of the mass of the top quark bears on the nature of the Higgs, says Kehoe, an assistant professor in SMU's Department of Physics.

The Higgs was postulated in the 1960s to help explain how basic elements of the universe fit together and interact. It is responsible for a phenomenon called the Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to the fundamental particles of nature.

Physicists have searched for more than four decades to observe the never-before-seen Higgs. Now they hope it will be observed in the next few years since data started flowing recently from the world's newest and largest high-energy particle accelerator, the CERN laboratory's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

Researchers theorize that the top quark - because of its sizable mass - is sensitive to the Higgs and therefore may point to it. They theorize that knowing the mass of the top quark narrows the range of where the Higgs will be detected in CERN's LHC collisions. The top quark is one of 16 species of subatomic particles that physicists have observed. It was predicted in the 1970s and observed in 1995. Increasingly precise measurements of its mass have been achieved almost every year since, and physicists closely watch the incremental measurements of the top quark.

The two-lepton analysis by Kehoe and SMU post-doctoral researcher Peter Renkel looked at data taken over four years during high-energy collisions at Fermilab, a Department of Energy proton-antiproton collider in Batavia, Illinois.

The two-lepton analysis is one of almost a dozen analyses of the mass of the top quark at a Fermilab experiment called "DZero." The DZero experiment involves 500 physicists and is one of Fermilab's two large experimental collaborations of scientists. The top quark mass was first observed simultaneously by these two experiments. Several measurements of the top quark's mass from these two experiments are combined to a "world average" value.

The new world average is so precise that it constrains more tightly than ever the range of possible measurements for the mass of the Higgs, Kehoe says.

If the Higgs does prove different than currently expected, physicists may have to rework their long-standing theoretical framework, known as the Standard Model. Scientists worldwide are hoping to validate the Standard Model - which has worked well for more than 30 years to explain everything from radioactivity to computer chips - by actually observing the Higgs.

"The new results may be an indication that the Higgs boson has different properties than the Standard Model indicates," Kehoe says. "It's very difficult to devise a theory without some mechanism that mimics fairly well the Higgs mechanism. But if the underlying cause of this mechanism is significantly different, that will have a major impact on the fundamentals of the Standard Model. It could point to something deeper than the standard Higgs boson at work, and that is very interesting."

(Above, a Fermilab graphic depicting the Standard Model fundamental particles.)

• Read more at the SMU Research blog

The artificial lower limbs of double-amputee Olympic hopeful Oscar Pistorius give him a clear and major advantage over his competition, taking 10 seconds or more off what his 400-meter race time would be if his prosthesis behaved like intact limbs.

That's the conclusion - released to the public for the first time - of human performance experts Peter Weyand of SMU and Matthew Bundle of the University of Wyoming.

The Weyand-Bundle conclusion is part of a written point-counterpoint style debate published online Nov. 19 in the Journal of Applied Physiology. Weyand and Bundle were the first two authors of the study publishing the test results acquired as part of the legal appeal process undertaken after the governing body of track and field - the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) - banned Pistorius from able-bodied track competitions, including the Olympics.

In banning Pistorius, the IAAF had concluded on the basis of other data that Pistorius' J-shaped artificial lower limbs, called "Cheetahs" by the manufacturer, gave him a competitive advantage over able-bodied competitors. But the ban subsequently was overturned on appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The case has been considered groundbreaking for the eligibility of disabled athletes and the regulation of prosthetic technology in sport. Pistorius hopes to qualify for the 2012 Olympics.

The newly released conclusion from Weyand and Bundle analyzes the scientific evidence and quantifies the competitive advantage provided by Pistorius' "Cheetah" limbs.

"Pistorius' sprinting mechanics are anomalous, advantageous and directly attributable to how much lighter and springier his artificial limbs are. The blades enhance sprint running speeds by 15-30 percent," says Weyand, associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics in SMU's Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development. Below the knee, Pistorius' limbs weigh less than half as much as the limbs of an able-bodied male sprinter.

(Above, SMU Professor Peter Weyand and sprinter Oscar Pistorius during testing. Photo by Jeff Fitlow, Rice University.)

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The Congo Basin - with its massive, lush tropical rain forest - was far different 150 million to 200 million years ago.

At that time Africa and South America were part of the single continent Gondwana. The Congo Basin was arid, with a small amount of seasonal rainfall, and few bushes or trees populated the landscape, according to a new geochemical analysis of rare ancient soils.

The geochemical analysis provides new data for the Jurassic period, when very little is known about central Africa's paleoclimate, says Timothy Myers, a paleontology doctoral student in SMU's Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College.

There aren't a whole lot of terrestrial deposits from that time period preserved in Central Africa," Myers says. "Scientists have been looking at Africa's paleoclimate for some time, but data from this time period is unique."

There are several reasons for the scarcity of deposits: Ongoing armed conflict makes it difficult and challenging to retrieve them; and the thick vegetation, a humid climate and continual erosion prevent the preservation of ancient deposits, which would safeguard clues to Africa's paleoclimate.

Myers' research is based on a core sample drilled by a syndicate interested in the oil and mineral deposits in the Congo Basin. Myers accessed the sample - drilled from a depth of more than 2 kilometers - from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, where it is housed. With the permission of the museum, he analyzed pieces of the core at the SMU Huffington Department of Earth Science's Isotope Laboratory.

"I would love to look at an outcrop in the Congo," Myers says, "but I was happy to be able to do this." (Above, an ancient soil crack, called a clastic dike, produced by alternate wetting and drying cycles from seasonal rainfall.)

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The Geothermal Laboratory at SMU has been awarded $5.25 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to help provide data for the planned National Geothermal Database.

The grant allocation is part of $338 million in Recovery Act funding that was announced Oct. 29 by DOE Secretary Steven Chu. The funding is intended to help dramatically expand geothermal production in the United States.

Principal investigators are SMU's David Blackwell, Hamilton Professor of Geothermal Studies, and Fabian Moerchen of Siemens Corporate Research. The project team also includes Jefferson Tester, the Kroll Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cornell University; William Gosnold, chair of Geology and Geological Engineering at the University of North Dakota; Seiichi Nagihara, associate professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University; John Veil, manager of the Water Policy Program at the Argonne National Laboratory and Martin Kay, president of MLKay Technology LLC.

"The primary benefit of this project is that it will support developers of geothermal power plants by decreasing the costs of the resource identification and the risks inherent in the exploration phase," Blackwell said. "The project will rescue important data from deterioration or complete loss and provide a set of tools to be used by other parties to submit data to the NGDS."

The SMU Geothermal Lab is hosting its annual conference, "Geothermal Energy Utilization Associated with Oil & Gas Development," Nov. 3-4 on the Dallas campus. Registration is available at the door. Find more information at the conference web site.

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The World Trade Organization's rules governing the multilateral trading system may pass legal litmus tests, but from an economic standpoint, do they work?

Kamal Saggi, chairman of the Department of Economics in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, has been examining international trade and the effects of multinational companies on developing countries since graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Lately he's also been delving into the legal layers of trade. A recent research focus has been India's burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.

"India has one of the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the developing world and is poised to be a world player," says Saggi, Dedman Distinguished Collegiate Professor of Economics and a 2003 Ford Fellowship recipient. "But pharmaceutical patents have been a big area of controversy." Divergent approaches to intellectual property (IP) have often caused friction between Indian and global pharmaceutical companies. "In India, you could patent a process but not a product," says Saggi, who grew up in India.

By developing alternative production procedures, Indian companies cleared their country's legal hurdle to produce cheap, generic drugs that could meet local demand and be exported to other developing countries. In 1995, member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) successfully negotiated a multilateral agreement that "basically says all members have to adopt the same rules and regulations regarding patents, trademarks and copyrights," he says. The WTO ruling protected the status quo for U.S. and European enterprises, but the benefit to firms in emerging economies was debatable, Saggi says. "Developing countries were asked to ratchet up their legal coverage of IP, but the question was: Why should they?"

His study of that complex issue appears in the paper "Intellectual Property Rights, Imitation, and Foreign Direct Investment: Theory and Evidence" (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2007). Saggi built a mathematical model that captured the essence of the problem - was it economically worthwhile for developing country members of the WTO to adopt its new rules regarding IP?

He and three co-authors - Lee Branstetter, Carnegie Mellon University; Raymond Fisman, Columbia University School of Business; and C. Fritz Foley, Harvard Business School - then plugged firm-level data on U.S. multinational companies collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis into the model to "theoretically and empirically analyze the effect of strengthening intellectual property rights in developing countries."

The economists determined that there were more gains than risks to the budding economies. "In some instances, it may be a case of trading apples for oranges. For example, a developing country may say, 'If we reform our IPR, then you'll open up agricultural trade to us,'" Saggi says. Or, as in the case of Indian pharmaceuticals, it may be an apples-for-apples exchange.

"We found IPR reform in developing countries had a pretty substantial effect," he says. "Where the IP laws have been strengthened, there has been a measurable increase in multinational investment." For example, some multinationals split aspects of research and development, such as clinical trials, into separate operations in collaboration with Indian companies.

• Read more from the 2009 SMU Research magazine
• Find more of Kamal Saggi's research at his faculty homepage

For paleobotanist Bonnie Jacobs standing atop a mountain in the highlands of northwest Ethiopia, it's as if she can see forever - or at least as far back as 30 million years ago.

Jacobs (right), an associate professor of Earth Sciences in SMU's Dedman College and director of the Environmental Science and Studies Programs, is part of an international team of researchers hunting scientific clues to Africa's prehistoric ecosystems.

The researchers are among the first to combine independent lines of evidence from various fossil and geochemical sources to reconstruct the prehistoric climate, landscape and ecosystems of Ethiopia in particular, and tropical Africa in general for the time interval from 65 million years ago - when dinosaurs went extinct, to about 8 million years ago - when apes split from humans.

While it's generally held that human life began in Africa, ironically there is little known about changes in the continent's vegetation during the time when humans were evolving.

The multi-disciplinary team is studying fossils they've found near Chilga, a small region in the agricultural highlands. Their work will also help climate scientists trying to model future global warming by providing data from the tropics that up to now did not exist.

Contrary to the common notion that vegetation decomposes in the tropics too quickly to supply evidence, sediments there have preserved an abundant variety of 28 million-year-old fossils. These include fruits, seeds, leaves, woods, pollen and spores, Jacobs says.

"There are lifetimes of work to be done in Africa on plant fossils alone, and certainly a lot more to be done with vertebrates as well," says Jacobs, who's done research in Africa since 1980 in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia. "There's not a well established record of plant fossils, so there's no real context. It's all new - so whatever you find is interesting."

• Read more from the SMU Research blog

Galleries, shops and restaurants built inside restored homes ring the historic plaza of Ranchos de Taos in northern New Mexico. The plaza, once a hub of village life in Ranchos de Taos, is notably absent of children these days. Their families have been driven to the outskirts of the Catholic village by a booming tourism industry that has pushed up property values.

But the children left their mark, says SMU archaeologist Sunday Eiselt, who for three years has led digging crews in some of the homes through her work at the University's Archaeology Field School at the SMU-in-Taos campus. They've unearthed children's artifacts up to 100 years old, including pieces of clay toys, tea sets, doll parts, clothing, mechanical trains, jacks, marbles, child-care implements, modern plastic Legos, Barbie doll parts, action figures and jewelry.

Eiselt's interest in childhood artifacts is unique because children are rarely documented in archaeological narratives - particularly in the Spanish borderlands, where they appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools.

Her pilot excavations in 2007 and 2008 revealed patterns that suggest children were integral to the workforce and household economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930s, the evidence shows, they were drawn from the workforce into the home and pulled as a consumer into the expanding commercial market as well as into the public education realm, says Eiselt, an assistant professor of anthropology in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Now Eiselt is launching the SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project - thanks in large part to community relationships and trust formed over the past few years. A systematic and scientific examination of children's lives will provide new perspectives on the dynamics of Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, she says.

"When state resources and institutions are aimed at children's lives, cultures are irrevocably changed," she says. "We're asking, 'What can the archaeology of children tell us about the transformation of Hispanic Rio Grande communities over time?'" We're investigating the impact of state expansion on child-rearing and education in the Spanish borderlands by examining childhood on the Ranchos de Taos Plaza."

• Read more at the SMU Research blog

As the health care reform debate turns to cutting costs and improving treatment outcomes, two SMU professors are expanding a study that shows promise for reducing both the expense and suffering associated with chronic asthma.

Thomas Ritz and Alicia Meuret, both of SMU's Psychology Department, have developed a four-week program to teach asthmatics how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.

With the help of a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, they plan to engage 120 Dallas County patients in four weeks of breathing training by the study's projected end in July 2012. Their co-investigators include David Rosenfield, also of SMU's Psychology Department, and Mark Millard, M.D., of Baylor University Medical Center.

More than 22 million Americans suffer from asthma at an estimated annual economic cost of more than $19 billion, according to the American Lung Association. The number of cases doubled between 1980 and 1995, prompting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to classify the disease as an epidemic in 2000.

During an attack, sufferers tend to hyperventilate, breathing fast and deep against constricted airways to fight an overwhelming feeling of oxygen deprivation.

Unfortunately, this makes the problem worse by lowering the body's carbon dioxide levels, which restricts blood flow to the brain and can further irritate already hypersensitive bro nchial passages.

Patients who "overbreathe" on a sustained basis risk chronic CO₂ deficiencies that make them even more vulnerable to future attacks. Rescue medications that relieve asthma symptoms do nothing to correct breathing difficulties associated with hyperventilation.

As part of SMU's Stress, Anxiety and Chronic Disease Research Program, Ritz and Meuret use their biofeedback-based Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (CART) to teach asthma patients to normalize and reverse chronic overbreathing. A hand-held device called a capnometer measures the amount of CO₂ exhaled. Using this device, patients learn how to breathe more slowly, shallowly and regularly.

CART techniques could have a positive impact on quality of asthma treatment even as they reduce the need for acute care, Ritz says.

"The research shows that this kind of respiratory therapy can limit both the severity and frequency of asthma attacks," he says. "That means fewer doctor visits and less frequent use of rescue medications, with the associated savings of both time and money."

And for those who count any year without a trip to the emergency room as a year with a good treatment outcome, that means a higher quality of life, says Meuret, who lives with asthma herself.

"The training gives patients new ways to deal with acute symptoms, and that helps them to feel more in control," she says.

• Read more at the SMU Research blog

Above, SMU Professor Alicia Meuret (at right in photo) uses biofeedback data to demonstrate the relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in hyperventilation.

Preliminary anthropology research in French Polynesia seems to confirm what psychology and sociology researchers have observed about domestic violence in general: There are two different types. One kind endures and escalates, while the other gradually fades away after a few years.

The findings are those of SMU's Victoria Lockwood, who for three decades has studied the lives of women on the chain of South Pacific islands that includes the tropical paradise of Tahiti.

Few anthropologists study domestic violence. What Lockwood has found initially confirms the existence of "battering," which is long-lived, versus "situational couple violence," which is short-lived.

"If we don't acknowledge there are two different kinds of domestic violence, then we'll never understand what the causes are," says Lockwood, associate professor of anthropology in SMU's Dedman College. "The causes are very different, so if we wish to devise policies or social programs, we need to be doing two different things to address the issues."

For 28 years, Lockwood has studied the impact of modernization and globalization on the women of Tahiti and its tiny rural neighbors, Tubuai and Rurutu. Her research took a turn, however, when the women began disclosing that arguments with their husbands at times resulted in physical violence.

Now she is investigating the prevalence, causes, meanings and consequences of domestic violence on its victims on the islands. The research is funded by a three-year, $128,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The islands are a fairly gender-egalitarian society, she says. Domestic violence is no more common there than anywhere else. The women expressed distress to Lockwood that their husbands hit them, but said the assaults gradually stop after the early years of marriage. That's not the stereotype of domestic violence, Lockwood notes, citing the widely held belief that one incident of abuse indicates more to come.

"The word on the street, at least in American society, is that domestic violence doesn't go away. 'Once an abuser, always an abuser,' and the abuse escalates over time," Lockwood says. "But that wasn't the case in Tahiti. And that's what got me interested in looking at the issue in Tahitian society."

• Read more at the SMU Research blog

A growing global movement to apologize and make restitution to victims of human rights abuses is now gathering steam in the United States, but it won't be a first for the country, says the president of The Western History Association.

"In reviewing the history of reconciliation in the American West, I've found three examples of government restitution - where we acknowledge we've participated in human rights abuses and offered either an apology, restitution, reparation or all three," says Sherry Smith, associate director of SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies and a professor in the University's William P. Clements Department of History, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

The state of Montana granted posthumous pardons to Germans and Austrians convicted and imprisoned under repressive sedition laws during World War I; the U.S. government paid reparations to the heirs of Japanese Americans relocated to incarceration camps during World War II; and in a landmark native-lands case, Arizona returned 6,000 acres to the Hualapai tribe in the 1940s and the U.S. government set up the Indian Claims Commission.

"These are tiny steps considering the magnitude of the problem. But they helped turn the corner of deep injustice," Smith says. "It's never too late to do the right thing." (Left, a Navajo mother and children in the door of a hogan, David deHarport, National Park Service Historic Photo Collection.)

• Read more at the SMU Research blog

Scientists have found the "Rosetta Stone" of supervolcanoes, those giant pockmarks in the Earth's surface produced by rare and massive explosive eruptions that rank among nature's most violent events. The eruptions produce devastation on a regional scale - and possibly trigger climatic and environmental effects at a global scale.

A fossil supervolcano has been discovered in the Italian Alps' Sesia Valley by a team led by Jim Quick, SMU's associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies, and a geology professor in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College. A rare uplift of the Earth's crust in the Sesia Valley reveals for the first time the actual "plumbing" of a supervolcano from the surface to the source of the magma deep within the Earth, according to a new research article reporting the discovery.

The uplift was created when Africa and Europe began colliding about 30 million years ago and the crust of Italy was turned on end, Quick says. It reveals to an unprecedented depth of 25 kilometers the tracks and trails of magma as it moved through the Earth's crust.

Supervolcanoes, historically called calderas, send up hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of volcanic ash in explosive events that occur every few hundred thousand years. They have spread lava and ash over vast distances, and scientists believe they may have set off catastrophic global cooling events at different periods in the Earth's past.

Sesia Valley's caldera, which is more than 13 kilometers in diameter, erupted during the Permian geologic time period, say the discovery scientists. Its discovery will advance scientific understanding of active supervolcanoes like Yellowstone, which is the second-largest supervolcano in the world and last erupted 630,000 years ago.

"What's new is to see the magmatic plumbing system all the way through the Earth's crust," says Quick, who previously served as program coordinator for the Volcano Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Now we want to start to use this discovery. We want to understand the fundamental processes that influence eruptions. Where are magmas stored prior to these giant eruptions? From what depth do the eruptions emanate?"

To date, scientists have been able to study a caldera's exposed "plumbing" from the surface of the Earth to a depth of only 5 kilometers. Because of that, scientific understanding has been limited to geophysical data and analysis of erupted volcanic rocks.

Quick likens the relevance of Sesia Valley to seeing bones and muscle inside the human body for the first time after previously envisioning human anatomy on the basis of a sonogram only.

"We think of the Sesia Valley find as the 'Rosetta Stone' for supervolcanoes because the depth to which rocks are exposed will help us to link the geologic and geophysical data," Quick says. "This is a very rare spot."

(Above, the Bishop Tuff volcanic deposits, consisting of ash and pumice ejected during the eruption that created the Long Valley Caldera in California. The event erupted 140 cubic miles of magma 760,000 years ago. Photo: U.S. Geological Survey)

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People don't like to admit if they are prejudiced, whether it's against blacks or gays, women or Jews, or the elderly.

But researchers of social psychology have tests that can measure conscious or unconscious bias, and one of them is the Implicit Association Test. Developed in 1998, the test asks implicit questions - as opposed to explicit - to expose bias on socially sensitive topics. Worldwide, various IAT versions have been used in more than 1,000 studies over the years. The test's most controversial finding has been that 70 percent of people tested for their racial attitudes unconsciously preferred white people to black people, but only 20 percent reported such an attitude.

What researchers hadn't determined up until now is how reliable IATs have been at predicting behavior related to these taboo prejudices. Now they know.

In the first study of its kind, publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, an SMU researcher and others validated the IAT's ability to predict behavior around socially sensitive topics, particularly race. The study aggregated the findings of 184 different IAT research studies, which tested 14,900 subjects, and found the predictive validity of self-report measures was remarkably low, while incremental validity of IAT measures - how much it can predict behavior over-and-above explicit measures - was relatively high.

"Within behavioral research, we humans have attitudes and feelings and beliefs that we're not willing or able to report on, or understand ourselves," says T. Andrew Poehlman, one of the study's four authors and an assistant professor of marketing in SMU's Cox School of Business. The lead author of the study is Anthony Greenwald, psychology professor and adjunct professor of marketing and international business at the University of Washington. Other authors are Eric Uhlmann, Northwestern University; and Mahzarin Banaji, Harvard University.

"This research shows that when you aggregate across many studies, it seems that non-conscious attitudes influence the way people behave in a systematic and important way," Poehlman says. "When you have attitude domains in which people are unable to accurately report on how they feel, then using a test like this can get around some of the touchier attitudes some subjects may have."

Studies reviewed for the analysis covered: black-white interracial behavior, non-racial intergroup behavior, gender and sexual orientation, consumer preference, political preference, personality differences, alcohol and drug use, close relationships and clinical phenomena.

Learn more at the SMU Research blog.

• Read the draft article: Predictive validity of the IAT (PDF format)
• UW News: Study supports validity of test that indicates widespread unconscious bias
• Sciencewatch.com: Anthony Greenwald talks about the Implicit Association Test (PDF format)
• Take the Implicit Association Test at harvard.edu

In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was a giant sentry with a hundred eyes. In the lab of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Marc Christensen, Panoptes is a camera technology that combines images from dozens of tiny lenses to focus on a big picture.

Lens performance tends to improve with size, which is why a small cell phone camera can't produce a very good image. Panoptes uses a computer to combine overlapping images from the small lenses to produce a clear photo without the size and weight of a large lens.

The technology is being developed with funding from the U.S. military for surveillance by small aircraft at low altitudes. The research should eventually provide helmet-mounted surveillance equipment for soldiers on the ground.

Christensen, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering in SMU's Lyle School of Engineering, has built a nationally recognized research group in photonics and computational imaging. His work with imaging sensors and micro-mirror arrays has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), among others. In 2007 he received the DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Read more at the SMU Research blog.

In the news:

Danger Room (Wired): DARPA's smart, flat camera is packed with beady eyes
Unfair Park (Dallas Observer): On the hilltop, SMU prof creating teensy-weensy military camera
Defense News: Sharper image for military surveillance

Geologists in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences are deploying 10 portable seismic stations in North Texas to study the increasingly frequent rumbling of earthquake activity in the Metroplex.

But the recent quakes that have occurred near Dallas-Fort Worth and Cleburne are not unexpected: They illustrate the earth's natural dynamic nature, says Brian Stump (right), Albritton Professor of Geological Sciences in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and a faculty member in its Seismology Research Program.

Rocks in the earth's crust store energy that is relieved when faults slip; that motion generates the waves that are felt or recorded during an earthquake. And even in a stable continental region such as North Texas, "we expect to see small events," Stump told WFAA-TV. "But we've seen a whole series of small events, and what intrigues us now is to try and understand that series of events." The monitoring stations his team will use to collect data are on loan from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and supported by the National Science Foundation.

Recent oil and gas production in the Barnett Shale has raised questions about whether the North Texas quakes are related to those activities. Current information cannot provide a definitive answer, but improved monitoring of the earthquake locations and a deeper understanding of how the earthquake sequences form and vanish may provide some insight, Stump says.

• Find an ongoing recap of media coverage at SMU News

From voice recorder-MP3 players to dual-fuel vehicles, hybrid products are everywhere - and emerging technologies mean there are likely to be more of them in the future. Marketers hope consumers will love the results when two popular products are blended into one package. But all too often, the extra features go unnoticed and unused.

Hybrid products face a unique set of marketing challenges, and advertising frequently fails to communicate those products' advantages effectively, according to Priyali Rajagopal, assistant professor of marketing in SMU's Cox School of Business.

For example, consumers used to view the cell phone with PDA attributes as primarily a cell phone, she says. "This is a huge problem for marketers, because it costs money to add features. Consumers categorize in one area or another and then draw inferences which flow from that single category, not multiple categories."

Rajagopal and co-author Robert Burnkrant of Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business conducted a study in which respondents were shown examples of hybrid products in ads - a pen-pencil, a cell phone-PDA, and so on. When the participants were given information about both product categories, they were able to properly acknowledge the two parts of a hybrid product.

The technique is calling "priming," a term from psycholinguistics. In short, exposure to information about both functions of a hybrid product helped people see that the hybrid belonged in both categories.

"It was a really simple, intuitive finding," Rajagopal says. "Being primed with many examples has an impact on information processing, and thus beliefs. This then affects how consumers see the product in the future."

At the same time, the authors found that when individuals were not "primed" with information, they refused to acknowledge that the product belonged in two categories. The marketing implications are unmistakable, Rajagopal says.

"In the absence of clear communications, consumers are not going to take away [the extra] feature. The product will be viewed as uni-dimensional otherwise."

"Consumer Evalutions of Hybrid Products" by Priyali Rajagopal and Robert Burnkrant is forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Research.

• Read more from the Cox School of Business website

A new study of veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suggests that exposure to neurotoxins such as anti-nerve agent pills, insect repellent and Sarin caused neurological changes to their brains.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Southern Methodist University, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dallas performed digital brain scans on 21 chronically ill Gulf War veterans from the same Naval Reserve construction bairttalion, all of whom had symptoms of Gulf War syndrome.

Richard Gunst, Wayne Woodward and William Schucany, professors in SMU's Statistical Science Department, are collaborating with imaging specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center to compare brain scans of people suffering from the syndrome with those of a healthy control group. They are pioneering the use of spatial statistical modeling to analyze brain scan data from Gulf War veterans, aiming to pinpoint specific areas of the brain affected by Gulf War Syndrome.

The SMU team is working with UTSW epidemiologist and 2008 Dedman College Distinguished Graduate Robert Ware Haley. Haley, one of the foremost experts on the syndrome, earned B.A. degrees in philosophy and social sciences from SMU in 1967.

A congressionally mandated study has revealed that 1 of every 4 veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffers from neurological symptoms collectively referred to as Gulf War syndrome. The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses began work in 2002 and presented its report to then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake in November 2008.

• Read more from the April 1, 2009 edition of Air Force Times
• Read more from the Nov. 20, 2008 edition of Science Daily
• The Report to Congress: Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans (pdf)

Decoding the genome of the Trypanosome parasite has led to new avenues of research for Larry Ruben, professor of biological sciences in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. Ruben has spent his 26-year career studying Trypanosome, the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. His most recent work focuses on proteins required for late stages of cell division. Better understanding of these proteins could lead to development of new drugs to treat sleeping sickness.

"This new research can take advantage of cancer drugs directed against the cell cycle," Ruben says. "Sleeping sickness affects the poorest populations in Africa who are unable to pay for expensive therapies. The ability to piggy-back onto therapies already being developed for other purposes is a huge advantage."

Find more stories about path-breaking research in Dedman College in the Spring 2009 Dedman College newsletter, now in print. (Left, molecular model of a small molecule inhibitor bound to the active site of trypanosome Aurora kinase-1, provided by John Wise, SMU.)

• Read more at Larry Ruben's faculty website

Amanda Aland, a graduate student in archaeology in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, has received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship to conduct archaeological fieldwork and research in Peru.

In March 2009, Aland returns to a site on Peru's northern coast, called Santa Rita B, where she spent several months last year excavating with the support of a National Science Foundation grant.

There, she and students under her direction unearthed evidence that the Incas had left their mark after conquering the region's Chimú empire in the 15th century.

"We found Chimú pottery and architecture that show Inca influences," she says, in addition to centuries-old animal matter and human remains.

During her 10-month Fulbright fellowship, Aland hopes to learn the extent of the Incas' influence on the Chimú people through further excavation and laboratory analysis of her findings. "We want to piece together how the two empires interacted," she says. "Did they go to war, or make peace living under new rules? We always can learn from the past."

Aland, a Dallas native, earned a Bachelor's degree in Spanish from the University of Southern California in 2004. At SMU, she has studied archaeological theory, methods and grant writing while directing summer field research in Peru. She earned her Master's degree in anthropology from the University in 2006. (Above, a Chimú ceramic lizard from the Santa Rita B site.)

• Read more from SMU News
• See a slide show from Santa Rita B in Peru

SMU is a partner in a newly designated National Science Foundation research consortium aimed at building both military and commercial superiority by making technology faster, better and smarter.

The Net-Centric Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, which also includes two other universities and 11 companies, will focus on improving how complicated information is gathered, shared and used, from the battlefield to the boardroom.

For example, FedEx's package tracking system, which links employees, customers, suppliers and partners, is an example of a commercial application of net-centric technology. And on the battlefield, where information superiority already translates to combat power, future net-centric systems will connect ground and air combat, linking shooters, decision makers and sensors toward a common goal.

"This opens a lot of doors," says Jeff Tian, associate professor of computer science in SMU's Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering. "We envision this consortium becoming a leading research alliance in the United States. Because we can cooperate with the expertise of academic institutions and high-tech companies, we have much greater research capabilities than any one institution working alone."

• Read more from SMU News

Do fewer regulations make markets such as New York City more competitive with other global financial centers such as London? New research by Caruth Chair in Finance Darius Miller of SMU's Cox School of Business, Ugur Lel of the Federal Reserve Board and Nuno Fernandes of IMD International shows that relaxing rules for foreign firms listing in the United States actually has had the opposite effect.

In March 2007, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) passed Rule 12h-6, which loosened the regulations of the 1933/1934 Exchange and Securities Acts. The rule required foreign firms that list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to maintain registration with the SEC as long as there were 300 shareholders of record. Thus, foreign firms that wanted access to U.S. capital markets were held accountable to their investor protections, including reporting requirements, laws and enforcement.

Think tanks and industry experts lobbied the SEC to amend the 300-shareholder law. "[The SEC] relaxed the rule to allow easier deregistering," Miller says. "The argument was that it was so hard to come to the U.S. and then leave, if needed." Lobbyists maintained that foreign firms that might list in the United States would fear becoming trapped in a "roach motel" - where they could check in but not check out - and would prefer therefore to go to London.

The goal of the deregulation was to encourage more foreign firms to register in the United States. However, the number of deregistrations has increased dramatically. In fact, 80 firms have left since the rule was changed - the most in U.S. history.

"There was in fact a value to this type of regulation, which has been lost in the debate about regulation and U.S. financial market competitiveness," Miller says. Though regulation is costly, there are benefits to investors, especially for certain types of firms. Now that the SEC has made it easy to leave, the type of firms that left early were those with previous run-ins with the law and those that were doing suspicious things, Miller noted in the study's findings. "It doesn't give one confidence that we're doing the right thing by relaxing the rule," he remarked.

The paper, "Escape from New York: The Market Impact of Loosening Disclosure Requirements," will be published in Journal of Financial Economics.

• Read more at the Cox faculty research website

On the third floor of SMU's Dedman Life Sciences Center, thousands of fruit flies are on a diet so someday you won't have to be.

Johannes Bauer, a faculty member and researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences in Dedman College, feeds the flies every other day with a mixture of sugar and yeast and studies the effects of calorie restriction on the flies' health and longevity. His experiments have shown that consuming 30 to 50 percent fewer calories daily allows the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly to live 10 to 40 percent longer than its natural lifespan - the equivalent in humans of living 120 years or more.

Flies fed less are more alert and more active in almost every way, except they're not as fertile, Bauer says.

Calorie restriction - scientifically speaking, under-nutrition without malnutrition - could extend the human "health span" and possibly the life span. Gerontologists, oncologists, biochemists and biologists who have conducted calorie-restriction studies on lab animals believe it may be an effective way to stave off cancers, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer's and many other ailments.

Reducing caloric intake, even by as little as 10 percent a day, sends the body's cells into a low level of stress that makes them stronger when high stresses occur. "Restricting calories just a little bit puts your body in a state of stress, which makes you a little bit healthier," says Bauer.

• Read more from the Dallas Observer

The first comprehensive analysis of air emissions associated with natural gas and oil production in the Barnett Shale area finds that emissions can be a significant contributor to Dallas-Fort Worth smog formation, comparable to the combined emissions from all Metroplex cars and trucks.

"Emissions from Natural Gas Production in the Barnett Shale Area and Opportunities for Cost-Effective Improvements," was written by Al Armendariz, research associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering in SMU's Lyle School of Engineering. The report is available online at the Environmental Defense Fund's website (PDF format).

In addition to emissions of smog-forming compounds, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOC), the report also considers air toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. Emissions of carbon dioxide and two other major greenhouse gases underlying climate change were estimated to be roughly equivalent to the impact from two 750 MW coal-fired power plants.

"It's true that Barnett Shale oil and gas activities are producing significant air emissions, but there's good news as well," Armendariz said. "There are off-the-shelf technologies that can greatly reduce these emissions and improve DFW Metroplex air quality." Cost-effective control strategies are readily available and can substantially reduce emissions, according to experts.

• Read more from SMU News

A new study on gender and how it impacts pricing decisions helps explain a piece of the puzzle about the income gap between men and women. Management Professor John Slocum of SMU's Cox School of Business - with coauthors William Cron of TCU, Mary Gilly of the University of California and John Graham of UC-Irvine - explains why women's salary gaps continue to widen compared to men.

Women-dominated professions tend to have lower salaries than male-dominated professions, the authors found, and the ways in which women price their own services are a factor. Women who run their own professional-services businesses are found to employ the practice of "compassionate pricing" based on the characteristics of the client. A relationship orientation - a desire to develop and preserve relationships with others - is one aspect of this gender-pricing dynamic, the authors write. Women generally have a higher relationship orientation than men, which impacts their pricing decisions - and therefore their income.

The study was designed as an experimental simulation involving a national sample of more than 500 veterinarians who own and run their own practices. Compassionate pricing manifested in a female vet charging a widow only $270 versus $376 to a young professional for identical treatment. The gap in income between male owners and female owners came to $26,486 on average.

"Women prefer to establish long-term relationships, and therefore they don't want to price so high as to make the client go elsewhere," Slocum says. This desire not to be rejected shows up in women's pricing decisions, especially when there is ambiguity about the pricing of certain services, and women are less likely to place demands on others that could potentially harm the relationship, he adds.

Charging a lower price can be a benefit in terms of building up a loyal client base, Slocum says. If the lower price enhances the positive outcomes associated with customer relationships, it can lead to greater long-term profits. On the other hand, if price-discounting behavior is not strategic but executed out of anxiety, its effects on financial performance are likely to be negative.

• Read more from the Cox School of Business website

SMU's Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering will serve as a designated research collaborator in the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), the first University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to focus on challenging systems engineering issues facing the DoD and related defense industries.

Simply speaking, systems engineering studies how things are done and finds ways to do them better, from how a computer is made and linked to other computers to how food is grown, collected and delivered to your table.

With Jerrell Stracener as lead senior researcher, the school will participate as part of a prestigious consortium of 18-leading collaborator universities and research centers throughout the United States, led by Stevens Institute of Technology, with the University of Southern California serving as its principal collaborator.

"As a key partner in this national consortium, we are pleased to have the opportunity to expand our contributions to this country in systems engineering education and research through the linkage of the Lyle Systems Engineering Program with SMU's Caruth Institute for Engineering Education and its one of a kind Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® Lab," says Geoffrey Orsak, engineering dean.

• Read more from SMU News

When dealing with difficult business issues such as rapidly emerging technologies, shrinking budgets and growing global competition, generating creative solutions is imperative for organizations to survive and prosper. Yet businesses may not be using the most effective technique to harness group brainpower, says Peter Heslin, an assistant professor of management and organization in SMU's Cox School of Business.

"The most widely adopted process for generating creative ideas within organizations is brainstorming," says Heslin, who won the 2006 C. Jackson Grayson Endowed Faculty Innovation Award for excellence and creativity in teaching. Yet despite its immense popularity, "when groups of people interact for the purpose of brainstorming, they significantly overestimate their productivity and produce fewer unique ideas than nominal groups of people generating ideas alone," he adds.

"When the stakes are high, group process innovations that enable even modest increases in the quality of ideas available for consideration could be of immense practical value," Heslin writes in an upcoming paper for the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

One answer may be for groups to share ideas on paper, Heslin says. Research shows that brainwriting - silently sharing written ideas in a structured environment - yields superior idea generation than either non-sharing or nominal groups. Groups that contain people with diverse but overlapping knowledge and skills tend to be particularly creative, he says.

The technique may minimize the effect of status differentials, interpersonal conflicts, domination by one or two group members, pressure to conform to group norms, and digressions from the focal topic, Heslin adds. It might also eliminate the blocking of productivity, reduce social loafing, and encourage careful processing of shared ideas.

• Read more about Heslin's paper
• Read the entire paper

Do recipients like gift-wrapped presents more than unwrapped gifts? It appears so, according to a study published in 1992 by Daniel Howard, professor of marketing in SMU's Cox School of Business. Howard designed a series of experiments to test the hypothesis that a gift-wrapped item influences the recipient to have a more favorable attitude toward owning the gift itself.

In one experiment, 45 participants were asked to evaluate 4 products in exchange for a free gift - a sheepskin bicycle seat cover. Even though they thought they were evaluating the products, they were actually evaluating the free gift they received in return for their time. Half of the subjects received the seat cover in the manufacturer's plastic bag, while the other half received it wrapped in blue-and-white paper with a matching ribbon and bow.

The subjects were then asked to rate their gift on three 9-point scales, ranging from undesirable to desirable, from bad to good and from foolish to wise. Those test subjects who received the gift wrapped bicycle seat cover gave it a higher overall approval rating (7.14) than those who received it unwrapped (6.06).

Another experiment tested whether the perceived "quality" of the wrapping paper affected the subjects' attitudes towards the gift. Sixty participants were given either wrapped, unwrapped or "nontraditionally wrapped" gifts (wrapped in brown packaging paper with neither ribbons nor bows). The nicely wrapped gift was the clear favorite, while the unwrapped gift was the least favorite. Even the gift wrapped in plain brown paper was preferred over the one that was not wrapped at all.

Howard argues that gift wrapping is a visual signal that is associated with a happy event in a person's life. "Gift wrapping, through repeated pairing with joyous events in people's lives, has utility in cueing a happy mood which, in turn, positively biases attitudes," he wrote.

Read more about Howard's research from the Living the Scientific Life blog.

Brent Sumerlin (left) works with a team of postdoctoral research associates, graduate and undergraduate students who fuse the fields of polymer, organic and biochemistries to develop novel materials with composite properties. His research has helped him earn a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, given to junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars in American colleges and universities.

Sumerlin, assistant professor of chemistry in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, will receive $475,000 over five years for two related nanotechnology research projects. The award also includes support for education outreach, and Sumerlin's will fund a program for K-12 school districts and community colleges to help prepare and attract underrepresented minority students for SMU chemistry internship positions.

The first part of Sumerlin's NSF-funded research will investigate how nano-scale polymer particles can be triggered to come apart in response to a chemical stimulus. One of the potential applications of the technology is an automatic treatment solution for diabetics - one that would release insulin from tiny polymer spheres when they encounter dangerous levels of glucose in the bloodstream.

"Researchers worldwide are looking toward methods of insulin delivery that will relieve diabetics of frequent blood-sugar monitoring and injections," Sumerlin said.

The second aspect of the project involves making polymers with the ability to come apart and put themselves back together again - a technique that Sumerlin believes can be used to construct materials that are self-repairing. "We could potentially think about coatings for airplane wings that are damaged by debris during flight," Sumerlin said. "After landing, we could quickly treat the coating, causing it to re-form itself."

• Learn more at the Sumerlin Research Group website

What, or rather who, contributed to China's economic miracle? Spending in research and development (R&D) - and its ability to produce technological change - is often considered as a factor in economic growth. Yet China has shown exceptional growth with scant spending on R&D, even as Japan's economy has stalled in comparison even with significant expenditures in that area.

New research by Maria Minniti, Bobby B. Lyle Chair in Entrepreneurship in SMU's Cox School of Business, and co-author Moren Lévesque shatters some myths about entrepreneurs, innovation and the growth of an economy.

The authors distinguish entrepreneurs as research-based (spending on R&D) or imitators (without R&D spending). The difference is between "those that commercialize invention and new markets, and those that commercialize products or services that already exist," Minniti says. "In the past, we have mainly focused on the research-based entrepreneurs. My claim is that the imitators are important, too." When returns on R&D spending are low, as in many emerging economies, a high number of imitative entrepreneurs who increase competition and product supply will still generate economic growth, she adds.

The authors write that entrepreneurs are the "lubricant at the core of the growth process." Their innovative contributions also vary by country. In countries like Somalia, for example, "growth is not necessarily going to come from technological innovation," Minniti says. Instead, it may rise from agricultural innovations that increase crops and provide clean water, she adds.

• Read more at the Cox School's Faculty Research site.

The United States needs to move toward a more globally inclusive foreign policy starting in 2009 with the new administration, says Seyom Brown, John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security in Dedman College's Department of Political Science. Brown offers his observations in Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States, slated for publication Nov. 30.

"The key to a successful foreign policy is to embrace global challenges and work in a collaborative effort to resolve global issues and conflict through peaceful negotiations and talks, rather than choosing war as a determining factor of who gets what. Doing what we've done in the past will not work for the future."

Brown's five-decade career in national security has taken him from academia to the Departments of Defense and State to policy think tanks including the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution.

• Read more about Brown's research in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of SMU Magazine, due in early December.

• Read an excerpt from Higher Realism.

Left: The image shows healthy neurons cultured from rats from a part of the brain called the cerebellum. Right: In degenerating neurons, the oval and bulbous cell bodies shrivel up and fragment, impeding connections with other neurons.

SMU Chemistry Professor Edward Biehl and UTD Biology Professor Santosh R. D'Mello teamed to test 45 chemical compounds. Four were found to be the most potent protectors of brain cells, or neurons. The synthesized chemicals, called "3-substituted indolin-2-one compounds," are derivatives of another compound called GW5074 that was shown to prevent neurodegeneration in a past report published by the D'Mello lab.

While effective at protecting neurons from decay or death, GW5074 is toxic to cells at slightly elevated doses, which makes it unsuitable for clinical testing in patients. The newly identified, second generation compounds maintain the protective feature of GW5074 but are not toxic - even at very high doses - and hold promise in halting the steady march of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The new compounds may offer doctors an option beyond treating the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases and may result in compounds that stop cell death that may be used in combination with currently existing drugs that battle the symptoms of brain diseases.

• Read more from SMU News

In search of a simple community life devoted to worship and social activism over program-driven church, some Christians today have chosen a "new monastic" lifestyle, taking a spiritual path that blends aspects of ancient monasticism with 21st-century church practices.

"Traditionally we think of evangelism as a tornado that moves through town and gathers everyone into the vortex of our church," says the Rev. Elaine Heath, McCreless Assistant Professor of Evangelism in SMU's Perkins School of Theology and director of Perkins' Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Evangelism. "In the neo-monastic model, evangelism is the 'reverse tornado' described in Luke 10: Going out into the community, being invited into our neighbors' lives and sharing the goodness of God."

The recipient of a Sam Taylor Fellowship from the United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, Heath is writing two books about emerging neo-monastic communities in the United States. A Summer Research Fellowship from the Wabash Center will enable her to spend time at several neo-monastic communities, including Communality in Lexington, Kentucky, and Camden House in Camden, New Jersey.

"I'm very interested in how neo-monasticism relates to the rest of the church and how it will shape the church and the church will shape it," she says. Although no statistics are available on the number of new monastic communities in the United States, she says the grassroots movement is growing. "The rest of the church can learn much from the new monasticism,??? Heath says, including regaining "a sense of parish, of being the church for the neighborhood, and disciplined spiritual practices and a rule of life for ordinary Christians."

• Read more from SMU Research magazine

Miguel Quiñones describes today's business climate with an age-old saying: "The only constant is change."

"With competition coming from the other side of the globe and over the Internet, the rate of change has accelerated. Organizations must constantly adapt to survive," says Quiñones, who joined SMU's Cox School of Business as the Marilyn and Leo Corrigan Endowed Professor of Management and Organizations in 2006.

Quiñones focuses much of his research on individuals working in these organizations, including his new study, "Explaining Differences in Reactions to Organizational Change: The Role of an Individual's Stage of Change." The study began in 2005, while Quiñones was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. There he met David Huepe, a graduate student and consultant to the Chilean investigative police, which was significantly changing how it hired detectives - and creating conflict between managers and subordinates in the process.

In developing a survey that Quiñones and Huepe gave to 580 officers in Santiago, they drew from a 1994 model that identified five necessary stages for lasting change - precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance - and demonstrated that different techniques are needed to move individuals from one stage to the next. Their survey found more managers at the action stage, when they felt genuinely committed to the change, and more subordinates at the early stages, where they felt forced to change. "When making a change, organizations clearly must not assume that everyone is at the same place," Quiñones says. "If they don't lead individuals through the process, the change isn't likely to take hold."

• Read more from SMU Research magazine

As an undergraduate German major at the University of Kentucky and a prize-winning writer in English, Paige Daniel Ware was surprised when the written intricacies of a foreign tongue did not come as easily as verbal fluency. Her second language flowed more naturally in conversation than it spilled onto the page, an experience that influences her research involving young English learners who often have "to perform [in school] in a language in which they are not yet proficient."

Now an assistant professor in SMU's Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Ware received a 2006 Ford Fellowship for her research on the integration of instructional technologies, particularly Web-based tools and applications, into second language learning and teaching. In support of further research in this area, she recently received a prestigious National Academy of Education Spencer Fellowship for a two-year project involving adolescent English language learners in the United States and their peers in Spain who are learning English as a foreign language.

Ware expects the results to have practical applications for teachers. "The findings should provide evidence that the type of engagement and language use generated around multimedia literacy also can lead to the growth of students' more traditional writing skills."

• Read more from SMU Research magazine

More and more Americans are choosing to receive medical treatment - even complicated surgeries - in foreign countries to save big money. The practice is called "medical tourism," but do the risks to consumers outweigh the savings?

"That's an important question, says Nathan Cortez, assistant professor in SMU's Dedman School of Law, who is focusing his research in health law on this emerging medical market. "Patients take a calculated risk by seeking medical care overseas in regulatory systems that may not offer the rights or protections they expect."

Interviewed for National Public Radio last November, he warned that although patients are free to travel overseas and reap whatever savings they can find, the international shop-around could affect how U.S. hospitals pay for care for the uninsured.

"We see this all the time with other industries," Cortez told NPR. "Health care has been notoriously a local industry, and now it's ... succumbing to globalization like other industries have."

• Read more in SMU Research magazine

If you've ever visited a dog park, you may have noticed that a chihuahua tires much more quickly than a German shepherd. That does not occur just because a small dog takes more steps to cover the same amount of ground, says Peter Weyand, associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics in SMU's Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

In his research into animal and human physiology, Weyand has studied the impact of such factors as muscular force and the amount of time limbs are in contact with the ground on the energy cost of walking and running. His years of research on creatures ranging from goats to antelopes to kangaroos indicate that smaller animals expend much more energy per pound to locomote. For example, a mouse expends 30 times more energy than an elephant in proportion to their weights, while human children use about twice as much energy as their parents to cover the same distance, he says.

Weyand and colleagues have found that one of the essential determinants of energy expenditure, fatigue rates and performance is the amount of time muscles are active to apply force to the ground, bicycle pedals or other external objects. "This holds true whether you are a chihuahua, a German shepherd, Usain Bolt or a couch potato," he says. Shorter times mean higher rates of energy expenditure and more rapid fatigue, but they are also necessary for high-end performance.

Now the holder of a patent on his methods, Weyand has explained the limits of human and animal running performance for the History Channel, CNN, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, NHK Television Japan and a host of other media outlets. He monitored sprinter Michael Johnson's running mechanics in a special feature for NBCOlympics.com during the 2000 Athens games and has provided live commentary for the Boston Marathon.

Weyand's research is funded in part by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which hopes to develop quick methods to assess and monitor soldiers' physical fitness to help improve their overall healthcare. He's also helping to develop a new SMU undergraduate major in applied physiology and sports management.

Peter Weyand in the news:

• TIME Magazine: How Fast Can Humans Go?
• The Times of India: Diet not a factor in sprinter's speed

Benjamin Heber Johnson, associate professor of history in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and Dallas physician/photographer Jeffrey Gusky will sign and discuss their new book, Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place, beginning at 6 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

The book, published by Yale University Press, uses the remote town of Roma, Texas, as an example of the larger history of the U.S.-Mexico border and its changing role in the United States. Johnson, who specializes in borderlands research, explores how border residents came to identify themselves as Americans in the United States while continuing to feel powerful kinship with their Mexican heritage. "The United States is not self-contained; to understand our history requires an understanding of our connection with other parts of the world, in this case Mexico," says Johnson, who also serves as associate director of SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

Johnson and Gusky will present their findings and take questions from 7-8:30 p.m. on the day of the signing. Admission is $25 for members, $35 for nonmembers and $10 for teachers. The Institute is located at 2719 Routh Street in Dallas.

• Visit the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Cultures online
• Read more about Johnson's work from the 2008 SMU Research magazine

Actors often are asked to mine their emotions and conjure up memories to bring substance to their roles for the stage or the big screen. But many become too focused on getting a feeling or a memory exactly right - what Professor of Theatre Rhonda Blair calls a "neurotic preoccupation with authenticity." On the other side of the issue are performance theorists who discount the validity and importance of emotions for actors.

Blair's own work turns to cognitive neuroscience, the study of the relationship between biological mechanisms. Cognitive science shows that memory, imagination, emotion, physicality and reason are all connected - "and they are all, in many ways, a process, not pieces to be held onto and practiced individually," Blair says. The goal of her research "is to teach actors to be less focused on themselves in a psychoanalytic sense and more on the role - on being as engaged as possible with the role and the audience. By doing so, actors can focus on what they can take from their experiences and imagination in service of the role.

Read more from the SMU Research magazine online.

With headlines proclaiming that climate change is coming - seas may rise and cities may flood, crops may fail and people may be displaced - nothing seems stable about the state of the Eart. But SMU geologist Robert Gregory has taken the long planetary view of geological and climate cycles, and he sees the Earth as extremely stable when compared with other alternatives in our solar system.

"We worry about the state of Earth and how climate is changing," says Gregory, professor and chair of the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. "But the underlying cycles have been similar for 3.5 billion years." Areas of the planet that were abnormally hot - or cold - change in size from time to time, he says. These fluctuations are not symptoms of major instability; in fact, they are normal.

"The problem is that civilizations are not good at adjusting to climate change, especially now," he explains. "In the old days, it was easier for civilizations to pick up and move when the climate shifted. But now, with human population near the carrying capacity of the planet and humans having the ability to affect global climate change, it is not so easy."

• Read more from SMU Research magazine online

According to the National Research Council (2006), women earned 44.7 percent of the doctorates awarded in the biological sciences between 1993 and 2004, yet comprised only 30.2 percent of the assistant professors at the top 50 U.S. universities. In physics, the gap is far wider. Anne Lincoln, assistant professor of sociology in SMU's Dedman College of Humanity and Sciences, researches the reasons for the gender disparities.

Last September Lincoln received a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Research on Gender in Science and Engineering program to examine women's and men's reasons for pursuing academic science careers as well as their perceptions about women's contributions to academic science. Lincoln and a team of four sociology undergraduate students are nearing the completion of the sampling database - a list of all faculty and graduates students at top-20 biology and physics graduate departments in the United States - and will randomly select 2,500 of them to participate in an Internet-based survey. A subsample of about 150 respondents will later be selected for more in-depth interviews, which will take place in 2009.

• Read more from the SMU Research magazine.

Real-time response is a second-by-second measurement of individuals' reactions to the presidential candidates debates while they are happening. But it is not just another method of opinion polling: It actually gives the public more clout in shaping election coverage.

"Voters are tired of being managed by the media," says Rita Kirk, professor of corporate communications and public affairs (CCPA) in Meadows School of the Arts. While studying how the public uses blogs, social networking sites and other online tools, Kirk and Assistant Professor Dan Schill developed the idea of giving voters a voice in network coverage through real-time response focus groups.

Using palm-sized electronic dial meters, members of focus groups signal their reactions to the issues raised, the arguments and the bluster. On a scale of 1 to 100, they "dial up" when they like what they hear and "dial down" when they don't. The professors' real-time response groups now play a prominent role in CNN's online coverage, beginning with the first New Hampshire debate in June 2007, and probably will continue through the final head-to-head debate in October, Schill says.

Read more at SMU Magazine online. (Right, undecided Democrats participated in a real-time response focus group for CNN on the SMU campus Feb. 21.)

SMU's Department of Psychology and The Guildhall at SMU have joined forces against dating violence. Psychology Professors Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald, with Guildhall Lecturer Jeff Perryman and Deputy Director Tony Cuevas, are collaborating on a role-playing program that combines virtual reality with behavioral insight to help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques.

The program's environment of a rain-lashed car parked in an isolated area immerses women into not just a location, but also a "conversation" with a potential attacker. It is the first step in what developers hope will be a program to help women practice strategies for averting sexual assault in a controlled situation that is safe, yet feels realistic. "This is a potential breakthrough opportunity for gaming technology - to help solve an important social problem," Jouriles says.

Read more about it in the Spring 2008 Dedman College newsletter. Look for the new issue in your campus mailbox in June. Right, psychology graduate students Gabriella Gomez and Matthew Leahy demonstrate the program.

What are you working on? SMU faculty members have answered that question in many different ways this academic year as they searched for answers to the questions their disciplines raise. Some of the results of that exploration will be on display in Central Unviersity Libraries' 2008 Faculty Recognition Exhibition, opening April 29 and running through Commencement Weekend. Opening day in Fondren Library Center will include a reception for the entire SMU community at 3 p.m., with remarks by Provost Paul Ludden.

In every presidential election year, at least a few candidates seek to establish their bona fides as hunters - usually in front of a camera. But the association of politics with hunting in the United States goes back at least to the American Revolution, says Daniel Herman, Research Fellow in SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

By that time, average Americans had come to associate political rights with hunting rights and saw any restriction on the latter as an attack on the former, Herman says. Yet in the late 19th century, "gentlemen hunters" tried to restrict hunting rights to themselves as part of a larger effort to buttress their social authority. What emerged was a discourse about the meaning of hunting that broke down old ideas about gentility and sportsmanship and led to a new, democratic cult of hunting in the 20th century.

Herman will discuss his research in a Clements Center Brown Bag Lecture, "Hunting Democracy," at noon April 16 in the Texana Room, DeGolyer Library. Bring your lunch. (Right, noted presidential sportsman Theodore Roosevelt delivers a speech in New Castle, Wyoming, ca. 1903.)

Everyone wants to pick a winner, but figuring out who's on a roll and who's not is tricky. Three in a row seems to be the key. But is Hillary or Barack on a streak? And what about all those men's and women's basketball teams in the NCAA tournaments?

Suzanne Shu, assistant professor of marketing in SMU's Cox School of Business, and co-author Kurt Carlson of Duke University got to thinking about perceived streaks and who - or what - is hot. In "The Rule of Three: How the third event signals the emergence of a streak," published in the September 2007 Organizational Behavior and Decision Processes, they find evidence that "3" holds significance in the minds of observers across many domains. In five studies, the authors noted direct and indirect evidence that perceived "streakiness" plateaus with the third repeat outcome in a sequence. The rule of three also draws support from human learning and cognition, such as the optimal number in advertising exposures, and perception and judgment in the role of patterns. Read more from SMU News.

What factors influence a girl's or woman's image of her own body, and how can she learn to accept how she looks? After all, the average American woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 142 pounds, but the average super model - whose image appears on TV, billboards and in magazines - is about 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. The difference between "the look" and reality causes low self-esteem and can lead to eating disorders.

"Think" host Krys Boyd of KERA Radio talked to SMU's Katherine Presnell, Psychology, and Camille Kraeplin, Journalism, who are studying how the media influences body image and how cognitive dissonance exercises may help. They tell Boyd that women are influenced by the media, their peers and their families - and not always with positive results. Listen to the interview or download it to your iPod.

Every four years, presidential campaigns become unique laboratories for teaching and research in U.S. political science. Harold Stanley, SMU's Geurin-Pettus Distinguished Chair of American Politics and Political Economy, uses primaries, media coverage, campaign finance reports and voter patterns to teach his popular political science course on presidential elections. "Most election analysis is written well after the fact," he says. "The challenge is trying to figure out what is happening while it is happening." Nationally known as an expert in American national politics and electoral change in the South, Stanley's current research focuses on presidential nominations, partisan change, voting rights and Latino politics. Learn more about his work at his website.

Companies spend millions of dollars trying to understand and change their cultures. It can doom mergers and derail careers: 90 percent of acquisitions don't live up to expectations due commonly to culture clashes. John Slocum, O. Paul Corley Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations in SMU's Cox School of Business, has turned for solutions to institutions ranging from Mary Kay Cosmetics to Whole Foods and from Johnson & Johnson to the Mayo Clinic - all organizations in which founders have left a deep imprint. Their common principle - which Slocum calls "mythopoetic leadership" - has its roots in myth, storytelling and the teachings of Joseph Campbell, and it can inspire employees and managers to achieve great things personally and professionally. In "Creating Cultures Through Mythopoetic Leadership," Slocum and co-author Chip Jarnagin explore this kind of leadership as a framework for developing corporate cultures and "heroic values" based on myths and archetypes - and identify 7 behaviors senior executives should develop to bring out the best in employees and ensure sustained high performance. Read more at the Cox School's faculty research site.

Past research on the U.S. labor market has shown that unemployment rates of African Americans have not only been substantially higher than those of whites over the past four decades, but that these differences have been amplified during recessions. But the extent to which these differences reflect unobserved skill and productivity - or factors such as discrimination - remains a matter of debate. Isaac Mbiti, assistant professor of economics in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, proposes the use of wages earned in the previous year as a measure of a worker's skill and productivity. With co-author Yusuf Soner Baskaya, he has used the Current Population Survey March Supplement and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in each year from 1976 to 2003, to compare the employment outcomes of black and white workers who earned the same wage in the previous year. Their results have provided important data on the sources of black-white differences in employment outcomes. Learn more about Mbiti's research in development and labor economics at his website.

Professor of Earth Sciences Louis Jacobs, doctoral student Yosuke Nishida and master's student Chris Strganac were part of a team that traveled to Antarctica during the austral summer in November and December to discover 120 million-year-old mammal fossils from Livingston Island and other places around the Antarctic Peninsula. They hope to link the evolutionary history of mammals across South America to Africa and Australia through ancient Antarctica when climates were warmer. Read about their journey, as chronicled by Strganac, at SMU's Student Adventures site. Left, the Antarctic Vertebrate Paleontology Expedition: Clare Flemming (American Museum of Natural History, New York), Ross MacPhee (principal investigator, American Museum of Natural History, New York), Jerry Hooker (Natural History Museum, London), Chris Strganac (Earth Sciences, SMU), Yosuke Nishida (Earth Sciences, SMU), Louis Jacobs (Earth Sciences, SMU).

How does Sony decide when to launch a major new gaming innovation? They should consider not just the proximity to a major giving holiday, but to the timing of Microsoft's next big announcement. New research by Sreekumar Bhaskaran and Karthik Ramachandran, professors of information technology in SMU's Cox School of Business, shows why firms must take into account what their competitors are doing when making launch decisions - and cite the ongoing video game console war as a case in point. While Microsoft planned to launch the Xbox 360 in late 2005, Sony scheduled its own PlayStation 3 much later in 2006. Both firms were debuting new consoles that were different in remarkable ways. To date, with a monopoly for about a year, Microsoft has sold 11.6 million consoles to Sony's 5 million.

"The expert consensus ... in 2005 was that Microsoft would be the early bird, but PS3 would be the superior console," Bhaskaran says. "Examples like these in competitive industries beg the question: How do - and how should - firms decide to launch new products in very technologically driven, highly competitive markets?... There are several strategic considerations in this industry. Consumers buy Xboxes because there are games for them. Additionally, given that users frequently participate in online gaming, the network base becomes a very important asset." Bhaskaran's and Ramachandran's work reveals different strategies companies can take to maximize profits, avoid mutual destruction and increase longevity on the long road to technological nirvana. (Right, a partial screenshot from the best-selling Halo 3, currently available only for the Xbox 360 platform.)

• Read more about the research at the SMU Cox website.

• Revisit the Guildhall at SMU's Top 10 Video Games of 2007.

Two current Meadows Museum exhibits on the works of Jerry Bywaters are designed to give visitors a three-dimensional portrait of the influential Dallas artist, right down to his favorite houndstooth fedora. That multifaceted view reflects the work of the two SMU researchers who curated the exhibits - both of whom have published new books on this Texas titan.

In Jerry Bywaters: Interpreter of the Southwest (Texas A&M University Press), Sam Ratcliffe provides a retrospective of Bywaters' paintings that shows the artist's perspective on the people of the region and their interactions with the land. "In a sense, I began writing this in 1986, when Jerry hired me to assist him with organizing his papers at SMU," says Ratcliffe, now head of the Jerry Bywaters Special Collections Wing in the Hamon Arts Library. "Those first days in a broom closet in Fondren Library began my gradual immersion into knowledge of his career - and therefore of the sweep of the cultural history of the Southwest."

For years, Bywaters kept notes about his printmaking in a small loose-leaf notebook. In Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker (SMU Press), Ellen Buie Niewyk, curator of the Bywaters Special Collections in SMU's Hamon Arts Library, worked directly from the frayed pages of the notebook to shed new light on Bywaters' prints. The 39 prints Bywaters created from 1935 to 1948 are reproduced in the book, as well as many of his book illustrations and ephemeral works. The book also include photographs both of the artists and the subjects he depicts. "Jerry Bywaters was a true Texas artist," Niewyk says. "His interpretations of the Texas and Southwest landscape, architecture and people mirror life during the 1930s and 1940s and still delight viewers and art collectors today."

Both books are available in the Meadows Museum Shop and from the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.

Anyone who has tried in vain to find a Wii console during a holiday shopping excursion knows that supply and demand help drive business success. Not enough inventory or staff means lost sales; too much of either means unnecessary costs. A new approach to estimating demand for products and services has the potential to revolutionize business by allowing organizations to estimate and forecast demand more quickly and accurately. The new technique, which uses an asymmetric model rather than the classic bell-curve distribution to display a "truer" demand curve, was created by Marketing Professor Ed Fox and Operations Management Professors Bezalel Gavish and John Semple of SMU's Cox School of Business. The researchers derived their distribution by focusing on the purchase timing of individual customers, Fox says: "If we have detailed data about customer transactions, the time between those transactions can be used to derive a distribution for total demand." Read more at the Cox School website.

As a University of Florida researcher, Sumi Helal made headlines with the launch of his "smart house" - an assistive environment for the elderly or disabled that can monitor everything from a resident's movement across the floor to his or her heart rate, and relay that information to medical staff, family members and caretakers. Now a professor of computer science and engineering in SMU's School of Engineering, Helal envisions a "smart village" that allows individuals with special needs to live alone but not isolated in a place where they can shop, socialize and enjoy the benefits of independence. The effort has the potential to make life better for everyone from aging Baby Boomers to injured veterans. Helal's Florida research partner, IBM, created a demonstration video of Helal's assistive technology called "A Smarter World for Charley" - see it now on YouTube.

Modern culture's perfect woman is ultra-toned and super-slender. Yet for the vast majority of women, the "thin ideal" is unattainable - and for some, it also can be destructive. Katherine Presnell, assistant professor of psychology in SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, is helping at-risk teens challenge this ideal with the Body Project, an eating disorder prevention program developed with Eric Stice of the University of Texas. In their nearly 10 years of research, more than 1,000 high school and college women have completed the program, and independent studies nationwide have shown that the Body Project significantly outperforms other interventions in promoting body acceptance, reducing the risk of obesity and preventing eating disorders.

During small-group sessions with a trained leader, Body Project participants argue against the thin ideal. They write letters to hypothetical girls about its emotional and physical costs, and challenge negative "fat talk" while affirming strong, healthy bodies. "Many girls don't question the messages we get from the media, the fashion industry, our peers and parents that it's important to achieve the thin ideal at any cost," says Presnell, who with Stice has published a facilitator guidebook and companion workbook, The Body Project: Promoting Body Acceptance and Preventing Eating Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2007). "We have the girls critically evaluate the ideal, and when they take a stance against their beliefs, that creates dissonance they work to resolve." Learn more about the book.

About 45 million Americans - 15 percent of the population - have some form of learning disability. And when students reach college, their learning differences become amplified because of tougher curricula, increased workloads and the absence of supportive family members. In SMU's School of Education and Human Development, researchers and reading specialists have developed training and research projects to answer some of the most critical questions about the development of students who struggle to read.

"While much has been accomplished, more work lies ahead," wrote Education Dean David Chard in a Dallas Morning News op-ed printed Nov. 1, 2007. "The opportunity to pursue higher education should be a minimum standard for all Americans. Approximately 35 percent of students with learning disabilities are attending colleges and universities, up from 15 percent in 1987."

At the International Dyslexia Association annual conference in Dallas (Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 2007), two SMU faculty members shared their experiences reaching students with learning differences. Patricia G. Mathes, director of the Institute for Reading Research at SMU, spoke on effective practices and research findings for English language learners with reading difficulties, and Karen Vickery, director of the Learning Therapy Program at SMU's School of Education and Human Development, spoke on "Teaching the Teachers: Effective Models for Colleges and Universities." Learn more about SMU research and resources at smu.edu/learndifferently.

If the daily headlines aren't scary enough - wars, fires, super germs, rising oceans - then slip into your local theater for a blood-curdling two or three hours. Horror movies and their stars, from rambling monsters to torturers to psychos, remain ever-popular, especially during the Halloween season.

"The successful horror film is similar to a nightmare," says Rick Worland, chair of SMU's Division of Cinema-Television and author of The Horror Film. "In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued very famously that all dreams are forms of self-communication about our deepest fears and desires. So, the monsters in horror films - human or otherwise - are easily seen as symbolic of what we fear most. The horror genre is traditionally held in low regard, at least in public by arbiters of taste and morality. However, horror often achieves its greatest impact when it exposes or flouts cultural taboos."

For those who want to get beyond such popular horror films as Jaws and The Exorcist, Kevin Heffernan, associate professor of cinema-television and author of Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, has several recommendations, which are "less familiar but which hold untold pleasures for those lucky enough to see them." Read more from SMU News.

The U.S. government missed an opportunity to improve America's image in the Arab and Muslim worlds when it shut down a public diplomacy television advertising campaign in 2002, according to a recent book by Professor Alice Kendrick in Meadows School of the Arts' Temerlin Advertising Institute and her associate, Jami Fullerton of Oklahoma State University. In Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative (Marquette Books, 2006), the professors examined the ads' effectiveness, part of a multifaceted communication campaign - the Shared Values Initiative - that the State Department launched in 2002 to convince the Muslim and Arab world that America wasn't waging war on Islam. About 300 million Arabs and Muslims saw the five televised ads, which depicted Muslims commenting on their happy lives and freedom of worship in America and were broadcast in Indonesia (the nation with the largest Muslim population) and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Despite support from Secretary of State Colin Powell, other bureaucrats and journalists criticized the effort and shut it down; however, they had no scientific evidence to back up their criticism, the authors say. "According to internal State Department documents about SVI in Indonesia, the campaign achieved its objectives. It not only got people talking about Muslim life in America, it also produced more positive perceptions of America," they wrote. Read more at the book's home page.

In the Middle Ages, Spain was comfortably multicultural for several hundred years longer than the rest of Europe, with Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisting in relative peace. But by 1200, European influences began to seep into Spain, and negative stereotypes, particularly of Jews, took hold - culminating in the expulsion of Jews from that country in 1492. Associate Professor of Art History Pamela Patton, whose research specialty is medieval Spain, is working on a book exploring this transformation from previously untapped sources: works of art produced for the Christian majority during this period. "Like drama, song and folklore, visual culture provides a view of Jewish-Christian relationships in the era that 'official' royal and legal texts often do not address," Patton says. Pursuing her research under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Patton says she hopes her book, with the working title Seeing Stereotypes: Christians, Jews, and Images in Medieval Iberia, will "help people understand we're still living out the legacy of the Middle Ages in our relationships with other cultures, and shed some light on how and why stereotypes and superstitions develop." Read more at her entry in the Meadows Art History faculty home page.

Why would businesses such as Toyota, Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo Bank invest good money to create a virtual workplace reality? Ulrike Schultze, professor of information technology in the Cox School of Business, explores game environments and virtual worlds to better understand their communication capabilities for businesses in the real world. Virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, known in the gaming industry as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), can allow thousands of participants to interact simultaneously and model social interactions that mirror everyday real life. In "Reframing Online Games: Synthetic Worlds as Media for Organizational Communication," Schultze and co-author Julie Rennecker explore the diversity of synthetic worlds by developing a framework for classifying games into four categories: simulation games, fantasy games, virtual reality and virtual fantasy. In the process, they intend to "debunk the mythical divide between technologies of work and technologies of play." Read more at the SMU Cox research site. (Right, a virtual retail store created in Second Life.)

In a study titled "Complementing Economic Advances in India: A New Approach in Financing Infrastructure Projects," SMU Finance Professor Andrew Chen and co-author Jennifer Warren Kubik have proposed an innovative solution to improving India's infrastructure that has significant implications for capital markets and development. "For India to continue growth on a sustainable path, investment in infrastructure is critical. Infrastructure bottlenecks are seen as one of the leading obstacles for India in realizing its economic growth potential," the authors say. Yet such development could cost the Indian government as much as $500 billion and will require substantial financing. Chen and Kubik suggest approaching the problem by raising capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) and securitizations globally. This approach, coupled with financial innovations, could help smooth the frictions which lay at the root of India's infrastructure development problems, the authors add. "Infrastructure spending in India is particularly politicized and could gain efficiencies through the benefits of global capital markets rather than at the hands of political agendas," they write. Read the executive summary at the Cox School of Business' faculty research site.

For sculptor Vanessa Paschakarnis, space and form serve as a means to an end: They encourage viewers to "re-evaluate their existence as physical beings." Her works, she says, allude to the "essence of an encounter - an encounter with form as a thing - and the thing as equal companion." Her designs borrow from simple forms in nature; working in stone and bronze, the assistant professor of art in Meadows School of the Arts creates pieces on a scale of the human body. A shark's tooth enlarged takes on centurion-like proportions. A sand dollar lends its shape to a human shield. Her sculptures, Paschakarnis says, "are beings in and of themselves, autonomous objects that occupy space - in the room and in the viewer's head." Read more in the current issue of SMU Research magazine, and view more of Paschakarnis' work at her Web site.

SMU engineers are working to defeat cancer by shedding light on it. The SMU Photonics Group in the School of Engineering is conducting research on photodynamic therapy (PDT), which destroys cancer cells through the use of red laser light in combination with a photosensitizing drug. The drug, administered to a patient hours before treatment, accumulates mainly in cancerous cells. Illuminating the cancerous area activates the drug and kills the cells, with little damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Gemunu Happawana uses semiconductor diode lasers as an optical source - equally powerful as but about 1,000 times smaller than existing PDT lasers, as well as less costly and more efficient. Happawana has developed a self-contained light delivery PDT system that positions semiconductor lasers at the end of a thin coaxial cable, which is inserted into a balloon catheter, allowing precise optical, electrical and thermal control at the tumor's location. Read more at the SMU Photonics Group Web site.

What are the economic incentives for conserving species? Understanding the market forces that drive these environmental decisions - and may drive some species to extinction - is vital for the formulation of public policy toward natural resource management, says Santanu Roy, SMU professor of economics and 2007-08 Ford Research Fellow. That understanding can help governments determine regulatory controls such as quotas on harvesting marine life or on exploitation of forestry. While most current literature applies conventional economic theory, Roy has developed dynamic models that incorporate ecological features such as the effect of random environmental fluctuations on future population size and the potential "existence value" of a species even if it is not harvested. His results negate conventional wisdom about the limits of optimal species conservation and highlight the way harvesting affects resource stocks under "truly adverse" environmental shocks such as Hurricane Katrina - with important implications for policy intervention. Read more at Roy's faculty Web site.

The Pima Indians on the Gila River Reservation have the highest recorded rate of diabetes of any population in the world - but before World War II, diabetes was rarely seen among the 12,000 Indians who live there. The decline of farming set the stage for the crisis, says Carolyn Smith-Morris, assistant professor of anthropology and author of Diabetes Among the Pima (University of Arizona Press, 2006). The dramatic change of diet and activity levels as well as a genetic predisposition to the disease led to the epidemic, which affects 50 percent of the adults on the reservation. "This epidemic is about a culture defining its path in an industrial world," says Smith-Morris, a medical anthropologist who has spent the past 10 years studying the causes and conditions of the health crisis and developing appropriate preventive strategies. She sees positive signs of change as tribal officials take more control of their health care system and health education. Learn more at her faculty Web site.

New and improved treatments - and even cures - for HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases depend upon finding ways to prevent virus production in infected cells. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Rob Harrod of SMU's Laboratory of Molecular Virology and fellow researchers at UT-Southwestern Medical Center, the University of Washington, Universite Libre de Bruxelles and other research institutions have identified a novel cellular cofactor essential for HIV-1 replication. Inhibition of this factor blocked up to 95 percent of virus production in HIV-1-infected T-lymphocytes in vitro, carrying important implications for the development of therapies against multi-drug-resistant HIV/AIDS. The research has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and featured in the LeadDiscovery pharmaceutical newsletter, and Harrod was invited to present the findings at the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals-Research Technology Center. Read more at his faculty Web site.