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NYT: Bickering more after kids?

DALLAS (SMU) – Feel like your fighting more with your spouse after having kids? 

That’s not surprising, given that you have new responsibilities to tackle and you’re probably not getting the sleep you need.

Stephanie Wilson, an SMU assistant psychology professor, told The New York Times that “that lack of sleep is one of the reasons couples spar.” Wilson has researched the relationship between sleep and marital conflict, and found that the worst case scenario for squabbling was when both partners were sleep deprived. If only one partner is exhausted, the bickering isn’t as bad, The NY Times’ Jessica Grose reported.

Read the article to find some great tips for avoiding a relationship apocalypse while you’re raising your children.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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New psychological study: Teaching people to experience and recognize joy

DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers at SMU and UCLA are enrolling subjects for a five-year study of a treatment for a psychological condition known as anhedonia – the inability to find pleasure in any aspect of life. A grant of approximately $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health will allow professors Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz at SMU and Michelle G. Craske at UCLA to study the effectiveness of their treatment in 168 people suffering from this very specific symptom.

Professor Alicia Meuret
Professor Alicia Meuret

“The goal of this novel therapeutic approach is to train people to develop psychological muscle memory – to learn again how to experience joy and identify that experience when it occurs,” said Meuret, professor of psychology and director of SMU’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center. “Anhedonia is an aspect of depression, but it also is a symptom that really reaches across psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. It’s the absence or the lack of experiencing rewards.”

People suffering from depression often report feeling down or blue, loss of appetite and having difficulty sleeping or concentrating, all described generally as “negative affect.” Meuret explained that there is another other side to depression – the reduction of all that is positive. This reveals itself in someone who says he or she is not especially anxious or depressed, but nothing gives them joy anymore.

“They don’t feel motivated to do anything, and when they do things that formerly gave them pleasure, they just don’t enjoy them anymore,” Meuret said. “We call that a deficit in the reward system – a reduction to reward sensitivity.”

Historically, treatments for affective disorders such as anxiety and depression have been aimed at reducing negative affect, Meuret said.  Over the next five years, Meuret, Ritz and Craske will treat 168 people using a type of cognitive behavioral therapy aimed at teaching people to seek out and recognize the positive aspects of life – increasing their sensitivity to reward. They will compare their results with a more traditional approach of treating the negative affect side of their problems.

Professor Thomas Ritz
Professor Thomas Ritz

The monitoring of treatment success will include simple biomarkers of enjoyment. “The heart beats faster in joy, something that has been shown to be absent in anhedonia,” said Ritz, an SMU professor of psychology who specializes in studying the relationship between biology and psychology in affective disorders and chronic disease. Other measures will capture immune activity, which is important as an indicator of long-term health.

Clinical psychology graduate students working on the project are Juliet Kroll, Divya Kumar, Natalie Tunnell, Anni Hasration, Andres Roques and Rebecca Kim, a recent SMU alumna, who will coordinate the day-to-day administration of the project.

Those interested in participating in the study may phone Rebecca Kim at 214-768-2188 or fill out the pre-screen form here.

The NIMH-funded study will follow the training framework of an SMU-UCLA pilot study conducted from 2014-2018:

  • The first half of the treatments are targeted at changing behavior, using strategies where the patient learns to seek out pleasant activities that they have previously enjoyed. Scheduled “homework” records that they list their mood before and after the activity, savoring the pleasurable moments in these activities. When resuming a session, the patient recalls the activity as if experiencing it in real time, such as, “I see Amy. I feel a connection with her. We walk on the street, and I can see the leaves changing.”
  • Cognitive training provides exercises that identify the positive aspects of various activities, taking responsibility for those activities and imagining what they would feel like.
  • The last module is compassion training, helping the patient to again learn to share love and kindness with another person, cultivating gratitude and generosity and learning to generate and savor positive feelings in the moment.

“Rather than saying to our patients, ‘Let me help you feel less bad,’ we are saying, ‘Let me help you re-learn how to feel good,” Meuret said.  “It’s very rewarding as a researcher psychologist that these patients can feel again – feel something positive.  I think there’s nothing worse than losing this sense of reward.”

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Alcohol use may increase among Hispanic Americans as they become more ‘Americanized’

SMU professor Priscilla Lui and co-author find that ‘Americanization’ of alcohol use affects women more than men

DALLAS (SMU) – Higher rates of alcohol use and drinking consequences are found among Hispanic American adolescents and adults who are more “Americanized,” according to a new study authored by Southern Methodist University (SMU) professor Priscilla Lui and her colleague, Byron Zamboanga, at Smith College.

Using scientific research accumulated over the past 40 years, Lui and Zamboanga analyzed data from over 68,000 Hispanic Americans – including first-generation immigrants and native-born individuals. Lui’s research has found that people in this group who are more “Americanized” are more likely to:

  • be drinkers,
  • consume alcohol at greater intensity,
  • experience more negative consequences associated with alcohol use, and
  • affect women more than men.

Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in the United States.  Similar results were found in the Asian ethnic group, which is the fastest-growing U.S. ethnic group.  Those who are considered acculturated or “Americanized” tend to have adapted to the political, cultural, or communal influences in the mainstream America, and assimilated to its customs and institutions.

“This research means that, for Asian and Hispanic men, being more ‘Americanized’ may not be associated with substantial changes in their drinking behaviors and consequences,” said Lui. “For Asian and Hispanic women, however, cumulative data show that there’s something about the American way of life that may be making them more likely to drink, and drink more intensely and hazardously.”

According to Lui, existing research has suggested two theories: “Either people are socialized to adopt more permissive and favorable drinking culture in the U.S., or their experiences with cultural stresses, such as the pressure to become ‘American’ or racial discrimination, are making people use alcohol to cope.”

Lui is currently conducting further studies to better test these two theories, and to understand risk and protective factors of alcohol use.

Associations between alcohol use and the acculturation process are a focus of Lui’s research in her Acculturation, Diversity, and Psychopathology Team (ADAPT), where she is the principal investigator.  Lui is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department in the Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences at SMU.

The study, “A Critical Review and Meta-Analysis of the Associations between Acculturation and Alcohol Use Outcomes among Hispanic Americans,” is published in the October issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

The study by Lui and Zamboanga are being published just as new research from the medical journal, The BMJ, revealed that more Americans, particularly young people, are dying from liver disease and cirrhosis as a result of alcohol consumption.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty, and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities, and the world.

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Letting kids shape how they learn algebra

SMU math educator Candace Walkington will use a $1 million NSF grant to help expand tool that allows kids to create and solve algebra problems related to their own interests.

Read more about Professor Walkington’s research in this Forbes article.

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Psychology Today: Empathic People Use Social Brain Circuitry to Process Music

High-empathy people process music using their social cognitive circuitry.

Christopher Bergland for Psychology Today covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

The Psychology Today article published June 18, 2018.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Christopher Bergland
Psychology Today

Those who deeply grasp the pain or joy of other people and display “higher empathic concern” process music differently in their brains, according to a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University and UCLA. Their paper, “Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening,” was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

As you can see by looking at the images at the top of the page and to the left, the SMU-UCLA researchers used fMRI neuroimaging to pinpoint specific brain areas that light up when people with varying degrees of trait empathy listen to music. Notably, the researchers found that higher empathy people process music as if it’s a pleasurable proxy for real-world human encounters and show greater involvement of brain regions associated with reward systems and social cognitive circuitry.

In the field of music psychology, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that varying degrees of trait empathy are linked to how intensely someone responds emotionally to music, his or her listening style, and overall musical preferences.

For example, recent studies have found that high-empathy people are more likely to enjoy “beautiful but sad” music. Additionally, high empathizers seem to get more intense pleasure from listening to music in general, as indicated by robust activation of their reward system in the fMRI.

The latest research on the empathy-music connection was conceived, designed, and led by Zachary Wallmark, who is a musicologist and assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. In 2014, Wallmark received his PhD from UCLA. He currently serves as director of the MuSci Lab, which is an interdisciplinary research collective and lab facility dedicated to the empirical study of music. Below is a YouTube clip of Wallmark describing his latest research:

Read the full article.

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KERA: Empathetic People Experience Music Differently, SMU Study Finds

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Zachary Wallmark, SMU

KERA journalist Justin Martin covered the research of Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Wallmark’s study with researchers at UCLA found that people with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark has said. He is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

Listen to the KERA interview, which aired June 20, 2018.

EXCERPT:

By Justin Martin
KERA News

A new study from Southern Methodist University shows that empathetic people — those who are generally more sensitive to the feelings of others — receive more pleasure from listening to music, and their brains show increased activity in areas associated with social interactions.

Researchers interviewed participants about their taste in music — songs they loved and others they hated. Then, participants were put into an MRI scanner and played different selections, including unfamiliar tunes, and researchers studied how their brain reacted to them.

All participants experienced positive activity in the brain when listening to music they loved, says Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor of musicology at SMU, who led the study. This activity increased for empathetic people.

When played unfamiliar music they didn’t like, empathetic participants still showed activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area associated with executive control and regulation of emotional reactions, Wallmark says.

“What this suggested to us is that these empathic people are hearing new music…and they tell us they dislike it after the fact…but they might be deliberately trying to ratchet down their negative reaction, maybe give more of the benefit of the doubt to this new music, even though they find it highly aversive,” Wallmark said.

Listen to the KERA interview.

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People who deeply grasp the pain or happiness of others also process music differently in the brain

Higher empathy people appear to process music like a pleasurable proxy for a human encounter — in the brain regions for reward, social awareness and regulation of social emotions.

People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

But there is at least one significant difference.

Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain’s social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark said.

Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.

“If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people,” said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

“This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other,” he said.

This may seem obvious.

“But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation,” Wallmark said. “In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past.”

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, in the article “Neurophysiological effects of trait empathy in music listening.”

The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.

“The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy — ‘feeling into’ a piece of art,” said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“On the other hand,” Iacoboni said, “the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions.”

Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy
Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.

Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy — for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another’s shoes.

The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.

Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain’s reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.

The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.

Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry
In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others’ behaviors and intentions.

Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.

Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data — answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.

Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.

Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored
A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy — how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.

Studies have shown that activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.

In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences — for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence,” Wallmark said, “that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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SAPIENS: Why Aid Remains Out of Reach for Some Rohingya Refugees

Even with the right to health care secured, medical assistance is elusive for urban refugees in India.

The anthropology publication SAPIENS has published an article by SMU doctoral candidate Ashvina Patel.

SAPIENS is an editorially independent publication of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Inc., which is dedicated to popularizing anthropology to a broad audience.

The article, “Why Aid Remains Out of Reach for Some Rohingya Refugees,” published May 17, 2018.

The article resulted from Patel’s 11-month stay in New Delhi, India, in which she interviewed residents of three urban refugee settlements. The purpose was to understand how issues of geopolitics and domestic policy inform various types of human insecurity for refugees.

Patel is currently a visiting student fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, where she is developing further publications on Rohingya refugee displacement.

She is a doctoral candidate in SMU’s Department of Anthropology. Patel holds an M.A. degree in Cultural Anthropology from SMU and an M.A. in Religion from University of Hawaii, Manoa. As a doctoral student, her research focuses on issues of human insecurity among Rohingya refugees in the context of American resettlement as well as within New Delhi, India as urban refugees. Her research work focuses specifically on defining the subjective experience of human insecurity and how various forms of insecurity are informed by statelessness.

Patel is a student of SMU anthropology professor Caroline Brettell, an internationally recognized immigration expert and Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute. Brettell is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A private operating foundation, Wenner-Gren is dedicated to the advancement of anthropology throughout the world. Located in New York City, it is one of the major funding sources for international anthropological research and is actively engaged with the anthropological community through its varied grant, fellowship, networking, conference and symposia programs.

It founded and continues to publish the international journal Current Anthropology, and disseminates the results of its symposia through open-access supplementary issues of this journal. The Foundation works to support all branches of anthropology and closely related disciplines concerned with human biological and cultural origins, development, and variation.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

From the field notes
of SMU PhD candidate Ashvina Patel

Ameena (a pseudonym) is a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee in New Delhi, India, who is seven months pregnant with twins. Her face is gaunt. Often there isn’t enough food at home for her family of five. Nestled among other shanty houses, her home is made of bamboo with scrap boards as paneling; a tattered piece of cloth serves as the front door. Recently, the monsoon rains caused her to slip and fall. Now one of the babies in her womb is not moving. She knows she needs to see a doctor, but she cannot afford one.

When Ameena fled acts of genocide perpetrated by her own government of Myanmar in 2012, she and her husband came to New Delhi. They both suffer from debilitating deformities due to polio, and they heard that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in New Delhi was helping Rohingya refugees. The UNHCR partners with the Indian government to provide free aid to help people obtain an education, a livelihood, and health care.

But as Ameena and others would learn, being offered access to aid isn’t always enough. Barriers to procuring those free resources often leave urban refugees to fend for themselves; many find they have to negotiate a system that inadvertently creates obstacles to reaching that aid.

Having spent 11 months with the Rohingya community in India from 2015 to 2017, I repeatedly saw how aid missed its intended target. As the UNHCR creates solutions to challenges that refugees face, these solutions can also serve as a catalyst for new obstacles or deepen already existing insecurities by creating additional barriers that are financial, linguistic, cultural, or exploitative. The UNHCR does a lot of good, but the organization could do a better job addressing challenges refugees face in accessing the services to which they are permitted.

Read the full article.

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Fox4WARD: Knowing how our partner is feeling

Fox 4 journalist Dan Godwin interviewed family psychologist Chrystyna D. Kouros, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology, about her latest research on couples.

Lead author on the new study, Kouros and her co-author, relationship psychologist Lauren M. Papp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that couples do poorly when it comes to knowing their partner is sad, lonely or feeling down.

Kouros and Papp reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Family Process, in the article “Couples’ Perceptions of Each Other’s Daily Affect: Empathic Accuracy, Assumed Similarity, and Indirect Accuracy.”

Godwin’s segment, “Knowing how our partner is feeling,” aired March 11 on Fox 4’s 10 p.m. Sunday news segment Fox4WARD.

Watch the full segment on Fox 4.

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SMU student to share innovative texting app at SXSW Red Bull Launch Institute

Users earn rewards with the “Just Drive” app designed to prevent distracted driving.

Neha Husein gripped her steering wheel as her car jolted forward, hit from behind on one of Dallas’ busiest and most dangerous freeways. Shaken, but not injured, the high school senior surveyed the significant damage to her car. The cause of the crash? The driver behind her was texting while driving.

The 2014 collision was the SMU junior’s inspiration to develop a solution to stop drivers from texting while driving, a practice that killed 455 Texans and played a role in 109,660 crashes in Texas in 2016. Her smart-phone app, “Just Drive,” awards points to drivers who lock their phones while driving. Those points can then be redeemed for coupons or free food, drinks or merchandise.

Husein is one of six college entrepreneurs selected to participate March 10 in the Red Bull Launch Institute at Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. She will meet with industry leaders and other entrepreneurs to further develop and amplify her project. The institute is scheduled from 3 to 6:30 p.m. at Palazzo Lavaca, 1614 Lavaca St., Austin.

She’s not being judgmental. Everyone has texted while driving, Husein says.

“We are used to multitasking, and sitting in traffic gets boring,” she says.

But the marketing and human rights major believes positive reinforcement can change behavior. Rewards are motivating to millennials like Husein. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, drivers age 16 to 34 are most likely to text while driving, but Husein is betting the app will appeal to all ages.

“Expecting incentives is a generational thing, but it’s a human thing too,” she says. “People enjoy rewards.”

Husein first presented “Just Drive” at SMU’s October 2017 Big Ideas pitch contest. She won $1,000 for her 90-second pitch and used it to create a wireframe app mock-up. The Big Ideas pitch contest is part of SMU’s Engaged Learning program, a campus wide initiative designed to enhance student learning by connecting a personal passion to academic learning and turning it into a personal project. Faculty mentorship is a key part of the Engaged Learning program.

Husein’s mentor, SMU law professor Keith Robinson, is a specialist in patent, intellectual property and technology law and co-directs the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation in SMU’s Dedman School of Law. He also teaches a class to law students on designing legal apps.

“I like people who show initiative and are willing to bet on themselves,” says Robinson, who meets weekly with Husein to discuss intellectual property issues and trademark application. “Neha has developed an app for a relatable problem, one that can save lives.”

Husein is a Carrollton, Texas, native who grew up with an entrepreneur mindset. She remembers manning a toy cash register alongside her father at his convenience store. He was on hand in February 2018 to see his daughter present her business plan at the second stage of SMU’s Big Ideas competition – and win $5,000 in start-up funds.

“Just Drive is a perfect combination of my interests in human rights and marketing,” Husein says. “It combines business with a philanthropic cause.”

She plans to launch the “Just Drive” app in September, 2018. — Nancy George, SMU

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DACA led to improved educational outcomes, lower teenage birthrate for young immigrant community

SMU professor available to discuss working paper’s analysis of controversial ‘dreamer’ population.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) increased high school graduation rates by 15 percent, reduced teenage birth rates by 45 percent, and led to a 25 percent increase in college enrollment among Hispanic women, according to a working paper co-authored by SMU economist Elira Kuka for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The results have significant bearing for the direction of future immigration policy, the paper concludes.

“Our research shows that when we give undocumented youth a large incentive to invest in education, such as participation in DACA and access to the labor opportunities it opens if they stay in school, they respond to these opportunities,” says Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics. “Giving immigrants a work permit and relief from deportation makes them more likely to invest in education, work more, and have less (teenage) fertility.”

The study also found that individuals who acquire more schooling work more at the same time, countering the typically held belief that work and school are mutually exclusive, and indicating DACA generated a large boost in productivity.

“You can think about our research in two ways: If you just care about immigration policy, it’s important because we show that DACA really improves these peoples’ lives and the type of immigrant workforce we have in the U.S., which is currently missing from the policy debate about the costs and benefits of the program,” Kuka says. “More generally, our research tells us something about the education choices of low-income Americans. Why don’t they invest in education despite its large wage premium? Do they not respond to incentives or do they lack the right incentives to go to school? Our results suggest the second.”

Co-authors are Na’ama Shenhav, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, and Kevin Shih, an economics professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“To complete this research, we used data from the American Community Surveys, which is a yearly survey that collects demographic, educational, and employment information for a 1 percent representative sample of the U.S. population,” Kuka explains. “We then identified who in the survey was likely to be a DACA recipient based on nation of origin, when they arrived in the country, and other factors, identified control groups that resembled the likely DACA recipients, then charted outcomes for both groups before and after DACA went into effect. We saw a divergence in trajectories where people eligible for DACA got this big bump in educational attainment, a big drop in fertility, and so on.” — Kenny Ryan, SMU

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KERA: 8 Questions For The Government To Consider Before Investigating Encrypted Data

“This debate is quite polarizing; it’s been in the media for a couple of years now. It was quite an accomplishment on our part to agree on a set of facts, to agree on a vocabulary and to agree on the framework.” — Fred Chang, SMU

Journalist Justin Martin with KERA public radio covered the new government guidelines for investigating encrypted data from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Frederick Chang, director of SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security and former director of research for the National Security Agency, participated in developing the guidelines.

KERA’s interview, “8 Questions For The Government To Consider Before Investigating Encrypted Data,” aired March 7, 2018.

Chang, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering, joined SMU in September 2013 as Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Centennial Distinguished Chair in Cyber Security, computer science and engineering professor and Senior Fellow in the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies in Dedman College. The Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security was launched in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering in January 2014, with Chang named as its director.

In addition to his positions at SMU, Chang is a distinguished scholar in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Chang has been professor and AT&T Distinguished Chair in Infrastructure Assurance and Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio and he was at the University of Texas at Austin as an associate dean in the College of Natural Sciences and director of the Center for Information Assurance and Security. Additionally, Chang’s career spans service in the private sector and in government including as the former Director of Research at the National Security Agency.

Chang has been awarded the National Security Agency Director’s Distinguished Service Medal and was the 2014 Information Security Magazine ‘Security 7’ award winner for Education. He has served as a member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency and as a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies. He has also served as a member of the National Academies Committee on Responding to Section 5(d) of Presidential Policy Directive 28: The Feasibility of Software to Provide Alternatives to Bulk Signals Intelligence Collection.

He is the lead inventor on two U.S. patents, and he appeared in the televised National Geographic documentary, Inside the NSA: America’s Cyber Secrets. He has twice served as a cyber security expert witness at hearings convened by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Chang received his B.A. degree from the University of California, San Diego and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Oregon. He has also completed the Program for Senior Executives at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

EXCERPT From KERA News:

The debate over government access to personal and private information dates back decades. But it took center stage after the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, when Apple refused to open a backdoor into an assailant’s encrypted cell phone for FBI investigators.

The agency ultimately paid a hacker to unlock the phone instead.

Now, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has produced a set of guidelines for government agencies to consider before approaching or investigating encrypted data.

To learn more about them, I talked with Frederick Chang, the executive director of Southern Methodist University’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security.

He’s also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and former director of research for the National Security Agency.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

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Culture, Society & Family Feature Health & Medicine

New study finds couples do poorly at knowing when their partner is sad or feeling down

Spouses are the primary source of social support to one another, so it’s important to their relationship they stay attuned to each other’s emotions.

How well do couples pick up on one another’s feelings? Pretty well, when the emotion is happiness, says a psychologist at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

But a new study finds that couples do poorly when it comes to knowing their partner is sad, lonely or feeling down.

“We found that when it comes to the normal ebb and flow of daily emotions, couples aren’t picking up on those occasional changes in ‘soft negative’ emotions like sadness or feeling down,” said family psychologist Chrystyna D. Kouros, lead author on the study. “They might be missing important emotional clues.”

Even when a negative mood isn’t related to the relationship, it ultimately can be harmful to a couple, said Kouros, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology. A spouse is usually the primary social supporter for a person.

“Failing to pick up on negative feelings one or two days is not a big deal,” she said. “But if this accumulates, then down the road it could become a problem for the relationship. It’s these missed opportunities to be offering support or talking it out that can compound over time to negatively affect a relationship.”

The finding is consistent with other research that has shown that couples tend to assume their partner feels the same way they are feeling, or thinks the same way they do, Kouros said.

But when it comes to sadness and loneliness, couples need to be on the look-out for tell-tale signs. Some people are better at this process of “empathic accuracy” — picking up on a partner’s emotions — than others.

“With empathic accuracy you’re relying on clues from your partner to figure out their mood,” Kouros said. “Assumed similarity, on the other hand, is when you just assume your partner feels the same way you do. Sometimes you might be right, because the two of you actually do feel the same, but not because you were really in tune with your partner.”

Co-author on the study is relationship psychologist Lauren M. Papp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kouros and Papp reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Family Process, in the article “Couples’ Perceptions of Each Other’s Daily Affect: Empathic Accuracy, Assumed Similarity, and Indirect Accuracy.”

Couples should assume less about one another, observe more
The problem isn’t one for which couples need to seek therapy, Kouros said. Instead, she advises couples to stop assuming they know what their partner is feeling. Also, pay more attention to your partner, and communicate more.

“I suggest couples put a little more effort into paying attention to their partner — be more mindful and in the moment when you are with your partner,” she said.

She cautions, however, against becoming annoying by constantly asking how the other is feeling, or if something is wrong.

“Obviously you could take it too far,” Kouros said. “If you sense that your partner’s mood is a little different than usual, you can just simply ask how their day was, or maybe you don’t even bring it up, you just say instead ‘Let me pick up dinner tonight’ or ‘I’ll put the kids to bed tonight.’”

Even so, partners shouldn’t assume their spouse is a mind-reader, expecting them to pick up on their emotions. “If there’s something you want to talk about, then communicate that. It’s a two-way street,” she said. “It’s not just your partner’s responsibility.”

Participants were 51 couples who completed daily diaries about their mood and the mood of their partner for seven consecutive nights. The study veers from conventional approaches to the topic, which have relied on interviewing couples in a lab setting about feelings related to conflicts in their relationship.

Kouros and Papp will also present the research findings March 23 at the 2018 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Human Development. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

Inside Higher Ed: Study Finds Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Increased Educational Attainment

It also cut teen pregnancy.

Journalist Elizabeth Redden with the website Inside Higher Ed covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Her working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Elizabeth Redden
Inside Higher Ed

A new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research argues that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had a “significant impact” on the educational and life decisions of undocumented immigrant youth, resulting in a 45 percent decrease in teen birth rates, a 15 percent increase in high school graduation rates and a 20 percent increase in college enrollment rates. The researchers found differential effects by gender, with most of the gains in college enrollment concentrated among women. For men alone, the effect of DACA on college enrollment was not statistically significant.

DACA, which was established by former president Obama in 2012, gave certain undocumented immigrant students who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children temporary protection from deportation and authorization to work in the U.S. DACA recipients have faced uncertainty over their future since September, when President Trump announced plans to end the program after six months.

“Our main conclusion from this paper is that future labor market opportunities or just opportunities in general really matter,” said Elira Kuka, one of the authors of the paper, titled “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence From DACA,” and an assistant professor of economics at Southern Methodist University.

“People are worried, ‘Why are there some populations that are not going to high school and not investing in education?’” Kuka said. “Maybe the reason is they don’t see improved opportunities — but if they see improved labor outcomes they will actually invest in their education.”

Read the full story.

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

Market Watch: Why ‘Dreamers’ are less likely to drop out of high school

New study suggests DACA pushed students to stay in school.

Journalist Jillian Berman with the website Market Watch covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Kuka’s working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, Kuka and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Jillian Berman
Market Watch

If students believe they’re education will pay off, they may be more likely to continue with it.

Enacting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, increased high school graduation rates among undocumented immigrants by 15% and college enrollment rates by 20%. That’s according to a study by economists at Dartmouth College, Southern Methodist University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday.

DACA provides work authorization and deferral of deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. In addition to eligibility requirements surrounding the age at which undocumented immigrants came to the U.S., DACA also has an education requirement — that immigrants be in school, completed high school or a GED program (unless they’re a veteran).

“You’ve given them a huge carrot to stay in school,” said Na’ama Shenhav, an economics professor at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the study. The opportunity for protection from deportation allows students to envision a possible return on their education that wasn’t available before. “For a population that previously was experiencing very low incentives to stay in school, this could have substantially re-oriented their perception of opportunities,” Shenhav said.

Read the full story.

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

Vox: DACA boosted immigrants’ education, labor force participation, productivity

It also cut teen pregnancy.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias with the website Vox covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Her working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Matthew Yglesias
Vox

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children in incredible ways — boosting high school graduation rates and college enrollment, while slashing teen births by a staggering 45 percent.

That’s according to timely new research from Elira Kuka, Na’ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih that uses the program to study a larger question that’s of interest to economists — when education becomes more available, do people go get more of it? The DACA results suggest that the answer is yes, at least when there’s a clear upside. The program itself, in other words, was a smashing success in terms of bringing people out of the shadows and letting them contribute more to American society.

Oscar Hernandez, a DACA recipient, explained to Vox’s Dara Lind how things changed.

”The discussion in my house was, ‘You don’t get noticed. Because if you do something awesome and great, you might get noticed, and if you do get noticed, they might find out that we’re here undocumented, and if they find we out we could get separated.’ It was never a discussion we had, but that was the unwritten rule for our house. You don’t do bad things, but you also don’t do good things. You stay under the radar, you work, and that’s it.”

DACA changed that. Suddenly, recipients got to experience what US citizens take for granted — that to excel is good.

Canceling DACA almost certainly won’t reduce the overall size of the unauthorized population living in the United States, but it will meaningfully reduce the educational attainment and economic productivity of the undocumented population. That’s bad for the DREAMers, but also America as a whole.

DACA eligibility led to a lot more schooling
One of DACA’s provisions was that to qualify, you had to get a high school degree if you were old enough. That’s an unusual incentive to stay in school, and using a difference-in-differences design to compare the eligible to non-eligible population over time (you can do this because you had to have arrived within a specific time and age window to qualify) they show that DACA-eligibility increased high school graduation rates by 15 percent and brought teen births down by 45 percent.

Read the full story.

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Female students exposed briefly to charismatic career women are inspired to pursue male-dominated field

Easy, inexpensive experiment briefly sent inspiring female role models into intro to econ classes and sharply increased college female interest in the male-dominated, well-paying field of economics.

A low-budget field experiment to tackle the lack of women in the male-dominated field of economics has been surprisingly effective, says the study’s author, an economist at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Top female college students were inspired to pursue a major in economics when exposed very briefly to charismatic, successful women in the field, according to SMU economist Danila Serra.

The results suggest that exposing young women to an inspiring female role model succeeds due to the mix of both information and pure inspiration, Serra said.

“The specific women who came and talked to the students were key to the success of the intervention,” she said. “It was a factor of how charismatic and enthusiastic they were about their careers and of how interesting their jobs looked to young women.”

Given the simplicity and low-cost of the intervention, similar experiments could be easily conducted in other male-dominated or female-dominated fields of study to enhance gender diversity.

Serra’s results showed that among female students exposed to the enthusiastic mentors there was a 12-percentage point increase in the percentage of female students enrolling in the upper-level Intermediate Microeconomics course the following year — a 100% increase, or doubling, for that demographic.

Not surprisingly, given that the intervention was targeted to female students, Serra found that the role model visits had no impact on male students.

But astonishingly it had the greatest impact on high-achieving female students.

“If we restrict the analysis to the top female students, the students with a GPA of 3.7 or higher, the impact is remarkable — it is a 26 percentage points increase,” Serra said. “So this intervention was especially impactful on the top female students who perhaps were not thinking about majoring in economics.”

The results were very surprising to Serra, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics in Dedman College who teaches the upper-level class Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Serra’s research relies on laboratory and field experiments, a relatively new methodology in the field of economics. She launched and is co-leader of the Laboratory for Research in Experimental Economics at SMU.

“I didn’t think such limited exposure would have such a large impact,” Serra said. “So this is telling me that one of the reasons we see so few women in certain fields is that these fields have been male-dominated for so long. This implies that it is very difficult for a young woman to come into contact with a woman in the field who has an interesting job in the eyes of young women and is enthusiastic about her major and her work. Young men, on the other hand, have these interactions all the time because there are so many male economics majors out there.”

Co-author on the research is Catherine Porter, associate professor of economics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Serra’s former Ph.D. classmate at the University of Oxford.

“The gender imbalance in economics has been in the news a lot lately, and much of the discussion has been very negative,” said Porter. “This study offers something positive: a cheap way of improving the gender balance. The results can hopefully be used by other schools in order to redress the low numbers of women that major in economics – women have a lot to offer and should consider economics as a subject that is interesting and varied for a career.”

Serra reported the findings, “Gender differences in the choice of major: The importance of female role models,” on Jan. 6 in Philadelphia at the 2018 annual meeting of the Allied Social Sciences Association. Hers is one of many findings on gender and gender differences in economics presented at a session organized by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

Inspiring the individual is the best tool to recruit and retain
Serra launched the study after SMU was one of 20 U.S. universities randomly chosen by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin for the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge. The project awarded each university a $12,500 grant to develop a program freely chosen by the universities to test the effectiveness of a deliberate intervention strategy to recruit and retain female majors.

Nationally, there’s only about one woman for every three men majoring in economics. SMU has a large number of economics majors for a school of its size, with 160 a year. The gender imbalance, however, is greater at SMU than the national average, with only one woman to every four men.

Serra developed her intervention based on her own experience as a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford several years ago.

“I started thinking about role models from my personal experience,” Serra said. “As a student, I had met many female professors in the past, but my own experience taught me that inspiration is not about meeting any female professor — it’s about meeting that one person that has a huge charisma and who is highly inspiring and speaks to you specifically.”

Serra said that’s what she experienced as a graduate researcher when she first met Professor Abigail Barr, who later became her Ph.D. advisor.

“I know for a fact that that is why I decided to do a Ph.D. in economics, because I was greatly inspired by this person, her experiences and her research,” she said. “So I thought it would be interesting to see whether the same could work for a general student population.”

Two inspiring women role models, 15 minutes, four classrooms
Serra asked two of her department’s top undergraduate female economics students to take the lead in choosing the role models.

The students, Tracy Nelson and Emily Towler, sorted through rosters of SMU economics alums and shortlisted 18 men and women that they thought were working in interesting fields – which purposely excluded stereotypical jobs in banking and finance – and then carried out scripted interviews with a subset of who agreed to be interviewed via Skype to get additional information about their career path and to assess their charisma.

The students ultimately found two alumnae, Julie Lutz and Courtney Thompson, to be the most inspiring. Lutz, a 2008 graduate, started her career in management consulting but, shortly after, decided to completely change her career path by going to work for an international NGO in Nicaragua, and then as a director of operations at a toy company based in Honduras. Lutz now works in Operations at a fast-growing candy retail company. Courtney Thompson, class of 1991, has had a stellar career in marketing, becoming the senior director of North American Marketing and Information Technology at a large international communications company, with the unique claim of being not only a female econ major at a time when that was exceedingly rare, but also African American in a white dominated field.

Serra invited each woman to speak during the Spring 2016 semester for 10 to 15 minutes to four Principals of Economics classes that she had randomly selected from a set of 10. The Principles classes are very popular, with about 700 students total from a variety of desired majors, and are typically gender balanced. The imbalance, said Serra, starts the following year with Intermediate Microeconomics, which is a requirement for upper-level economics courses and so is a good indicator of a desire to major in economics.

Serra offered each role model an honorarium for speaking, but each woman declined and indicated they were happy to be back on campus sharing with students. Serra told the speakers nothing of the purpose of the research project, but encouraged each one to explain to the class why they majored in economics and to be very engaging. She directed them to approach the students with the following question in mind: “If you had to convince a student to major in economics, what would you say?”

Thompson, Serra said, during her college days played SMU’s costumed Peruna mascot, and today retains a “bubbly, big personality, that makes her extremely engaging.” In her classroom visits, Thompson described her experience working and being extremely successful in marketing with an economics degree, while being surrounded by business majors. Lutz, being still in her 20s, was very easy for the young women in the classrooms to identify with, and her experience working in the non-profit and in developing countries may have been especially appealing to them.

Young women judge best who will inspire them
Serra believes that a key to the success of the intervention was the fact her two female economics students actively participated in the selection of the role models.

“The most important thing about the project was that I realized I needed current female students to choose the role models,” Serra said. “I’m not that young anymore, so I’m probably not the best person to recognize what is inspiring to young women. I think young female students are in the best position to tell us what is most inspiring to them.”

In November the directors and officers of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics honored Serra as the inaugural recipient of the $50,000 Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize. The Smith Prize is described by the foundation as a “budding genius” award.

For her highly cited corruption research, Serra uses lab experiments to study bribery, governance and accountability, questioning long-standing assumptions. Some of her findings are that corruption declines as perpetrators take into account social costs of their illegal activities, and as victims share information about specific bribery exchanges through online reporting. Serra’s current research agenda also includes experimental work on gender differences in preferences, behaviors and outcomes. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Daily Planet: Star Wars come to life in SMU chemist’s invention

Long ago, sort of, scenes from Star Wars triggered a child’s imagination, so that today it’s informed one of his research goals as a chemist.

Discover Canada’s science magazine show Daily Planet reported on the research of SMU organic chemist Alex Lippert, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Lippert’s team develops synthetic organic compounds that glow in reaction to certain conditions. He led his lab in developing a new technology that uses photoswitch molecules to craft 3-D light structures — not holograms — that are viewable from 360 degrees. An economical method for shaping light into an infinite number of volumetric objects, the technology will be useful in a variety of fields, from biomedical imaging, education and engineering, to TV, movies, video games and more.

For biomedical imaging, Lippert says the nearest-term application of the technique might be in high-volume pre-clinical animal imaging, but eventually the technique could be applied to provide low-cost internal imaging in the developing world, or less costly imaging in the developed world.

The Daily Planet segment aired Dec. 12, 2017.

Lippert’s lab includes four doctoral students and five undergraduates who assist in his research. He recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, expected to total $611,000 over five years, to fund his research into alternative internal imaging techniques.

NSF Career Awards are given to tenure-track faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research in American colleges and universities.

Lippert joined SMU in 2012. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bachelor of Science at the California Institute of Technology.

Watch the full Dec. 12 show.

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Culture, Society & Family Feature Learning & Education Researcher news Student researchers Technology

Cyber grad and U.S. Marine Corps vet Michael Taylor proved his mettle as an outstanding student researcher

‘Outstanding student in computer science & engineering’ graduates Dec. 16 with master’s degree and Raytheon ticket to a Ph.D.

Michael Taylor will be the first to tell you that he was not ready for college when he graduated from Plano East High School in 2006. And he’ll also tell you that nobody was more surprised than he was when SMU admitted him in 2014, a little later than the average undergrad.

But Taylor’s disciplined approach to life, honed through five years in the Marine Corps, combined with the intelligence he learned to tap, has earned him a master’s degree from SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering that will be awarded Dec. 16. And after proving his mettle as a student researcher in Lyle’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security, Taylor has been awarded the first Raytheon IIS Cyber Elite Graduate Fellowship, which will fund his Ph.D. in quantum computing at SMU and then put him to work as an employee at Raytheon.

“Michael Taylor stood out to me when I first had him in an undergraduate class,” said Mitch Thornton, research director for the Deason Institute and Cecil H. Green Chair of Engineering at SMU. “I could sense there was something special about him and that he had a lot of talent. I actively encouraged Michael to do research with me and he has excelled in everything I have asked him to work on. He is a credit to the student body of SMU’s Lyle School, and a credit to the nation.”

Taylor learned to focus on the details in the Marine Corps. He had sampled community college very briefly after high school, but it didn’t stick. He knew he didn’t have skills to trade for a decent job, so joining the Marine Corps made sense to him.

“Honestly? In retrospect, I wasn’t ready for school,” Taylor acknowledged.

After the Marines, finally ready for college
Taylor’s dad was an SMU engineering alumnus, and this was not the career path he’d envisioned for his son. But it’s funny how things work themselves out. Taylor completed Marine basic training, and took an aptitude test to determine where his skills might fit the Marine Corp mission. He did very, very well.

“My score on that test – I qualified for every enlisted job in the Marine Corps,” Taylor said. “I got to pick what job I wanted.” Working as a calibration technician sounded interesting – a job that would require him to conduct testing for proper operation of a wide range of mechanical and electronic devices and tools. But before working in calibration, he’d have to go school for a year.

“Ironic, I know,” Taylor said, smiling. “I had to sign up for an extra year, so I ended up doing a five-year tour in the Marines.”

He spent most of that time working out of Camp Pendleton in California, but was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, from March through September 2010, at the height of the surge of U.S. troops. “I wasn’t a combat guy,” Taylor said. “But even on base, sometimes, the rockets would come in the middle of the night.”

Nearing the end of his enlistment in 2012, Taylor was getting the hard sell to stay in and make the Marines a career. By now, he had decided he was ready for college, but the career planner he met with tried hard to talk him out of it, predicting that Taylor would “fail again.”

“He actually told me if I got out of the Marine Corps and went back to college, I’d end up living under a bridge,” Taylor said, shaking his head. It just made him more determined to succeed.

He started back at community college, and this experience was very different. “It seemed like it was so hard the first time,” Taylor said. “What then seemed like a monumental task, now seemed like nothing. I started thinking, I might be able to do school, now.”

And he started thinking about SMU. Taylor’s grades at Collin County Community College were good – good enough to get him into his father’s alma mater.

SMU Prof’s mentoring made all the difference
Taylor never dared to think he could live up to what his Dad had accomplished, starting with the scholarship to attend SMU that Jim Taylor ’89 had received from Texas Instruments. “He was a technician there,” Taylor recalled, “and they paid for him to come here. As a kid, if you’d told me I could do something like that, too, I’d never have believed you. For me there was Albert Einstein, and Jim Taylor.”

Michael Taylor came to the Hilltop on the GI Bill, and SMU’s Yellow Ribbon program for military veterans covered what the GI Bill didn’t. Then, the Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security picked up the cost of his master’s degree.

Taylor’s first semester at SMU’s Lyle School was a tough adjustment after his relatively easy path at community college, but that class with professor Thornton his second semester changed everything. “Dr. Thornton offered me a position working in the Deason Institute for Cyber Security,” Taylor said. “It’s been going great since then.”

Thornton’s influence and mentoring made all the difference for Taylor.

“If I had not met Dr. Thornton, there were times I wondered if I would have gotten my bachelor’s degree. I definitely wouldn’t be getting the master’s degree. And a Ph.D. wouldn’t have been something I ever considered.”

Compelled to dive into quantum computing and cyber security
Taylor was interested in computer hardware when he arrived at SMU, but the Deason Institute opened the door to the contributions he could make in cyber security. He received the Lyle School’s 2017 Rick A. Barrett Memorial Award for outstanding work in computer science and engineering. And as he neared the completion of his master’s degree, he was tapped for the Raytheon Cyber Elite Graduate Fellowship and is looking forward to pursuing his Ph.D. in quantum computing.

“Quantum computers solve problems that are too difficult for classical computers to solve,” Taylor said. “Certain problems in classical computation are intractable, there’s no way you can solve them in this lifetime. It’s only a matter of time before quantum computers render all encryption obsolete.”

For Fred Chang, executive director of SMU’s Deason Institute and former research director for the National Security Agency (NSA), finding talented students like Taylor to fill the gaps in the cyber security workforce is “job one.” Chang testified before a congressional subcommittee in September that we are likely facing a worldwide shortage of cyber security workers five years from now.

“Today’s students will be responsible for designing, creating, operating, maintaining and defending tomorrow’s cyber infrastructure,” Chang explained. “We need a large and capable pool of folks to staff these positions for the future.”

For Taylor, cyber security is just plain compelling.

“I just like the challenge. There’s somebody out there that’s trying to crack what you have, to break you down. You have to be smarter than them. It’s a game!” — Kim Cobb, SMU

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SMU economist wins $50,000 “budding genius” prize with highly cited corruption research

Serra questioned long-standing assumptions; found corruption declines as perpetrators take into account social costs of their illegal activities, and as victims share information about specific bribery exchanges through online reporting systems.

Guilt and shame play a role in reducing bribery, according to research by economist Danila Serra, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

As an economist who has studied bribery behavior extensively, Serra has discovered that bribery declines if potentially corrupt agents are made aware of the negative effects of corruption, and when victims can share specific information about bribe demands through online reporting systems.

An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, Serra’s research methodology is unique — relying on lab experiments in which players gain and lose real money. Her work is frequently cited by other researchers studying the field of bribery.

In November the directors and officers of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics honored Serra as the inaugural recipient of the $50,000 Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize. The Smith Prize is described by the foundation as a “budding genius” award.

“Dr. Serra’s accomplishments have marked her as an ascending scholar, teacher, mentor and colleague of exceptional promise,” said a statement from the foundation.

The prize is named for Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith, considered the father of experimental economics. It aims to build on his legacy and inspire recipients, early on in their careers, to set the loftiest possible goals for themselves as social-science theorists, practitioners, colleagues, mentors and truth seekers, the foundation said.

Serra’s interest in understanding bribery transformed in 2005 when she became frustrated by measurement problems and the difficulty of finding good data. Her goal was to identify and understand the causes of corruption, and in particular whether non-monetary motivations, social norms and culture play any role in corruption decision-making. During her Ph.D. work at the University of Oxford, economist Abigail Barr exposed Serra to lab experiments, a relatively new methodology for the field of economics.

“I was always interested in corruption. As soon as I discovered the field of experimental economics I decided to design and implement bribery experiments,” Serra said. “I recreate the situation I want to study in a laboratory setting, employing real monetary incentives, which we provide, and with scenarios where the subjects can make corruption decisions that increase their money at the expense of other players. The play is anonymous and they get to bring home the money they earn in the experimental setting.”

Corruption isn’t purely about money
The focus of Serra’s research sharpened further when she began to question the root assumption that guilt and shame don’t play a role in bribery. She found in laboratory experiments that the intrinsic costs of guilt and shame do matter, and that corruption isn’t purely a matter of money.

She found that corruption declines when potentially corrupt agents are made aware of the negative impact of their actions, and when bottom-up anti-corruption mechanisms are in place, such as victims sharing specific information about bribe demands. Serra also found evidence of a significant relationship between corruption and culture.

“In one of my early studies, I employed a sample of international students at the University of Oxford and found among undergraduate students that the level of corruption in their home country predicts their propensity to engage in corruption in my bribery experiment,” she said.

“This is what we’d expect, they have internalized corrupt norms,” Serra said. “But the surprising result is that this wasn’t true for graduate students. We concluded that graduate students do not conform to the prevailing social norms of their home countries and, possibly, they want to distance themselves from such norms.”

Serra’s research has produced 12 papers on bribery and she has edited a book about experimental research on corruption. Her work on corruption has been cited hundreds of times by other researchers in the field. She has also investigated issues related to governance, public service provision and bottom-up accountability in developing countries. More recently, she has embarked on new research exploring gender differences in behaviors and outcomes in a variety of contexts, including students’ choices of major.

Serra launched and is co-leader of the Laboratory for Research in Experimental Economics at SMU’s Economics Department in the Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences.

The Vernon L. Smith Ascending Prize for Serra is a major professional recognition of the profound impact of her pioneering research in the area of experimental public economics and in particular on the understanding of corruption and other forms of rule breaking, said SMU economist Santanu Roy, chair of the SMU Department of Economics and University Distinguished Professor.

“She is one of the most cited economists of her generation,” Roy said. “The prize comes with a $50,000 award which, as far as I know, is the largest amount awarded as a prize for young economists. The fact that Dr. Serra was chosen to receive the inaugural prize named for the father of experimental economics tells us about the high expectations that her peers have about her future research productivity.”

Economics as an empirical discipline
The Smith Prize seeks to inspire early-career scholars to emulate Smith’s joyous zeal for scientific discovery. It may be used flexibly to advance social science in whatever manner a recipient chooses, the foundation said.

The prize is made possible through the Rasmuson Foundation and other contributors.

As a social scientist, Smith was committed to exploring theoretical foundations in economics, social science, and science generally; achievement in the form of quantifiable impacts in transforming economics into an experimental and more empirical discipline; collegiality in funding, mentoring, and collaborating with fellow scholars; and curiosity in looking beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries in search of truth.

“The International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics heartily congratulates Dr. Serra and looks forward to following her career in the years to come,” the statement said. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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The Chronicle of Higher Education: Is Protesting a Privilege?

The results could suggest that a certain type of environment allows a student more freedom to protest, Baker says. “Certain people have the time and resources to be able to protest in certain ways.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education covered the research of SMU education policy expert Dominique Baker, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership of Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

Baker’s research published recently in The Journal of Higher Education. She and her co-author on the study, “Beyond the Incident: Institutional Predictors of Student Collective Action,” reported that racial or gender diversity alone doesn’t make a college campus feel inclusive. Students are more likely to initiate social justice campaigns at large, selective, public universities.

Some universities are more likely than others to experience student activism like the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign in 2014, the study found.

The Chronicle article by journalist Liam Adams, “Is Protesting a Privilege,” published Dec. 6, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Liam Adams
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Campus protests advocating for diversity occur more frequently at elite colleges, a study suggests.

Since her days as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, Dominique J. Baker says, she had wondered, “Why do certain universities have protests and others don’t?”

That curiosity led Ms. Baker and a colleague to study differences in protests among higher-education institutions.

Their recent report, published in The Journal of Higher Education, is titled “Beyond the Incident: Institutional Predictors of Student Collective Action.”

The more selective a college and the fewer of its students receiving Pell Grants, they found, the more likely those colleges are experiencing protests against racial microaggressions.

It’s not a new notion that protests occur more commonly at elite institutions. A previous study, by the Brookings Institution, found that more-affluent colleges are likelier venues for protests against controversial speakers, although the report was criticized for being incomplete.

The study by Ms. Baker, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University,and Richard S.L. Blissett, an assistant professor in the department of quantitative methods and education policy at Seton Hall University, focused on the “I, Too, Am” movement, which started at Harvard University to protest microaggressions against students of color.

Racial microaggressions usually involve unequal treatment of people of color, or racial slurs or jokes, notes the report. Some students at Harvard were so fed up with microaggressions on the campus that they started a photography project in which students of color held signs containing offensive statements that had been made to them.

Read the full story.

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Student-led protests seeking inclusive campuses are more likely to occur at selective universities

A new study found that racial or gender diversity alone doesn’t make a college campus feel inclusive. Students are more likely to initiate social justice campaigns at large, selective, public universities.

Some universities are more likely than others to experience student activism like the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign in 2014, a new study finds.

That student-led campaign at Harvard publicized the hurtful experiences routinely faced on campus by students from marginalized populations, meaning gender and ethnic minorities.

A new study led by a researcher from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, found that students are more likely to initiate social justice campaigns like the one at Harvard at large, selective, public universities where there are fewer students receiving financial aid.

The study is one of the first to take an empirical look at the institutional characteristics of universities in an effort to understand the current spike in student-led activism.

“Interestingly, our quantitative analysis found that numerical student diversity — in terms of gender and race — was not sufficient to make students feel they attend school on an inclusive campus,” said Dominique Baker, lead author on the research and assistant professor of higher education at SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

“Our study found that more selective institutions, larger institutions, and institutions with fewer students receiving the Federal Pell Grant had greater odds of students adopting social justice campaigns to heighten awareness of their plight,” Baker said.

The federal government awards Pell grants to undergraduate students who need financial assistance for college.

Eradicating student protests isn’t the goal of the new research study, Baker said. Universities are seeing one of the largest jumps in student activism since the 1960s, so the goal is to provide data-based empirical research to help universities improve the campus environment for minority students.

“We are more concerned with what leads to protest and collective action — and which environments are conducive to it,” Baker said. “This research project helps us understand the kinds of contexts in which students may feel compelled and able to act. That may help us think about the ways in which we can best support our students and create more inclusive spaces.”

Co-author of the study is Richard Blissett, an assistant professor in Seton Hall University’s department of education. The researchers reported their findings in The Journal of Higher Education in the article “Beyond the Incident: Institutional Predictors of Student Collective Action.

Students across the country are fighting for inclusion and justice
The issue is a growing one. Recently, more than 70 U.S. universities have faced questions about how to address student protest demands regarding a variety of social injustices, such as police brutality, racism, and gender disparity, among others, the authors say.

At least 40 U.S. universities have had some sort of “I, Too, Am” campaign.

Studies from decades past that looked at student activism found that social movements and student protests during the 1960s and 1970s took place at more cosmopolitan and prestigious universities on both coasts, as well as some major public universities in between and some progressive liberal arts colleges.

With their new study, Baker and Blissett wanted to see if that holds true now. They looked at whether certain types of U.S. institutions were more likely to see student activism than others.

Numerical diversity is not enough for students to feel a campus is inclusive
The “I, Too, Am Harvard” movement began as a student play and evolved into a photo campaign. For the play and photos, 63 Harvard students held up dry-erase boards on which they wrote examples of racist things that had been said to them, as well as things they would like to say to their peers in response. The photos were published on Tumblr, then went viral on the social news website BuzzFeed. Ultimately that sparked many similarly named movements on other U.S. campuses.

For their study, Baker and Blissett analyzed 1,845 institutions, including those with publicized “I, Too, Am” campaigns. They linked the information with five-years of institution-level data from the U.S. Department of Education on all four-year public and not-for-profit universities.

The researchers also collected various measures of student diversity at each university, including gender and undergraduate racial identity, as well as Pell Grant recipients to capture low-income backgrounds.

They investigated whether the current state of diversity, or recent changes to it, could predict where an “I, Too, Am” campaign would appear. They found no consistent evidence that racial diversity was predictive of a campaign, suggesting diversity alone may not be enough to address student dissatisfaction, the authors said.

“Colleges focusing solely on the number of marginalized students may miss other characteristics of the institutions that could be associated with student mobilization or discontent,” Baker said.

Institutions without campaigns may also have inclusion issues
The researchers found that the 40 institutions with social movements were generally more selective in their admission policies, more socially prestigious, and primarily in the Mideast.

This prompted the researchers to pose the question, “What social resources are required for people to be able to protest in the first place?” Baker said. “This could explain why some institutions have campaigns and some do not. We are continuing in our work to investigate some of these types of questions.”

The results have important implications, said co-author Blissett, suggesting that student expressions of dissatisfaction with institutional racism may not be, as some theories describe, “idiosyncratic overflows of emotion,” but instead a function of the institutional environment.

“We are adding to a growing base of literature that suggests that thinking beyond diversity as reflected in enrollment numbers may be important for institutions that want to ensure that their minority students can thrive, and feel safe and at home on campus,” he said.

That said, just because an institution hasn’t had a student-led campaign does not necessarily mean that the institution doesn’t have social justice problems related to gender and race.

The research findings can help campus leadership see student protests as a key source of political information. The findings suggest that the higher education community can seek ways to create supportive spaces that make campuses feel more inclusive so students are less likely to feel compelled to protest the environment, Baker said.

“We’re not saying that the presence of racial and ethnic minorities or women is not important,” she said. “Our main conclusion from this research is that a focus on forms of diversity and inclusion beyond only enrollment numbers may also be important. Institutions may want to think more holistically about the challenges that these students are facing on their campuses.” — Margaret Allen

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Commerce Department selects scientific team to conduct independent abundance estimate of red snapper in Gulf of Mexico

The initiative addresses one of the most pressing issues currently facing U.S. Gulf of Mexico fisheries management, as the iconic red snapper supports one of the most economically valuable finfish fisheries in the Gulf.

An expert team of university and government scientists will determine the abundance of red snapper in the U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico, as availability of the fish is vital to the region’s economy.

“Red snapper have great economic value to all the gulf states,” said SMU statistician Lynne Stokes, a member of the team. “Maintaining the health of the species is vitally important, so it’s necessary to ensure species are fished at the right level.”

As an expert in surveys, polls and sampling, Stokes’ role in the project is to help design ways to sample the vast expanse of the gulf efficiently so that good estimates of abundance can be produced.

“The gulf is very diverse, and different sampling methods are needed for different habitats, which makes the sample design problem interesting,” said Stokes, a professor in the SMU Department of Statistical Science. “The cheapest way to collect data about the health of a marine fish species is by asking a sample of anglers about their catch. However, if fish are present in places where anglers are not, other methods are needed. There is some uncertainty about all the places red snapper exist in the gulf, so it is not known if catch-based methods provide accurate estimates of abundance.”

The project will obtain angler-independent data about red snapper abundance by sampling their potential habitat, Stokes said. The team will collect data on red snapper numbers by direct observation of a sample of transects on the sea bottom and structures on the sea floor, using remotely controlled video cameras. Stokes will help determine how extensive the observation must be.

The team of scientists was selected by an expert review panel convened by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium to conduct the independent study.

“American communities across the Gulf of Mexico depend on their access to, as well as the long term sustainability of, red snapper,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “I look forward to the insights this project will provide as we study and manage this valuable resource.”

Recreational anglers and commercial fishers will play a key role
The research team, made up of 21 scientists from 12 institutions of higher learning, a state agency and a federal agency, was awarded $9.5 million in federal funds for the project through a competitive research grant process. With matching funds from the universities, the project will total $12 million.

“We’ve assembled some of the best red snapper scientists around for this study,” said Greg Stunz, the project leader and a professor at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. “The team members assembled through this process are ready to address this challenging research question. There are lots of constituents who want an independent abundance estimate that will be anxiously awaiting our findings.”

Recreational anglers and commercial fishers will be invited to play a key role in collecting data by tagging fish, reporting tags and working directly with scientists onboard their vessels.

“The local knowledge fishermen bring to this process is very valuable and meaningfully informs our study,” Stunz said.

Some stakeholder groups have expressed concerns that there are more red snapper in the Gulf than currently accounted for in the stock assessment. The team of scientists on this project will spend two years studying the issue.

In 2016, Congress directed the National Sea Grant College Program and NOAA Fisheries to fund independent red snapper data collections, surveys and assessments, including the use of tagging and advanced sampling technologies. Sea Grant and NOAA Fisheries worked collaboratively to transfer federal funds to Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant to administer the competitive research grant process and manage this independent abundance estimate.

“Today’s announcement is welcome news for all red snapper anglers in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama. “As Chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, I was proud to author and secure federal funding to address the need for better data, which is a fundamental issue plaguing the fishery. The management of red snapper must be grounded in sound science if we want to provide fair access and more days on the water for our anglers. It is my hope that these independent scientists will be able to accurately determine the abundance of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico once and for all.”

Project team will determine abundance and distribution of red snapper
The research will be driven largely by university-based scientists with partners from state and federal agencies, Stunz said.

The funding will allow the scientists to carry out an abundance estimate using multiple sampling methods with a focus on advanced technologies and tagging for various habitat types, he said.

“I’m pleased to see that the independent estimate is moving forward and including the expertise of recreational fishermen,” said Rep. John Culberson of Texas. “I will continue to work with Texas fishermen and NOAA to address the inadequate access to red snapper.”

The project team will determine abundance and distribution of red snapper on artificial, natural and unknown bottom habitat across the northern Gulf of Mexico.

As a statistician chosen for the team, SMU’s Stokes is also an expert in non-sampling survey errors, such as errors by interviewers and respondents. She recently conducted research on evaluating the accuracy of contest judges and on improving estimates of marine fishery yields by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Stokes also contributes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “Nation’s Report Card,” examining the way schools and students are selected for the large study.

Besides SMU, others on the team include Texas A&M University, University of Florida, University of South Alabama, Louisiana State University, Florida International University, NOAA Fisheries, Auburn University, Mississippi State University, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, College of William and Mary, University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of South Florida. — Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant and Southern Methodist University

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Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center awards first research grants to shape economic, migration policies

Research findings will be presented at the second annual Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Symposium to be held in Mexico City April 6, 2018.

The Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center at SMU has awarded grants to four scholars from both sides of the border who aim to support the Center’s goal of providing policy-relevant, action-oriented research on the dynamic relationship between Texas and Mexico.

Findings from each of the four projects, selected by the Texas-Mexico Center’s Faculty Advisory Board, will be shared this spring, says Luisa del Rosal, executive director of the Center.

“This is a tremendous benefit to Dedman College, where so many faculty members research and teach about Texas and Mexico,” says SMU Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Dean Thomas DiPiero. “This will help strengthen the social, economic and cultural ties between the two regions.”

The four projects are:

  • “Migration, Inequality & Public Policies in Mexico and the United States”
    Lead researcher: Colegio de Mexico President Silvia Giorguli, Mexico City
  • “Are Mexican and U.S. Workers Complements or Substitutes?”
    Lead researcher: Raymond Robertson, Helen and Roy Ryu Chair in Economics
    & Government, Texas A&M Bush School of Government & Public Service, College Station
  • “Institutions, Trade and Economic Prosperity: An Examination of the U.S. and Mexican States”
    Lead researcher: Dean Stansel, associate professor, O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom, SMU Cox School of Business
  • “Slowdown in Mexico-U.S. Migration: Why is Texas Different?”
    Lead researcher: Colegio Tlaxcala President Alfredo Cuecuecha, Tlaxcala, Mexico

Grant recipient Stansel said his team will focus on the potential economic damage from a possible new regime of trade restrictions in the U.S.

“By examining the interconnected relationships between trade policy, trade volume and economic prosperity in the U.S. and Mexico,” he said, “we hope to provide insights into the importance of maintaining a system of relatively free trade.”

Research findings will be presented at the second annual Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Symposium to be held in Mexico City April 6, 2018.

Three dozen applicants applied for the grants, which was “more than we expected for the first year,” says Javier Velez, vice-chair of the Texas-Mexico Center Executive Advisory Board and CEO of Mission Foods’ U.S. headquarters in Dallas.

“It was pleasing for us how much interest there is in effectively promoting and facilitating a better understanding of the relation between Texas and Mexico,” Velez said.

The Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center at SMU is dedicated to improving relations between Texas and Mexico through dialogue and research. It works to encourage greater cross-border integration and cross-sector collaboration in academia, government, non-governmental organizations and business. The Center strives to enhance a political dialogue to reshape the policies that govern the relationship between Texas and Mexico, focusing on five areas: trade and investment, energy, human capital and education, border issues and migration. — Denise Gee, SMU

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The CW33: Dark Matter Day rocks SMU’s campus

The CW33 TV visited SMU on Halloween to get a glimpse of International Dark Matter Day in action on the SMU campus.

The CW33 TV stopped at the SMU campus during the early morning hours of Halloween to interview SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley about the capers afoot in celebration of International Dark Matter Day.

The SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences hosted the Oct. 31, 2017 Dark Matter Day celebration for students, faculty, staff and Dallas-area residents.

As part of the festivities, there were speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter, including dark matter expert Cooley, to explain the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter.

Then throughout Halloween day, the public was invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of 26 rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students had painted and hidden around the campus. Lucky finders traded them for prizes from the Physics Department.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” said Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Watch the full news segment.

EXCERPT:

By Shardae Neal
The CW33

On Halloween (excuse us) “International Dark Matter Day,” SMU students hosted a public witch hunt to search for the unknown: dark matter.

“What we’re doing is hiding 26 rocks that we have with the help of our society of physic students,” explained SMU Physicist Jodi Cooley.

What exactly is dark matter?

“Think about all the stuff there is in the universe,” Cooley added. “What we can account for makes up only four to five percent of the universe. The rest of it is unknown. Turns out 26% of that unknown stuff is dark matter.”

Watch the full news segment.

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Study: New simple method determines rate at which we burn calories walking uphill, downhill, and on level ground

New method uses three variables of speed, load carried and slope to improve on the accuracy of existing standards for predicting how much energy people require for walking — a method beneficial to many, including military strategists to model mission success

When military strategists plan a mission, one of many factors is the toll it takes on the Army’s foot soldiers.

A long march and heavy load drains energy. So military strategists are often concerned with the calories a soldier will burn, and the effect of metabolic stress on their overall physiological status, including body temperature, fuel needs and fatigue.

Now scientists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, have discovered a new more accurate way to predict how much energy a soldier uses walking.

The method was developed with funding from the U.S. military. It significantly improves on two existing standards currently in use, and relies on just three readily available variables.

An accurate quantitative assessment tool is important because the rate at which people burn calories while walking can vary tenfold depending on how fast they walk, if they carry a load, and whether the walk is uphill, downhill or level.

“Our new method improves on the accuracy of the two leading standards that have been in use for nearly 50 years,” said exercise physiologist Lindsay W. Ludlow, an SMU post-doctoral fellow and lead author on the study. “Our model is fairly simple and improves predictions.”

The research is part of a larger load carriage initiative undertaken by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. The average load carried by light infantry foot soldiers in Afghanistan in April and May 2003 was 132 pounds, according to a U.S. Army Borden Institute report.

“Soldiers carry heavy loads, so quantitative information on the consequences of load is critical for many reasons, from planning a route to evaluating the likelihood of mission success,” said SMU biomechanist and physiologist Peter Weyand, @Dr_Weyand.

“The military uses a variety of approaches to model, predict and monitor foot-soldier status and performance, including having soldiers outfitted with wearable devices,” Weyand said. “There is a critical need with modern foot soldiers to understand performance from the perspective of how big a load they are carrying.”

Weyand is senior author on the research and directs the Locomotor Performance Laboratory in the SMU Simmons School of Education, where subjects for the study were tested.

The researchers call their new method the “Minimum Mechanics Model” to reflect that it requires only three basic and readily available inputs to deliver broad accurate predictions. They report their findings in “Walking economy is predictably determined by speed, grade and gravitational load” in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

The necessary variables are the walker’s speed, the grade or slope of the walking surface, and the total weight of the body plus any load the walker is carrying.

“That’s all it takes to accurately predict how much energy a walker burns,” Ludlow said.

While the measurement is a critical one for foot soldiers, it’s also useful for hikers, backpackers, mall-walkers and others who are calorie conscious and may rely on wearable electronic gadgets to track the calories they burn, she said.

Muscle and gait mechanics tightly coupled across speed, grade, load
Existing standards now in use rely on the same three variables, but differently, and with less accuracy and breadth.

The new theory is a departure from the prevailing view that the mechanics of walking are too complex to be both simple and accurate.

“Ultimately, we found that three remarkably simple mechanical variables can provide predictive accuracy across a broad range of conditions,” Ludlow said. “The accuracy achieved provides strong indirect evidence that the muscular activity determining calorie-burn rates during walking is tightly coupled to the speed, surface inclination and total weight terms in our model.”

By using two different sets of research subjects, the researchers independently evaluated their model’s ability to accurately predict the amount of energy burned.

“If muscle and gait mechanics were not tightly coupled across speed, grade and load, the level of predictive accuracy we achieved is unlikely,” Weyand said.

First generalized equation developed directly from a single, large database
The two existing equations that have been the working standards for nearly 50 years were necessarily based on just a few subjects and a limited number of data points.

One standard from the American College of Sports Medicine tested only speed and uphill grades, with its first formulation being based on data from only three individuals.

The other standard, commonly referred to as the Pandolf equation is used more frequently by the military and relies heavily on data from six soldiers combined with earlier experimental results.

In contrast, the generalized equation from SMU was derived from what is believed to be the largest database available for human walking metabolism.

The SMU study tested 32 adult subjects individually under 90 different speed-grade and load conditions on treadmills at the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory, @LocomotorLabSMU.

“The leading standardized equations included only level and uphill inclinations,” Weyand said. “We felt it was important to also provide downhill capabilities since soldiers in the field will encounter negative inclines as frequently as positive ones.”

Subjects fast prior to measuring their resting metabolic rates
Another key element of the SMU lab’s Minimum Mechanics Model is the quantitative treatment of resting metabolic rate.

“To obtain true resting metabolic rate, we had subjects fast for 8 to 12 hours prior to measuring their resting metabolic rates in the early morning,” Ludlow said. “Once at the lab, they laid down for an hour while the researchers measured their resting metabolic rate.”

In separate test sessions, the subjects walked on the treadmill for dozens of trials lasting five minutes each, wearing a mouthpiece and nose clip. In the last two minutes of each trial, the researchers measured steady-state rates of oxygen uptake to determine the rate at which each subject was burning energy.

Adults in one group of 20 subjects were each measured walking without a load at speeds of 0.4 meters per second, 0.7 meters per second, 1 meter per second, 1.3 meters per second and 1.6 meters per second on six different gradients: downhill grades of minus six degrees and minus three degrees; level ground; and uphill at inclines of three degrees, six degrees and nine degrees.

Adults in a second group of 20 were each tested at speeds of 0.6 meters per second, 1 meter per second and 1.4 meters per second on the same six gradients, but they carried loads that were 18 percent of body weight, and 31 percent of body weight.

Walking metabolic rates increased in proportion to increased load
As expected, walking metabolic rates increased in direct proportion to the increase in load, and largely in accordance with support force requirements across both speed and grade, said Weyand and Ludlow.

Weyand is Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development. He also is lead scientist for the biomechanics and modeling portion of the Sub-2-Hour marathon project, an international research consortium based in the United Kingdom. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Prehistoric humans formed complex mating networks to avoid inbreeding

A new study has sequenced the genomes of individuals from an ancient burial site in Russia and discovered that they were, at most, first cousins, indicating that they had developed sexual partnerships beyond their immediate social and family group.

A new study has identified when humans transitioned from simple systems designed to minimize inbreeding to more complex ones suitable for hunter-gatherer societies.

The study findings are reported in the journal Science and demonstrate that, by at least 34,000 years ago, human hunter-gatherer groups had developed sophisticated social and mating networks that minimized inbreeding.

The study examined genetic information from the remains of modern humans who lived during the early part of the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonized western Eurasia, eventually displacing the Neanderthals who lived there before.

The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, thus avoiding inbreeding.

The research was carried out by an international team of academics, led by the University of Cambridge, U.K., and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The team included SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer, whose expertise includes the First People in the Americas.

The researchers sequenced the genomes of four individuals from Sunghir, a famous Upper Palaeolithic site in Russia, which was inhabited about 34,000 years ago.

The article, “Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers,” is published in the Oct. 5, 2017 issue of Science.

Complex mating systems may partly explain modern human survival
Among recent hunter-gatherers, the exchange of mates between groups is embedded into a cultural system of rules, ceremonies and rituals. The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the extraordinarily rich objects and jewellery found in the Sunghir burials, as well as the burials themselves, suggest that these early human societies symbolically marked major events in the life of individuals and their community in ways that foreshadow modern rituals and ceremonies — birth, marriage, death, shared ancestry, shared cultures.

The study’s authors also hint that the early development of more complex mating systems may at least partly explain why modern humans proved successful while other, rival species, such as Neanderthals, did not. More ancient genomic information from both early humans and Neanderthals is needed to test this idea.

The human fossils buried at Sunghir are a unique source of information about early modern human societies of western Eurasia. Sunghir preserves two contemporaneous burials – that of an adult man, and that of two children buried together and which includes the symbolically modified remains of another adult.

To the researchers’ surprise, however, these individuals were not closely related in genetic terms; at the very most, they were second cousins. This is true even for the two children who were buried head-to-head in the same grave.

“What this means is that people in the Upper Palaeolithic, who were living in tiny groups, understood the importance of avoiding inbreeding,” said Eske Willerslev, a professor at St John’s College and the University of Copenhagen, who was senior author on the study. “The data that we have suggest that it was being purposely avoided. This means that they must have developed a system for this purpose. If the small hunter and gathering bands were mixing at random, we would see much greater evidence of inbreeding than we have here.”

Early human societies changed ancestral mating system
The small family bands were likely interconnected within larger networks, facilitating the exchange of peoples between bands in order to maintain diversity, said Martin Sikora, a professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Most non-human primate societies are organized around single-sex kin (matrilines or patrilines), where one of the sexes remains resident and the other migrates to another group, thus minimizing inbreeding. At some point, early human societies changed the ancestral mating system into one in which a large number of the individuals that form small resident/foraging units are non-kin, where the relations among units that exchange mating partners are formalized through complex cultural systems.

In at least one Neanderthal case, an individual from the Altai Mountains who died about 50,000 years ago, inbreeding was not avoided, suggesting that the modern human cultural systems that allows to decouple the size of the resident community from the danger of inbreeding was not in place. This leads the researchers to speculate that an early, systematic approach to preventing inbreeding may have helped modern humans to thrive in relation to with other hominins.

This should be treated with caution, however.

“We don’t know why the Altai Neanderthal groups were inbred,” Sikora said. “Maybe they were isolated and that was the only option; or maybe they really did fail to develop a network of connections. We will need more genomic data of diverse Neanderthal populations to be sure.”

Upper Palaeolithic human groups sustained very small group sizes
The researchers were able to sequence the complete genomes of all four individuals found within the two graves at Sunghir. These data were compared with information on both modern and ancient human genomes from across the world.

They found that the four individuals studied were genetically no closer than second cousins, while the adult femur filled with red ochre found in the youngsters’ grave would have belonged to an individual no closer than great-great grandfather of the boys. “This goes against what many would have predicted,” Willerslev said. “I think many researchers had assumed that the people of Sunghir were very closely related, especially the two youngsters from the same grave.”

The people at Sunghir may have been part of a network similar to that of modern day hunter-gatherers, such as Aboriginal Australians and some historical Native American societies. Like their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, these societies lived in fairly small groups of some 25 people, but they were also connected to a larger community of perhaps 200 people, within which there were rules governing with whom individuals can form partnerships.

“The results from Sunghir show that Upper Palaeolithic human groups could sustain very small group sizes by embedding them in a wide social network of other groups maintained by sophisticated cultural systems,” said Marta Mirazón Lahr, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Willerslev also highlights a possible link with the unusual sophistication of the ornaments and cultural objects found at Sunghir. Such band-specific cultural expressions may have been used to signal who are “we” versus who are “they,” and thus a means of reinforcing a shared identity built on marriage exchange across foraging units. The number and sophistication of personal ornaments and artefacts found at Sunghir are exceptional even among other modern human burials, and not found among Neanderthals and other hominins.

“The ornamentation is incredible and there is no evidence of anything like that with other hominins,” Willerslev added. “When you put the evidence together, it seems to be telling us about the really big questions: what made these people who they were as a species, and who we are as a result.”

Ancient genomics throw light on aspects of social life
These results show the power of ancient genomics to throw light on aspects of social life among early humans, and pave the way for further studies to explore variation in social and demographic strategies in prehistoric socieities.

“Much of human evolution is about changes in our social and cultural behavior, and the impact this has had on our success as a species. This study takes us a step further toward pinpointing when and why the things that make humans unique evolved,” said Robert Foley, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. — University of Cambridge, SMU

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A composite window into human history

Better integration of ancient DNA studies with archaeology promises deeper insights.

DNA testing alone of ancient human remains can’t resolve questions about past societies.

It’s time for geneticists and archaeologists to collaborate more fully in the face of ever greater advancements in ancient DNA research, according to SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer and his colleagues in a recent article in the scientific journal Science.

The authors write in “A composite window into human history” that over the past decade, DNA testing of ancient human remains has become a valuable tool for studying and understanding past human population histories.

Most notably, for example, is how sequencing of ancient genomes resolved the dispute over our species’ evolutionary relationship with Neanderthals, the authors point out.

Even so, the authors caution that collaboration with archaeologists is key for scientific accuracy as well as navigating ethical implications.

Archaeologists know from the study of artifacts that it isn’t always the case that people who share material culture traits were likewise part of the same biological population.

“One can have similar traits without relatedness, and relatedness without similarity in traits,” say the authors in the article.

At the same time, where there is biological relatedness, cultural relatedness can’t be assumed, nor can language groups indicate that biological populations, material assemblages or even social units are related.

“Geneticists are often keen to use ancient DNA to understand the causes and mechanisms of demographic and cultural change,” the authors write. “But archaeologists long ago abandoned the idea that migrations or encounters between populations are a necessary or sufficient explanation of cultural change.”

The authors make the point that understanding population movements requires broad investigation of many factors, including environmental and social contexts, timing and logistics, how new resources and landscapes were managed, and the transfer of cultural knowledge.

“Hence, it requires evidence for archaeology, paleoecology and other fields to supplement and complement ancient DNA data,” the authors write. “And that entails effective collaboration, one that goes beyond archaeologists serving as passive sample providers.”

Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Co-authors on the perspective piece with Meltzer were Niels N. Johannsen, Aarhus University, Denmark; Greger Larson, University of Oxford; and Marc Vader Linden, University College London.

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$2.5 million NSF grant gives teachers a math assessment tool to help students

New assessment tool for teachers to measure math reasoning skills can drive effort to intervene early in ongoing struggles of U.S. elementary and high school students

A $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, targets the ongoing struggle of U.S. elementary and high school students with math.

When it comes to the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math, research shows that U.S. students continue at a disadvantage all the way through high school and entering college.

The four-year NSF grant to the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development is led by SMU K-12 math education experts Leanne Ketterlin Geller and Lindsey Perry. They will conduct research and develop an assessment system comprised of two universal screening tools to measure mathematical reasoning skills for grades K–2.

“This is an opportunity to develop an assessment system that can help teachers support students at the earliest, and arguably one of the most critical, phases of a child’s mathematical development,” said Ketterlin Geller, a professor in the Simmons School and principal investigator for the grant developing the “Measures of Mathematical Reasoning Skills” system.

Teachers and schools will use the assessment system to screen students and determine who is at risk for difficulty in early mathematics, including students with disabilities. The measures also will help provide important information about the intensity of support needed for a given student.

Few assessments are currently available to measure the critical math concepts taught during those early school years, Ketterlin Geller said.

“Providing teachers with data to understand how a child processes these concepts can have a long-term impact on students’ success not only in advanced math like algebra, but also success in STEM fields, such as chemistry, biology, geology and engineering,” she said.

Early math a better predictor of future learning
A 2015 Mathematics National Assessment of Education Progress report found that only 40 percent of U.S. fourth-grade students were classified as proficient or advanced, and those numbers have not improved between 2009 and 2015. In fact, the geometry scale of the fourth-grade mathematics report was significantly lower in 2015 than in 2009.

Early mathematics is a better and more powerful predictor of future learning, including reading and mathematics achievement, compared to early reading ability or other factors such as attention skills, according to one 2007 study on school readiness.

Research also has found that students’ early mathematics knowledge is a more powerful predictor of their future socioeconomic status at age 42 than their family’s socioeconomic status as children.

Early mathematics comprises numerous skills. However, number sense — the ability to work with numbers flexibly — in addition to spatial sense — the ability to understand the complexity of one’s environment — are consistently identified as two of the main components that should be emphasized in early mathematics standards and instruction, say the SMU researchers.

The Measures of Mathematical Reasoning Skills system will contain tests for both numeric relational reasoning and spatial reasoning.

Universal screening tools focused on these topics do not yet exist
“I’m passionate about this research because students who can reason spatially and relationally with numbers are better equipped for future mathematics courses, STEM degrees and STEM careers,” said Perry, whose doctoral dissertation for her Ph.D. from SMU in 2016 specifically focused on those two mathematical constructs.

“While these are very foundational and predictive constructs, these reasoning skills have typically not been emphasized at these grade levels, and universal screening tools focused on these topics do not yet exist,” said Perry, who is co-principal investigator.

“Since intervention in the early elementary grades can significantly improve mathematics achievement, it is critical that K-2 teachers have access to high-quality screening tools to help them with their intervention efforts,” she said. “We feel that the Measures of Mathematical Reasoning Skills system can really make a difference for K-2 teachers as they prepare the next generation of STEM leaders.”

The four-year project, Measuring Early Mathematical Reasoning Skills: Developing Tests of Numeric Relational Reasoning and Spatial Reasoning, started Sept. 15, 2017. It employs an iterative research design for developing formative assessments, a process that Ketterlin Geller has devoted much of her 20-year career to.

Ketterlin Geller is Texas Instruments Endowed Chair in Education and director of Research in Mathematics Education in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development. She is also a Fellow with the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education in the Lyle School of Engineering.

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Sapiens: Why the Famous Folsom Point Isn’t a Smoking Gun

A Folsom spear point was discovered between the ribs of an extinct species of bison — but was it really proof that humans had killed the animal?

The research into the arrival of how and when people first arrived in North America by noted SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer was covered in the online anthropology magazine Sapiens in a column by Stephen E. Nash, science historian and archaeologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The article, Why the Famous Folsom Point Isn’t a Smoking Gun, published Aug. 29, 2017.

Meltzer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, conducts original research into the origins, antiquity and adaptations of the first Americans.

Paleoindians colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. Meltzer focuses on how those hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.

Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Stephen E. Nash
Sapiens

Remember the iconic Folsom point? The one that I said, in my last post, changed the future of archaeology?

To recap: On August 29, 1927, paleontologists from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in 2000) discovered a stone projectile point embedded in the ribs of an extinct form of bison.

After making that discovery in the field, the researchers left the point sitting where it was and immediately sent out a call to their colleagues to come to northeastern New Mexico to see it for themselves. Within two weeks a number of well-known scientists had visited the site, seen the point in position, and established a scientific consensus: Native Americans lived and hunted in North America during the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, far earlier than they were previously thought to be here.

It turns out, though, that the story at the Folsom Site was more complicated than researchers initially believed. So what has changed since 1927? The latest part of the story began 20 years ago.

In 1997, David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who studies “Paleoindians,” the earliest inhabitants of North America, began a three-year project at the Folsom Site to reassess and re-excavate the site using modern tools and techniques—which were not available in the 1920s. His goal was to better understand how, and under what conditions, the Folsom Site formed. Meltzer and his team used now-standard excavation-control techniques to record their findings in three-dimensional space and to determine if any unexcavated areas of the site could be found. In so doing, they hoped to find evidence of the Paleoindian campsite that might have been associated with the main bison-kill and butchering site.

As a result of Meltzer’s research, we now know that the bison-kill event occurred in the fall. How do we know? Bison reproduce, give birth, and grow up on a reasonably predictable annual cycle. Meltzer and his colleagues analyzed dental eruption patterns on excavated bison teeth to determine the season of the kill.

The archaeologists also determined that Folsom hunters were experts at their job, having systematically killed and butchered at least 32 bison at the site.

Read the full story.

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Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Paige Ware, SMU Simmons School

In this week’s Q&A, The Texas Tribune interviews Paige Ware, who chairs the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University.

Texas Tribune reporter Cassandra Pollock interviewed SMU education expert Paige Ware in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development for a Q&A about preparing the teachers who teach English language learners by instructing them on-site at their schools and helping them work with families in community centers.

Ware’s research focuses both on the use of multimedia technologies for fostering language and literacy growth among adolescents, as well as on the use of Internet-based communication for promoting intercultural awareness through international and domestic online language and culture partnerships.

Her research has been funded by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, by the International Research Foundation for English Language Education, and by the Ford Scholars program at SMU.

Ware was the principal investigator of a Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition professional development grant supporting secondary school educators in obtaining their ESL supplemental certification.

She is co-author of a technology standards book for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and has written or co-written dozens of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is a frequent speaker on technology as an acquisition tool for language and culture and on writing development in adolescent learners.

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Paige Ware,” published Aug. 31, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Cassandra Pollock
Texas Tribune

Paige Ware chairs the Department of Teaching and Learning at Southern Methodist University’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development. She recently received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to prepare ELL (English language learners) teachers by instructing them on-site at their schools and helping them work with families in community centers.

Tasbo+Edu: Can you expand on the U.S. Department of Education grant you recently received?

Paige Ware: Yes — I co-wrote it with two of my colleagues. The Department of Education can offer these grants every five years; traditionally, they’re called professional development grants, and it’s basically money that flows into tuition to provide teacher training. However, this particular grant required an embedded strong research design into the teacher training components. That’s never been the case with these grants — it’s been exclusively just teacher training.

There were over 300 applications, and only 55 were funded. For our particular grant, we think we got funded for two reasons. First, we partnered really well with Dallas Independent School District. There’s a real desire right now for higher education and teacher training programs to do more partnering and work with districts to be more purposeful about the kind of professional development teachers need. We also partnered with the community; there’s a place in Dallas called the School Zone, which is a consortium of nonprofit groups that are there to help impact West Dallas.

The second reason we think we got the grant is our teachers will be deeply embedded in these community settings. They’ll be learning not just how to teach English better to those learners, but also learning the context. There are also multiple opportunities to work with parents.

Tasbo+Edu: The question your team is trying to tackle is whether it makes a difference for teachers to be practicing in community settings. How are you planning to move forward on it?

Ware: The question came about because most of the time in higher ed for master-level courses, we deliver instruction on university campuses; it’s divorced from actual practice in the field. Or we deliver our instruction on university campuses and then assign teachers to work on their own with English learners. There’s not engagement in the community at the graduate level. What do teachers learn differently when they’re not isolated, but when they’re actually out there in the field? We’re interested in knowing what advantages are there, and what you gain by placing teachers in the community.

There are six reasons why we think it will be advantageous for teaching in the community. First, professional development typically focuses on instruction. Second, our teachers will have more opportunities to engage with families, which isn’t always possible in a school setting. A third reason is our teachers will be able to learn from one another. Fourth, they’ll get to know the children really well because they’re only working with two children for an entire academic year. Fifth, there are a lot of opportunities for feedback, since our instructors will be with teachers in the field, giving them feedback on a weekly basis. Finally, we think this approach will help cultivate a mindset such that when teachers think about English learners, they’re seeing the education of new immigrants as a larger web of bringing people into the community.

Read the full story.

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Class of 2017: SMU professor named outstanding teacher by UT Regents

Alisa Winkler is an SMU adjunct faculty member and research assistant professor of paleontology in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The University of Texas System has recognized SMU Research Assistant Professor Alisa J. Winkler for extraordinary classroom performance and innovation in undergraduate instruction.

Winkler, who is an SMU adjunct faculty member in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, was named to the Class of 2017 for the Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Awards of The University of Texas. It is the Board of Regents’ highest honor. It recognizes faculty for the highest quality of instruction in the classroom, laboratory, field and online.

Winkler earned her Ph.D. in geology from SMU in 1990, specializing in mammalian vertebrate paleontology.

“To be honest, when I was young I never thought about being a teacher. Later in life it just came with the territory of being in academia,” Winkler said. “What I discovered as a teacher, however, is how much I enjoy, learn from, and am inspired by my students. Their passion for knowledge is both a challenge and a stimulus for me to continue learning myself.”

She is an associate professor at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Cell Biology, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

In addition to her teaching commitments and some contributions to the higher education literature, Winkler maintains an active research program in vertebrate paleontology as a research professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

In recent work, she analyzed research literature for “Fossil Rodents of Africa,” the first comprehensive summary and distribution analysis of Africa’s fossil rodents since 1978, according to SMU professor of geological sciences and vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs, a world-renowned dinosaur expert and president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

“Alisa has been recognized for her teaching skills at U.T. Southwestern, but she is also globally recognized for her research on East African fossil mammals, which constrains the age and paleo-environments of human evolution,” Jacobs said. “Working from her research office in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, and in the field in Kenya and Uganda, she is a great asset to our students and adds depth to our program.”

Winkler received a B.A. in Biology from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 1978. She then earned an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982.

She has been teaching anatomy at U.T. Southwestern since 1990. Winkler is currently co-director of the Human Structure course (anatomy, embryology and radiology) for first year medical students, and director of the Anatomy course for health professions students. Both courses focus on a cadaver-based dissection laboratory, and require extensive administrative, organizational and teaching commitments.

Winkler is the recipient of numerous teaching awards from the medical students, including seven pre-clinical teaching awards and a Katherine Howe Muntz Award for Teaching in Anatomy (2010). The Human Structure course was awarded the best course award for first year courses in 2016. She was awarded an outstanding educator award in health care sciences from the health professions students in 2014.

The Regent’s Outstanding Teacher Award was established in 2008 and is offered annually in recognition of faculty members at the The University of Texas System’s eight academic and six health institutions. With a monetary award of $25,000, the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards are among the largest and most competitive in the nation for rewarding outstanding faculty performance.

Faculty members undergo a series of rigorous evaluations by students, peer faculty and external reviewers. The review panels consider a range of activities and criteria in their evaluations of a candidate’s teaching performance, including classroom expertise, curricula quality, innovative course development and student learning outcomes.

Winkler is one of 56 faculty members from across U.T.’s 14 academic and health institutions honored with the award by the Regents Aug. 23 in Austin. — SMU, U.T. System

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Sapiens: Can Medical Anthropology Solve the Diabetes Dilemma?

As the number of sufferers continues to rise, some researchers are moving in new directions to figure out how culture and lifestyle shape disease outcomes.

Sapiens reporter Kate Ruder covered the research of SMU anthropologist Carolyn Smith-Morris, who has studied diabetes among Arizona’s Pima Indians for more than 15 years.

Smith-Morris wrote about what she learned from her research in her 2006 book, “Diabetes Among the Pima: Stories of Survival.”

The Pima have the highest prevalence of diabetes ever recorded, although the disease is alarmingly on the increase throughout the United States. In an effort to understand the rise of the disease, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) from 1965 to 2007 focused on the Pima to carry out the largest continuous study of diabetes in Native Americans. Researchers examined the environmental and genetic triggers of the disorder, management of the disease, and the treatment of thousands of Pimas.

Smith-Morris is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the SMU Anthropology Department in Dedman College. Her research addresses chronic disease, particularly diabetes, through ethnographic and mixed methodologies. She has conducted ethnographic research among the Gila River (Akimel O’odham) Indian Community of Southern Arizona, Mexicans and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. and veterans with spinal cord injuries.

The Sapiens article, “Can Medical Anthropology Solve the Diabetes Dilemma?” published Aug. 22, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Kate Ruder
Sapiens

Mary (a pseudonym) was 18 years old and halfway through her second pregnancy when anthropologist Carolyn Smith-Morris met her 10 years ago. Mary, a Pima Indian, was living with her boyfriend, brother, parents, and 9-month-old baby in southern Arizona. She had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes during both of her pregnancies, but she didn’t consider herself diabetic because her diabetes had gone away after her first birth. Perhaps her diagnosis was even a mistake, she felt. Mary often missed her prenatal appointments, because she didn’t have a ride to the hospital from her remote home on the reservation. She considered diabetes testing a “personal thing,” so she didn’t discuss it with her family.

As Smith-Morris’ research revealed, Mary’s story was not unique among Pima women. Many had diabetes, but they didn’t understand the risks. These women’s narratives have helped to explain, in part, why diabetes has been so prevalent in this corner of the world. An astonishing half of all adult Pimas have diabetes.

Medical anthropologists like Smith-Morris are helping the biomedical community untangle the social roots of diabetes and understand how and why the disease is exploding in the United States. Smith-Morris, based out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been working on this cause for over 15 years—from a decade spent among the Pimas, to a new study sponsored by Google aiming to prevent diabetes-related blindness. Anthropology, she says, provides the most holistic perspective of this complex problem: “Anthropology seems to me the only discipline that allows you to look both closely at disease … and from the bird’s eye perspective.”

More than 30 million people in the United States are estimated to have diabetes, and it’s on the rise. If trends continue, 1 out of every 3 American adults could have diabetes by 2050, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The condition involves insulin, a hormone that regulates the way the body uses food for energy. In type 1 diabetes, the body stops making insulin entirely; those affected need daily insulin injections to survive. In type 2 diabetes, which accounts for the vast majority of cases, change is more gradual.The body slowly makes less insulin and becomes less sensitive to it over the years. Gestational diabetes, which strikes during pregnancy, can give mothers a dangerous condition called preeclampsia, which is related to high blood pressure and can harm both mothers and babies. Women with gestational diabetes are more than seven times likelier to later develop type 2 diabetes than women who do not have the condition in pregnancy, and their children are at higher risk of obesity and diabetes. If left untreated, diabetes can cause heart disease, kidney failure, foot problems that can lead to amputation, and blindness.

The preventative measures for type 2 and gestational diabetes are seemingly straightforward: eat healthy foods, lose weight, and exercise. Treatment for both can include taking medications. Yet prevention, lifestyle, and treatment cannot entirely solve the problem; family history, ethnicity, and other factors play a critical role in a person’s susceptibility to type 2 and gestational diabetes. Both forms of diabetes continue to plague Americans, particularly certain groups, including Native Americans. “My interest in diabetes grew out of an interest in Indigenous groups,” says Smith-Morris. “I took on diabetes because it was important to them.”

From 1965 to 2007, the Pimas of Arizona were the focus of the largest continuous study of diabetes in Native Americans. Conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), it examined the environmental and genetic triggers of the disorder, management of the disease, and the treatment of thousands of Pimas. It also documented that they had the highest prevalence of diabetes ever recorded. The pivotal work told researchers much of what they know about diabetes today, including that obesity is a significant risk factor, and that a mother’s diabetes during pregnancy can pass risk along to her children.

The political and economic contributors to the Pima people’s health problems have long been well-known: Their traditional farming practices collapsed during the late 1800s and early 1900s when non-Native settlers upstream diverted essential water resources, contributing to poverty, sedentariness, and a lack of fresh food. Yet Smith-Morris felt something integral was missing from this picture: the Pimas’ stories.

Read the full story.

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A Total Eclipse of the First Day of School

Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing

Thousands of students, faculty and townspeople showed up to campus Monday, Aug. 21 to observe the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and the SMU Department of Physics.

The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.

The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.

“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”

Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.

Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.

“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.

Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.

Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.

Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.

“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”

Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.

Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.

“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.

Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.

“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.

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Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Dr. Diego Román, Simmons School

In this week’s Q&A, The Texas Tribune interviews Diego Román, assistant professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University.

Texas Tribune reporter Cassandra Pollock interviewed SMU education expert Diego Román in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development for a Q&A about how middle school science textbooks frame climate change as an opinion rather than scientific fact.

Román is co-author of a 2015 study of California 6th grade science textbooks and how they present global warming.

Studies estimate that only 3 percent of scientists who are experts in climate analysis disagree about the role of humans in the causes of climate change. And the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the evidence of 600 climate researchers in 32 countries reporting changes to Earth’s atmosphere, ice and seas — in 2013 stated “human influence on the climate system is clear.”

Yet only 54 percent of American teens believe climate change is happening, 43 percent don’t believe it’s caused by humans, and 57 percent aren’t concerned about it.

The new study measured how four sixth-grade science textbooks adopted for use in California frame the subject of global warming. Sixth grade is the first time California state standards indicate students will encounter climate change in their formal science curriculum.

“We found that climate change is presented as a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions,” said Román, an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. “Climate skeptics and climate deniers are given equal time and treated with equal weight as scientists and scientific facts — even though scientists who refute global warming total a miniscule number.”

The findings were reported in October 2015 at the 11th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA), held in Helsinki, Finland.

The findings were also published in the Environmental Education Research journal in the article, “Textbooks of doubt: Using systemic functional analysis to explore the framing of climate change in middle-school science textbooks.”

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Diego Román,” published Aug. 17, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Cassandra Pollock
Texas Tribune

With each issue, Tasbo+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to health care. Here is this week’s subject:

Diego Román is an assistant professor in teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University. He has recently researched how climate change is framed for middle school students in science textbooks.

Tasbo+Edu: Can you briefly explain your research findings?

Dr. Diego Román: The big picture of my research is that I look at the linguistic and social factors that impact language use in the science-education context and language development for English learners who are attending school in the U.S.

I am an applied linguist, and one of my research topics was the framing of climate change in middle school textbooks. In terms of the science textbooks and what we found in that specific study, the ones we investigated don’t reflect the way scientists discuss climate change in reports. While science reports resort to the certainty that climate change is happening, the textbooks that we looked at were very uncertain about defining that issue. We looked into seeing why that would be the case, particularly at how science is seen as very specific, objective and certain, but when we discuss climate change, we use a lot of qualifiers — “would,” “could” and “might.”

We’re arguing that this places the weight on the reader to decipher what that means. “Not all” could mean 90 percent, 55 percent or 10 percent, depending on who you’re talking to. So while textbooks are required to address certain topics — such as climate change — they’re not using specific language to help students and teachers have a better understanding and discussion around the issue.

I also look at how we use language — and I do that by using a framework called systemic functional linguistics. It argues that language is caused by the context of use, so the way we talk about science and the way we frame science topics when discussing them may be different than social studies. To explain a different type of knowledge, we connect ideas differently. For example, we emphasize the idea versus the people in science, but in social studies, we look at the people. To do that, we use language. So I look at how language is used in those purposes to convey knowledge and be effective. I try to understand the perspectives of the authors or the people. That’s a big picture description of my research.

Tasbo+Edu: What are the biggest challenges you see moving forward to try to modify the textbook system?

Román: It seems to be how research can impact, in this case, textbook development, and how to find things that applied linguists are doing when it relates to how language is used and if there’s a way to convey scientific knowledge — from a contextual perspective, but also from a linguistics perspective.

Read the full story.

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How Stuff Works: Scientists Discover Something Mind-blowing About How Usain Bolt Runs

Journalist Patrick J. Kiger with the news site How Stuff Works covered the research of SMU biomechanics expert Peter Weyand and his colleagues Andrew Udofa and Laurence Ryan for a story about Usain Bolt’s asymmetrical running gait.

The article, “Scientists Discover Something Mind-blowing About How Usain Bolt Runs,” published Aug. 2, 2017.

The researchers in the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory reported in June that world champion sprinter Usain Bolt may have an asymmetrical running gait. While not noticeable to the naked eye, Bolt’s potential asymmetry emerged after the researchers dissected race video to assess his pattern of ground-force application — literally how hard and fast each foot hits the ground. To do so they measured the “impulse” for each foot.

Biomechanics researcher Udofa presented the findings at the 35th International Conference on Biomechanics in Sport in Cologne, Germany. His presentation, “Ground Reaction Forces During Competitive Track Events: A Motion Based Assessment Method,” was delivered June 18.

The analysis thus far suggests that Bolt’s mechanics may vary between his left leg to his right. The existence of an unexpected and potentially significant asymmetry in the fastest human runner ever would help scientists better understand the basis of maximal running speeds. Running experts generally assume asymmetry impairs performance and slows runners down.

Udofa has said the observations raise the immediate scientific question of whether a lack of symmetry represents a personal mechanical optimization that makes Bolt the fastest sprinter ever or exists for reasons yet to be identified.

Weyand, who leads the lab and its researchers, he is an expert on human locomotion and the mechanics of running. He is Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology & Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, is director of the Locomotor Lab.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Patrick J. Kiger
How Stuff Works

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is the world record-holder in both the 100- and 200-meter, and winner of those events in the last three Summer Olympics. Bolt can hit a top speed of around 27 mph (43.5 kph), and has clearly established himself as the greatest sprinter of all time. But there’s something curious about his legs, and the way he uses them.

As the athlete prepares to run in his final world championship meet in London’s 2017 World Athletics Championships, taking place Aug. 4-13 and less than three weeks before Bolt’s 31st birthday, scientists are still trying to figure out just how the fastest human on the planet manages to achieve such incredible speed. Researchers at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Locomotor Performance Laboratory don’t quite have the answer yet — but they’ve made a surprising discovery.

The researchers analyzed video footage of Bolt and other sprinters from the 2011 Diamond League race at the World Athletics Championships in Monaco. They also used a “two mass model” analysis tool they developed, which allows them to study the physical forces that a runner creates — without actually bringing Bolt into a lab and putting him on a treadmill. They found that Bolt had an uneven, assymetrical stride, which is something that scientists might have expected to slow him down.

When he runs, Bolt’s right leg strikes the ground with 13 percent more peak force than does his left leg, and with each stride, his left leg stays in contact with the track about 14 percent longer than the right. The researchers findings have been published in a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Bolt’s asymmetrical stride is probably due to his anatomy. As he recounted in his autobiography “The Fastest Man Alive: The True Story of Usain Bolt,” Bolt discovered as an adult that he has scoliosis, a condition in which his spine curves slightly to the left, which has forced his hips out of alignment so that his right leg is a half-inch (1.2 centimeters) shorter than the left. Bolt has written that he feels awkward standing still, and leans to the right because it feels uncomfortable to stand and place pressure on his left leg. Sitting in the same position for too long gives him backaches.

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People ForWords team named semifinalist in national XPrize competition

SMU’s puzzle-solving smartphone app selected as one of eight to move to next round in $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE competition

For Corey Clark, deputy director for research in the SMU Guildhall game development program, adult literacy became a personal challenge the moment he learned of its scope. “There are about 600,000 adults in Dallas who have less than a third-grade reading level,” he says. “If we could help 10 percent of those people, that’s 60,000 people who could learn to read proficiently. That makes a difference in a lot of people’s lives.”

This challenge is at the heart of a partnership between Southern Methodist University and Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT), and their work has been recognized with a semifinalist position in the $7 million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by Dollar General Literacy Foundation competition.

The team, People ForWords, includes collaborators from SMU Guildhall, SMU Simmons School of Education and Human Development, and LIFT. People ForWords is one of eight teams chosen for the semifinals out of 109 entrants, and the only Texas team to make the cut.

In this global competition, teams develop mobile applications, compatible with smart phone devices, that have the potential to increase literacy skills among adult learners. The solutions discovered through the applications will help reveal and overcome roadblocks in improving adult literacy through providing access, retention, and a scalable product to the public.

As development lead of People ForWords, Clark recruited a cadre of Guildhall-trained artists, programmers and producers via the program’s alumni career portal. The development team came together in March 2016. By October, they had created a beta version of Codex: The Lost Words of Atlantis.

As participants in a globe-trotting adventure, English-language learners play as enterprising archaeologists and work to decipher the forgotten language of a lost civilization. As the players solve the puzzles of the Atlantean runes, audible prompts for each letter and sound help them learn the look and feel of written English<, developing and strengthening their own reading skills. Developed for English- and Spanish-speaking adults, but safe for all ages, the game also provides history lessons as it visits real locations around the world. Needs of adult literacy learners very different from other gamers
Codex: The Lost Words of Atlantis supports English literacy learners in both English and Spanish. Egypt is the first destination in a planned five-region journey across the globe; in future versions, People ForWords plans to develop additional regions with new gameplay, new characters, and new literacy skills.

An important step in the game design process came with playtesting at LIFT Academy and Dallas’ Jubilee Park community center — where the designers could reach their game’s target audience. They quickly figured out that the needs of adult literacy learners were very different from those of other gamers.

“This was the first time some participants had used a desktop computer,” Clark says. “How do you make a game that’s fun and interactive, yet simple and intuitive enough to be a first experience with technology?”

To find out, Clark collected and analyzed data on game elements such as how long players stuck with a task, how many times they repeated moves, how quickly they progressed, and whether performing the game actions translated into the desired learning outcomes. “First, games have to be fun,” he says. “From story to characters, you want to engage people enough to play over and over again. And this happens to be the exact same process that reinforces learning.”

And as Clark points out, at its core, every game is about learning. “Whether it’s a map, a system or a skill, you learn something new with every move you make,” he says. “And games are safe environments to do that, because they allow you to fail in ways that aren’t overwhelming. They let you keep trying until you succeed.”

Illiteracy plays a factor in poverty
In North Texas, the XPRIZE is more than a competition. According to LIFT, one in five adults in North Texas cannot read, a key factor in poverty. Dallas has the fourth highest concentration of poverty in the nation, with a 41 percent increase from 2000 to 2014.

“This is a dedicated effort by our team to tackle the growing issue of low literacy and poverty in our communities,” according to a People ForWords statement. “Each organization involved in the collaboration brings their expertise to the competition: knowledge in education, adult literacy, and game development. Together these skills have allowed our team to build a functional, fun application that helps improve adult literacy through sharpening reading and writing skills.”

“The faculty at SMU Guildhall bridge the gap between serious academic research and commercial video games,” says Guildhall Director Gary Brubaker. “This environment has allowed our research and development team to yield a product for the XPRIZE adult literacy competition that brings together the creative, entertaining nature of games with the impactful literacy lessons being taught.”

Research plays a large role at SMU Guildhall. Not only are large-scale research endeavors such as the XPRIZE taking place year-round, but research is also incorporated into the curriculum. Independent studies such as student theses explore a vast range of interests within video game development and its global implications and uses. Both current students and alumni are able to put their analytical and research skills to good use by participating as funded research assistants on a myriad of Guildhall’s “games for good” projects.

“Our students greatly benefit from breaking ground with new gaming technologies and expanding their usage into other fields,” said Elizabeth Stringer, Deputy Director of Academics at SMU Guildhall. “Many of our graduates continue to use their game development skills to aid society and further causes for which they are passionate.”

Testing of the eight semifinalists’ literacy software begins in mid-July with 12,000 adults who read English at a third grade level or lower. Selection of up to five finalists will depend on results of post-game testing to evaluate literacy gains among test subjects. Finalists will be named in May 2018, and the winner will be selected in 2019. — Kathleen Tibbetts, SMU

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SMU and LIFT team named one of eight semifinalists for $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPrize

SMU’s “Codex: Lost Words of Atlantis” adult literacy video game is puzzle-solving smartphone game app to help adults develop literacy skills

The SMU and Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT) team was named today one of eight semifinalists in the $7 million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by Dollar General Literacy Foundation.

The XPRIZE is a global competition that challenges teams to develop mobile applications designed to increase literacy skills in adult learners.

SMU participants include education experts from SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development, along with video game developers from SMU Guildhall — a graduate school video game development program. They are working with literacy experts from LIFT to design an engaging, puzzle-solving smartphone app to help adults develop literacy skills. Students from LIFT help test the game.

The SMU and LIFT team, People ForWords, is one of 109 teams who entered the competition in 2016. The team developed “Codex: Lost Words of Atlantis.”

In the game, players become archeologists hunting for relics from the imagined once-great civilization of Atlantis. By deciphering the forgotten language of Atlantis, players develop and strengthen their own reading skills. The game targets English- and Spanish-speaking adults.

Students at LIFT, a North Texas nonprofit adult literacy provider, have tested and provided key insights for the game during its development. According to LIFT, one in five adults in North Texas cannot read, a key factor in poverty. Dallas has the fourth highest concentration of poverty in the nation, with a 41 percent increase from 2000 to 2014. LIFT is one of the largest and most widely respected adult basic education programs in Texas and offers adult basic literacy, GED preparation and English as a Second Language programs with the goal of workforce empowerment.

Testing of the eight semi-finalists’ literacy software begins in mid-July with 12,000 adults who read English at a third grade level or lower. Selection of up to five finalists will depend on results of post-game testing to evaluate literacy gains among test subjects. Finalists will be named in May of 2018 and the winner will be named in 2019. — Nancy George, SMU

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Cosmos: Painting with light in three dimensions

A new technique uses photoswitch molecules to create three-dimensional images from pure light.

Australia’s quarterly science magazine Cosmos covered the research of SMU organic chemist Alex Lippert, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Lippert’s team develops synthetic organic compounds that glow in reaction to certain conditions. He led his lab in developing a new technology that uses photoswitch molecules to craft 3-D light structures — not holograms — that are viewable from 360 degrees. The economical method for shaping light into an infinite number of volumetric objects would be useful in a variety of fields, from biomedical imaging, education and engineering, to TV, movies, video games and more.

For biomedical imaging, Lippert says the nearest-term application of the technique might be in high-volume pre-clinical animal imaging, but eventually the technique could be applied to provide low-cost internal imaging in the developing world, or less costly imaging in the developed world.

Cosmos reporter Joel F. Hooper wrote about the new technology in “Painting with light in three dimensions,” which published online July 14, 2017.

Lippert’s lab includes four doctoral students and five undergraduates who assist in his research. He recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, expected to total $611,000 over five years, to fund his research into alternative internal imaging techniques.

NSF Career Awards are given to tenure-track faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research in American colleges and universities.

Lippert joined SMU in 2012. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bachelor of Science at the California Institute of Technology.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Joel F. Hooper
Cosmos

Those of us who grew up watching science fiction movies and TV shows imagined our futures to be filled with marvellous gadgets, but we’ve sometimes been disappointed when science fails to deliver. We can’t take a weekend trip to Mars yet, and we’re still waiting for hoverboards that actually hover.

But in the case of 3-D image projection, the technology used by R2D2 in Star Wars is making its way into reality. Using advances in fluorescent molecules that can be switched on by UV light, scientists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas have created a method for producing images and animations by structuring light in 3-dimentions.

The technology uses a solution of fluorescent molecules called rhodamines, which have the potential to emit visible light when they are excited by a light beam of the right wavelength. But these molecules are usually in an inactive state, and must be “switched on” by UV light before they can become emitters. When a UV light or visible light beam alone shines through the solution, the rhodamines to not emit light. But where these two beams intersect, the emitting molecules are both switched on and excited, and can produce a small glowing 3D pixel, known as a voxel.

When a number of voxels are produced at once, using two projectors positioned at 90° to a flask containing a solution of the fluorescent molecules, a 3D image is produced.

“Our idea was to use chemistry and special photoswitch molecules to make a 3D display that delivers a 360-degree view,” says Alexander Lippert, lead author of the study. “It’s not a hologram, it’s really three-dimensionally structured light.”

Read the full story.

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Better than Star Wars: Chemistry discovery yields 3-D table-top objects crafted from light

Photoswitch chemistry allows construction of light shapes into structures that have volume and are viewable from 360 degrees, making them useful for biomedical imaging, teaching, engineering, TV, movies, video games and more

A scientist’s dream of 3-D projections like those he saw years ago in a Star Wars movie has led to new technology for making animated 3-D table-top objects by structuring light.

The new technology uses photoswitch molecules to bring to life 3-D light structures that are viewable from 360 degrees, says chemist Alexander Lippert, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who led the research.

The economical method for shaping light into an infinite number of volumetric objects would be useful in a variety of fields, from biomedical imaging, education and engineering, to TV, movies, video games and more.

“Our idea was to use chemistry and special photoswitch molecules to make a 3-D display that delivers a 360-degree view,” said Lippert, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Chemistry. “It’s not a hologram, it’s really three-dimensionally structured light.”

Key to the technology is a molecule that switches between non-fluorescent and fluorescent in reaction to the presence or absence of ultraviolet light.

The new technology is not a hologram, and differs from 3-D movies or 3-D computer design. Those are flat displays that use binocular disparity or linear perspective to make objects appear three-dimensional when in fact they only have height and width and lack a true volume profile.

“When you see a 3-D movie, for example, it’s tricking your brain to see 3-D by presenting two different images to each eye,” Lippert said. “Our display is not tricking your brain — we’ve used chemistry to structure light in three actual dimensions, so no tricks, just a real three-dimensional light structure. We call it a 3-D digital light photoactivatable dye display, or 3-D Light Pad for short, and it’s much more like what we see in real life.”

At the heart of the SMU 3-D Light Pad technology is a “photoswitch” molecule, which can switch from colorless to fluorescent when shined with a beam of ultraviolet light.

The researchers discovered a chemical innovation for tuning the photoswitch molecule’s rate of thermal fading — its on-off switch — by adding to it the chemical amine base triethylamine.

Now the sky is the limit for the new SMU 3-D Light Pad technology, given the many possible uses, said Lippert, an expert in fluorescence and chemiluminescence — using chemistry to explore the interaction between light and matter.

For example, conference calls could feel more like face-to-face meetings with volumetric 3-D images projected onto chairs. Construction and manufacturing projects could benefit from rendering them first in 3-D to observe and discuss real-time spatial information. For the military, uses could include tactical 3-D replications of battlefields on land, in the air, under water or even in space.

Volumetric 3-D could also benefit the medical field.

“With real 3-D results of an MRI, radiologists could more readily recognize abnormalities such as cancer,” Lippert said. “I think it would have a significant impact on human health because an actual 3-D image can deliver more information.”

Unlike 3-D printing, volumetric 3-D structured light is easily animated and altered to accommodate a change in design. Also, multiple people can simultaneously view various sides of volumetric display, conceivably making amusement parks, advertising, 3-D movies and 3-D games more lifelike, visually compelling and entertaining.

Lippert and his team in The Lippert Research Group report on the new technology and the discovery that made it possible in the article “A volumetric three-dimensional digital light photoactivatable dye display,” published in the journal Nature Communications.

Some of the 3-D images generated with the new technology are viewable in this video.

Co-authors are Shreya K. Patel, lead author, and Jian Cao, both students in the SMU Department of Chemistry.

Genesis of an idea — cinematic inspiration
The idea to shape light into volumetric animated 3-D objects came from Lippert’s childhood fascination with the movie “Star Wars.” Specifically he was inspired when R2-D2 projects a hologram of Princess Leia. Lippert’s interest continued with the holodeck in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

“As a kid I kept trying to think of a way to invent this,” Lippert said. “Then once I got a background in chemistry molecules that interact with light, and an understanding of photoswitches, it finally dawned on me that I could take two beams of light and use chemistry to manipulate the emission of light.”

Key to the new technology was discovering how to turn the chemical photoswitch off and on instantly, and generating light emissions from the intersection of two different light beams in a solution of the photoactivatable dye, he said.

SMU graduate student in chemistry Jian Cao hypothesized the activated photoswitch would turn off quickly by adding the base. He was right.

“The chemical innovation was our discovery that by adding one drop of triethylamine, we could tune the rate of thermal fading so that it instantly goes from a pink solution to a clear solution,” Lippert said. “Without a base, the activation with UV light takes minutes to hours to fade back and turn off, which is a problem if you’re trying to make an image. We wanted the rate of reaction with UV light to be very fast, making it switch on. We also wanted the off-rate to be very fast so the image doesn’t bleed.”

SMU 3-D Light Pad
In choosing among various photoswitch dyes, the researchers settled on N-phenyl spirolactam rhodamines. That particular class of rhodamine dyes was first described in the late 1970s and made use of by Stanford University’s Nobel prize-winning W.E. Moerner.

The dye absorbs light within the visible region, making it appropriate to fluoresce light. Shining it with UV radiation, specifically, triggers a photochemical reaction and forces it to open up and become fluorescent.

Turning off the UV light beam shuts down fluorescence, diminishes light scattering, and makes the reaction reversible — ideal for creating an animated 3-D image that turns on and off.

“Adding triethylamine to switch it off and on quickly was a key chemical discovery that we made,” Lippert said.

To produce a viewable image they still needed a setup to structure the light.

Structuring light in a table-top display
The researchers started with a custom-built, table-top, quartz glass imaging chamber 50 millimeters by 50 millimeters by 50 millimeters to house the photoswitch and to capture light.

Inside they deployed a liquid solvent, dichloromethane, as the matrix in which to dissolve the N-phenyl spirolactam rhodamine, the solid, white crystalline photoswitch dye.

Next they projected patterns into the chamber to structure light in two dimensions. They used an off-the-shelf Digital Light Processing (DLP) projector purchased at Best Buy for beaming visible light.

The DLP projector, which reflects visible light via an array of microscopically tiny mirrors on a semiconductor chip, projected a beam of green light in the shape of a square. For UV light, the researchers shined a series of UV light bars from a specially made 385-nanometer Light-Emitting Diode projector from the opposite side.

Where the light intersected and mixed in the chamber, there was displayed a pattern of two-dimensional squares stacked across the chamber. Optimized filter sets eliminated blue background light and allowed only red light to pass.

To get a static 3-D image, they patterned the light in both directions, with a triangle from the UV and a green triangle from the visible, yielding a pyramid at the intersection, Lippert said.

From there, one of the first animated 3-D images the researchers created was the SMU mascot, Peruna, a racing mustang.

“For Peruna — real-time 3-D animation — SMU undergraduate student Shreya Patel found a way to beam a UV light bar and keep it steady, then project with the green light a movie of the mustang running,” Lippert said.

So long Renaissance
Today’s 3-D images date to the Italian Renaissance and its leading architect and engineer.

“Brunelleschi during his work on the Baptistery of St. John was the first to use the mathematical representation of linear perspective that we now call 3-D. This is how artists used visual tricks to make a 2-D picture look 3-D,” Lippert said. “Parallel lines converge at a vanishing point and give a strong sense of 3-D. It’s a useful trick but it’s striking we’re still using a 500-year-old technique to display 3-D information.”

The SMU 3-D Light Pad technology, patented in 2016, has a number of advantages over contemporary attempts by others to create a volumetric display but that haven’t emerged as commercially viable.

Some of those have been bulky or difficult to align, while others use expensive rare earth metals, or rely on high-powered lasers that are both expensive and somewhat dangerous.

The SMU 3-D Light Pad uses lower light powers, which are not only cheaper but safer. The matrix for the display is also economical, and there are no moving parts to fabricate, maintain or break down.

Lippert and his team fabricated the SMU 3-D Light Pad for under $5,000 through a grant from the SMU University Research Council.

“For a really modest investment we’ve done something that can compete with more expensive $100,000 systems,” Lippert said. “We think we can optimize this and get it down to a couple thousand dollars or even lower.”

Next Gen: SMU 3-D Light Pad 2.0
The resolution quality of a 2-D digital photograph is stated in pixels. The more pixels, the sharper and higher-quality the image. Similarly, 3-D objects are measured in voxels — a pixel but with volume. The current 3-D Light Pad can generate more than 183,000 voxels, and simply scaling the volume size should increase the number of voxels into the millions – equal to the number of mirrors in the DLP micromirror arrays.

For their display, the SMU researchers wanted the highest resolution possible, measured in terms of the minimum spacing between any two of the bars. They achieved 200 microns, which compares favorably to 100 microns for a standard TV display or 200 microns for a projector.

The goal now is to move away from a liquid vat of solvent for the display to a solid cube table display. Optical polymer, for example, would weigh about the same as a TV set. Lippert also toys with the idea of an aerosol display.

The researchers hope to expand from a monochrome red image to true color, based on mixing red, green and blue light. They are working to optimize the optics, graphics engine, lenses, projector technology and photoswitch molecules.

“I think it’s a very fascinating area. Everything we see — all the color we see — arises from the interaction of light with matter,” Lippert said. “The molecules in an object are absorbing a wavelength of light and we see all the rest that’s reflected. So when we see blue, it’s because the object is absorbing all the red light. What’s more, it is actually photoswitch molecules in our eyes that start the process of translating different wavelengths of light into the conscious experience of color. That’s the fundamental chemistry and it builds our entire visual world. Being immersed in chemistry every day — that’s the filter I’m seeing everything through.”

The SMU discovery and new technology, Lippert said, speak to the power of encouraging young children.

“They’re not going to solve all the world’s problems when they’re seven years old,” he said. “But ideas get seeded and if they get nurtured as children grow up they can achieve things we never thought possible.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Dallas Innovates: SMU Researchers: Usain Bolt’s Gait is Asymmetrical

The researchers assessed Bolt’s running using a new motion-based method to test how hard and fast each foot hits the ground.

Journalist Lance Murray with D Magazine’s Dallas Innovates covered the research of SMU biomechanics expert Peter Weyand and his colleagues Andrew Udofa and Laurence Ryan for a story about Usain Bolt’s asymmetrical running gait.

The article, “SMU Researchers: Usain Bolt’s Gait is Asymmetrical,” published July 5, 2017.

The researchers in the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory reported in June that world champion sprinter Usain Bolt may have an asymmetrical running gait. While not noticeable to the naked eye, Bolt’s potential asymmetry emerged after the researchers dissected race video to assess his pattern of ground-force application — literally how hard and fast each foot hits the ground. To do so they measured the “impulse” for each foot.

Biomechanics researcher Udofa presented the findings at the 35th International Conference on Biomechanics in Sport in Cologne, Germany. His presentation, “Ground Reaction Forces During Competitive Track Events: A Motion Based Assessment Method,” was delivered June 18.

The analysis thus far suggests that Bolt’s mechanics may vary between his left leg to his right. The existence of an unexpected and potentially significant asymmetry in the fastest human runner ever would help scientists better understand the basis of maximal running speeds. Running experts generally assume asymmetry impairs performance and slows runners down.

Udofa has said the observations raise the immediate scientific question of whether a lack of symmetry represents a personal mechanical optimization that makes Bolt the fastest sprinter ever or exists for reasons yet to be identified.

Weyand, who leads the lab and its researchers, he is an expert on human locomotion and the mechanics of running. He is Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology & Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, is director of the Locomotor Lab.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates

When it comes to running, nobody does it faster than Usain Bolt, the eight-time Olympic champion and triple world record holder.

The lanky Jamaican sprinter is known for his explosive acceleration down the track and the famous images of him looking back as he leaves his competitors in his wake.

You’d think Bolt’s powerful legs work as a symmetrical team propelling him at great speed toward the finish line, but according to researchers at Southern Methodist University, Bolt’s gait may, in fact, be asymmetrical.

SMU researchers examined the running mechanics of Bolt, who is considered the world’s fastest man.

The analysis, so far, suggests that his mechanics may vary from his right leg to his left, according to Andrew Udofa, a biometrics researcher in the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory.

According to a blog on SMU Research News, most running experts assume that asymmetry impairs performance and slows a runner down. This unexpected asymmetry in Bolt’s mechanics could help scientist better understand the basis of maximal running speeds, according to the university.

“Our observations raise the immediate scientific question of whether a lack of symmetry represents a personal mechanical optimization that makes Bolt the fastest sprinter ever or exists for reasons yet to be identified,” Udofa, a research team member, said in the blog.

Read the full story.

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Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Dr. Jill Allor, Simmons School

In this week’s Q&A, The Texas Tribune interviews Jill Allor, professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University.

Texas Tribune reporter Sanya Monsoor interviewed SMU education expert Jill Allor, professor of Teaching and Learning in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development for a Q&A about kids with disabilities and struggling readers.

A former special education teacher, Allor’s research is school-based and focuses on reading acquisition for students with and without disabilities, including students with learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities.

She is principal investigator on the federally-funded research grant “Project Intensity: The Development of a Supplemental Literacy Program Designed to Provide Extensive Practice with Multiple-Criteria Text for Students with Intellectual Disabilities” from the Institute of Education Sciences.

The grant’s purpose is to develop carefully designed texts and application lessons to provide students who are struggling to learn to read, particularly those with intellectual disabilities.

Allor was awarded the 2000 Award for Outstanding Research by the Council on Learning Disabilities.

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Jill Allor,” published June 21, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Sanya Monsoor
Texas Tribune

With each issue, Trib+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to public education. Here is this week’s subject:

Jill Allor is a professor with the Department of Teaching and Learning at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on reading and reading disabilities.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trib+Edu: Tell me about the most important aspects of your research as it relates to kids with disabilities and struggling readers.

Jill Allor: One of the things that’s really interesting about kids with disabilities is the things we know that are effective for teaching kids in general are also effective for them.

The differences are in how explicit we need to be and how much repetition is needed. A child with a disability needs more intensive instruction — they need more practice and they need every step laid out very carefully.

Research shows if you start out with explicit instruction in kindergarten and first grade, you can address reading problems extremely early. You can prevent many problems and prevent some kids from even needing a diagnosis.

Trib+Edu: What are some of the biggest challenges in identifying and addressing these problems?

Allor: There are some kids that have average intelligence or better but yet struggle to learn how to read. We have a lot of research about what to do for them. They need explicit instruction and the primary problem is usually in the phonological areas. So focusing on phonics early and making that very explicit is critical.

The majority of the kids in special education have learning disabilities. But more recently, since 2005, my focus has been on students who have intellectual disabilities.

A student with a learning disability generally has an average IQ level but has an unexpected problem learning how to read. For a student with an intellectual disability, they’re going to have problems learning in all areas.

What we found in our research is all of the things that work for students who have a learning disability, who are struggling readers, also work for (students with an intellectual disability) but it needs to be even more explicit and more intensive.

Trip+Edu: How do you attain that intensive instruction?

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Dallas Innovates: SMU Researchers, Gamers Partner on Cancer Research

Adding the processor power of the network of “Minecraft” gamers could double the amount of computer power devoted to the SMU research project.

Reporter Lance Murray with Dallas Innovates reported on the research of biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall.

The researchers are leading an SMU assault on cancer in partnership with fans of the popular best-selling video game “Minecraft.”

They are partnering with the world’s vast network of gamers in hopes of discovering a new cancer-fighting drug. Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.

A boost in computational power by adding crowdsourcing may help the researchers narrow their search.

The Dallas Innovates article, “SMU Researchers, Gamers Partner on Cancer Research,” published June 5, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates

Game developers and researchers at SMU are partnering with a worldwide network of gamers who play the popular game in a crowdsourcing effort to beat the disease.

The project is being led by biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise of the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall, the university’s graduate video game development program.

“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” Vogel said in a release. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”

Vogel and Wise have been utilizing the university’s ManeFrame supercomputer, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the country, to sort through millions of compounds that potentially could work in the fight against cancer.

Now, they’re going to try crowdsourced computing.

The researchers believe that the network of gamers will be able to crunch massive amounts of data during routine game play by pooling two weapons — human intuition and the massive computing power of the networked gaming machine processors.

Adding gamers could double processing power
That should more than double the amount of processing power aimed at their research problem.

“If we take a small percentage of the computing power from 25,000 gamers playing our mod we can match ManeFrame’s 120 teraflops of processing power,” said Clark, who is also an adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.

“Integrating with the ‘Minecraft’ community should allow us to double the computing power of [SMU’s] supercomputer.”

The research labs of Vogel and Wise are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design, and Delivery in SMU’s Dedman College, whose mission is a multidisciplinary focus for scientific research that targets medically important problems in human health, the release said.

According to SMU, the research is partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers narrowed a group of compounds that show potential for alleviating the issue of chemotherapy failure after repeated use.

Using gamers in research has happened before
Using human gamers to enhance data-driven research has been done before with success and is a growing practice.

Vogel cited the video game “Foldit.”

Read the full story.

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Dallas Innovates: Mobile Makerspace Once Known as SparkTruck Rolls Into Town

The big, boxy California transplant is being adopted by Southern Methodist University and will be retooled for Texas to help teachers fuel the creative spark in students.

Reporter Dave Moore with Dallas Innovates interviewed Katie Krummeck, director of SMU’s Deason Innovation Gym in the Lyle School of Engineering, and Rob Rouse, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning of Simmons School about their collaboration in design-based learning environments.

The School of Engineering and SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development are building a dedicated place for students to adopt a “maker-based approach” to education.

The Dallas Innovates article, “Mobile Makerspace Once Known as SparkTruck Rolls Into Town,” published May 19, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Dave Moore
Dallas Innovates

You might call it a maker truck in the making, and it’s about to hit the streets of Dallas to promote the maker movement to teachers and students alike.

Formerly called the SparkTruck, Southern Methodist University adopted the vehicle from Stanford University in California where it resided for the past five years.

The truck made a cross-country journey to Dallas where SMU students will redesign it, inside and out, to make it a teaching tool to help K-12 teachers to inspire and to pursue professional development through innovation.

“This big truck is a kind of rolling ambassador for the maker movement,” said Katie Krummeck, director of SMU’s Deason Innovation Gym. “If you’re not familiar with it, the maker movement is all about sharing creative challenges with people from very different backgrounds to build things.“

Krummeck said the truck will be a big boost in maker education.

“The explosion in easily available digital tools and software is fueling the fire, and it turns out that this kind of hands-on maker-based instruction is a great way to engage students in whatever subject they are learning,” she said.

SMU students will retrofit the truck to ensure that its educational mission is supported by things such as workflow, storage, and comfort.

During its journey from California, the truck carried this message on its side: “This is not a maker truck” — yet.

Krummeck is familiar with the truck. She managed the SparkTruck program at Stanford before coming to SMU in 2015.

“We’re going to develop teaching frameworks, open-source curriculum, tools, and resources as well as some really engaging professional development opportunities for educators,” Krummeck said in a release. “And we’re going to deliver these resources and experiences out of the back of this mobile makerspace. We’ll know what to call it after our students put their heads together during the design challenge we have planned for May 22-26.”

Read the full story.

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SMU law research: Dallas County gun-surrender program yields few results, needs improvement

Each year, potentially thousands of domestic abusers in Dallas County should surrender firearms. Only 60 guns have been surrendered in two years.

Under Texas and Federal law, individuals convicted of domestic abuse are required to surrender any firearms they possess — but it rarely happens.

A team of SMU law students who spent the past year studying Dallas County’s gun-surrender efforts say the program can be improved and presented recommendations during the Twelfth Annual Conference on Crimes Against Women on May 24, 2017 at the downtown Dallas Sheraton hotel.

“It is estimated that between 7,000 and 8,000 cases of domestic violence go through the courts each year in Dallas County, and yet only 60 guns have been turned in over the past two years,” says SMU Law professor Natalie Nanasi, director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women. Nanasi advised law students Laura Choi, Rachel Elkin and Monica Harasim in assembling the report.

“We spent the past year looking at other programs around the country, like El Paso, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. and developed recommendations on how to improve what’s being done in Dallas County,” Harasim says.

Proposed solutions include best-practice training for judges, the creation of a centralized office to coordinate efforts and increasing funding. The students compiled their recommendations in Taking Aim at Violence: A Report on the Dallas County Gun Surrender Program.

“Statistics show that the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the likelihood of death by 500 percent,” Elkin says. “We hope that this report can be a tool for Dallas County leaders to use to expand and improve the Gun Surrender Program.”

The students presented their findings alongside Dallas County Criminal Court Judge Roberto Cañas, who first attempted to tackle the gun-surrender problem in Dallas County in 2015 by soliciting a grant and launching a program responsible for collecting the 60 guns over two years.

Before that, there were no organized efforts to collect guns from domestic abusers.

“Initial estimates suggested that Judge Cañas’ program would collect approximately 800 guns per year, but those estimates assumed that all judges in Dallas County would participate in the program equally, (which didn’t turn out to be the case),” says Choi. “There’s no question that the program sends an important message just by existing. The fact that the program is here and is collecting weapons speaks volumes to Dallas County’s commitment to survivor safety.”

The research and report were covered by the Dallas Morning News in the article Dallas County plan to disarm domestic abusers seizes just 60 guns in 2 years — a fraction of goal, and by Fox 4 News in their TV report Study: Dallas County gun confiscation program from domestic violence offenders falls shortKenny Ryan, SMU

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Elira Kuka, SMU economics professor, appointed to prestigious national research organization

SMU economics professor wins prestigious appointment to nation’s premier organization for impartial economic research, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization, has appointed SMU Assistant Professor Elira Kuka a faculty research fellow.

Kuka is in the SMU Department of Economics. She will be a fellow in the NBER’s research program on children, a key policy area.

NBER, founded in 1920, is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers and business professionals.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is the most prestigious and active research organization in economic policy and empirical analysis in the U.S., said University Distinguished Professor Santanu Roy, chair of the SMU Department of Economics. Several Nobel laureates and Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers (to the White House) have been fellows of the NBER, Roy said.

“To be appointed a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER is a tremendous recognition for a young scholar like Elira Kuka, who is just completing her second year as assistant professor after her Ph.D. It is a major boost to the SMU Economics Department’s research profile and visibility,” Roy said. “Elira’s work on several important public policy issues related to children’s health, unemployment insurance and education have started appearing in the very top journals of the profession. She is on a firm trajectory to be a star in her research field.”

NBER-affiliated researchers study a wide range of topics and they employ many different methods in their work. Key focus areas include developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior and analyzing the effects of public policies while remaining impartial and foregoing recommendations.

Over the years the NBER’s research agenda has encompassed a wide variety of issues that confront our society. Twenty-six Nobel Prize winners in Economics and 13 past chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations.

The more than 1,400 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields.

Kuka joined SMU in 2015. She received an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, Mass., and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Davis. Her research focuses on understanding how government policy affects individual behavior and wellbeing, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the federal Unemployment Insurance program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Kuka’s appointment was effective May 1, 2017.

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SMU Guildhall and cancer researchers level up to tap human intuition of video gamers in quest to beat cancer

Massive computational power of online “Minecraft” gaming community bests supercomputers

Video gamers have the power to beat cancer, according to cancer researchers and video game developers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

SMU researchers and game developers are partnering with the world’s vast network of gamers in hopes of discovering a new cancer-fighting drug.

Biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall, are leading the SMU assault on cancer in partnership with fans of the popular best-selling video game “Minecraft.”

Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.

“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” said Vogel. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”

Up to now, Wise and Vogel have tapped the high performance computing power of SMU’s Maneframe, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation. With ManeFrame, Wise and Vogel have sorted through millions of compounds that have the potential to work. Now, the biochemists say, it’s time to take that research to the next level — crowdsourced computing.

A network of gamers can crunch massive amounts of data during routine gameplay by pairing two powerful weapons: the best of human intuition combined with the massive computing power of networked gaming machine processors.

Taking their research to the gaming community will more than double the amount of machine processing power attacking their research problem.

“With the distributed computing of the actual game clients, we can theoretically have much more computing power than even the supercomputer here at SMU,” said Clark, also adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. SMU Guildhall in March was named No. 1 among the Top 25 Top Graduate Schools for Video Game Design by The Princeton Review.

“If we take a small percentage of the computing power from 25,000 gamers playing our mod we can match ManeFrame’s 120 teraflops of processing power,” Clark said. “Integrating with the ‘Minecraft’ community should allow us to double the computing power of that supercomputer.”

Even more importantly, the gaming community adds another important component — human intuition.

Wise believes there’s a lot of brainpower eager to be tapped in the gaming community. And human brains, when tackling a problem or faced with a challenge, can make creative and intuitive leaps that machines can’t.

“What if we learn things that we never would have learned any other way? And even if it doesn’t work it’s still a good idea and the kids will still get their endorphin kicks playing the game,” Wise said. “It also raises awareness of the research. Gamers will be saying ‘Mom don’t tell me to go to bed, I’m doing scientific research.”

The Vogel and Wise research labs are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) in SMU’s Dedman College. The center’s mission is a novel multi-disciplinary focus for scientific research targeting medically important problems in human health. Their research is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

The research question in play
Vogel and Wise have narrowed a group of compounds that show promise for alleviating the problem of chemotherapy failure after repeated use. Each one of those compounds has 50 to 100 — or even more — characteristics that contribute to their efficacy.

“Corey’s contribution will hopefully tell us which dozen perhaps of these 100 characteristics are the important ones,” Vogel said. “Right now of those 100 characteristics, we don’t know which ones are good ones. We want to see if there’s a way with what we learn from Corey’s gaming system to then apply what we learn to millions of other compounds to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

James McCormick — a fifth year Ph.D. student in cellular molecular biology who earned his doctoral degree this spring and is a researcher with the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery — produced the data set for Clark and Guildhall.

Lauren Ammerman, a first-year Ph.D. student in cellular and molecular biology and also working in the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery, is taking up the computational part of the project.

Machines can learn from human problem solving
Crowdsourcing video gamers to solve real scientific problems is a growing practice.

Machine learning and algorithms by themselves don’t always find the best solution, Clark said. There are already examples of researchers who for years sought answers with machine learning, then switched to actual human gamers.

Gamers take unstructured data and attack it with human problem-solving skills to quickly find an answer.

“So we’re combining both,” Clark said. “We’re going to have both computers and humans trying to find relationships and clustering the data. Each of those human decisions will also be supplied as training input into a deep neural network that is learning the ‘human heuristic’ — the technique and processes humans are using to make their decisions.”

Gamers already have proven they can solve research problems that have stymied scientists, says Vogel. She cites the video game “Foldit” created by the University of Washington specifically to unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme.

Some other Games With A Purpose, as they’re called, have produced similar results. Humans outperform computers when it comes to tasks in the computational process that are particularly suited to the human intellect.

“With ‘Foldit,’ researchers worked on a problem for 15 years using machine learning techniques and were unable to find a solution,” Clark said. “Once they created the game, 57,000 players found a solution in three weeks.”

Modifying the “Minecraft” game and embedding research data inside
Gamers will access the research problem using the version of “Minecraft” they purchased, then install a “mod” or “plugin” — gamer jargon for modifying game code to expand a game’s possibilities — that incorporates SMUs research problem and was developed in accordance with “Minecraft” terms of service. Players will be fully aware of their role in the research, including ultimately leaderboards that show where players rank toward analyzing the data set in the research problem.

SMU is partnering with leaders in the large “Minecraft” modding community to develop a functioning mod by the end of 2017. The game will be heavily tested before release to the public the second quarter of 2018, Clark said.

The SMU “Minecraft” mod will incorporate a data processing and distributed computing platform from game technology company Balanced Media Technology (BMT), McKinney, Texas. BMT’s HEWMEN software platform executes machine-learning algorithms coupled with human guided interactions. It will integrate Wise and Vogel’s research directly into the SMU “Minecraft” mod.

SMU Guildhall will provide the interface enabling modders to develop their own custom game mechanic that visualizes and interacts with the research problem data within the “Minecraft” game environment. Guildhall research is funded in part by Balanced Media Technology.

“We expect to have over 25,000 people continuously online during our testing period,” Clark said. “That should probably double the computing power of the supercomputer here.”

That many players and that much computing power is a massive resource attacking the research problem, Wise said.

“The SMU computational system has 8,000 computer cores. Even if I had all of ManeFrame to myself, that’s still less computing and brainpower than the gaming community,” he said. “Here we’ve got more than 25,000 different brains at once. So even if 24,000 don’t find an answer, there are maybe 1,000 geniuses playing ‘Minecraft’ that may find a solution. This is the most creative thing I’ve heard in a long time.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Dallas Fed, SMU and consortium to establish new Federal Statistical Research Data Center

The center will advance scientific knowledge, improve data quality and inform policy in fields ranging from the social, behavioral and economic sciences to health professions, urban planning and engineering.

A consortium of institutions led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas will partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to establish the Dallas-Fort Worth Federal Statistical Research Data Center.

The DFW center is the result of an extensive grant application process involving contributions from each consortium member and a review by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Census Bureau. One of several planned Federal Statistical Research Data Center locations across the country, the center will be housed at the Dallas Fed and will provide approved researchers with secure access to restricted micro-level data.

“The establishment of this center is the culmination of two years’ worth of effort on the part of the Bank and consortium to bring this important new research facility to North Texas,” said Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan. “Our role in this project aligns well with the Bank’s strategic priorities of serving as a thought leader in policy-related research and being a leading citizen in the communities we serve.”

The center will advance scientific knowledge, improve data quality and inform policy in fields spanning the social, behavioral and economic sciences and the health professions, and extending to urban planning, and engineering. The cutting-edge research opportunities afforded by the center will raise the profile of participating institutions and assist in attracting and retaining top research talent to the region.

“This is a very positive demonstration of how the major universities and institutions in the DFW area, along with West Texas, can work together to both increase quality research as well as strengthen the ties between consortium members,” said Kurt Beron, professor of economics at UT Dallas, who played a leading role in the grant application process and will help coordinate the consortium.

In addition to the Dallas Fed and UT Dallas, the consortium includes UT Arlington, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Southern Methodist University, Texas Tech University, University of North Texas, Texas Christian University and the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation.

The DFW center is expected to open in early 2018. Wenhua Di, senior research economist at the Dallas Fed, will serve as executive director of the center.

“There is significant demand in the region for this center,” said Di. “Since researchers need to be physically present to access the data, housing the center at the Dallas Fed will provide excellent security, easy accessibility and collaboration opportunities to a large research community.”

The new data center will encourage greater use of federal statistical data among faculty, researchers and graduate students in the many diverse research institutions in the DFW area, including traditional universities and health institutions. It will also provide access to West Texas and the Panhandle, as well as parts of Oklahoma. In addition, two major airports in the area provide convenient gateways for researchers in the region as well as nationally.

The research data center program is administered by the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies. More information about the FSRDCs is available at https://www.census.gov/fsrdc. — Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

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Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Dr. Stephanie Al Otaiba, Simmons School

In this week’s Q&A, The Texas Tribune interviews Stephanie Al Otaiba, professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University.

Texas Tribune reporter Sanya Monsoor interviewed SMU education expert Stephanie Al Otaiba Professor of Teaching and Learning in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development for a Q&A about early language acquisition in children.

Al Otaiba holds the Patsy and Ray Caldwell Centennial Chair in Teaching and Learning and teaches graduate courses in literacy, special education, assessment, response to intervention and mentoring doctoral students.

Al Otaiba’’s research interests include school-based literacy interventions, response to intervention, learning disabilities, diverse learners and teacher training. Her line of research has been supported by several federally funded grants from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the Office of Special Education Programs, and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Her dissertation was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Reading Association and in 2010 she was the recipient of The Council for Exceptional Children Division for Research’ Distinguished Early Career Research Award. She is vice president of the Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children.

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Stephanie Al Otaiba,” published April 27, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Sanya Monsoor
Texas Tribune

With each issue, Trib+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to public education. Here is this week’s subject:

Stephanie Al Otaiba is a professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University. Her work focuses on early language acquisition, literacy interventions, disabilities and diverse learners.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trib+Edu: Tell me more about your research regarding early language acquisition and why it’s important to start early.

Stephanie Al Otaiba: Research shows that once kids are in third and fourth grade it’s a lot more difficult to remediate reading problems, which sometimes go on to be classified as disabilities. But early intervention can help kids before they fall behind. In many cases, if we start very early, we can discern who are the children who have true learning disabilities from children who just haven’t had the right kind of instruction.

Trib+Edu: How common is it for those two categories to get mixed up?

Al Otaiba: It’s common. The statistics show that fewer than 50 percent of children that are in urban high-need schools are reading on grade level by fourth grade. Classrooms are getting more and more diverse, which brings more heterogeneity to the classroom. Teachers need to have an array of strategies that they can use to target the needs of different children.

If we have children that are emerging bilinguals, ideally, they will be taught in both languages but primarily in their native language until they learn how letters and sounds work. Children that are coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, many of them have had less exposure to rich academic language or had fewer opportunities to read at home, and so may come to school with different levels of preparedness.

If you work hard in pre-K and kindergarten to close the language gap, then these students will be better prepared once they get to second and third grade. If we get kids to third grade and they’re two grade levels behind, it’s really hard for them to catch up.

Trip+Edu: How do you deal with students of the same age group who are at different stages in their reading comprehension?

Read the full story.

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Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Candace Walkington

In Texas middle schools, only around 70 percent of students actually pass our state standardized tests in math. — Candace Walkington, SMU

Texas Tribune reporter Sanya Monsoor interviewed SMU education expert Candace Walkington, an assistant professor of Teaching and Learning in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, for a Q&A about teaching math to middle school and high school students.

Walkington specializes in mathematics education. She holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from Texas A&M University, and she is a former NSF-GK12 Fellow and college mathematics professor. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from the University of Texas at Austin. She was also an IES Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematical Thinking, Learning, and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a recipient of the prestigious Spencer Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant.

Walkington’s research examines how abstract mathematical ideas can become connected to students’ concrete, everyday experiences such that they become more understandable. She conducts research on “personalizing” mathematics instruction to students’ out of-school interests in areas like sports, music, shopping, and video games. She also examines ways to connect mathematical practices with physical motions including gestures. Her work draws upon theories of situated and embodied cognition, and she is an active member of the learning sciences community. Her research uses both qualitative methods like discourse and gesture analysis, and quantitative methods like hierarchical linear modeling and educational data mining.

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Candace Walkington,” published April 12, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Sanya Monsoor
Texas Tribune

With each issue, Trib+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to public education. Here is this week’s subject:

Candace Walkington is an assistant professor in teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on innovative ways to teach math to middle school and high school students.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trib+Edu: Tell me about your research as it relates to teaching math differently.

Candace Walkington: My research mainly focuses on ways to make mathematics instruction more engaging for students in grades six through 10. Research suggests that’s a particularly problematic time for students when it comes to motivation and interest in math.

I look at interventions where mathematics is connected to things that students are interested in, like popular culture interests. This could include their experiences playing sports, playing video games, engaging with social media and how they’re using numerical and algebraic reasoning in all of these contexts.

Trib+Edu: Why is mathematics intervention important for this age group?

Walkington: In Texas middle schools, only around 70 percent of students actually pass our state standardized tests in math. If you look at the passing rate for students who are economically disadvantaged, it’s around 60 percent. These numbers have been on a pattern of decline.

According to ACT scores, only 42 percent of test takers in Texas are deemed college ready in mathematics, meaning they have a reasonable chance of being successful in an introductory college algebra course.

So things are happening around this middle school transition and the end of high school transition, which is causing a lot of students to turn away from mathematics, disengage and run into trouble in these classes.

Read the full story.

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More than half of the racial college completion gap explained by pre-college factors

The two key factors driving the achievement gap between Hispanic and White students were poverty and attending a high-minority high school.

In an analysis of Texas students, more than 60 percent of the racial gap in college completion rates can be attributed to factors that occur before college — factors that are beyond the control of many colleges and universities, finds a new study led by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and with a co-author from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The study found that the two key factors driving the achievement gap between Hispanic and White students were poverty and attending a high-minority high school.

“Our findings demonstrate that these disparities can often be traced back to high school, suggesting that colleges and universities are not solely responsible for the racial gap in graduation rates,” said Stella M. Flores, associate professor of higher education at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s lead author.

Co-authors are Dominique J. Baker, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Education Policy & Leadership in the Simmons School of Education & Human Development, and Toby J. Park, Florida State University.

Research shows that some student populations are less likely than others to complete college, with a significant gap in completion rates between Black and Hispanic students and their White counterparts. But less information is available on what part of the educational pipeline is most likely to contribute to the gaps between these student groups.

The study, “The racial college completion gap: Evidence from Texas,” published in The Journal of Higher Education. The researchers focused on the college completion gap by race and sought to determine not only the factors associated with college completion, but also how these factors may be contributing to racial disparities.

They analyzed data from kindergarten through college completion for all public school students in Texas, one of the nation’s largest and most diverse states. They focused on one cohort of students who graduated from high school in 2002, entered a four-year institution that fall, and graduated college within six years by 2008. The sample consisted of 25,875 White, 9,837 Hispanic and 5,139 Black students.

As expected, six-year college completion rates varied by race: 65.5 percent for White students, 51.4 percent for Hispanic students, and 43.6 percent for Black students. The college completion gap in Texas aligns with national figures, where Hispanics experience at least a 12 percentage-point gap in college completion compared with their White counterparts, while Black students experience a 22 percentage-point gap.

Combination of factors contribute to disparities
Confirming the racial college completion gap, however, was only the first step in the analysis. The researchers then dug into what factors contribute to these disparities.

They found that pre-college characteristics — a combination of individual, academic, and high school context factors — contributed upward of 61 percent of the total variance for both Hispanic and Black students as compared with their White counterparts.

These pre-college influences shared similarities but also differed by race. The two key factors driving the achievement gap between Hispanic and White students were poverty and attending a high-minority high school.

While attending a high-minority high school also explained a large portion of the college completion gap between Black and White students, the next most critical group of factors that explained this gap were related to academic preparation such as access to rigorous coursework that included high-level math courses and AP courses.

“These results unsurprisingly suggest that college completion is both a financial issue and one of academic preparation, but also that one factor may be more critical to one population than another, at least in Texas,” said Flores. “This has important implications for how and where we should invest public funds.”

Post-secondary factors accounted for a much smaller proportion of completion gap
The researchers also looked at factors connected to the college experience, such as the percentage of tenured faculty members, faculty-to-student ratio, per-student expenditures, and whether the school was designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution or a Historically Black College or University. These post-secondary factors accounted for a much smaller proportion — 35 percent — of the completion gap than did individual factors and schooling outcomes initiated prior to enrolling in college.

“This finding is notable because a number of states have engaged in performance-based funding for higher education. However, our research suggests that it would be unfair to rank or award funding to institutions based on factors over which they have lower levels of control,” Flores said. “Accountability is very important, but knowing the sources of inequality along the educational pipeline should be acknowledged and attended to in such formulas.”

The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Civil Rights Project/Projecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. — New York University

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SMU Anthropologist Caroline Brettell Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Brettell is one of 228 leaders in sciences, humanities and the arts in the class of 2017

Noted SMU anthropologist Caroline Brettell joins actress Carol Burnett, musician John Legend, playwright Lynn Nottage, immunologist James Allison and other renowned leaders in various fields as a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The class of 2017 will be inducted at a ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 7 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brettell joins 228 new fellows and foreign honorary members — representing the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector — as a member of one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies.

“Caroline Brettell is an internationally recognized leader in the field of migration, and one of Dedman College’s most productive scholars,” said Thomas DiPiero, dean of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. “I couldn’t be happier to see her win this well-deserved accolade.”

“I am surprised and deeply honored to receive such a recognition,” said Brettell, Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Interdisciplinary Institute in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. “It is overwhelming to be in the company of Winston Churchill, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jonas Salk and the ‘mother’ of my own discipline, Margaret Mead. And I am thrilled to have my favorite pianist, André Watts, as a member of my class. I am truly grateful to join such a distinguished and remarkable group of members, past and present.”

Brettell’s research centers on ethnicity, migration and the immigrant experience. Much of her work has focused on the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex as a new immigration gateway city, especially on how immigrants practice citizenship and civic engagement as they meld into existing economic, social and political structures. She has special expertise in cross-cultural perspectives on gender, the challenges specific to women immigrants, how the technology boom affects immigration, and how the U.S.-born children of immigrants construct their identities and a sense of belonging. An immigrant herself, Brettell was born in Canada and became a U.S. citizen in 1993.

She is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, most recently Gender and Migration (2016, Polity Press UK) and Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space, co-edited with Faith G. Nibbs, Ph.D. ’11 (2016, Vanderbilt University Press). Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, among many others.

An SMU faculty member since 1988, Brettell has held the Dedman Family Distinguished Professorship and served as chair in the Department of Anthropology and as director of Women’s Studies in Dedman College. She served as president of the Faculty Senate and a member of the University’s Board of Trustees in 2001-02, and was dean ad interim of Dedman College from 2006-08. Brettell is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and the Society for Urban, National and Transnational Anthropology, among others. She is the fourth SMU faculty member elected to the Academy, joining David Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in Dedman College (class of 2013); Scurlock University Professor of Human Values Charles Curran (class of 2010); and the late David Weber, formerly Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History in Dedman College, (class of 2007).

“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Their talents and expertise will enrich the life of the Academy and strengthen our capacity to spread knowledge and understanding in service to the nation.”

“In a tradition reaching back to the earliest days of our nation, the honor of election to the American Academy is also a call to service,” said Academy President Jonathan F. Fanton. “Through our projects, publications, and events, the Academy provides members with opportunities to make common cause and produce the useful knowledge for which the Academy’s 1780 charter calls.”

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership of about 4,900 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. The Academy’s work is advanced by these elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs from around the world.

Members of the Academy’s 2017 class include winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the Wolf Prize; MacArthur Fellows; Fields Medalists; Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Arts recipients; and Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award winners.

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KERA News: Teens In Low-Income Families Get HPV Vaccine If Parents Persuade Themselves Of Benefits

In the first study of its kind, self-persuasion software on an iPad motivated low-income parents to want to protect their teens against the cancer-causing Human Papillomavirus.

Journalist Justin Martin with KERA public radio news covered the research of SMU psychology professor Austin S. Baldwin, a principal investigator on the research.

KERA’s article, “Teens In Low-Income Families Get HPV Vaccine If Parents Persuade Themselves Of Benefits,” aired April 12, 2017.

The SMU study found that low-income parents will decide to have their teens vaccinated against the sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus if the parents persuade themselves of the protective benefits.

The study’s subjects — almost all moms — were taking their teens and pre-teens to a safety-net pediatric clinic for medical care. It’s the first to look at changing parents’ behavior through self-persuasion using English- and Spanish-language materials.

A very common virus, HPV infects nearly one in four people in the United States, including teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. HPV infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females; penile cancer in males; and anal cancer, back of the throat cancer and genital warts in both genders, the CDC says.

The CDC recommends a series of two shots of the vaccine for 11- to 14-year-olds to build effectiveness in advance of sexual activity. For 15- to 26-year-olds, they are advised to get three doses over the course of eight months, says the CDC.

Currently, about 60% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys get the first dose of the HPV vaccine. After that, about 20% of each group fail to follow through with the second dose, Baldwin said.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

EXCERPT From KERA News:

Guilt, social pressure and even a doctor’s recommendation aren’t enough to motivate low-income families to vaccinate their teenagers for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), according to research from Southern Methodist University.

But a follow-up study from SMU finds that if parents persuade themselves of the benefits of the vaccinations, more teenagers in low-income families receive protection from the sexually transmitted, cancer-causing virus.

Austin Baldwin, a professor of psychology at SMU, led the research.

What the study tells us about poverty: HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that is the primary cause of a variety of cancers. There’s been a vaccine developed in the last 10 years, 12 years that’s now approved. At times, those who are underinsured or uninsured don’t have this same level of access to it. Both here locally as well as nationally [among] folks who are poor, who are uninsured, we see clear disparities across a variety of health outcomes including cancer, including cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine is potentially a very effective means to address some of those health disparities.

How the study was conducted: We recruited parents of adolescents who get their pediatric care at Parkland clinic, and they participated in an iPad app that we developed. It provides them with some basic information about HPV and about the vaccine. It then prompts them with a number of questions to think about why getting the vaccine may be important, and then it prompts them to generate their own reasons for why they would get the vaccine. Most of the parents who had not previously given thought to or were undecided about the vaccine reported that they had decided to get their adolescent vaccinated.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

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Relentless gene hunter, NIH Director Francis Collins, to speak at SMU Commencement May 20

Collins is best known for leading the Human Genome Project, the world’s largest collaborative biological project and one of the most significant scientific undertakings in modern history.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the National Institutes of Health, who may be best known for leading the Human Genome Project, will be the featured speaker during SMU’s 102nd all-University Commencement ceremony at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 20, in Moody Coliseum.

Collins — whose own personal research efforts led to the isolation of the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome — will receive the Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa, from SMU during the ceremony. The entire event, including Collins’ address, will be live streamed at smu.edu/live.

“We are honored to have a pioneering scientist and national leader of Dr. Collins’ stature as featured speaker at Commencement,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “His life is testament to a strong, unwavering commitment to the search for scientific knowledge paired with deep religious faith. He has much to share with us.”

As NIH director, Collins oversees the work of the largest institutional supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research. He was appointed by President Obama in 2009 and was asked to remain in the position by President Trump in January 2017. As director, he has helped launch major research initiatives to advance the use of precision medicine for more tailored healthcare, increase our understanding of the neural networks of the brain to improve treatments for brain diseases, and identify areas of cancer research that are most ripe for acceleration to improve cancer prevention and treatment.

While director of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, he oversaw the Human Genome Project, a 13-year international effort to map and sequence the 3 billion letters in human DNA. HGP scientists finished the sequence in April 2003, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of James Watson and Francis Crick’s seminal publication describing the double-helix structure of DNA.

It remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project and one of the most significant scientific undertakings in modern history.

As an innovative evolutionary geneticist and a devout Christian, Collins also has gained fame for his writings on the integration of logic and belief. His first book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, became a New York Times bestseller in 2006. Since then, he has written The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine (2011) and edited a selection of writings, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith (2010).

Born in Staunton, Va., and raised on a small family farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Collins was home schooled until the sixth grade and attended Robert E. Lee High School in his hometown. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Virginia in 1970.

In 1974, Collins received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Yale University, where a course in molecular biology triggered a major change in career direction. He enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he earned his M.D. degree in 1977. From 1978 to 1981, Collins completed a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. He then returned to Yale as a Fellow in Human Genetics at the university’s medical school from 1981 to 1984.

Dr. Collins joined the University of Michigan in 1984 as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a position that would eventually lead to a Professorship of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics. Collins heightened his reputation as a relentless gene hunter with an approach he named “positional cloning,” which has developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics.

In contrast to previous methods for finding genes, positional cloning enabled scientists to identify disease genes without knowing the functional abnormality underlying the disease in advance. Collins’ team, together with collaborators, applied the new approach in 1989 in their successful quest for the long-sought gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. Other major discoveries soon followed, including isolation of the genes for Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, the M4 type of adult acute leukemia, and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome.

In 1993, Collins joined NIH to become director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which became NHGRI in 1997. As director, he oversaw the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and many other aspects of what he has called “an adventure that beats going to the moon or splitting the atom.”

An elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 from President George W. Bush. He received the National Medal of Science in 2009.

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Joint Study on Gender Disparity in Art Museum Directorships Shows Gap Persists Despite Gains

While incremental gains were observed, a new study shows that women still hold fewer than 50% of directorships, earn less than male counterparts, and typically lead institutions with smaller budgets

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) at Southern Methodist University in Dallas today released findings from the second iteration of their gender gap study, which was designed to deepen understanding of the gender disparity in art museum directorships to help AAMD member institutions advance towards greater gender equity.

Through a combination of quantitative analysis of 2016 data collected from AAMD member institutions and interviews with female museum directors and executive search consultants who specialize in recruitment for art museums, NCAR and AAMD researchers – led by Zannie Voss, director, NCAR, and Christine Anagnos, executive director, AAMD – examined the ongoing and historical factors of the gender gap in art museum directorships, and compared their findings to those of the previous study, conducted in 2013.

While incremental gains have been observed in the last three years, the study found that the gender gap persists: women still hold fewer than 50% of directorships and, on average, earn less than their male counterparts. The study also found that museum type and budget size were influential factors on representation and salary differentials.

In 2016, AAMD conducted a survey of its members, collecting data from 210 respondents that included each institution’s operating budget, endowment, the salary of the director (or top leader), the director’s gender, and the self-reported museum type (e.g. encyclopedic, contemporary, etc.). Of these 210 museums, 181 also participated in the 2013 survey, allowing for examination of trends. The study sought to answer three main questions: What is the current state of women in art museum directorships? How has the gender gap in art museum directorships shifted in the past three years? What are some factors that may drive the gender gap? The NCAR and AAMD study had several key findings:

  • While men continue to outnumber women in director roles, there has been a 5% increase in female directorships from 2013: women represented 48% of art museum directorships in 2016 (compared to 43% in 2013).
  • There are clear disparities in gender representation depending on operating budget size: the majority of museums with budgets of less than $15 million are run by a female, rather than a male, director. The reverse is true for museums with budgets of over $15 million, where female representation decreases as budget size increases.
  • Women are at a salary disadvantage: on average, female directors earned 73 cents for every dollar that male directors earned.
  • When segmented by operating budget, the gender disparities are more nuanced:

    For museums with a budget of over $15 million—roughly the top quarter of museums—female directors earned 75 cents for every dollar a male earned, an improvement from 2013, when women earned only 70 cents per dollar earned by a man.
    For the other three-quarters of member museums (those with budgets of less than $15 million), female directors on average earned 98 cents to every dollar earned by a man. This represents a reversal from three years ago, when female directors at these same museums earned an average of $1.01 for each dollar earned by their male counterparts.

  • Women hold the majority of directorships in College/University museums (60%) and Culturally Specific museums (57%). Men hold the majority of directorships at Single Artist (67%), Encyclopedic (59%) and Contemporary (54%) museums.
  • Museum types, which are also tied to budget size, also help reveal salary dynamics at play: some museum types with higher average budgets have less of a salary gap as compared to some museums with lower average budget size. The biggest pay disparity is at Encyclopedic museums, where female directors average only 69 cents for every $1 of their male counterparts, while the smallest gap is at Culturally Specific institutions, where women earn 91 cents for every dollar a male director earns.

Drawing from interviews with executive search consultants and female museum directors, the report also includes a qualitative analysis that examines the personal as well as the institutional barriers in achieving gender equality in the field. Overall, interviewees observed that while progress is incremental, the needle is moving, with changes accomplished through cultural shifts within the field and in broader society, and with the emergence of a new generation of leaders.

In addition to Voss and Anagnos, co-authors of the study are Veronica Treviño, SMU MA/MBA Class of 2017, and Alison D. Wade, Chief Administrator, Association of Art Museum Directors. The authors gratefully acknowledge and thank the members of the Association of Art Museum Directors and, specifically, the following art museum directors and executive search consultants for their perspective: Gretchen Dietrich (Utah Museum of Fine Arts), Madeleine Grynsztejn (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Sarah James (Phillips Oppenheim), Laurie Nash (Russell Reynold Associates), Lisa Phillips (New Museum), Kimerly Rorschach (Seattle Art Museum), Sally M. Sterling (Spencer Stuart), and Belinda Tate (Kalamazoo Institute of Arts).

About AAMD
The Association of Art Museum Directors advances the profession by cultivating leadership capabilities of directors, advocating for the field, and fostering excellence in art museums. An agile, issues-driven organization, AAMD has three desired outcomes: engagement, leadership, and shared learning. Further information about AAMD’s professional practice guidelines and position papers is available at aamd.org.

About NCAR
In 2012, the Meadows School of the Arts and Cox School of Business at SMU launched the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR). The vision of NCAR is to act as a catalyst for the transformation and sustainability of the national arts and cultural community. The goals of the Center are to unlock insights on: 1) arts attendance and patronage; 2) understanding how managerial decisions, arts attendance, and patronage affect one another; and 3) fiscal trends and fiscal stability of the arts in the U.S., and to create an in-depth assessment of the industry that allows arts and cultural leaders to make more informed decisions and improve the health of their organizations. More information about NCAR and its reports, white papers, and tools can be found at smu.edu/artsresearch.

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Male versus female college students react differently to helicopter parenting, study finds

Helicopter parenting reduces the well-being of young women, while the failure to foster independence harms the well-being of young men but not young women.

Male and female college students react differently to misguided parenting, according to a new study that looked at the impact of helicopter parenting and fostering independence.

Measuring both helicopter parenting as well as autonomy support — fostering independence — was important for the researchers to study, said family dynamics expert Chrystyna Kouros, an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and an author on the study.

“Just because mom and dad aren’t helicopter parents, doesn’t necessarily mean they are supporting their young adult in making his or her own choices,” Kouros said. “The parent may be uninvolved, so we also wanted to know if parents are actually encouraging their student to be independent and make their own choices.”

The researchers found that young women are negatively affected by helicopter parenting, while young men suffer when parents don’t encourage independence.

“The sex difference was surprising,” said Kouros, an expert in adolescent depression. “In Western culture in particular, boys are socialized more to be independent, assertive and take charge, while girls are more socialized toward relationships, caring for others, and being expressive and compliant. Our findings showed that a lack of autonomy support — failure to encourage independence — was more problematic for males, but didn’t affect the well-being of females. Conversely, helicopter parenting — parents who are overinvolved — proved problematic for girls, but not boys.”

The study is unique in measuring the well-being of college students, said Kouros, director of the Family Health and Development Lab at SMU. The tendency in research on parenting has been to focus on the mental health of younger children.

“When researchers do focus on college students they tend to ask about academic performance, and whether students are engaged in school. But there haven’t been as many studies that look at mental health or well-being in relation to helicopter parenting,” she said.

Unlike children subjected to psychological control, in which parents try to instill guilt in their child, children of helicopter parents report a very close bond with their parents. Helicopter parents “hover” out of concern for their child, not from malicious intent, she said.

What helicopter parents don’t realize is that despite their good intentions to help their child, it actually does harm, said Naomi Ekas, a co-author on the study and assistant professor of psychology at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth.

“They’re not allowing their child to become independent or learn problem-solving on their own, nor to test out and develop effective coping strategies,” Ekas said.

Young men that reported more autonomy support, measured stronger well-being in the form of less social anxiety and fewer depressive symptoms.

For young women, helicopter parenting predicted lower psychological well-being. They were less optimistic, felt less satisfaction with accomplishments, and were not looking forward to things with enjoyment, nor feeling hopeful. In contrast, lacking autonomy support wasn’t related to negative outcomes in females.

“The take-away is we have to adjust our parenting as our kids get older,” said Kouros. “Being involved with our child is really important. But we have to adapt how we are involved as they are growing up, particularly going off to college.”

The findings were reported in the article “Helicopter Parenting, Autonomy Support, and College Students’ Mental Health and Well-being: The Moderating Role of Sex and Ethnicity,” in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.

Other co-authors were: Romilyn Kiriaki and Megan Sunderland, SMU Department of Psychology, and Megan M. Pruitt, Texas Christian University. The study was funded by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin.

Parental involvement can go too far
Research on child development has consistently found that children are more successful when they have parental involvement and support.

Now, however, research is finding that parental involvement can go too far. Call it over-parenting, over-controlling parenting or helicopter parenting, but the characteristics are the same: parents offer their child a lot of warmth and support, but in combination with high levels of control and low levels of autonomy and independence.

For example a parent may dispute their college student’s low grade with a professor or negotiate their young adult’s job offer and salary.

Previous research in the field has linked helicopter parenting to a student’s poor academic achievement, lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, poor peer relationships, and greater interpersonal dependency.

“With helicopter parenting you’re impeding children from meeting the developmental goals of being independent and autonomous,” Kouros said. “That lowers their confidence in being able to solve problems on their own. They lose the opportunity to learn how to deal with stressors. Someone who’s used to figuring out daily hassles, however, learns strategies, gets practice and knows problems aren’t the end of the world.”

In contrast, research in the field links positive outcomes when parents support autonomy and independence by encouraging their young adults to make decisions and solve problems. Autonomy support is related to higher self-esteem and less depression.

Minimal research into sex differences of young adults
For the current study, the researchers wanted to see if helicopter parenting and low autonomy support equally affected male and female students.

Researching potential differences was especially important, the researchers concluded, since studies have found that females are twice as prone as males to develop depression and anxiety.

Very little research of sex differences has been conducted in emerging adulthood in relation to parenting. What limited research there is suggests that over-controlling or lax parenting increases the risk for maladjustment, particularly for young women.

The researchers surveyed 118 undergraduate students recruited from two mid-sized private universities in the southwest United States. The majority of students were female, between 18 and 25 years old, primarily white and Hispanic and living on campus.

Students completed widely accepted measures of helicopter parenting and autonomy support. The questionnaires asked students to rank their agreements or disagreement on a scale for items such as “If I were to receive a low grade that I felt was unfair, my parents would call the professor,” or “My parents encourage me to make my own decisions and take responsibility for the choices I make.”

To assess mental health and well-being, the students completed an accepted inventory for depression and anxiety symptoms that asked questions about their feelings the past two weeks. Examples include, “I felt depressed,” “I felt self-conscious knowing that others were watching me,” and “I felt hopeful about the future.”

The study complements a growing body of research about the harmful effects of helicopter parenting for adult children. It also adds to research indicating females are more vulnerable to the negative effects than males.

“You should love and care for your child, but the way you show it and manifest it has to be developmentally appropriate. Your parenting has to follow where your child is developmentally,” Kouros said. “Being over-involved while your child is in college, that may not be appropriate anymore. That doesn’t mean you disengage. So if a college student wants to call their parent and talk through an issue and problem solve, I think that’s appropriate. But it’s their problem and they should be able to confidently handle it on their own.” — Margaret Allen

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Quartz: When diverse groups interact, everybody ends up smarter and healthier

“…although individuals may feel antagonism towards other groups in society, that prejudice is less strong if they interact with these groups in their daily lives.” — Desmet, Gomes and Ortuño-Ortín

Quartz internet news magazine covered the research of SMU Economics Professor Klaus Desmet and colleagues. The article reported that the new study by Desmet and two other economists found that after examining data from nearly every country in the world, they find that when diverse groups interact, it leads to better outcomes in terms of health, education and public infrastructure.

“Chalk one up for contact theory,” wrote San Francisco-based reporter Dan Kopf, who covers economics and markets and has a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Desmet, who has his degree from Stanford University, is Ruth and Kenneth Altshuler Centennial Interdisciplinary Professor. His research interests include international trade, regional and urban economics, macroeconomics and political economy.

Desmet’s work is likely to be of profound significance for actual policy makers, according to Santanu Roy, University Distinguished Professor and Chair of the SMU Department of Economics.

“Klaus Desmet is engaged in truly path breaking research in undestanding the spatial, cultural and genetic dimensions of the global economy and the deep long run determinants of economic change,” said Roy. “Over the last few years, his work has been published in the very top journals in economics such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, a major boost to the reputation and visibility of the SMU economics department.”

The Quartz article, “When diverse groups interact, everybody ends up smarter and healthier,” published March 24, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Dan Kopf
Quartz

A striking fact about the tide of nationalism sweeping through the West is that it is strongest in places with the least diversity. Supporters of Donald Trump, and his “America first” policies, generally come from areas of the US least touched by immigration. The parts of the UK that opted to “take back control” by voting for Brexit also clustered in areas with fewer foreign-born residents.

But as a group of economists note, “although individuals may feel antagonism towards other groups in society, that prejudice is less strong if they interact with these groups in their daily lives.”

In recently released research (pdf), Klaus Desmet, Joseph Gomes, and Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín go well beyond examining the demographics of Trump and Brexit voters. Their research explores whether contact theory, the belief that increased interaction leads to better relations between groups, or conflict theory, that interaction leads to more prejudice, is a better way to describe the current state of the world. They examined data from nearly every country in the world, and find that when diverse groups interact, it leads to better outcomes in terms of health, education, and public infrastructure. Chalk one up for contact theory.

A vast body of earlier research has found, however, that ethnic and linguistic diversity tends to reduce spending on public goods. This is usually explained as a preference not to share with people perceived to be different. For example, Sweden’s high government spending versus the US might be down to Sweden’s relative lack of diversity.

This suggests that diversity is not helpful if groups mainly keep to themselves. To test this assumption, Desmet, Gomes, and Ortuño-Ortín divided the world into a grid of five-square-kilometer cells and estimated the number of people who speak different languages in each. Using this data and country-level estimates of diversity, the researchers calculated two numbers:

1) Country diversity: The probability that within a country two randomly chosen people speak the same language. A higher score means greater diversity in languages spoken.

Read the full story.

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D CEO: Why You Need to Know Suku Nair

The director of the new AT&T Center for Virtualization at SMU will drive crucial technical research and help create a knowledgeable North Texas employee base.

D Magazine’s D CEO profiled longtime SMU faculty member Suku Nair, a professor in the SMU Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering.

Nair has been named director of the AT&T Center for Virtualization at SMU. He is an internationally recognized authority on cyber security and reliable computing and communication, and founding director of the HACNet (High Assurance Computing and Networking) Lab at SMU.

AT&T and SMU in December 2016 announced the two would collaborate in a unique new research center that would deliver solutions to critical industry needs, educate the next generation of virtualized network technology experts and support Dallas’ emergence as a global information technology hub.

A $2.5 million contribution from AT&T to SMU endows the AT&T Center for Virtualization and funds its research to support the fast, reliable cloud-based telecommunications necessary for global connectivity.

Nair said at the time of the announcement that “AT&T is a leader in providing connectivity for a wide variety of resources, both on and off the cloud, requiring deployment of hundreds of thousands of complex, expensive routers. The cost comes down and the system becomes more agile and efficient if the routers can be simplified by putting the intelligence that makes them work on the cloud.”

Through the AT&T Center for Virtualization, students will leave SMU not just with textbook knowledge, but with knowledge earned through hands-on research carried out in partnership with industry. Equally important, the center will be a critical resource in Dallas as the city continues to evolve as a global information technology hub.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Danielle Abril
D CEO

Because he will spearhead technical research that could become essential to doing business in the future. He also will help provide North Texas companies with a technologically well-versed talent pool.

As director of the new AT&T Center for Virtualization at Southern Methodist University, Nair, 53, will be at the center of understanding some of tomorrow’s biggest technology challenges. And, with a $2.5 million endowment from AT&T, his center’s research will help companies across industries migrate from hardware and launch software- and cloud-based systems to increase efficiency, accessibility, and reliability.

Nair plans to work side by side at the center with companies like AT&T, which aims to commission research as it seeks out solutions to create stronger global connectivity. If all goes as expected at the new venture, Dallas could emerge as a hub for information technology, heavy with talent, companies, and research.

“This is going to be a forum for universities, industries, and government to come and freely exchange ideas,” Nair says, adding that “everyone” is dealing now with virtualization issues in business. “We have the track record, and we are in the right place and the right time.”

Nair has been working at SMU since 1990, when he joined the university as a professor in computer science and engineering. The Illinois transplant quickly recognized Dallas-Fort Worth’s robust business environment and knew he wanted to play an integral role in research for some of the largest local firms.

The Telecom Corridor in Richardson was alive and well back then, and Nair was able to land his first research contract with Alcatel in 1993. He also helped SMU launch its cybersecurity program, which has since received nearly $10 million in endowments and funding. Over the years Nair has generated several million dollars in research for companies. “Sometimes they’ll have some technology problems they want to solve,” says Nair, who brings his SMU students into the process of researching possible solutions. “It’s a very cost-effective means of doing research, and it trains students to be hired.”

The AT&T research center will be located in the Gerald J. Ford Research Building, which will be built at SMU with help of a $15 million endowment from Gerald J. Ford, Kelli O. Ford, and The Gerald J. Ford Family Foundation. The timing and location for the building, which will highlight the center on the ground floor, is still being determined. The center currently operates out of temporary space at SMU’s east campus, across from U.S. Highway 75. Nair expects the center to attract companies from the region, state, and beyond, as it delves into a topic with broad appeal and an increasingly more powerful impact.

Read the full story.

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Self-persuasion iPad app spurs low-income parents to protect teens against cancer-causing hpv

In the first study of its kind, self-persuasion software on an iPad motivated low-income parents to want to protect their teens against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus

As health officials struggle to boost the number of teens vaccinated against the deadly human papillomavirus, a new study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, found that self-persuasion works to bring parents on board.

Currently public health efforts rely on educational messages and doctor recommendations to persuade parents to vaccinate their adolescents. Self-persuasion as a tool for HPV vaccinations has never been researched until now.

The SMU study found that low-income parents will decide to have their teens vaccinated against the sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus if the parents persuade themselves of the protective benefits.

The study’s subjects — almost all moms — were taking their teens and pre-teens to a safety-net pediatric clinic for medical care. It’s the first to look at changing parents’ behavior through self-persuasion using English- and Spanish-language materials.

“This approach is based on the premise that completing the vaccination series is less likely unless parents internalize the beliefs for themselves, as in ‘I see the value, I see the importance, and because I want to help my child,’” said psychology professor Austin S. Baldwin, a principal investigator on the research.

Depending on age, the HPV vaccine requires a series of two or three shots over eight months. External pressure might initially spark parents to action. But vaccinations decline sharply after the first dose.

The new study follows an earlier SMU study that found guilt, social pressure or acting solely upon a doctor’s recommendation was not related to parents’ motivation to vaccinate their kids.

The new finding is reported in the article “Translating self-persuasion into an adolescent HPV vaccine promotion intervention for parents attending safety-net clinics” in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.

Both studies are part of a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. Baldwin, associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology, is co-principal investigator with Jasmin A. Tiro, associate professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

Addressing the HPV problem
A very common virus, HPV infects nearly one in four people in the United States, including teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. HPV infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females; penile cancer in males; and anal cancer, back of the throat cancer and genital warts in both genders, the CDC says.

The CDC recommends a series of two shots of the vaccine for 11- to 14-year-olds to build effectiveness in advance of sexual activity. For 15- to 26-year-olds, they are advised to get three doses over the course of eight months, says the CDC.

Currently, about 60% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys get the first dose of the HPV vaccine. After that, about 20% of each group fail to follow through with the second dose, Baldwin said.

The goal set by health authorities is to vaccinate 80% of adolescents to achieve the herd immunity effect of indirect protection when a large portion of the population is protected.

NCI grant aimed at developing a software app
The purpose of the National Cancer Institute grant is to develop patient education software for the HPV vaccine that is easily used by low-income parents who may struggle to read and write, and speak only Spanish.

A body of research in the psychology field has shown that the technique of self-persuasion among well-educated people is successful using written English-language materials. Self-persuasion hasn’t previously been tested among underserved populations in safety-net clinics.

The premise is that individuals will be more likely to take action because the choice they are making is important to them and they value it.

In contrast, where motivation is extrinsic, an individual acts out of a sense of others’ expectations or outside pressure.

Research has found that people are much more likely to maintain a behavior over time — such as quitting smoking, exercising or losing weight — when it’s autonomously motivated. Under those circumstances, they value the choice and consider it important.

“A provider making a clear recommendation is clearly important,’” said Deanna C. Denman, a co-author on the study and a graduate researcher in SMU’s Psychology Department. “Autonomy over the decision can be facilitated by the doctor, who can confirm to parents that “The decision is yours, and here are the reasons I recommend it.’”

Doctor’s recommendation matters, but may not be sufficient
For the SMU study, the researchers educated parents in a waiting room by providing a custom-designed software application running on an iPad tablet.

The program guided the parents in English or Spanish to scroll through audio prompts that help them think through why HPV vaccination is important. The parents verbalized in their own words why it would be important to them to get their child vaccinated. Inability to read or write wasn’t a barrier.

Parents in the SMU study were recruited through the Parkland Memorial Hospital’s out-patient pediatric clinics throughout Dallas County. Most of the parents were Hispanic and had a high school education or less. Among 33 parents with unvaccinated adolescents, 27 — 81% — decided they would vaccinate their child after completing the self-persuasion tasks.

New study builds on prior study results
In the earlier SMU study, researchers surveyed 223 parents from the safety-net clinics. They completed questionnaires relevant to motivation, intentions and barriers to vaccination.

The researchers found that autonomous motivation was strongly correlated with intentions, Denman said. As autonomous motivation increased, the greater parents’ intentions to vaccinate. The lower the autonomous motivation, the lower the parents’ intentions to vaccinate, she explained.

“So they may get the first dose because the doctor says it’s important,” Baldwin said. “But the second and third doses require they come back in a couple months and again in six months. It requires the parent to feel it’s important to their child, and that’s perhaps what’s going to push or motivate them to complete the series. So that’s where, downstream, there’s an important implication.”

Other co-authors on the study are Margarita Sala, graduate student in the SMU Psychology Department; Emily G. Marks, Simon C. Lee and Celette Skinner, who along with Tiro are at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas; L. Aubree Shay, U.T. School of Public Health, San Antonio; Donna Persaud and Sobha Fuller, Parkland Health & Hospital System, Dallas; and Deborah J. Wiebe, University of California-Merced, Merced, Calif.

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D Magazine Dallas Innovates: SMU Students Taking Wireless Vehicle Tech to the Streets

Researchers at Southern Methodist University are putting many Smart Car/Smart City theories to real-world tests.

Reporter Dave Moore with Dallas Innovates covered the research of Khaled Abdelghany in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. Abdelghany is an associate professor and chair of the department.

His research focuses on advanced traffic management systems, intermodal transportation networks, airlines scheduling and irregular operations, and crowd dynamics. The article, “SMU Students Taking Wireless Vehicle Tech to the Streets,” published Jan. 18, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Dave Moore
Dallas Innovates

In urban areas, trips by cars and trucks are often unpleasant (and all-too-familiar) adventures in avoiding accidents, potholes, construction zones, and other drivers.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University are developing technologies that allow vehicles, traffic signals, and even construction signs to share information, to reduce unwanted surprises and drama on roadways.

While what Khaled Abdelghany and his team of researchers is up to sounds incredibly complex (because it is), the net result might lead drivers to do something as simple as stopping for a cup of coffee instead of sitting in traffic caused by an accident.

“With the information we’ve been collecting, perhaps someday, you will receive a message in your car that says ‘There’s congestion ahead; why don’t you stop and get a Starbucks?’ ” said Abdelghany, an associate professor in SMU’s Lyle Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

Abdelghany is working on the project with four students in his department, and is collaborating with Dinesh Rajan and Joseph Camp, who are professors in SMU’s Lyle Electrical Engineering Department.

RESOLVING URBAN PROBLEMS WITH SMART TECH
Their research is part of a larger initiative to resolve long-standing urban problems.

SMU, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Texas at Arlington are taking part in a nationwide effort — called MetroLab Network — to solve lingering urban problems by pairing university researchers with cities and counties seeking solutions.

Launched by the White House in 2015, the MetroLab Network includes 34 cities, three counties, and 44 universities, organized into 30 regional city-university partnerships.

The Texas Research Alliance is coordinating research efforts locally. The resulting technology developed in North Texas is intended to be deployed at some point in Downtown Dallas’ West End, and, perhaps, scaled regionally or nationwide.

Abdelghany and his students chose to tackle the problem of traffic congestion for their MetroLab project in part because they had already been working on various iterations of the issue.

Over the past several years, Abdelghany has collected Dallas-area traffic data, for purposes of predicting future traffic jams, and to help develop strategies for routing traffic around tie-ups when they happen.

Read the full story.

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Fast Company: Why Higher Education Needs Design Thinking

Research professor Kate Canales believes design is crucial to disrupting higher education, and the timing has never been better.

Fast Company reporter Doreen Lorenzo interviewed Kate Canales, a research professor and the director of design and innovation programs at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.

Canales spoke to Lorenzo as part of Co.Design’s “Designing Women,” a series of interviews with inspiring women in the design industry. The interview published Dec. 7, 2016.

Canales oversees the popular Innovation Gymnasium and serves as Director of the new Master of Arts in Design & Innovation (MADI) program. She has a background in mechanical engineering, product design and design research. Much of her recent work focuses on building creative capacity inside organizations. She studies and teaches the ways we innovate on the basis of human needs and behavior, and is responsible for integrating empathy and creativity into the technical engineering curriculum. Kate teaches several design courses including Human-Centered Design and Building Creative Confidence.

She has worked as a designer and design researcher at IDEO and as a Creative Director at frog design, both internationally recognized leaders in the field of design and innovation.

Canales holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Her writing on human-centered design has appeared in GOOD magazine, The Atlantic, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Doreen Lorenzo
Fast Company

Doreen Lorenzo: How did you end up where you are today? Did you go directly to academia or did you jump into design first?

Kate Canales: I started my early professional career at Ideo, right out of college. I grew up there over eight years. As a designer, Ideo is my hometown. Then after a couple of years working freelance, I joined frog design in Austin as a principal designer and then a creative director. In 2012 I joined SMU. Although that turn looks a little abrupt, in my heart it really made sense. I had been evolving to support work that did not just deliver great design to clients, but helped clients become more design-led. When SMU called and asked me to help them develop a design program, it was something that made a lot of sense to me. It felt like a natural progression.

Did you go to school for design?
My degree is in mechanical engineering, but I pursued a minor in studio art. Truly, I didn’t feel stirred by either one of those independently, but in the place where those two things overlapped I found a lot of fulfillment. That was design.My degree is in mechanical engineering, but I pursued a minor in studio art. Truly, I didn’t feel stirred by either one of those independently, but in the place where those two things overlapped I found a lot of fulfillment. That was design.

Let’s talk about this phenomenon that’s called design thinking. Why is it so important?
In our program at SMU, we’ve chosen to use the term human-centered design, which overlaps dramatically with what people mean when they say design thinking.

Design thinking emerged as a topic when we all started applying design methodology to problems that hadn’t traditionally presented themselves as design problems. For instance, using design as a problem-solving framework to understand how students might interact more effectively with online courses. That kind of problem might not have looked like a design problem previously. What we’ve learned is that design pairs really well with other ways of working.

Read the full story.

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Two faculty win NEH fellowships to study music and human brain; quest for Kurdish state

The National Endowment for the Humanities named SMU professors Zachary Wallmark and Sabri Ates as fellowship grant recipients in January — the only two recipients in North Texas for the current funding cycle.

Wallmark, assistant professor and chair of music history at SMU Meadows School of the Arts, is using music studies, cognitive sciences and original brain imaging experiments to research the nature of our emotional response to music.

“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition,” Wallmark said. “With the support of the NEH, I hope in my work to help people better understand music’s grip on human emotion and imagination.”

Ates, associate professor in the Clements Department of History, is drawing on a variety of archival sources from different languages to write Sheikh Abdulqadir Nehri (d. 1925) and the Pursuit of an Independent Kurdistan. In the book, Ates will explore the quest for a Kurdish state between 1880-1925, when the creation of such a state emerged as a distinct possibility and then quickly unraveled.

“What this grant tells us is that our work has national relevance,” Ates said. “Recognition of SMU’s faculty work by a prestigious institution like NEH further cements SMU’s standing as a research university. With the support of NEH, I hope to answer one of the enduring questions of the contemporary Middle East: The Kurdish statelessness.”

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.

This is the first time since 2010 that two awards were granted to SMU faculty members within the same funding cycle. More recently, history professor Alexis McCrossen received the fellowship in 2015 and assistant professor of English Timothy Cassedy earned it in 2014.

“NEH fellowships are among the most competitive humanities research opportunities in the nation, with a funding rate of approximately seven percent,” said Meadows Dean Sam Holland. “We are delighted that Zach has won this recognition, which is significant for the Meadows Music Division and reflects the growing visibility and stature of SMU on the national research stage.”

“Recognition from the NEH reinforces that our faculty garner national and international recognition for their research,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “Professor Ates’ work is very timely as the world struggles to determine how best to address our needs for greater intercultural understanding.”

Wallmark teaches courses in American popular music, including opera history and the psychology of music, and serves as director of Meadows’ new MuSci Lab, an interdisciplinary research group and lab facility dedicated to the scientific study of music. His first book, Timbre and Musical Meaning, is under contract with Oxford University Press. He will be combining his NEH support with a sabbatical from Meadows for a full year of dedicated research and writing time.

Ates’ research focuses on Ottoman-Iranian relations, Kurdish history, borderlands and the borderland peoples, and the history of sectarianism in the Middle East. His first book Tunalı Hilmi Bey: Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyet’e Bir Aydın, (Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları, 2009), examines competing projects of Ottoman intellectuals to keep the disparate parts of the Empire together, as well as their responses to the age of nationalism and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Partially based on his award-winning dissertation, his second book, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary (Cambridge University Press, 2013) discusses the making of the boundaries that modern states of Iraq, Turkey and Iran share.

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New York Observer: Is Bigger Always More? How U.S. Museums Fared in 2016

The New York Observer newspaper relied on the expertise of Zannie Voss, director of SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR), for an article about how museums are faring at a time with tighter budgets, less revenue and an evolution in museum-going behavior.

Voss is chair and professor of arts management and arts entrepreneurship in the Meadows School of the Arts and the Cox School of Business at SMU. She has a worked as consultant on projects for the Irvine Foundation, the League of American Orchestras, Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Communications Group, co-authoring TCG’s Theatre Facts since 1998. She has published over a dozen articles in academic and practitioner journals on research examining the strategic factors that influence organizational performance in the arts using multiple stakeholder measures.

The Observer article, “Is Bigger Always More? How U.S. Museums Fared in 2016,” published Dec. 26, 2016.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Daniel Grant
Observer

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times? The Metropolitan Museum of Art set a new attendance record in fiscal year 2016, bringing in 6.7 million visitors, the fifth year in a row that more than six million people have come through the doors in a given year. However, the institution reported a $10 million general operating deficit, requiring it to institute a hiring freeze, lay off dozens of staffers and put on hold an addition to the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.

This might be just an oddity, but other art museums have experienced financial troubles as well. The Museum of Modern Art has offered early retirement buy-outs for its older employees in order to trim its budget, and a $3 million deficit has compelled the Brooklyn Museum to offer its staff early retirement packages. The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, which is planning an expansion that will triple its exhibition space, is eliminating eight full-time and 20 part-time employees, and the Cincinnati Museum Center has cut 60 jobs in order to stem the flow of red ink while it prepares its own expansion.

“Museums are in a period of transition, as they are spending more on marketing … and attracting more people through new educational, digital and other programming while garnering less revenue per person who attends,” said Zannie Voss, director of the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Spending by the average visitor has declined from $25.81 in 2012 to $17.52 in 2015, according to data from DataArts, one of NCAR’s partners, for more than 100 art museums around the country. Meanwhile, those same institutions have increased their programming by 67 percent, raising their costs while earning less per visitor.

“Museums are striving for larger and more diverse audiences, looking to increase accessibility and remove the economic barriers to visiting, and they are creating new programs to engage people,” Voss said. Program revenues and fundraising have not been keeping up, though, she said, noting that the costs of running the sampled museums have risen 10 percent above inflation and only trustee giving, at nine percent, has kept pace. Growth in the other principal sources of raising funds— through individuals, foundations, corporations and government grants—“have not been as robust and, in the case of individual giving, represent a decrease of seven percent in absolute dollars.”

Read the full story.

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APS Physics: Viewpoint — Dark Matter Still at Large

“No dark matter particles have been observed by two of the world’s most sensitive direct-detection experiments, casting doubt on a favored dark matter model.” — Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, writes in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters about the hunt by physicists worldwide for dark matter — the most elusive and abundant matter in our Universe.

Cooley is an expert in dark matter and a lead researcher on one of the key dark matter experiments in the world.

Cooley’s APS Physics article, “Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large,” published Jan. 11, 2017.

The journal is that of the American Physical Society, a non-profit membership organization advancing knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents more than 53,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Cooley’s current research interest is to improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly 80 years ago. However, it wasn’t until the last decade that the revolution in precision cosmology revealed conclusively that about a quarter of our universe consisted of dark matter. Cooley and her colleagues operate sophisticated detectors in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. These detectors can distinguish between elusive dark matter particles and background particles that mimic dark matter interactions.

She received a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1997. She earned her Masters in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her research searching for neutrinos from diffuse astronomical sources with the AMANDA-II detector. Upon graduation she did postdoctoral studies at both MIT and Stanford University.

Cooley is a Principal Investigator on the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment and a Principal Investigator for the AARM collaboration, which aims to develop integrative tools for underground science. She has won numerous awards for her research including an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

She was named December 2012 Woman Physicist of the Month by the American Physical Societies Committee on the Status of Women and earned a 2012 HOPE (Honoring our Professor’s Excellence) by SMU. In 2015 she received the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Jodi Cooley
Southern Methodist University

Over 80 years ago astronomers and astrophysicists began to inventory the amount of matter in the Universe. In doing so, they stumbled into an incredible discovery: the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galaxy clusters, could not be explained by the gravitational tug of visible matter alone [1]. So to rectify the situation, they suggested the presence of a large amount of invisible, or “dark,” matter. We now know that dark matter makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe [2], but its composition—the type of particle or particles it’s made from—remains a mystery. Researchers have pursued a myriad of theoretical candidates, but none of these “suspects” have been apprehended. The lack of detection has helped better define the parameters, such as masses and interaction strengths, that could characterize the particles. For the most compelling dark matter candidate, WIMPs, the viable parameter space has recently become smaller with the announcement in September 2016 by the PandaX-II Collaboration [3] and now by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Collaboration [4] that a search for the particles has come up empty.

Since physicists don’t know what dark matter is, they need a diverse portfolio of instruments and approaches to detect it. One technique is to try to make dark matter in an accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and then to look for its decay products with a particle detector. A second technique is to use instruments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe dark matter interactions in and beyond our Galaxy. This approach is called “indirect detection” because what the telescope actually observes is the particles produced by a collision between dark matter particles. In the same way that forensic scientists rely on physical evidence to reverse-engineer a crime with no witnesses, scientists use the aftermath of these collisions to reconstruct the identities of the initial dark matter particles.

The third technique, and the one used in both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments, is known as “direct detection.” Here, a detector is constructed on Earth with a massive target to increase the odds of an interaction with the dark matter that exists in our Galaxy. In the case of LUX and PandaX-II, the dark matter particles leave behind traces of light that can be detected with sophisticated sensors. This is akin to having placed cameras at the scene of a crime, capturing the culprit in the act.

Read the full article.

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CBS News: The “spanking” debate — views depend on what you call it

CBS News covered the research of SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden, an expert in spanking and its adverse impact on child development. Holden is co-author on a new study that found corporal punishment is viewed as more acceptable and effective when it’s referred to as spanking.

The new study found that parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called spanking rather than hitting or beating.

Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

SMU psychologist Alan S. Brown was lead author on the study.

Holden is a noted expert on parenting, discipline and family violence and a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.

Holden is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.

Brown is an expert in how people store and retrieve information about the real world, and the manner in which those processes fail us, such as tip of the tongue experience, where one is momentarily stymied in accessing well-stored knowledge.

He also explores the prevalence of other varieties of spontaneous familiarity, related to déjà vu, and whether there are changes across the age span and how people incorporate other’s life experiences into their own autobiography.

The CBS News article, “The ‘spanking’ debate: Views depend on what you call it,” published Jan. 5, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Mary Brophy Marcus
CBS News

Words matter when it comes to how people perceive parents’ actions when they discipline their kids, a new study shows.

When researchers at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, asked adults – 481 parents and 191 without kids – to judge a child’s misbehavior and the punishment that followed, the study participants were more accepting of the same violent punishment when it was called a “spank” versus terms like “slap,” “hit” or “beat.”

In other words, the same form of discipline was considered better or worse depending on the verb used to describe it, study author Dr. George Holden, professor and chair of the department of psychology at SMU, told CBS News.

“Other people have talked about this issue, so it’s not a novel idea, but no one to date has done an empirical study to show simply by changing the particular verb used to describe a parental act that it does indeed change peoples’ perceptions,” he said.

Read the full story.

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CW33: Spanking Sounds OK, Hitting Not So Much, SMU Study Says

Television station CW33 quoted SMU Psychology Professor Alan S. Brown for his latest research that found corporal punishment is viewed as more acceptable and effective when it’s referred to as spanking.

Brown’s new study found that parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called spanking rather than hitting or beating.

Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

The article, “Spanking Sounds OK, Hitting Not So Much, SMU Study Says,” published Jan. 4, 2017.

Brown was lead author on the research, conducted with SMU psychologist George W. Holden, a noted expert on parenting, discipline and family violence and a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

Brown’s research primarily involves how people store and retrieve information about the real world, and the manner in which those processes fail us, such as tip of the tongue experience, where one is momentarily stymied in accessing well-stored knowledge.

He also explores the prevalence of other varieties of spontaneous familiarity, related to déjà vu, and whether there are changes across the age span. Finally, there are several research projects on how people incorporate other’s life experiences into their own autobiography.

Holden is noted for his expertise on spanking. He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.

Holden is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.

Read the story at CW33.

EXCERPT:

By Eric Gonzales
The CW33

So how does the word spanking hit you?

A new study by Southern Methodist University bets there are no hard feelings when it comes to getting spanked.

Psychology Professor Alan Brown says the word spank sounds more acceptable to people than saying a kid is getting a slap, a hit or a beating as punishment.

Even though hitting or slapping as punishment may be the same as a spanking, the professor says spanking sounds less harsh.

But parents say it may depend on where you’re spanked. “We got our butts spanked, our butts, not out backs, not our legs,” said Renee Hudspeth. “Even if we did get hit on the arm or the leg, it`s because we were trying to run from our parents.”

The professor says even swatting a kid sounds better than other words for corporal punishment, like beating.

Of course, some people say it’s never okay to hit a child. But a lot of parents believe spanking isn`t behind them.

Read the story at CW33.

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Corporal punishment viewed as more acceptable and effective when referred to as spanking, study finds

Parents and nonparents alike buffer their views of physical discipline and rate it more common, acceptable and effective when it’s labeled with a more neutral, less violent word

Parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called ‘spanking’ rather than ‘hitting’ or ‘beating,’ according to a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

Discipline acts referred to as spank and swat were ranked as more effective and acceptable than those referred to as slap, hit or beat.

The findings of the study indicate that people buffer negative views of corporal punishment by calling it by a more culturally acceptable label, said psychologist Alan Brown, psychology professor at SMU and lead author on the research.

“Our findings suggest that the way child-discipline is described may alter the action’s implied intensity or physical harm, and its consequences such as emotional upset,” Brown said. “Calling a response to misbehavior a ‘swat’ may imply higher prevalence of that response as well as make it seem more justifiable and valid — even if the actual punishment is the same as an act described more harshly.”

Participants in the study rated the acts after reading and responding to hypothetical scenarios in which a mom disciplined her misbehaving son. Spank rated highest for commonness, acceptability and effectiveness, while beat ranked the worst, he said.

“The labels that we give to our experiences can have a moderate to profound influence on how we interpret and remember these events,” Brown said. “We found that altering the verb used to describe an act of corporal punishment can change perception of its effectiveness and acceptance of it.”

One implication of the study is that public health interventions to eliminate corporal punishment should focus on changing the semantics of discipline to reduce or prevent violence, say the authors. They cite UNICEF’s 2014 recommendation that “There is a need to eliminate words which maintain ‘social norms that hide violence in plain sight.’”

The psychologists endorse replacing the verb spank with the verb assault, as suggested by other researchers in the field, which they say could change the perception of spanking and reduce its use.

Labels can buffer how actions are perceived
Research consistently has found that corporal punishment does emotional and developmental harm to children and fails to improve a child’s behavior over the long run.

“Our belief is that it is never OK to discipline a child by striking them, and that various terms commonly used to describe such actions can buffer how these actions are perceived,” Brown said. “Our research demonstrated that ratings of how common, acceptable and effective an act of corporal punishment appears to be is significantly influenced by the word used to describe it.”

Co-author on the study was psychologist George Holden, a noted expert on parenting, discipline and family violence and co-author on the research and a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

The findings were reported in the article “Spank, Slap, or Hit? How Labels Alter Perceptions of Child Discipline” published in the journal Psychology of Violence.

The other co-author on the research was Rose Ashraf, a graduate student in SMU’s Department of Psychology.

Holden is a founding steering committee member and current president of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.

Study examined how different terms influence perceptions and actions
Participants were 191 nonparents and 481 parents.

The discipline scenarios were between a mom and her 5-year-old son. The mom and son varied with each scenario, which described a boy in eight acts of misbehavior: aggression, stealing, ignoring requests, deception, teasing, property destruction, animal cruelty and lying.

Study participants read each vignette of misbehavior, and the subsequent description of the mom’s response using a term commonly reflecting corporal punishment: spank, slap, swat, hit and beat.

The authors selected the labels from the most commonly used terms in the research literature for corporal punishment in American culture.

The hypothetical scenarios were brief and left context and details such as the seriousness of the transgression or the intentions of the misbehaving child to the respondents’ imaginations.

For example: “John continues to hit his sibling after his mother has asked him to stop. John’s mother ______ him.” The participants then rated the mother’s response on how common it was, how acceptable it was and how effective it was.

The purpose was to examine how differences in the terms influence perceptions of parental discipline, the authors said.

“Our study highlights the role of language in legitimizing violent parental behavior,” according to the authors in their article. “Altering the verb used to describe the same act of corporal punishment can have a substantial impact on how that parental response is evaluated, with some terms having a relative tempering effect (spank, swat) compared with others (hit, slap, beat).”

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Wall Street Journal: For better talk therapy, try taking a nap

Doctors are finding creative ways to make cognitive behavioral therapy more effective

The Wall Street Journal has covered the latest research of SMU clinical psychologist Alicia Meuret, quoting her as an expert source.

The article, “For better talk therapy, try taking a nap,” published Nov. 28.

Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.

An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division at the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.

The article “For better talk therapy, try taking a nap,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Andrea Petersen
Wall Street Journal

New tweaks are improving the age-old practice of talk therapy.

Doing therapy in the morning, taking a nap afterward or adding a medication that enhances learning are just a few of the methods scientists are discovering that can make cognitive behavioral therapy work better.

CBT, which involves changing dysfunctional patterns of thoughts and behaviors, is one of the most well-researched and effective treatments for a range of mental health issues, including anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders.

But about a quarter to half of people with depression and anxiety don’t get significant relief after a course of CBT, which usually consists of about 12 to 15 weekly sessions. Some patients find the treatment time-consuming and difficult. Anywhere from 15% to 30% of people who begin it don’t finish, says David H. Barlow, founder of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. “There’s still plenty of room for improvement,” he says.

A study published in September in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology that involved 24 patients with anxiety disorders found that therapy appointments earlier in the day were more effective than those later in the day.

In the study, subjects—who all had panic disorder with agoraphobia (fear of situations where escape may be difficult)—were treated with exposure therapy, a common component of CBT: They repeatedly confronted situations they feared, such as being in elevators or crowds. Subjects with sessions early in the day reported less severe anxiety symptoms at their next session than those who had sessions later in the day.

The researchers found that higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that naturally occur in the morning were responsible for at least part of the benefit of the earlier sessions. “Acute boosts of cortisol can actually facilitate learning,” says Alicia E. Meuret, associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University and lead author of the study.

Read the full story.

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The making of Maori society: An archaeological analysis of social networks

SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy has been awarded a grant to collaborate with other researchers on how New Zealand’s Māori society developed.

McCoy is working with Thegn Ladefoged, University of Auckland, New Zealand, to reconstruct ancient systems of inter-iwi trade and contact by looking at the physical evidence of everyday life — tracing when and where ancient tools made from obsidian moved throughout New Zealand.

An expert in landscape archaeology and monumental architecture and ideology in the Pacific Islands, McCoy is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology.

“One of the most exciting things about this project is we have the opportunity to add a new dimension to the rich history of Māori society that we already know from oral histories passed down over about 20 generations, stretching back to the first people to arrive in New Zealand around A.D. 1250,” McCoy said. “Those histories describe the confederation of families and villages into larger tribal identities that have carried on to the modern day.”

By working in collaboration with contemporary Māori, the researchers hope to learn what happened over the years to shape the kind of society that early European visitors encountered when they began to regularly visit New Zealand in the late 1700s, he said.

“I think this is especially relevant to the modern world where it is easy to think of social networks as a by-product of living in a digital age, when in fact social networks have always been part of the human experience and likely tell us a great deal about how we see ourselves and our place in the world,” McCoy said.

The project is funded by The Marsden Fund, which was established by the government of New Zealand in 1994 to fund fundamental research. New Zealand’s equivalent to the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation, The Marsden Fund is administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The new project integrates science, archaeology and local knowledge on a rarely seen scale, making it one of the most unique and exciting Marsden-funded projects in recent years, according to a statement from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

“No culture is socially static. Over several centuries, the Polynesian colonists who settled New Zealand began to create a new type of society. Relatively autonomous village-based groups transformed into larger territorial hapū lineages, which later formed even larger iwi associations,” the statement reads.

Traditionally, information passed down through the generations by word of mouth has provided the best evidence of these complex, dynamic changes in social organization. However, the novel Marsden-funded project will use archaeological evidence to examine how social networks beyond the village changed as Māori society developed.

By combining traditional archaeological techniques, sophisticated Geographical Information System analyses and social network analysis modelling with local iwi input, the team led by McCoy and Ladefoged will gain new insights into how Māori society emerged and flourished in the past.

Proposed experiments will use obsidian hydration dating as a method for determining the age of New Zealand artifacts. This collaborative research will also connect or reconnect Māori with their taonga held in museums and university archaeology collections.

Recently McCoy published findings uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to more accurately date the age of Nan Madol, an ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean with a monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief among the islands. — The Royal Society and SMU

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How Stuff Works: Could Humans Break the Two-hour Marathon Barrier?

How Stuff Works reporter Julia Layton tapped the expertise of SMU biomechanics expert Peter Weyand for a news story about the burning question of the limits of human speed and whether — or when — runners will break the two-hour marathon barrier. Weyand explained the biomechanics of human locomotion, particularly as it pertains to fast runners.

The article “Could Humans Break the Two-hour Marathon Barrier?” published Nov. 16, 2016.

Weyand, director of the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory, is one of the world’s leading scholars on the scientific basis of human performance. His research on runners, specifically world-class sprinters, looks at the importance of ground forces for running speed, and has established a contemporary understanding that spans the scientific and athletic communities.

Weyand is Glenn Simmons Centennial Chair in Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

Could Humans Break the Two-hour Marathon Barrier?.

EXCERPT:

By Julia Layton
How Stuff Works

The New York City Marathon saw some impressive finishes in 2016. In the Nov. 6 race, women’s winner Mary Keitany of Kenya crossed the finish line in 2:24:26, and Eritrea’s Ghirmay Ghebreslassie took the men’s division with 2:07:51. Ghebreslassie earned a $25,000 bonus for breaking the 2:08:00 mark.

The world records, however, were perfectly safe. No woman has come within three minutes of Paula Radcliffe’s 2:15:25 at the London Marathon in 2003 (Radcliffe is British). In the 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) stretch that is the marathon, a minute is an “exceptionally long time,” writes Noah Davis on Pacific Standard. “Losing by five minutes to a 2:15 marathoner,” he explains, “is to be almost a mile [1.6 kilometer] behind when she crosses the finish line.”

The men’s marathon record of 2:02:57, established by Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto at the 2014 Berlin Marathon, may be approaching the limits of human physiology.

The Two-hour Barrier
In marathon science, two hours is the “golden ticket.” It’s really just the next-lowest round number in marathon times, explains Dr. Peter Weyand, professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, but “[t]he progression toward the [two-hour] barrier has for some time marked it as a milestone in the history of athletics and human performance — one of great symbolic and functional significance.”

Marathon times have plummeted in the last few decades. The men’s record fell by almost four minutes between 1998 and 2014, and the women’s dropped by more than five minutes. At this point, most experts predict a runner will eventually break the two-hour-hour mark. When and how it will happen is more controversial.

“The number of variables involved that will need to align simultaneously to break the two-hour barrier are numerous,” writes Weyand, “making specific predictions highly uncertain.” However, he says five years is “not unrealistic.”

Could Humans Break the Two-hour Marathon Barrier?.

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Radio New Zealand: New research sheds more light on ancient Pacific site

New research has pinpointed the date construction started on an ancient abandoned city in the Federated States of Micronesia and could eventually help shed light on other societies in the region.

Radio New Zealand covered the research discovery of SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy. The new uranium series dating on the stone buildings of the ancient monumental city of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief, McCoy found.

The article, “New research sheds more light on ancient Pacific site,” published Oct. 26, 2016.

McCoy led the discovery team. The discovery was uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to study the monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief of the island of Pohnpei. McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.

Read the full story.

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Radio New Zealand
The 98 man-made islets of Nan Madol on Pohnpei housed the tombs and ceremonial centre of the island’s Saudeleur rulers hundreds of years ago.

The 83 hectare site, which received UNESCO World Heritage status in July, is made up of impressive stone monuments linked by a network of canals in a lagoon on the south-east side of Pohnpei.

One of the researchers involved in the study, archaeologist Mark McCoy, said advances in technology enabled the team to date the architectural stone and coral from the tomb of the first chief of the entire island.

“What I was able to do with this particular research was to be able to say quite precisely that the major monumental burial at the site of Nan Madol dates to around 1180 to 1200 AD which makes it the earliest construction of its type by at least a century for the Pacific islands.”

Using x-ray fluorescence technology, the team tested the chemistry of the massive stones and discovered it came from the opposite side of Pohnpei.

Different technology was used to date the tonnes of crushed coral also used in construction.

Dr McCoy said Nan Madol’s exact engineering was still a mystery but he said the stones were probably dragged around the island from their source.

Read the full story.

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Daily Mail: The first king — 1200 AD tomb reveals ancient city invented new kind of society

They used an X-ray gun … and dates were calculated based on the characteristics of the radioactive isotope thorium-230 and its radioactive parent uranium-234.

Science journalist Cheyenne MacDonald covered the research discovery of SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy. New dating on the stone buildings of the ancient monumental city of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief, McCoy found.

The article, “The first king: 1200 AD tomb reveals ancient city invented new kind of society and was the first of the Pacific Islands to be ruled by a single chief,” published Oct. 19, 2016.

McCoy led the discovery team. The discovery was uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to study the monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief of the island of Pohnpei. McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Cheyenne MacDonald
DailyMail.com

A massive stone tomb buried beneath foliage in the long-abandoned city Nan Madol may have been built for the first chief of the island of Pohnpei.

Through uranium series dating, researchers have determined that the structure began construction by 1180 CE and housed the chief’s body just 20 years later, pushing back the establishment of a powerful dynasty more than 100 years earlier than previously thought.

The dynasty of Saudeleur chiefs ruled the island society for over 1,000 years, and the new find suggests this ancient city built atop a coral reef was the earliest of the Pacific Islands to be ruled by a single chief.

Nan Madol is the largest archaeological site in Micronesia, and researchers with a National Geographic expedition say this is the first burial site of such massive scale to be built on the Pacific Islands.

It was previously estimated that it was established in 1300 CE, but now, the team has found evidence that suggests this occurred much earlier, providing new insight on the transformation of societies into complex, hierarchical systems.

‘The kind of society that we live in today, it wasn’t born last year, or even 100 years ago,’ said lead archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Read the full story.

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Real Simple: This Is the Best Time of Day to See Your Therapist

If you’re struggling to overcome anxiety or a phobia, you’ll want to schedule a session at this time.

Real Simple health writer Amanda MacMillan covered the research of SMU clinical psychologist Alicia Meuret in the latest issue of the magazine and web site.

The article, “This Is the Best Time of Day to See Your Therapist,” published Oct. 16.

Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.

An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division at the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.

The article “This Is the Best Time of Day to See Your Therapist,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Amanda MacMillan
Real Simple

If you see a therapist for anxiety or a phobia, you might make more progress in sessions scheduled for the morning hours. Cortisol, a hormone that regulates stress and fear, is highest at this time of day—and a new study suggests this could make a real difference in overcoming emotional difficulties.

The new research, conducted by researchers at Southern Methodist University and the University of Michigan, focused specifically on a treatment known as exposure therapy. During exposure therapy, patients work with mental-health professionals to put themselves in situations that would normally cause panic or fear. The goal, with repeated exposures, is to diminish those stress responses over time.

“For example, a patient may think that standing in an elevator could cause him or her to lose control or faint, suffocate, or may create physical symptoms that would be intolerable,” explained Alicia E. Meuret, PhD, director of the SMU Anxiety and Depression Research Center, in a press release. “By having them stand in an elevator for a prolonged time, the patient learns that their feared outcome does not occur, despite high levels of anxiety. We call this corrective learning.”

Read the full story.

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Fox News: Mysterious Pacific island burial site is older than thought, study says

“Nan Madol represents a first in Pacific Island history. The tomb of the first chiefs of Pohnpei is a century older than similar monumental burials of leaders on other islands.” — Mark McCoy, SMU

Science reporter Rob Verger covered the research discovery that new dating on the stone buildings of the ancient monumental city of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief.

The article, “Mysterious Pacific island burial site is older than thought, study says,” published Oct. 19, 2016.

SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, led the discovery team. The discovery was uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to study the monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief of the island of Pohnpei. McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Rob Verger
Fox News

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there’s a large, lush, verdant island called Pohnpei, where pigs are commonly raised by the locals and mangrove trees abound. On the coast of this island is an ancient burial site for chiefs who lived there hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and now, new research is shedding light on the history of this archaeological wonder.

The burial, ceremonial, and cultural site is called Nan Madol, and it dates back to about the year 1180, according to new research led by Mark McCoy, an anthropologist and associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas. McCoy said that the site is at least 100 years older than similar ones in the Pacific islands.

“It now looks like Nan Madol represents a first in Pacific Island history,” McCoy said in an email to FoxNews.com. “The tomb of the first chiefs of Pohnpei is a century older than similar monumental burials of leaders on other islands.”

Read the full story.

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Evidence of first chief indicates Pacific islanders invented a new society on city they built of coral and basalt

New analysis of chief’s tomb suggests island’s monumental structures are earliest evidence of chiefdom in Pacific — yielding new keys to how societies emerge and evolve

New dating on the stone buildings of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief.

The discovery makes Nan Madol a key locale for studying how ancient human societies evolved from simple societies to more complex societies, said archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. McCoy led the discovery team.

The finding was uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to study the monumental tomb said to belong to th