Maria Kozhevnikov

Some people say they can remember something better if they see it written down — say, a phone number or a password.

Often, when visual memory is tested, one’s capacity for recalling details of a room’s layout, a person’s clothing or a painting only goes so far. Eyewitness testimony in crimes, for example, becomes less accurate as time goes by.

Monks have long been known for their ability to meditate, and they claim to be able to keep a very complex religious image in their minds for a long time. Are their techniques super memory machines? And if so, what can we learn from them?

Recently, Mason psychology professor Maria Kozhevnikov was tasked with finding the answers to some of these questions.

Through colleague and advisor Stephen Kosslyn, professor of psychology at Harvard, Kozhevnikov was involved in carrying out an intriguing experiment first commissioned by the Dalai Lama.

At a cognitive neuroscience conference held at MIT several years ago, the Dalai Lama said that accomplished monks who meditate on religious images of a deity can keep a complex image in their mind for up to 24 hours.

The Dalai Lama asked the researchers to look at accomplished monks. If the thesis was true, it would change the way people think about visual imagery.

Kozhevnikov spent a year in Nepal, traveling to different monasteries, interviewing monks on this sacred practice that, frankly, the monks wanted to keep sacred.

“It was difficult at first to get the monks to cooperate,” Kozhevnikov says. “I really needed to know exactly what they do when they meditate, but because so much of their practices are secret, they did not want to share.”

So, to understand the techniques better, Kozhevnikov undertook some meditation training of her own. After several retreats, she began to gain a greater understanding of the practice and formulated better questions to ask.

Because there are so many different kinds of meditation practices, Kozhevnikov focused on two: the deity yoga and rig pa (open meditation).

While deity yoga emphasizes imagery and involves staring and meditating on a very complex image, rig pa involves meditating on nothingness — stopping any images that crop up in one’s mind and blocking out everything.

Kozhevnikov tested different groups — from experienced monks to people who had never meditated — before and after meditation to see how their visual memories improved.

She found that monks who practiced deity yoga more than doubled their performance on memory tests after meditating for just 20 minutes. Her results were recently published in Psychological Science.

Kozhevnikov found that monks' ability to retain a visual image after meditating was remarkable. Photo courtesy of Maria Kozhevnikov

“This is an extraordinary score, really,” she says. “Highly unusual.”

This state of extraordinary memory does not last forever. When tested without meditating first, the monks’ performance was about average — similar to people who’ve never meditated before.

“They can’t maintain this state forever,” she says. “But it does exist, and meditation seems to help them get into it.”

Depending on how experienced the monk is and how long he meditates, one can maintain this state for anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours, says Kozhevnikov.

This high state of consciousness intrigues Kozhevnikov because it relates to her primary research focus of visual–spatial cognition — how people visualize and what specific brain areas are involved when they are visualizing. She is interested in particular how artists visualize in contrast to scientists.

“Artists report the same states of extended consciousness after painting,” she says. “It is the state where they paint their masterpieces; however, artists do not know how to control getting into this state the way that monks do.”

Kozhevnikov says that psychologists know little about the creative state, and she hopes this research will help her better understand how the brain works in these areas.

This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Mason Spirit.

Accounting professor Rick Warne. Photo by Evan Cantwell

Apologizing for negative outcomes — a practice common even with children — may lead to more favorable verdicts for accounting auditors in court, according to a study by researchers at George Mason University and Oklahoma State University.

The results of the study will be available in a forthcoming issue of Contemporary Accounting Research, published by the Canadian Academic Accounting Association.

Assistant accounting professors Rick Warne of Mason and Robert Cornell of OSU found that remedial tactics such as apologizing or first-person justification can result in lower frequencies of negligence verdicts in cases against auditors when compared to a control group receiving no remedial tactic.

Apologies allow the accused wrongdoer to express sorrow or regret about a situation without admitting guilt. Alternatively, a first-person justification allows the accused to indicate the appropriateness of decisions given the information available when decisions were made.

“We found that apologies reduce the jurors’ need to assign blame to the auditor for any negative outcomes to the client,” says Warne.

“It also appears that a first-person justification influences the jurors impression that the auditor’s actions were reasonable and in accordance with professional standards.”

The researchers administered several versions of a mock trial involving a lawsuit against an auditor whose actions had negative consequences on a client. In the scenario used by the researchers, the auditor performed an appropriate audit, yet the audited company eventually went into bankruptcy.

The researchers examined whether a defendant making an apology, offering a justification, using both techniques or remaining silent led to the most favorable verdicts.

Research in psychology, management and medicine concludes that remedial tactics are effective when expressed directly to injured parties. However, Cornell and Warne’s research expands on prior findings by examining the effects remedial tactics have on jurors who are indirectly involved and cannot directly forgive the accused.

“We know victims often respond favorably to an apology, but our findings suggest that even unharmed jurors react in a similar manner,” says Cornell.

“Offering an apology, though, is not synonymous with admitting guilt.”

Approximately 30 states have some form of ‘apology law’ that prevents an apology from being used against a defendant as evidence in court. According to the researchers, these laws encourage the use of apologies when disputes arise.

“Defense attorneys must consider several factors before having their client testify in court,” says Warne. “However, we believe that most innocent parties could benefit from utilizing the apology and justification strategies when legal conflicts arise.”

Each fall and spring semester, and during the summer session, an elite group of Mason undergraduates gets a taste of an experience usually reserved for graduate students: working one-on-one with a faculty mentor on a meaty research project.

Although the research topic is chosen by the student, it is selected after consultation with the mentor and is usually a direct or indirect extension of the mentor’s research interests.

The students in the Undergraduate Apprenticeship Program complete a formal application process, and the selection process is competitive.

This summer, 15 ambitious students were selected and spent their summer delving deeply into topics in the fields of art, biology, chemistry, engineering, information technology, math, psychology, sociology, sport management and tourism and events management. Following is a glimpse into a few of those experiences.

Examining Anxiety from a New Perspective

Senior Yong-Bee Lim and psychology professor John Riskind worked on a research project that might help identify new strategies to combat anxiety. Creative Services photo

Senior Yong-Bee Lim, whose research project is titled “The Distorting Effects of Anxiety and the Looming Cognitive Style on the Internal Clock,” has been working with psychology professor John Riskind.

According to Riskind, certain people possess a looming cognitive style, or the predisposition to construct mental scenarios of rapidly intensifying danger, even in the face of nonthreatening stimuli.

What Lim would like to research is how this looming cognitive style affects people’s ability to measure time.

“Have you ever heard those stories where people are about to be hit by a car and they say that time stands still?” asks Lim. “That’s precisely what we’re dealing with here — that distortion of time because of a fear-inducing event.”

Lim hypothesizes that those who score high on the looming cognitive style scale will demonstrate a more dramatic distortion of time.

Depending on his findings, Lim’s research project could be the first of several that could identify new strategies to combat anxiety.

“There are certainly things that can be said for present research about stress and individuals stressing about the future,” says Lim.

“Especially with the economy now, where people are wondering, ‘When am I going to be laid off?’ It would also be a healthy approach to look at how all these things interact and not just necessarily target the anxiety head-on, but see what else is contributing to the anxiety, and see if we can try to treat it in alternative ways.”

As for Riskind, the apprenticeship has also been an educational experience.

“It has been delightful working with Yong-Bee, and I have actually learned as much as I have taught him,” says the professor.

“He has a wide-ranging curiosity and an exceptional ability to grasp concepts and see connections.”

Though Lim’s apprenticeship officially ended at the end of July and he is still in the early stages of his experiment, he plans to implement and present his findings by spring 2010.

Putting a Spin on Basketball in India

Senior Robin Brahmbhatt and sport management professor Robert Baker are interested in how sports take hold in a particular culture. Creative Services photo

Senior Robin Brahmbhatt, who is pursuing a Bachelor of Individualized Study  degree with a sport management concentration, has been studying the prospects of basketball in India, a country dominated by cricket.

Brahmbhatt partnered with associate professor and sport management coordinator Robert Baker, who is also involved with a basketball project in India.

“This is traditionally more of a hard science program,” says Baker of the Undergraduate Apprenticeship Program. “But [acceptance of his project] is a real recognition of the value of qualitative research and Robin’s insights. He’s looking at the development of a sport in India and development through sport.”

Brahmbhatt explored the ways basketball could be successful in the country of more than one billion people. He also found that any development of the sport in India would be pioneering work.

“I did a database search for basketball in India, and I found nothing,” Brahmbhatt said. “Nothing scholarly has been written on basketball in India.”

He adds, “Sports are on the tail end of development in India. It is still viewed as a frivolous activity [there].”

So, in his research Brahmbhatt looked at basketball’s popularity in China and cricket’s popularity in India to determine what factors were critical to those sports’ success. He also explored sports as a development tool and combated the notion of sports as a frivolous activity.

Brahmbhatt developed recommendations on how to popularize and improve the success, participation, competition and awareness of basketball in India.

The work is a first, according to Baker.

“Robin’s research is a building block in a much bigger puzzle,” Baker says. “In some places, sports is a leading component of development. In India, it’s trailing. Robin is trying to pinpoint a different approach for India.”

Brahmbhatt began to apply his research almost immediately.

He traveled to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India – a city of more than four million people – on Aug. 12 to design, develop and implement a citywide Ultimate Frisbee league. This project is courtesy of a 12-month fellowship Brahmbhatt earned from Indicorps, a nonprofit organization dedicated to grassroots service in India. His goal is to ensure the league can survive after his stay in the country is over.

“He’s putting this research to work,” Baker says. “He chose to get involved in cultural and community development through sport. It’s an extension of his research interests and a broader interest in public service.”

Narrowing Down Causes of Epilepsy

Senior Aazim Siddiqui and physics professor Rob Cressman are studying the mechanisms that affect the brain and cause epilepsy. Photo by Rashad Mulla

Senior Aazim Siddiqui, an information technology major and pre-med student, has been working with physics professor Rob Cressman to pinpoint causes of epileptic seizures and diminish their frequency. This is Siddiqui’s second semester working on the project, “The Influence of Glial Strength on the Onset of High Potassium Induced Epileptic Seizures.”

Using mathematical models and laboratory experiments, the duo is focusing on mechanisms that affect the brain and cause epilepsy, the debilitating neurological disorder that causes frequent seizures and affects about 50 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

“Our goal is to study seizure-like activity,” Siddiqui says. “When that happens, different activities take place. We’re trying to incorporate those changes in mathematical formulas we have developed to help us find a way to control, and maybe even diminish, this seizure-like activity.”

So far, Siddiqui and Cressman have found that certain neurons and tissues in the brain are affected during seizure-like activity. Ions in the brain get out of balance and become hyperactive, Cressman says.

“Our model predicts different types of behavior we should see in the concentration dynamics. The ion concentrations are what drive the electrical activity in neurons,” Cressman says. “Aazim is developing a model that focuses on potassium, for example.”

The two have experimented on rats and mice, using different chemical agents to induce seizures. Using different types of drugs helps Siddiqui and Cressman pinpoint prospective causes for epileptic seizures.

“Epilepsy is a very debilitating disease for people who have it,” Cressman says. “The medications [for epilepsy] are too strong and generally have very strong side effects. More targeted treatment can be more effective.”

Using models Siddiqui made during the summer, Cressman will continue the research and conduct more experiments in the fall.

Image courtesy of George Mason University Office of Sponsored Programs

George Mason University has surpassed $100 million in sponsored research expenditures for fiscal year 2009, marking a 25 percent growth compared to 2008 and a 45 percent increase compared to 2007.

Roger Stough, vice president for research and economic development, attributes Mason’s success to the collaborative culture among researchers from different units and commitment from the university’s leadership to provide the tools needed to secure sponsored research funding.

“Research is a top priority at Mason, and this is a great mark to measure our performance in the years to come,” says Stough. “A number of our senior researchers are preparing larger-scale research proposals, and this will allow the university to build on our previous success and continue to raise our profile as a nationally ranked research university.”

Stough also notes that as Mason’s facilities, enrollment and reputation grow, the university is becoming better known among funding sources.

Mason’s strategic plan calls for the university to invest even more heavily in research infrastructure to support moving the university from a “high research activity” designation by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to a “very high research activity” designation. To meet this goal, the university has made a commitment to attract faculty members of national and international reputation as well as support scholarly inquiry and productivity in the basic sciences and the applied sciences.

Ed Maibach. Creative Services photo

About half of the car trips in the United States cover less than five miles — a distance easily navigated by walking or cycling, Mason communication professor Edward Maibach points out in a recent Preventative Medicine article.

Reducing short-distance car trips has multiple benefits. It decreases car accidents, benefits the environment and increases physical health and activity, Maibach says.

An expert in climate change communication research, Maibach urges community leaders to make promoting physical activity a priority.

“There are lots of proven low-cost options that communities can use to encourage people to get out of their cars and walk or ride instead,” he says.

“Use of these options helps people remain healthy (by promoting physical activity and reducing obesity) and helps reduce heat-trapping pollutants that cause global warming.”

In the article, Maibach suggests that to promote active transport, policy makers and government officials at all levels should look at communication, marketing and policy enhancements that can be implemented relatively easily.

Maibach cites the web site Active Living by Design as showcasing many examples of successful programs, such as city-bike sharing, customized walking or cycling maps and grassroots campaigns.

“One of my favorite examples is ‘walking school buses’ in which children and a few parents walk together to the local school,” says Maibach.

Community leaders can implement policy changes to make forgoing the car a more attractive alternative.

He also suggests that policy changes such as reducing speed limits, giving cyclists priority at intersections and closing some roads to cars can also encourage people to consider alternative ways of commuting.

“There is no one magic bullet. All of these examples can be effective here in the U.S., and all should be implemented in as many communities as possible. The more that are implemented, the more we will wean people away from sole reliance on their cars when they could be walking and/or riding, and improving their health as a result.”

Maibach is the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at Mason. His work over the past 25 years has helped define the fields of public health communication and social marketing, and his book, “Designing Health Messages: Approaches from Communication Theory and Public Health Practice,” is widely used by academics and practitioners alike.

Louise Shelley. Photo by Jocelyn Rappaport

Human trafficking is a growing transnational crime, becoming more frequent with the increase in regional conflicts, natural disasters, international mobility, trade, communications and unemployment in developing countries.

According to School of Public Policy Professor Louise Shelley, human trafficking is the most lucrative organized crime activity after drug and arms trade.

A leading expert on transnational crime and terrorism with a particular focus on the former Soviet Union, Shelley is currently completing a book for Cambridge University Press titled “Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective,” in which she examines the consequences of trafficking on social, political and economic life internationally.

Shelley is the founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) that moved with her from American University to Mason. TraCCC analyzes effective anti-trafficking policies, hosts forums on the subject and develops academic courses on trafficking and a range of transnational crime and corruption issues.

Shelley notes that human trafficking affects the security of a nation because of the multiple actors who profit, such as participants in organized crime, terrorists and the corrupt officials who facilitate this trade.

The phenomenon has grown more global as traffickers move victims across continents where there is demand for cheap labor, sexual services or children. TraCCC has found that trafficking can be a two-way street. For example, women are trafficked out of Russia for sexual exploitation, and men from Central Asia are moved into Russia for labor exploitation.

Human trafficking is not just an international problem. Shelley indicates that it is a problem here at home. Although most victims in the United States are exploited for labor, an official U.S. government estimate suggests that thousands of foreigners annually are trafficked into the United States for sexual exploitation. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the largest number of U.S. sexual exploitation victims is found among teenage American youth.

Shelley recommends more attention be paid to the business of human trafficking. As part of her research, she analyzes the various business models different regions use. Some are trade models requiring training to target maximum profit, while others focus on volume.

“Much more can be accomplished if we analyze the traffickers, their modes of operation and the ways in which their proceeds are used and laundered,” Shelley says.

Shelley recommends more attention be paid to the business of human trafficking. She adds that while the legislative focus is on the victim, more attention can be devoted to dismantling the criminal network. She says that much more education regarding this phenomenon is needed.

This article originally appeared in 2009 Policy Impact, a publication of the School of Public Policy.

Mason scientist Paul Cooper is interested in the chemistry of what occurs in solid ice. Creative Services photo

Think Alaska, Siberia, the Arctic — some of the coldest places on Earth — and then multiply that cold dozens of times. That gives you the average temperature of some of the moons orbiting around Jupiter.

Could living organisms possibly survive on such a place?

Paul Cooper, Mason assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is on a team dedicated to finding the answer to that question.

Working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech/NASA, Cooper and the team recently received a grant that will help them look at the icy worlds of the moons of Jupiter to see if these moons could possibly harbor life.

There is evidence that suggests that oceans or seas may lie beneath the icy surfaces of moons such as Titan or Europa. But can these bodies of water contain any living organisms?

Cooper, who is interested in the chemistry of what occurs in solid ice, believes that it is possible.

“We’re taking the approach of just assuming there is life,” he says.

Cooper explains that Jupiter has a strong magnetic field that traps charged particles. The icy moons orbit within this magnetic field, so they are constantly exposed to high radiation. Because life has to have a source of energy, this radiation might provide the energy needed to sustain biological processes in the sub-surface oceans.

“However, too much radiation can destroy life, and so this is one aspect we are investigating.”

In his Astrophysical Ice and Matrix-Isolation Spectroscopy Laboratory (AIMIS) on the Fairfax Campus, Cooper is taking common biological molecules — amino acids, DNA, proteins — and freezing them in water.

He will then expose the ice to radiation to see what new molecules form as the biological molecules break down. He hopes they will someday be able to compare this data with actual samples from Jupiter’s moons.

The laboratory is also trying to make biological molecules from ices.

Simple amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, may actually be synthesized in space environments where icy mixtures of water, methane and ammonia are exposed to radiation, Cooper explains.

In his Fairfax Campus lab, Paul Cooper uses cryogenic equipment to re-create temperatures as low as -269 degrees Celsius (-452 F) . Creative Services photo

“If we can make amino acids from irradiating icy mixtures, then perhaps this is part of the story of how life gets started in the universe.”

On Earth, most living organisms require oxygen and liquid water to survive. Research has revealed that Europa has these two critical requirements. Liquid water exists in the sub-surface ocean of Europa, and oxygen is produced when its icy surface is exposed to radiation.

During Cooper’s two years working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., prior to joining Mason, he discovered a previously unknown chemical reaction that explains how oxygen is produced in irradiated ice. He is continuing this work at Mason to further understand this process.

“We’re basically re-creating Europa here at Mason,” he says.

Surface temperatures of the moons can be around –180 degrees Celsius (–292 F), and the cryogenic equipment Cooper uses can re-create temperatures as low as –269 degrees Celsius (–452 F).

That makes even the coldest day of the year in winter on Earth seem like a cozy night by the fire.

Panagiota Kitsantas. Creative Services photo

While losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare and a subject no one wants to think about, a Mason researcher studies infant mortality in an attempt to help prevent it.

“The loss of a pregnancy or a child not only yields great emotional and psychological turmoil for parents, but may also influence future pregnancy outcomes,” says Panagiota Kitsantas, assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in Mason’s Department of Health Administration and Policy.

“Infant mortality is a tough topic to talk about, but I hope that by studying it, we can help health professionals provide pregnant women with better care and support.”

In a study published in the International Journal of Medicine, Kitsantas found that women who had experienced a previous child death (defined as the death of a child from birth to 18 years of age) were more likely to suffer an infant death or deliver a premature or low-birth-weight infant in a subsequent pregnancy.

Kitsantas analyzed almost a half million birth and infant death records from the North Carolina Center for Health Statistics to estimate the risk of adverse birth outcomes in pregnancies preceded by a child’s death in a family.

Approximately 10,000 mothers in the sample, which included births that took place in North Carolina from 1999 to 2006, had experienced at least one previous child death. Sadly, these women were almost twice as likely to lose an infant in a subsequent pregnancy, experience a short gestation or deliver a low-birth-weight infant.

Kitsantas' study may help health professionals provide better prenatal care to women at risk for adverse birth outcomes.

The mechanism by which a prior loss of a child affects subsequent pregnancy outcomes is not known and requires further study. Kitsantas hopes that by identifying the prior loss of a child as a risk factor, her research will help health professionals provide better care to these women, thereby encouraging healthier pregnancies.

“The death of a child is traumatic, and the stress from the loss may cause health problems that increase the mother’s risk for complications in a subsequent pregnancy. Regardless of racial or ethnic background, women who fit this profile can be at greater risk for adverse birth outcomes,” says Kitsantas.

“This study provides evidence that health care providers should examine a woman’s reproductive history and emotional well-being during prenatal care visits to ensure that those with a prior child loss get the appropriate support and treatment for successful pregnancy outcomes.”

Distinguished Professor David Weisburd has been named the winner of the 2010 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research and findings that police patrols at crime “hot spots” do not merely move crime around the corner.

The Stockholm prize is widely considered the most prestigious in the field of criminology, and this is the first time the international committee has bestowed the award on a single individual. Winners receive 1 million Swedish kroner (about $130,000).

The award will be presented on June 15, 2010, during the annual international Stockholm Criminology Symposium.

A detailed look at Weisburd’s award-winning research follows.

David Weisburd brought with him a revolutionary way to understand and deal with crime when he joined Mason’s Administration of Justice Department last year.

Traditional criminology focuses on understanding the characteristics and careers of criminals, but Weisburd has been an international leader in exploring the implications of where crime occurs and the “history” of high-crime places.

Looking at “crime in place” is a relatively new focus for criminologists, and studies on the subject first appeared in the late 1980s.

Weisburd’s research shows that focusing on where crime is concentrated enables police and communities to target their efforts more effectively.

Simply steering clear of “the bad side of town” may not help citizens avoid crime.

“Research has shown that in what are generally seen as good parts of town there are often streets with strong crime concentrations, and in what are often defined as bad neighborhoods, many places are relatively free of crime,” Weisburd says.

While police have generally organized their patrols by neighborhoods or precincts that span several city blocks, a “hot spot” — a small area of concentrated crime — can be a single street segment, a cluster of addresses or even a single building.

For example, in a study conducted in 2004, Weisburd and his colleagues found that 86 out of 29,849 street segments account for one-third of the total number of juvenile crime incidents in Seattle.

While targeting crime at the places where it occurs seems like a simple shift in strategy, it requires drastic changes in data gathering and the overall philosophy and actions of the police.

The strategies of place-based policing can be as simple as patrolling hot spots, but could also include changes in laws and techniques. For example, policy-makers might use “nuisance laws” to encourage landlords and property owners to aid the police in dealing with crime that occurs in or around their buildings.

“Hot spots provide a stable target for police interventions, unlike the constantly moving targets of criminal offenders,” Weisburd says.

If police intervene at a hot spot, many citizens and even police officers believe that the criminal activity will simply move around the corner. Weisburd’s research suggests the opposite is true. A study from Weisburd and his colleagues in 2004 found that areas close to the hot spot receiving intervention actually showed a reduction in crime despite the fact that these areas were not the focus.

The Consummate Police Chief’s Researcher

A leading expert on crime in places, policing terrorism and white-collar crime, Weisburd is well respected by police chiefs and high-ranking law enforcement officials around the world who have implemented his forward-thinking strategies toward policing.

“David is the consummate police chief’s researcher. He understands the political issues involved in policing and is a dream to work with,” says Jim Bueermann, chief of the Redlands Police Department in California.

Weisburd led two experimental studies with Bueermann’s police department, the “Risk-Focused Policing at Places Experiment” and the “Second Responder Experiment.”

Bueermann says Weisburd understands that it is important to put the community first.

“David conducts his research in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the community on the behalf of research. He understands the practical realities of keeping the community safe.”

Using Weisburd’s research results and policing strategies, Bueermann helped his department alter and discontinue ineffective practices and implement new strategies that are proven to work.

Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy

Before arriving at Mason last year, Weisburd had previously collaborated with many of its administration of justice faculty members, including Cynthia Lum, who studied under Weisburd at the University of Maryland before she joined Mason.

Weisburd is also active in his profession outside the university, sitting on a number of national steering committees and participating in working groups. He is a member of the Committee on Crime, Law and Justice of the National Research Council and served on the NRC working group on evaluating anticrime programs and its panel on police practices and policies.

The distinguished criminologist has received more than $12 million in private and public research funds during his career.

He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology and serves on many journal editorial boards in criminology.

Weisburd holds a joint appointment as the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice and director of the Institute of Criminology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

At Mason, Weisburd serves as the director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, and Lum is deputy director.

Over the last year, the center has hosted congressional briefings on the role that location plays in crime and counterterrorism research, and professors affiliated with the center presented at Sen. Jim Webb’s symposium on drug trafficking, policy and sentencing that took place at Mason.

The center is planning a congressional briefing in October related to major criminal justice issues.

Current research topics at the center include the geography of crime and criminal justice, re-entry centers in the federal justice system and evidence-based practices in correction facilities. In addition, the center’s Crime and Place Working Group has created a comprehensive bibliography of crime in place literature and research.

Three new innovations developed by Mason faculty members may play a key role in improving the lives of people worldwide. One will assist those with writing disabilities, another may reduce injuries from land mines and a third aims to improve global food production.

A Helping Hand for Writing

My Scrivener can help people with writing disabilities. Image courtesy of Sue Palsbo

Sue Palsbo, principal research associate in the College of Health and Human Services’ Center for the Study of Chronic Illness and Disability, has developed an inexpensive computer game device that could help people with writing difficulties to regain control of their writing skills.

My Scrivener, which is currently undergoing a clinical trial in Oregon, provides repetitive motion training for individuals who have trouble with fine-motor control of their hands. The device is intended to provide personalized occupational and physical therapy for children or adults with disabilities and to serve as an assistive technology device for those with permanent handwriting deficits.

It may also fill a major unmet need in rehabilitation science for technology that analyzes fine-motor movement in the arms and hands, and could one day become a valuable tool for rehabilitating patients with traumatic brain injuries.

“This virtual teaching system is an inexpensive, portable and user-friendly interface that provides a repetitive and engaging approach to letter writing,” says Palsbo. “We are hopeful that this technology will improve the quality of life for people with writing difficulties.”

Zoran Duric, associate professor in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering’s Department of Computer Science, and his students contributed to this research.

My Scrivener is owned by George Mason Intellectual Properties and by Obslap Research LLP. Funding for the research and development of My Scrivener was provided through the U.S. Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR). This YouTube video provides a demonstration of the tool.

Listening to Land Mines

Ken Hintz

People living in the United States don’t have to worry about land mines when walking across an open field. But for many people living in Africa and Asia, the fear is very real. The U.S. Department of State estimates that 45-50 million land mines worldwide remain to be cleared and that land mines claim 15,000-20,000 victims each year in 90 countries.

Ken Hintz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his co-principal investigator Nathalia Peixoto, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are currently working on a new way to detect and identify land mines in the ground. Their research is funded by the Office of Naval Research.

“Conventional ground-penetrating radars, typically used to locate land mines, have difficulty distinguishing among land mines and other small objects that are just clutter,” says Hintz. “This leads to a high false alarm rate and is the problem we are trying to target. We are working on a method that uses syntactic pattern recognition to distinguish among rocks, hubcaps and land mines.”

Nathalia Peixoto

To detect land mines, the researchers are using a ground-penetrating radar that radiates an electromagnetic signal. This signal bounces off objects in the ground when there is a change in materials, reflecting electromagnetic energy back to the surface and allowing them to see patterns inside the land mine.

Hintz explains that he processes the radar return to produce a sequence of 1s and 0s when it hits an object in the ground. This sequence varies, depending on the object. Each type of land mine produces a unique sequence, making it much easier to distinguish land mines from clutter. Hintz refers to these sequences as the “language of mines.”

“Using our methodology, we are concerned about what’s inside the land mine, not what’s outside around it,” says Hintz. “If this technique continues to work as well as we believe it does, we may someday be able to not only detect and remove all land mines quickly, but also make it no longer cost effective to put land mines in the ground.”

A Revolutionary Chip Speeds Up Genetic Research in Cows

Lakshmi Matukumalli

The BovineSNP50 BeadChip

Lakshmi Matukumalli, research assistant professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, has helped to lay the groundwork for improving the quality of milk and beef while lessening the environmental impact of cattle.

A visiting scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Matukumalli collaborated with researchers from the USDA, the University of Missouri, the University of Alberta and Illumina Inc. to develop a high-density DNA mapping and identification tool called the BovineSNP50 BeadChip. The chip is revolutionizing cattle genetic improvement and genomics research.

Matukumalli and his colleagues recently won two outstanding technology transfer awards from the Agricultural Research Service, USDA and Federal Laboratory Consortium for the development and commercialization of the BovineSNP50 assay.

“This chip is a small etched glass slide that can simultaneously analyze 12 individual cattle DNA samples each for 54,001 variations. Each of the 12 stripes on the chip contains millions of coded probes. You can spread one DNA sample on each of these stripes and the probes will produce a specific color of light that identifies the animal’s genomic makeup,” says Matukumalli.

“This chip has allowed us to rapidly capture important genetic information to determine and compare the genetic merit of bulls used in artificial insemination for making animal selection decisions at reduced costs. The dairy industry adaptation of this technology in the U.S. is almost 100 percent. This chip has also helped identify core marker sets for use in dairy and beef industries at still lower genotyping costs.”

An article describing the SNP chip development was published in PLOS One.

This project was funded by the USDA and cattle artificial insemination industries, and was developed through a specific cooperative agreement between the USDA and Illumina Inc. For the benefit of cattle genome researchers throughout the world, this product has been commercialized as The BovineSNP50 BeadChip and is produced by Illumina.

Geoffrey Birchard. Creative Services photo

Since the word “dinosaur” was coined in 1842 by an English biologist, these creatures have been depicted throughout popular culture in movies, books, television shows, artwork and other media. Dinosaurs have been considered the largest animals to have ever walked on Earth.

While they still maintain this status, a new study suggests that some dinosaurs may actually have weighed as little as half as much as previously thought.

Geoffrey Birchard, associate professor of environmental science and policy at Mason, was part of a team that uncovered a problem with the statistical model used by some scientists to estimate the mass of dinosaurs. The team conducted a study titled “Allometric Equations for Predicting Body Mass of Dinosaurs” and published their findings in the Journal of Zoology.

“The original equation used by scientists produces fairly accurate results when determining the mass of smaller animals, but when used on larger animals, our research shows that many errors have occurred,” says Birchard. “The new equation shows that dinosaurs are much smaller than we thought, but there is no mistaking that they were indeed huge animals.”

Developed in 1985, the original equation has been used by scientists to estimate or evaluate a variety of parameters, including brain size and egg size. The problem occurs as a result of transforming the data, which changes the properties of the original data and creates biases that can affect the predictive results obtained from the equation.

Birchard and his colleagues realized there was an error when they used the equation to determine the weight of living animals, such as a hippopotamus and an elephant, and discovered that the equation greatly overestimated the weight of these animals.

The researchers developed a new equation for calculating dinosaur mass based on bone dimensions. This equation doesn’t require the transformation of data that the original equation involves.

“The best way to understand the new equation is to think about a building that is built on pillars,” says Birchard. “The bigger the building, the larger the pillars must be to support the weight of the building. In the same way, the legs of an animal are the pillars supporting its body.”

According to Birchard, this new research suggests that some dinosaurs were much more slender than had been thought. It also changes many of the characteristics scientists had already determined about dinosaurs, such as the amount of muscle required to use their bodies and how much they ate and breathed.

Birchard’s other research interests include reptilian and avian egg biology. Some of the courses he teaches at Mason include animal biology, animal physiology and dinosaur biology. In the dinosaur biology class, Birchard and his students examine both the old and new equations used to determine the mass and other characteristics of an animal.

Sushil Jajodia, director of CSIS. Creative Services photo

Information is an important strategic and operational corporate asset that creates a need for adequate security measures to safeguard sensitive material. And, at a time when people are constantly on the move, it’s necessary to ensure information’s safe transmission, whether it is taking place on a secure computer network, from a cell phone or from an Internet café.

In spite of its importance, there is still a shortage of truly comprehensive university research programs dedicated to information system security.

However, Mason’s Center for Secure Information Systems (CSIS), created in 1990 by Sushil Jajodia, provides an environment committed to encouraging expertise development in both the theoretical and applied aspects of information systems security.

The center has the distinction of being the first academic center in security established at a U.S. university.

While CSIS conducts a broad spectrum research and development program on information system security, its researchers also provide technical support to industry and government. CSIS’ research scope encompasses information secrecy, integrity and availability problems in military, civil and commercial sectors.

“The center has a dedicated full-time team of scientists, engineers and software developers with a wide range of expertise,” says Jajodia, adding that the center’s eight researchers regularly collaborate with Mason faculty in computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

“Our range and depth of experience has allowed us to understand and anticipate future requirements in information security and to formulate innovative solutions and build high-quality tools to meet those requirements.”

Government and Private Sponsorship

CSIS has produced licensed works, filed for multiple patents and benefitted from a long history of federal agency and commercial sector sponsorship.

Some government agencies that sponsor CSIS research are the National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Science Foundation and Federal Aviation Administration. CSIS also has working relationships with companies such as Raytheon, BAE Systems and MITRE Corporation.

Since 2006, the center has seen its total award amount increase 62 percent from just over $2.6 million to more than $4.2 million in 2008.

Along with recently licensing its Cauldron software, which identifies complex cyber network attacks, and receiving two equipment grants totaling approximately $400,000, the center also received a new grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award. This is the second MURI award the center has received in a little more than two years.

• The AFOSR grant will allow the researchers to create a new, dynamic approach for interaction of networked systems. According to Jajodia, there are three types of requirements related to a user task: task requirements (e.g., audio, video); requirements imposed by an organization’s security policy (e.g., data must be encrypted); and requirements related to quality-of-service (e.g., images must have high resolution). The new system proposed by CSIS will take all these requirements into account and automatically compose systems to fulfill the user task.
• The MURI award, sponsored by the Army Research Office, is for research relating to cyber situational awareness. When a security incident occurs, the top three questions security administrators ask are, in essence: What has happened? Why did it happen? What should I do? Answers to the first two questions form the core of cyber situational awareness.

Teaching Security at Every Level

Housed in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering, the center also has an academic focus and develops courses dealing with information systems security.

While the center emphasizes doctoral research and producing students with a PhD in security, it also offers many other degrees and concentrations at the master’s and undergraduate levels.

“When recruiting students for our doctoral program, we are competing with universities such as Stanford, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon,” says Jajodia. “Many of our students secure jobs in industry or government after graduating from Mason, and others become professors. Four of my former students have received National Science Foundation Career Awards, which is highly prestigious and a measure of how well our students are doing.”

Recognized since 1999 as one of the NSA’s original Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, CSIS was awarded the new NSA designation of National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research in 2008.

Since the term “black hole” was coined in the 1960s, it has been used to describe everything from an insatiable appetite to a messy kid’s room. One physicist called black holes “the ultimate cookie monsters.”

So just what are these fascinating celestial phenomena? In short, stellar black holes are collapsed stars whose gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape their grasp.

Because they are indeed black, it is a challenge for astronomers to determine their presence in a galaxy. Usually, they can be found by observing the area surrounding them. Stars will rotate around a black hole’s gravitational field, and unlucky matter, such as gas, will spiral toward the black hole, eventually getting sucked into its abyss.

How Big? How Small?

Lev Titarchuk

Astrophysicists are still discovering new characteristics about black holes. For example, take Lev Titarchuk. He recently developed an innovative technique that allows scientists to gauge how large or small a black hole may be.

Titarchuk is a research professor in computational and data sciences in Mason’s College of Science who also works at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He first suggested the technique a decade ago and, with his former graduate student and Mason alumnus Nikolai Shaposhnikov, has since been working on finding evidence to support it.

Titarchuk’s technique weighs a black hole by looking at its accretion disk, which is the area surrounding the collapsed star that hosts spiraling matter before it falls into the hole’s center.

Titarchuk has found that the distance between where matter piles up on the accretion disk and the black hole’s center is directly related to its mass.

“Our method can measure a black hole’s mass when the optical observation method fails,” Titarchuk explains.

He and Shaposhnikov have tested their technique on several black holes near our galaxy. When compared with results from other methods of measurement, their method determines the masses of the black holes with only a minor margin of error.

At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division last year, they presented evidence of a black hole with a solar mass of 3.8, or 3.8 times the mass of our sun. When compared with the Milky Way’s black hole, which boasts a solar mass of 3.7 million, Titarchuk and Shaposhnikov’s black hole is downright tiny.

Titarchuk emphasizes that his method can be used to determine the mass of any black hole, large or small. The technique can also be used to establish the distance between a black hole and the sun.

If You Can’t See It, How Do You Know It’s There?

Shobita Satyapal

Shobita Satyapal is also making strides in the world of black holes.

An associate professor in Mason’s Physics and Astronomy Department, Satyapal focuses on extragalactic astronomy, that is, the study of galaxies outside the Milky Way.

To understand how a particular extragalactic galaxy forms and evolves, Satyapal looks at what lies in the center of most galaxies: a black hole.

Galaxies fall into two main categories: elliptical and spiral, or skinny. Elliptical galaxies are a collection of stars in a spherical shape or bulge, while skinny galaxies are shaped like a flat disk.

Astronomers once believed that black holes reside only in the middle of elliptical galaxies since that was the only kind of galaxy with an observable black hole. Furthermore, a correlation seemed to exist between the size of a galaxy’s bulge and its black hole.

Satyapal explains, “One of the questions we wanted to answer in our research was, is a bulge somehow necessary for a black hole to form? Can you find black holes in galaxies that have no bulges?”

NASA photo

Because galaxies without bulges have a lot of dust and gas in their center, astronomers have not been able to infer the presence of a black hole because visible light can’t be seen through the dust.

So Satyapal used a tool that no one had used before to investigate these low- to no-bulge galaxies—NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. This infrared telescope has a longer wavelength than optical light has and is able to penetrate to the center of these dusty, skinny galaxies.

By looking for the high-energy radiation that’s only known to occur with active black holes, Satyapal and her research team set out to discover whether these skinny galaxies hosted black holes.

Of the 33 skinny galaxies Satyapal surveyed, eight were home to black holes. These black holes are significant, too, she says, since all are at least 100,000 times the size of our sun. Using optical light, none of these black holes was visible and therefore wouldn’t have been detected without the use of infrared.

“Now, we know that black holes actually do reside in galaxies with no bulge,” says Satyapal. “That’s an important result because it implies that galaxies don’t require a bulge to form and grow a black hole. That will have a critical impact on theories of galaxy formation and evolution.”

This article originally appeared in Mason Research 2009.

Stephen Mastrofski. Creative Services photo

In 2004, the government of Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean democracy of 1.3 million people, was looking for help. Faced with a rapidly rising homicide rate and declining public confidence in the police, it reached out to Mason policing expert Stephen Mastrofski.

The Trinidadian government was considering implementing COMPSTAT, a technological management system. But Mastrofski concluded that a technological solution was premature.

“The government needed to change fundamental things about the organization,” says Mastrofski, who is also director of Mason’s Center for Justice Leadership and Management. “It needed a functional bureaucracy, rather than one mired in procedures dating back to its 19th-century colonial experience as a constabulary police force under British rule. Purchasing COMPSTAT would have been like putting a band-aid on a patient in critical condition.”

A Comprehensive Program Provided by Dozens of Experts

Mastrofski instead offered a comprehensive program that included experts in community policing and law enforcement professionals.

Over the next four years, Trinidad and Tobago invested millions of dollars into revitalizing the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, a national police agency of approximately 7,000 officers and 72 police districts.

More than 70 researchers and professionals have played roles in the overhaul, including Mason faculty and experts from Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Justice and Safety, the firm Justice and Security Strategies and a number of other universities.

The funding has been funneled into consulting, training, technical assistance and research, with the later component residing at Mason.

One of the greatest challenges facing Mastrofski and his colleagues was transforming the police culture “from an occupying force, which is what it was in colonial times—it was there to make sure indentured servants and others who worked on the plantations didn’t cause any trouble—to police as public servants,” he says.

By changing the culture and improving police interactions with the public, Mastrofski and colleagues anticipated the result would be less fear of and more confidence in the police.

The Model Station Initiative is one of the large-scale projects begun under the effort. It involves five model police stations and five comparison stations. Selected because of their high crime rates, the locations of the model stations are culturally different and geographically distributed around the island.

“The model stations received all kinds of things that the comparison stations didn’t,” Mastrofski says. “More resources, more people. Also, much more training on the fundamentals of police work and street-level supervision. We located American law enforcement professionals on site as field advisors to work day to day with the people in the model stations.”

The consultants also assisted the Trinidadians in implementing procedures that would help them become the functional bureaucracy Mastrofski prescribed.

Another innovation for the police service was standardized paperwork.

“There were no accurate data,” says Mastrofski.

Using the Results to Advance Knowledge

So far the Model Station Initiative and the data it has generated over time have provided the basis for numerous reports to the sponsor.

“There were some implementation challenges. It was difficult to get needed resources and new policies and practices actually carried out,” says Mastrofski. “But positive changes are occurring in ways that we have been able to measure, and this is encouraging.

“It’s remarkable to see the impact that some very committed change agents can have within the police service. The transformation is a work in progress, and we are glad to have contributed to the changes that have occurred.”

As work in Trinidad and Tobago comes to an end, data are being analyzed and additional reports are being written. Mastrofski believes there is much to be learned from this project. The scholarly and informational publications stemming from the research are just beginning, including two dissertations and a thesis on community efficacy, gangs and fear of crime.

“Trinidad and Tobago wanted to solve its crime problem,” says Mastrofski. “But we are a unit that believes research should be policy relevant. In this case, the needs of the client came first, but we are also doing [the work] in such a way that we can use our experiences to advance knowledge.”

Mastrofski is the author of “Policing for People,” published by the Police Foundation and used as a model in several departments in the United States.

This article originally appeared in Mason Research 2009.

Anthropologist Mark Goodale with a condor mascot at a political rally in La Paz, Bolivia.

Mason anthropologist Mark Goodale has been studying human rights, culture and conflict in Bolivia for the past 13 years. His latest research looks at the political and social dynamics that led to the election of President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and the writing of a new constitution that passed in January 2009.

Goodale states that Morales’s rise was made possible by the explosion of humans rights discourse in the mid- to late-1990s.

“I spent over a year in one of the most remote areas of the Bolivian Andes, walking from village to village watching and asking people how they resolve conflicts,” Goodale says. “I picked this area because it was remote, but I found that there were also a number of nongovernment organizations and international development agencies working in the area.”

Goodale says that the presence of these organizations indicates an increased focus on human rights in an expanded sense because the right to food and clean air and water would be classified as basic human rights in Bolivia.

An anti-American poster that hangs on the wall of a national teachers union reads "Bolivia will not be a hacienda of the gringos."

With a 67 percent vote of confidence from an Aug. 10, 2008, recall vote to determine whether the president and regional governors should stay in office, Morales had the political clout to pass the new Bolivian constitution in January.

“There are deep levels of poverty and injustice in Bolivia, and to correct these historic conditions, the government determined that structural changes in the form of a new constitution were required,” Goodale says.

Goodale calls the new constitution the most radical and far-reaching constitution in the world in terms of human rights.

“Before 2009, I would say that the constitution of South Africa was the most radical [in terms of human rights] in the world,” he said during a recent interview with Radio New Zealand. “The new Bolivian constitution goes many steps further. It is filled with every international norm that exists and, perhaps we might say, that doesn’t exist. In fact, it introduces new norms, new human rights.”

Bolivia is South America’s poorest country and the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere, according to the United Nations. The gross domestic product of the country is increasing because of oil and natural gas revenues, but there is an ongoing debate over how those revenues are used.

What Goodale calls "extraordinary antigovernment propaganda" in a central plaza in Santa Cruz. Images courtesy of Mark Goodale

Goodale notes that Morales has already created a wealth distribution fund for the elderly in Bolivia and is trying to create a wider social welfare model that is similar to the system enacted in Scandinavian countries in the 1970s, where national trust funds were created.

Currently, Goodale is conducting the first ethnographic stakeholder analysis of the key actors in the debate surrounding the constitution and present government policies. The actors include government officials, union leaders, students, indigenous leaders and right-wing and fringe neofascist groups in the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

“Much of Latin America is in the midst of a period of profound transition and uncertainty,” Goodale wrote in a recent newsletter of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Mason. “The end of the Cold War dramatically changed an important geopolitical calculation: the role and influence of the United States in the region.”

Goodale urges the United States and other dominant countries to recognize that perceptions or fears of a communist Latin America might be out of date and that a new discourse of human rights is making such countries as Bolivia a laboratory for novel experiments in law, politics and multiculturalism.

Goodale is the author of “Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism” (Stanford, 2008), a chronicle of the social and political revolution under way in contemporary Bolivia. His most recent book, “Surrendering to Utopia” (Stanford, 2009), discusses the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped social change and the role anthropology plays in legitimizing new human rights. His current research, Conflicting Perspectives on Social and Political Dynamics in Bolivia, is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Lisa Pawloski

Once thought to be a strictly American phenomenon, childhood obesity rates are soaring in nations still plagued with hunger and poverty.

According to World Health Organization statistics, globally at least 20 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2005, putting them at risk for a number of chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Mason nutritional anthropologist Lisa Pawloski has studied biocultural approaches to nutrition and health among children and adolescents and has found that several factors contribute to the obesity phenomenon.

These include a rise in the number of two-income families, a dietary shift increasing the intake of foods high in fat and sugars, the rapid expansion of fast-food restaurants in developing nations and a trend toward decreased physical activity.

“Countries such as Chile and Thailand are going through huge economic changes. The economic situation in those nations has improved dramatically in the past 30 years,” says Pawloski, chair of the College of Health and Human Services’ Department of Global and Community Health.

“Unfortunately, a negative side effect of this [growth] is a surge in obesity among kids and teenagers.”

Cultural Customs Affect Eating Behavior

Pawloski has always been fascinated by cultural customs and social relationships that influence human behavior.

Pawloski at work taking measurements in a Mali village.

“Humans do not instinctively know what types of food they should be eating. Eating behaviors are learned, and culture definitely plays a role in our eating behaviors,” she says.

A widely published scholar and presenter, Pawloski has been investigating global trends of childhood obesity since 1997 when, as a Fulbright Scholar, she conducted a study examining the nutritional status, growth and development of adolescent girls from the Ségou Region in Mali, West Africa.

She has since conducted research into the biocultural aspects of health and nutrition among Malian adolescent immigrants living in Paris, France, and the nutritional behaviors and growth among Nicaraguan adolescent girls.

In 2005, Pawloski received a second Fulbright to continue her analysis of nutrition and dietary behaviors among adolescents in suburban Bangkok, Thailand.

In a joint venture with the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, Pawloski recently concluded a study of childhood obesity in that country.

The government, which had effectively overcome undernutrition among its citizens through an aggressive public health and nutrition campaign, is now seeking solutions to a childhood obesity epidemic.

“One of the major issues underlying nutrition and undernutrition is selecting the right foods,” says Pawloski.

“In Chile, we studied the self-care deficit theory, which states that by educating children about making healthy eating choices and educating parents on how to encourage those behaviors, children may have better success in sustaining a healthy weight.”

Education and Parental Involvement Are Key

Pawloski notes that in each country where she has worked, she has found a different set of challenges resulting from cultural and environmental influences.

“In Thailand, I found that a greater number of children in primary schools are obese compared with children in secondary schools. Furthermore, obesity is more prevalent in boys than girls. Therefore, targeting younger children and developing interventions specifically for young boys may be more effective.”

In Nicaragua, one of the major issues is access to fruits and vegetables within the neighborhood, she says.

“Fruits and vegetables are not sold at local markets, but at larger markets that are difficult to get to because of lack of transportation and lack of sidewalks causing safety issues.

Also, families are hesitant to grow their own gardens because of a lack of space and fear of neighbors poaching their gardens.”

However, Pawloski is confident that obesity can be overcome through education and parental involvement. She is currently working with colleagues on a project in Costa Rica that will involve just such a nutrition intervention.

“We believe that the promotion of healthy diets, improved eating behaviors that include a reduction of high-calorie snacks and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, along with greater exercise, will dramatically reduce the risk of both obesity and chronic disease among children.”

This article originally appeared in Mason Research 2009.

Jessica Rosenberg, assistant professor of physics and astronomy

Think back to your class trips to the planetarium. Remember the awe-inspiring view of all those stars and heavenly bodies projected onto the ceiling? Now imagine charting stars and celestial gases in about 40,000 nearby galaxies.

That’s the responsibility facing Mason astronomer Jessica Rosenberg. She’s been creating an enormous dataset — a huge extragalactic survey — which she and her colleagues will use to help answer fundamental questions facing astronomers today.

One the major questions in astronomy is how galaxies evolve, she says.

“These data will give us some of the pieces to that puzzle,” says Rosenberg, an assistant professor in Mason’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “To do this, we need to move beyond looking at only the stars and study the gas and stars together.”

400 Million Light Years Away

Rosenberg’s finished product will combine these two elements to create a more complete set of data than if stars or gas were mapped independently.

“The understanding of these components of galaxies allows us to test some of the theories of how the universe evolves,” she says.

The survey will look for galaxies out to 400 million light years from the Milky Way, which is “far away, but relatively close relative to the full scale of the universe,” says Rosenberg.

“Usually, when we look for galaxies, we look for them by their stars,” explains Rosenberg. “But there have been a few studies that have tried to look for galaxies by their gas.”

Rosenberg’s extragalactic study will be the first to combine optical (stars) and radio (gas) survey data. It focuses on matching data collected from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) radio survey with optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Rosenberg has been involved with the ALFALFA survey from its inception. She contributed to the survey planning, observed, worked on data reduction and wrote some analysis software.

The Primordial Element

The ALFALFA survey will have collected information on about 25,000 gas-rich galaxies when it is completed in early 2011.

Rosenberg will use a large cross-section of the information about these galaxies to compare against the additional 30,000 or so galaxies from the SDSS. She anticipates approximately 40,000 galaxies in the overlap region.

By combining the optical and radio data, astronomers will measure the fraction of mass in two of the major components of galaxies, which is the key to understanding how galaxies form and evolve.

“Hydrogen gas is the primordial element out of which everything in a galaxy was formed,” Rosenberg says. So by evaluating a galaxy’s stars and gas, she hopes to shed some light on the processes that govern galaxy evolution.

This article originally appeared in Mason Research 2009.

One out of three American adults is concerned enough about global warming to make changes in their political and consumer behavior, a new study by George Mason and Yale Universities shows.

With such a rapidly growing segment of the American public either concerned or alarmed about climate change, this study suggests that the United States may be approaching an important tipping point in public engagement.

The report, “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” divides the American public into six unique segments that engage with the issue of global warming in their own distinct way: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful and Dismissive.

“Just over half of American adults are either alarmed or concerned about global warming, and these individuals are poised to vote on the issue with their pocketbooks and at the ballot box,” says the report, which was written by Mason professors Edward Maibach and Andrew Light and Yale professor Anthony Leiserowitz.

The report also shows an increase in personal energy conservation across all six groups, a development that may be motivated by a desire to save money as well as to benefit the environment. More than half of Americans also believe that global warming is currently harming or will harm Americans in the next 10 years or so.

The full report can be found here.

Working from a computer lab, Mason bioinformatics researchers have entered the virtual barnyard to look for genetic clues about the evolution of cattle. The goal? To find ways to develop cattle that consume fewer resources, produce less greenhouse gases and provide higher quantities of more tender beef and milk in order to create more sustainable food production in a world challenged by global population growth.

John Grefenstette, professor of bioinformatics and computational biology, Lakshmi Matukumalli, research assistant professor, and Rafael Villa-Angulo, a graduate student in bioinformatics, collaborated with 300 researchers from 25 countries to analyze the DNA sequence of a Hereford cow.

The researchers also examined the differences among DNA samples (polymorphisms) taken from 497 cows in 17 different breeds of cattle and two related species. Computational and statistical analyses were performed to understand how modern cattle breeds evolved from the ancient breeds.

Growing the Cattle Family Tree

“This bovine genome sequencing project is important for animal researchers because it serves as a model for all livestock species. This work provides insights about the origin of cattle in relation to other mammals. It also clarifies the relationships and genetic diversity within and across various breeds of cattle,” says Matukumalli.

The team developed new computer algorithms for the analysis of the 30,000 or more variations of genetic data found in the cows and produced a variety of graphical outputs, including charts, graphs, colorful blocks and tree-like diagrams.

“Cattle family trees are substantially different from human ones due to the effects of inbreeding from artificial insemination. We had to modify the data analysis methods that were previously used to study the diversity in the human population so that they would work with cattle DNA,” says Grefenstette.

What did they find? The data supports the hypothesis of two separate domestication events of cattle between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago — one in the Indian subcontinent (indicus) and another (taurus) that formed most of the modern breeds widely used for dairy and beef across the world.

A Decline in Genetic Diversity Spotted

The bioinformatics analysis by the Mason research team suggests that the genetic diversity among taurine breeds is similar to that of humans and that the rapid decline in genetic diversity among cattle is of some concern. Lack of genetic diversity is worrisome because breeds could become less viable and more susceptible to disease. This new data will benefit efforts by the artificial insemination industries and breed organizations to conserve genetic diversity and produce healthier cows.

Although DNA sequencing has been conducted on humans and other animals, such as mice and dogs, the cow is the first livestock animal to be sequenced and the first animal to be sequenced for the purpose of improving the human food supply.

The data is expected to contribute to increased quality and efficiency of meat and dairy production through genomic selection and may even help to protect the environment by creating “greener” cows.

“Certainly, part of the goal is the improvement of global food production. We’ve produced data that people will be studying for years. Scientists will be trying to develop more environmentally friendly cattle that consume fewer resources, produce less greenhouse gases and provide more beef and milk. We’ve helped to lay the groundwork for those future studies,” says Grefenstette.

The findings were published in the April 24, 2009, issue of Science and are available online at www.sciencemag.org.