Category: Lecture

Do we judge ourselves by our covers?

On October 25, 2011

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Faculty, Lecture, Neuroscience, Students

By Becca Bayham

After giving a lecture at a major women’s magazine, Dan Ariely was faced with a dilemma — in the shape of a huge Prada duffel bag.

As the behavioral economist walked down the street with the bag (a gift from the magazine), he wondered whether he should display the large Prada logo to passersby or hide it against his side.

He decided to hide the logo, but “I was surprised that I still felt like I was walking around with a Prada bag,” Ariely said. “What if I had Ferrari underwear… would I walk a little faster?”

How do the things we wear affect how we think about ourselves? Ariely explored this question (among others) at a Chautauqua lecture on Oct. 18.

In one of Ariely’s experiments, subjects wore shirts emblazoned with the word “stingy” or “generous.” After wearing the shirts around for awhile, participants completed tasks that evaluated their generosity. Strangely enough, “generous” t-shirt wearers gave more during these tasks than those with the “stingy” shirt on.

The word on a participant’s shirt “kind of penetrated their personality,” Ariely said. Notably, the effect was just as strong when participants wore shirts with the writing on the inside.

“Telling ourselves who we are seems to be a crucial element,” Ariely said.

It’s like giving money to a beggar. Giving money doesn’t instantly make you a better person, but it points out certain qualities in yourself. We learn about ourselves the same way that we learn about other people — by observing our actions.

In another study, women were given designer purses, but some were told that their purses were fake. Then participants played a game where cheating was advantageous.

Everyone started fairly enough, but eventually began to cheat. And once they’d cheated a little bit, they just cheated the rest of the time.

“We call this the ‘what the hell’ effect. Everyone who’s been dieting knows this feeling… I’m not good, so I might as well enjoy,” Ariely said.

Interestingly, women wearing counterfeit goods started cheating a lot earlier. Did having fake bags “penetrate their personality,” just as in the t-shirt experiment?

“What if fashion’s not just about telling other people who we are, but also about telling ourselves who we are?” Ariely said.

A few small steps for mankind

By Becca Bayham

On October 20, 2011

In Business/Economics, Environment/Sustainability, Global Health, Lecture, Students

By Becca Bayham

“There are the thermometers who passively record social injustices, and then there are the thermostats that actively do something about it,” Dr. Sunny Kishore said during the Eureka Symposium last Saturday, a dPS-sponsored event that brought together 120 students and a number of Duke alums for some deep thinking about social change.

The main lecturers were followed by break-out sessions, which ranged in topic from global health to human rights. The four-hour symposium packed a philosophical punch, outlining a few actions that could save millions or even billions of lives in the developing world. It’s probably the most inspired I’ve felt on a Saturday afternoon.

Representatives from the Enough Project made the case for using conflict-free minerals on campus (similar to the idea behind conflict-free diamonds). Tin, tantalum, coltan and gold — used in cell phones and other electronics — currently fuel war in eastern Congo, where various armed groups mine them for profit; more than five million people are thought to have died from the conflict so far. (Following a rather pointed editorial in the Chronicle by two Symposium organizers, Duke Procurement stated on its website that it would “[give] preference to vendors who have made a commitment to conflict-free supply chains when quality and cost performance are equal or superior.”)

Drs. Anthony So, Robert Johnston and Kishore discussed strategies that could provide people in developing nations with access to life-saving treatments and vaccines — at a price they can afford. Triple therapy for AIDS used to cost $10-15,000, “too high a price for hope,” So said. But thanks to ‘bootstrap philanthropy’ — free licenses and free production, supported by grant money — that same treatment costs less than $100 now.

Royalty fees and license exclusivity have usually put vaccines out of reach for the developing world, unless the drug is off-patent. Johnston (of Global Vaccines, Inc.) proposed one solution: commercial sub-licenses, which allow low-cost manufacturers to produce affordable vaccines without violating companies’ intellectual property rights.

“You have the ability to have a drug at first-world prices in developed countries and can now provide lower-cost medicines in developing countries,” Kishore said.

Research universities could play a pivotal role by allowing “humanitarian licenses” of their technologies, according to Kishore. Several universities — Duke among them — have signed a statement supporting dissemination of medical technologies, but not much progress has been made.

“Are we engaged in rhetoric or are we engaged in actually doing something?” Kishore said. “These are our labs, our drugs, and this is our responsibility.”

Us vs. Them

By Prachiti Dalvi

On October 15, 2011

In Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Lecture, Medicine

By Prachiti Dalvi

Bacteria occupied Earth long before the evolution of humans. Inhabiting a wide array of environments and exhibiting unparalleled genetic diversity, bacteria share a unique relationship with humans. Some of these microscopic organisms are essential to life while others threaten our very existence.

Sir Richard Roberts, a 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society, spoke about the importance of bacteria to the world of science on Thursday in an event co-sponsored by the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP) and Quintiles, a clinical research organization.

Roberts articulated the importance of understanding the structure of macromolecules in order to understand their precise function: a principle he has used to build his own career. The molecular biologist was awarded a Nobel for his discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA as well as for explaining the mechanism of gene-splicing.

According to Roberts, although bacteria are generally looked at in a negative light, most bacteria are harmless. He expressed concern about the indiscriminate use of antibiotics. For example, the strength of the farm lobby has prevented the strict regulation of antibiotics administered to animals in the food industry. Here, antibiotics are being used to make animals weightier rather than to fight an infection.

Misuse of antibiotics can help bacteria generate resistance, making fighting these microorganisms in the future more difficult. In fact, when we develop an antibiotic we are simply “selecting for the next drug-resistant bacteria, and we are polluting ourselves out of existence.”

“We tend to lose track of just how interesting bacteria are,” says Roberts. “There was a time when an awful lot of NIH funding was set aside exclusively for bacterial research.” However, now, NIH funding is focused primarily on eukaryotic organisms despite the indispensible role bacteria play.

Open source science

By Becca Bayham

On October 5, 2011

In Computers/Technology, Engineering, Lecture, Science Communication & Education

By Becca Bayham

In 2009, mathematician Timothy Gowers posed this question to the blogosphere: “Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?” He described an unsolved math problem and asked for help figuring it out. Over the next few hours and days, commenters began to pick at the problem together. They brought up incomplete ideas, which were expanded and incorporated into other peoples’ ideas, until Gowers posted 37 days later that the problem had (probably) been solved.

Which raises the question — Can open source principles be applied to scientific problems? Michael Nielsen explored this idea during a lecture last Tuesday, sponsored by the Duke University Libraries.

When a non-profit needed a technology that didn’t exist (an affordable solar-powered wireless router), they turned to InnoCentive, a website that allows organizations to post descriptions of scientific problems they’d like solved. Rewards range from a couple thousand dollars (for designing a better beverage container) to a cool million (for finding the biomarker for ALS).

The challenge was solved by a man who’d made a hobby of building his own low-cost radio networks and solar power systems. The moral of the story — if a problem requires an unusual combination of expertise, someone somewhere might have it. Or a collaboration of people might generate the “conversational critical mass” to make easy work of the problem.

Open source science can be difficult to achieve, however. Nielsen said that numerous wikis and online communities have tried to facilitate idea sharing, but failed for a lack of incentives.

“Imagine you’re a young scientist who wants to get a job at some point,” Nielsen said. “You know that from the point of view of some hiring committee, a long slew of brilliant contributions to a wiki doesn’t count as much as a single mediocre scientific paper that no one is going to read.”

Nielsen advocated creating incentives for scientists to share in new ways. For example, including blog posts in Google Scholar searches, or publishing data sets instead of just papers.

“The payoff is to develop new methods for the construction of knowledge … and to expand the range of scientific problems that we can attack,” Nielsen said.

Astroplanets: What we can now see.

By Jeannie Chung

On October 3, 2011

In Lecture, Physics

Dr.Ronald Walesworth lecturing about the two methods

By Jeannie Chung

Duke Physics hosted Ronald Walsworth of Harvard last week to hear about his use of something called an “astrocomb,” a tool that could help astronomers make more precise measurements of distant astronomical objects, including planets like Earth.

An astrocomb uses a a laser and an atomic clock to improve the calibrations on the instruments astronomers use to measure tiny shifts in the spectra of a star. The shifts can indicate if a star has a planet.

Currently, astrophysicists cannot measure the minute shifts of planets the size of Earth, or other cosmological phenomena, with these spectrographs. The shifts are too tiny. But this laser calibration astrocomb could be seen as the sunrise on a bright future.

Walsworth said that in five years, discovery and characterization of Earth-like planets would be possible, and that in 10-20 years, direct measurement of cosmological dynamics — the change and characteristics of celestial bodies – may be possible. He said the laser frequency comb will allow us to see a live feed of the expansion of the universe, instead of looking at hindsight and making inferences from snapshots of a past universe.

Detecting disease with sound

By Becca Bayham

On September 29, 2011

In Biomedical Engineering, Cancer, Cardiology, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Faculty, Lecture, Medicine, Physics

By Becca Bayham

Most people experience ultrasound technology either as a pregnant woman or a fetus. Ultrasound is also employed for cardiac imaging and for guiding semi-invasive surgeries, largely because of its ability to produce real-time images. And Kathy Nightingale, associate professor of biomedical engineering, is pushing the technology even further.

“We use high-frequency sound (higher than audible range) to send out echoes. Then we analyze the received echoes to create a picture,” Nightingale said at a Chautauqua Series lecture last Tuesday.

According to Nightingale, ultrasound maps differences in the acoustic properties of tissue. Muscles, blood vessels and fatty tissue have different densities and sound passes through them at different speeds. As a result, they show up as different colors on the ultrasound. Blood is more difficult to image, but researchers have found an interesting way around that problem.

“The signal from blood is really weak compared to the signal coming from tissue. But what you can do is inject microbubbles, and that makes the signal brighter,” Nightingale said.

Microbubbles are small enough to travel freely throughout the circulatory system — anywhere blood flows. Because fast-growing tumors require a large blood supply, microbubbles can be particularly helpful for disease detection.

Like most other electronics, ultrasound scanners have gotten smaller and smaller over the years. Hand-held ultrasounds “are not as fully capable as one of those larger scanners, just as with an iPad you don’t have as many options as your computer or laptop,” Nightingale said. However, the devices’ portability has earned them a place both on the battlefield and in the emergency room.

Nightingale’s research explores another aspect of ultrasonic sound — its ability to “push” on tissue at a microscopic scale. The amount of movement reveals how stiff a tissue is (which, in turn, can indicate whether tissue is healthy or not). It’s the same concept as breast, prostate and lymph node exams, but allows analysis of interior organs too.

“We can use an imaging system to identify regions in organs that are stiffer than surrounding tissue,” Nightingale said. “That would allow doctors to look at regions of pathology (cancer or scarring) rather than having to do a biopsy or cut someone open to look at something.”

Visualizing the past

By Becca Bayham

On September 22, 2011

In Computers/Technology, Engineering, Faculty, Field Research, Lecture, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

Duke Academic Quad, circa 1932 (Duke University Archives)

By Becca Bayham

Perkins Library didn’t always look the way it does now. Since the sanctum of scholarly thought was built in 1928, it has been expanded and renovated several times — so if you looked at a blueprint from 1928, you’d only be getting part of the story. The same applies to historical structures, according to Caroline Bruzelius, professor of art, art history & visual studies.

“Buildings are constantly changing, and a [building] plan represents one part of the process … of course it is useful in many ways, but it’s very frozen,” Bruzelius said during the Sept. 16 Visualization Friday Forum, a recurring lecture series sponsored by the Research Computing Center. Bruzelius was joined by fellow art, art history and visual studies professors Sheila Dillon and Mark Olson for a discussion of how digital representational technologies — such as animation, 3D modeling and virtual reality — can benefit the humanities.

Unlike static drawings or building plans, digital technologies can illustrate how forms change over time, something “no one’s really thought about showing,” Bruzelius said. Structural changes often reflect changing social, religious, political and ideological concerns, as was the case with the church of San Francesco in Folloni, Italy. See below: a student project about the church’s transformation over several centuries.

See Video:
San Francesco a Folloni on Vimeo.

Dillon has also used visualization technologies to show change — but for ancient sculpture bases, instead of buildings.

“We’ve been really good about representing the buildings of an ancient site. But for the most part, the bases on which statues stood tend to be ‘edited out’ of ground plans,” Dillon said, either because of uncertainty about the bases’ original location or because they make a site seem impossibly cluttered. The reality is that statues were abundant, and constantly vying with each other for the attention of passerby.

“When you set up your statue monument, you wanted it to be visible. You wanted it to be in the most prestigious location,” Dillon said. “I tell my students that the best way to imagine these spaces is to imagine the most open part of East campus and fill it up with 3,000 statues of Benjamin Duke.”

The accumulation of statues over time (courtesy Sheila Dillon)

According to Dillon, some archeologists have qualms with digital representation as a research tool, claiming that it is misleading and hypothetical. Dillon argued that ground plans can be misleading too, because they represent 3D objects in 2D space. 3D representation can offer a more true-to-life view, especially in the case of ancient statues.

“When you open up that elevation, [the space] becomes much less crowded,” Dillon said.

Olson acknowledged a few challenges with digital representation: disseminating and preserving large amounts of data, conveying uncertainty and allowing annotation from other scholars. For the most part, digital representational technologies can help humanities researchers ask and answer new questions.

“Visualization becomes a way of doing our research– not just [something we do] at the end,” Olson said.

Human brain isn't so special, neurobiologist says

By Ashley Yeager

On September 21, 2011

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Lecture, Neuroscience

Mark Changizi argues that speech, writing and music evolved from our brain's interactions with nature.Image courtesy of changizi.com.

By Ashley Yeager

Mark Changizi says there’s no “special sauce” in the human brain. Instead, he argues that our way of thinking is just the brain’s ability to recognize and mimic visual and sound patterns found in nature.

Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of Human Cognition at 2ai Labs, spoke about his research during Duke’s first neurohumanities research group seminar on Sept. 20. The group is co-organized by the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

During his talk, Changizi explored with the audience of both scientists and artists his investigations between shapes and sounds, nature and the fundamental elements of speech, music and writing.

He said that our brains didn’t evolve to have language and music instincts. Instead, language and music shaped themselves to be tailored to our brains. Because our brains were cut for nature, language and music mimicked it to transform ape to man.*

Comparing letter structures, with simple opaque, object positions like fallen trees, for example, Changizi explained that there are 36 topological shapes that form the basis for the letters found in 100 different writing systems across the world.

He showed the audience how these different structures could be made by crossing his arms. Most would think that this makes an X, but based on the position of the two objects, the shapes are ultimately two T intersections, he said.

By dropping objects and listening to the thunks and bangs, he explained the origin of sounds that have become words. And, by walking across the room, he pointed out elements in music such as pitch, loudness and melody.

Changizi's latest book explores how speech, music and writing evolved. Credit: changizi.com

“If you have a dog, you know exactly where he is in the house and probably what he is doing, just by listening to his movements,” Changizi said. The same goes for kids banging drawers in the kitchen.

Changizi explores this idea and more of his research in his latest book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella 2011).

He said he has drawn a lot of inspiration from art, adding that artists and those in the humanities are the true experimentalists that must shape the complicated structures to affect human minds.

It’s these experimentalists who really know “what minds like or don’t like,” he said, adding that he turns to their work to explore the “universal regularities” that are being discovered about the mind.

*This passage is adapted from Changizi’s book. To read an excerpt, click here.

A Witness to AIDS

By Ashley Yeager

On September 8, 2011

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine

Edwin Cameron is the only South African public figure to speak openly about his infection with HIV. Credit: witnesstoaids.com

By Ashley Yeager

Telling young people to use a condom or to stop having sex won’t prevent the spread of HIV in South Africa.

It’s like telling the one in five people in the U.S. who still smoke to simply stop, said Judge Edwin Cameron, a sitting justice in the South African Constitutional Court and an HIV-positive public figure.

Cameron spoke to a standing-room only crowd during a Global Health Seminar in the John Hope Franklin Center on Sept. 8.

His message was that the biggest barrier to preventing the spread of HIV and deaths from AIDS in his country was not access to anti-viral drugs or even the spread of information about the disease.

The barrier is self-stigma and our inability to talk candidly about sex.

In South Africa, 300,000 new HIV infections are diagnosed each year. For every two individuals treated, three more become infected, Cameron said.

Yet, women found with condoms in their purses can be harassed and arrested as suspected sex workers.

What’s even more of an issue is that both heterosexual and homosexual individuals still have difficulty talking openly about HIV and its transmission through sex, a natural part of human biology.

Having condoms and medication to prevent and treat the disease is not enough, Cameron said. “We need to understand the genetic cofactors of the disease,” to figure out why it spreads like “wildfire” in southern parts of Africa but not in west Africa, he said.

Cameron also argued that young activists, health practitioners, parents, basically all individuals, need to work as a civil society to normalize HIV and have open discussions about intimacy and the misconception that the virus “can’t touch me.”

Getting infected people to come forward and not be ashamed to admit they are sick because they fear being stigmatized has been, and remains, pivotal to the social understanding, acceptance and prevention of this disease, he said.

In 2005, Cameron published a book about his own issues dealing with self-stigma and his journey to speaking openly about his battle with HIV.