‘Love, Rock and Revolution’ features legendary music photographer Jim Marshall’s work

Never-before-seen 1960s photographic work by legendary San Francisco rock and roll

photographer Jim Marshall (1936-2010) will be featured in “The Haight: Love, Rock and Revolution,” an exhibit opening Friday, Feb. 6, in the halls of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

JimMarshallExhibit-410aThe show will run through May at the school’s Reva and David Logan Gallery of Documentary Photography at North Gate Hall, located on campus near the intersection of Hearst and Euclid avenues. It is free and open to the public.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has joined with Marshall’s estate to launch the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, with a goal of raising $500,000 to $1 million to  support the visual arts at the journalism school.

Marshall was widely known for his documentary photos of big-name musicians from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana and the Rolling Stones, as well as Johnny Cash’s groundbreaking live concerts at Folsom and San Quentin prisons. His work appeared on more than 500 album covers and in magazines such as Rolling Stone.

Marshall’s photos also captured street life in San Francisco and New York, a Kentucky coal mining town’s despair and Mississippi civil rights demonstrations. He received an honorary Grammy lifetime achievement award posthumously in 2014, the only photographer to ever receive such an honor.

At the opening reception on Feb. 6, longtime San Francisco music critic and Marshall friend Joel Selvin and Amelia Davis, a photographer and Marshall assistant, will be on hand to discuss Marshall’s work.

The 6:30-8:30 p.m. event also will feature a psychedelic light show, in keeping with the popular rock programming of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, free psychedelic posters resembling those made famous during that era by the Fillmore music hall in San Francisco will be given away at the reception, while they last.

The exhibit was curated by Ken Light, the Reva and David Logan Chair in Photojournalism.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, founded in 1996, offers courses in hands-on photojournalism and social documentary photography. The center routinely exhibits world-class photographers and hosts programs with distinguished photojournalists.

For more information about the event, contact Julie Hirano at juliehirano@berkeley.edu.

For more details about the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, contact Marlena Telvick at marlenatelvick@berkeley.edu.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Student psychologists help the depressed

Liisa Luuk and Lisa Backlund are in the last term of their Psychology programme. During the spring they will be doing a graduation project in which they will evaluate the effects of cognitive behavioural therapy on depression, where the treatment is a combination of online treatment and actual face-to-face meetings. Their study is a part of a larger European research project in which the results from eight European countries are brought together.

Liisa Luuk och Lisa Backlund There is good support in research for both traditional face-to-face CBT and for treatment delivered online, Ms Backlund explains. What is new, and has not been researched as much, is that in this study there are four face-to-face meetings with the therapist in addition to the online treatment. Many patients request meeting their therapist, and it can result in more people completing their therapy.

“We will be taking part in the entire project,” Ms Luuk says. “We have received general guidelines from the other EU countries taking part, but we have been able to design the online treatment and the form of the treatment meetings. And we are also part of the recruitment process, conducting interviews with the participants prior to treatment. Then we follow up the results afterward, and we will also take part as therapists.”

Meeting and treating patients is not new for them.

“We see patients for three terms during our course at the university clinic ,” Ms Backlund explains. “During that time we are given basic psychotherapy training. And last term we went out for twelve weeks on professional placement, working with patients.”

In Sweden the studies will be carried out in Linköping and Stockholm. There will be places for 150 people who feel depressed to receive treatment and take part in the study, which is free. The criteria for taking part include being over 18 and having access to a telephone and a smart-phone. The treatment itself will start in February and run over ten weeks. Those interested in taking part may indicate their interest now.

“It’s important for us to have a large number of participants to make the results as reliable as possible and so that they can be compared with the various other EU countries,” Ms Luuk says. “It’s great being part of a real research project that is so big, it’s wonderful. Gaining experience of seeing how the research is done when these big names in the field are the ones doing it.”

“If we were to work as psychologists in primary care in the future, it is very possible that we would be the ones actually putting this treatment into practice,” Ms Luuk says.

Ms Backlund agrees with her.

“Yes, there's a good chance that treatment will go in this direction – more online treatment – so it’s an excellent experience for us.”

The treatment includes four face-to-face meetings with the therapist; in between, the treatment is internet-based. The participants will read some texts that talk about depression and how it is dealt with in CBT. Some of it deals with changing what you do – how to do things differently in order to deal with your depression – and part of it deals with how to manage your thinking. These are two key parts of CBT. Then there are small tasks. They might be answering questions or doing some exercises. Then you apply what you’ve read to your daily life.

Later, the treatment will be evaluated.

“We will compare it with a control group,” Ms Backlund says. “We have various questionnaires that the participants will fill in before and after the study, where they will assess how they feel. We will compare the severity of the depression symptoms before and after the treatment. We will also have a control group, that does not take part, to compare with. They will receive online treatment after the study has been completed. So everyone who takes part in the study will receive treatment.”

Professor Gerhard Andersson of the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linköping University is behind the project. Naira Topooco is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology, and a part of Professor Andersson’s research team. She is a project manager in the research study and Ms Luuk’s and Ms Backlund’s immediate supervisor. DAY treatment was developed by researchers and psychologists from Linköping University and is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Source: The DAY-studie (article in Swedish)

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A French Chevalier for scholarly societal contributions

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Berkeley’s Program of Critical Theory, where she served as founding director, received the formal honor from Consul General Pauline Carmona at ceremonies in San Francisco. Butler was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry in 2013. This week she was pinned with the medal itself.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier in the Order of Arts et Lettres for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Carmona noted at the award ceremony the strength of Butler’s links with French scholars and intellectuals and the profound impact her work has had on France’s society, especially in the fields of feminism and gender studies.

Butler is active in gender and sexual politics, human rights and anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She was recently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She received the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, as well as the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies.

She is the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford and American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the College des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She has received honorary degrees from Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University and the University of St. Andrews. In 2013 she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry. In November 2014, Butler received an honorary degree from the Universite Fribourg in Switzerland.

She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Feelings of awe and joy can bolster your mental and physical health.

              POSITIVE EMOTIONS CAN STRENGTHEN YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM
                                         Image Credit: Mens Health

The wonders of the world can be just as good for your health as they are for your enjoyment, suggests a UC Berkley study.

Researchers have linked positive emotions—awe, contentment, spirituality—with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, proteins that signal your immune system to work harder and bolster good health.

In two separate experiments, more than 200 young adults were asked to log the extent to which they experienced amusement, awe, compassion, joy, love, and pride on a given day. Samples of gum and cheek tissue taken that same day showed that those who experienced more of these positive emotions had the lowest levels of the cytokine Interleukin 6, a marker of inflammation that can cause autoimmune disease and depression.

“That awe, wonder and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy,” says UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, a co-author of the study.

An added emphasis on spirituality and mindfulness may just be enough to get you through this winter happy and healthy. 

Source: Mensfitness

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Walter Gordon: A Pioneer On The Field And Beyond

Walter Gordon was the first African-American student at the Boalt Law School. Courtesy: Cal Athletics

While Walter A. Gordon was a trailblazer during his days as a Cal football player, it’s the ground he broke after he left Berkeley that really made history.

Gordon was a star player along the Bears’ offensive and defensive lines from 1916-18, and after his senior season he became the first All-American football player in Cal history. His selection also made him the second African-American ever to be named All-American.

Gordon went on to become a pioneer in many ways after graduating from Cal. He was the first African-American on the Berkeley police force and the first African-American student at the Boalt Law School, from which he received his JD in 1922. Later in his life, Gordon was appointed to the position of Governor of the Virgin Islands by President Dwight Eisenhower.

Gordon was born in Atlanta, Ga., in 1894 as a second generation free African-American. His father was a Pullman porter, who moved his family to Riverside, Calif., in 1904. Gordon’s father enrolled his children in Riverside Polytechnic High School, a predominantly white high school, in an attempt to give his son a better education. Walter was deeply affected by this and was known to quote his father in later years, asserting that color should not be an influence in access to education.

Walter entered UC Berkeley in 1914 and quickly became involved in a variety of activities. Although now known primarily for football, Gordon was a talented athlete who also excelled in wrestling and boxing, winning the state championship in both of these sports during his time at Cal. He also founded the Alpha Epsilon Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African-American Greek-letter fraternity.

In football, Gordon was a star player. He was also the first African-American player on first string. Extremely versatile, he played every position on both the offensive and defensive lines except center throughout his three years on the varsity. He shone as both a blocker and a tackler, a large man who was remembered by all who knew him for both his brute force and a surprising amount of litheness. In 1918, his senior season, Gordon was selected as a member of the third All-American team by the “Father of American Football” himself, Walter Camp. Gordon was the second African-American player to receive the honor of All-American, and the first player from Cal. That same year, Gordon was honored with an outstanding player award, presented in front of a large audience at the Greek Theatre.

Walter Gordon

Gordon experienced a great amount of success during his tenure as an athlete; however, he was also faced with challenges on account of his skin color. During his participation on the Cal heavyweight boxing team, prejudices against African-Americans sometimes kept Gordon out of the ring. In one such incident, the Stanford boxing team refused to compete against Berkeley due to Gordon’s presence. Gordon was forced to sit on the sidelines as another boxer was substituted in his place.

Racism followed Gordon into football as well. Andy Smith (coach of the “Wonder Years” teams) became head coach in 1916 and was unsure of how to navigate the sensitive subject of an African-American player on the team. When Cal was booked to play in Seattle, Smith was uncertain if Gordon should be allowed to come along. When put to a vote, the team decided that if Gordon made first string, he should be able to come with them and play the game. Nevertheless, as soon as the train arrived in Seattle, Gordon left his teammates to find lodging in an African-American part of town, reappearing the next morning to take his place in the game. He was unable at that time to stay in the same hotels as his teammates. Those who knew him say Gordon consciously handled situations regarding race this way, pushing boundaries, while leaving other battles for a later day.

After Gordon’s graduation, Smith hired Gordon as a part-time coach for the football team. He became the head coach for the Goofs, later known as the Ramblers. This team was the equivalent of the junior varsity. Gordon also became the head scout for Smith during the team’s Wonder Years and continued on through the tenure of famed head coach Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf.

Gordon’s responsibilities included both scouting new players and attending the games of Cal’s opponents to study their plays. Those who worked with Gordon claimed he was so perceptive he could predict the other team’s next play based solely off of their movements. Gordon’s skill was also apparent when he assisted in planning plays for Cal. He was thought to have a keen sense of what would happen; one player claimed he felt that when he stepped on the field, he was acting out a scenario that had been written by Gordon. Additionally, he worked closely with quarterbacks. In this era, no plays could be called from the sideline during a game, so the quarterback was essentially an offensive coach on the field. This meant quarterbacks worked a lot with the scouts to determine plays.

Gordon was considered a valuable member of the coaching staff, yet he was an understandably frustrated coach. During the 1920s and 30s, no African-American was allowed to hold any place of significant importance on the staff. Gordon was only allowed to be a coach for the Goofs, though he sometimes ran plays with the varsity linemen. Smith also kept Gordon out of all coaching staff pictures because he felt that seeing an African-American coach would discourage recruits from coming to Cal.

At the beginning of his term, Gordon had to change in a separate room from the rest of the coaches. When he went on scouting trips, he was subject to law allowed by the infamous Plessey v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, which legalized separate transportation and lodging for African-Americans. Gordon was forced to ride on the day coach in trains, regardless of the duration of a trip, and continued to stay in separate accommodations from his white counterparts.

Eventually, Gordon made some headway against the challenges of segregation. He got an “individual privilege” to stay in white hotels while on scouting and coaching jobs in major cities, although he still had to sneak in the side door. The trains also granted concessions, awarding Gordon with his own Pullman section compartment – a much more comfortable way to travel.

Gordon stayed very involved with football at Cal while continuing to expand his horizons. From 1919 to 1929, he served as a member of the Berkeley Police force, where he was once again the first black member. In the ’20s and ’30s, Gordon was active in the NAACP, eventually becoming president of the Alameda County branch. He married May Elisabeth Fisher in 1920, and together they had three children. He attended Boalt Law School and was the first African-American student and JD recipient when he graduated in 1922. Afterwards, he held a joint practice for many years, serving a mostly white client base, while gaining enormous respect in his field. Gordon also served as the vice president of the Lawyer’s Guild of San Francisco and was invited to speak at the L.A. Bar association.

In 1943, Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself a 1914 Boalt graduate, appointed Gordon to the California Adult Authority Board, which dealt with matters of state parole. Gordon ended his private practice a year later and for the next nine years served as chairman of the Board. Throughout his tenure, Gordon was credited for helping to change attitudes towards crime, focusing on humane policies and rehabilitation.

In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Gordon to the position of Governor for the Virgin Islands. Gordon served as Governor for three years, during which time he aimed to better the struggling society. After his term, he became a Federal Judge of the District Court of the Virgin Islands, and for the next 10 years used his law degree to try and better people’s lives.

Those who knew him remember Gordon as a charismatic and determined individual. He aimed to be an “inspiration to members of his race” and frequently insisted that the world should not think less of him based on the color of his skin. He took pride in all that he did and what he had accomplished, as well as his history and family.  He made no apologies for his heritage and achieved a great amount in his 82 years before passing away in 1976. He was chosen the California Alumnus of the Year in 1955, received the Citation Award from the Law School in 1964, and was named to the National Football Foundation’s College Hall of Fame in 1975. Today, he is remembered through the Walter Gordon Memorial Fund, established in 1991 to provide money for summer internships at the Law School.

Allison Spivack (UC Berkeley, Class of 2017) did the research and writing of this story as part of her Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship with Professor Margaret Conkey (Anthropology), which has brought together four undergraduates at Berkeley who are researching various aspects of Cal's student-athletes and the athletic program.

Source: Calbears

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February 2015 Supermarket Orchid, Mass marketing has hit the orchid world!

The phalaenopsis, or moth orchid, is a favorite gift orchid and is readily available in supermarkets and garden centers. It comes in a variety of colors and exotic patterns, and with care the long-lived blooms can be enjoyed for weeks. Photo by P. McDaniels, courtesy UTIA

Did someone bless you with a beautiful orchid? Mass marketing has hit the orchid world!
Among the most popular orchids for gifting are cattleyas (pronounced “KAT-lee-uh”). Another favorite gift orchid is the genus phalaenopsis (pronounced “fail-en-NOP-sis”).  This orchid is nicknamed the moth orchid because of the shape of its blooms. Both come in a variety of sizes and colors, are readily available in grocery stores and garden centers, and can look just as good in your home as the store.

In spite of the fact that my friends think I can grow anything with little regard for plant rules, I will confess that I managed to kill the first two orchids I was given years ago by simply not consulting the experts. Orchids are epiphytes or air plants that have developed specialized water-storage organs. They like to attach to moist tree bark in a tropical atmosphere. Thus, they have their own set of recommended growing practices. The American Orchid Society (aos.org) gives great advice on keeping your new friend healthy and blooming. 

Both cattleyas and phalaenopsis appreciate a lot of air movement and a long day of filtered, bright light. They don’t appreciate direct sunlight but do thrive in temperatures between 60 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Living in an east-facing window usually makes them happiest.

Both orchids should be kept in free-draining growing media. The AOS recommends even moisture, although allowing the media to dry slightly can be beneficial. I recommend you water your orchid once a week, at most. Be sure the water can drain and does not stand in the pot. The pot it came in probably has no drainage, so your job is to not overwater. You can also create drainage holes.

Orchids should be watered in the morning. Because the water should run through the pot, place the plants in the sink. Tepid water is recommended. Also, do not use salt-softened or distilled water. Let the water run through the plant for a minute or so. Be sure to let the plant drain completely. If any water gets trapped in the leaves, use a paper towel to blot. This will help avoid crown rot. If you’ve read that you should just lay some ice cubes around the roots, I have found that generally works, also.

As for fertilizer, there are a number of mixtures and brands, but the AOS recommends that any fertilizer you use should not contain urea. Their website discusses recommended methods. If you want to try a home fertilizer brew, you might try your morning brew. I dump the dregs of my coffee pot into my orchids once a week, all year around.  For an average pot with a 5-inch top measurement, about 1/4 cup of these leavings works best. Doing this will negate the job of occasional fertilizing, as the dregs give your new friend all the encouragement it needs to do its best. I use “high test” (caffeine) coffee leavings, but a friend is using decaf on hers. It will be interesting to see which formula produces the best results. 

When orchids have completed their flowering cycle, it’s time to cut the flower stem to encourage a new bloom on a healthy plant. Again, the AOS has a number of tips about getting your orchid to re-bloom. For phalaenopsis, they recommend cutting the flower stem ½-inch above the first or second node. Be sure your pruners have been disinfected. The plant will most often grow another flower stem and re-bloom.

Repotting may be necessary every one to three years if the plant becomes root-bound or the media needs replenished.  Don’t be tempted to substitute the loose medium that came with your orchid with your favorite soil mix. Orchids like orchid mixes that drain well, otherwise they may decline to the point of no return.

Source: UTIA

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The Power of the Past

If you grow up in the working class, neither love nor money can trump your blue-collar roots, a Duke sociologist has found.

Her study of couples from different social classes suggests that those who “marry up” still make life decisions based on their upbringing.

                             Cover of Streib book by Eric Ferreri, Duke News & Communications
                          Sociologist Jessi Streib’s book “The Past” is about class structure in marriages.

“Your social class never goes away,” says Jessi Streib, an assistant professor of sociology whose findings are revealed in her new book: The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. “It stays with you in terms of how you live your life. The class you’re born into sticks with you and shapes you, even when you marry into more money and a far more financially secure life.”

Streib’s findings derive from interviews she conducted with white, heterosexual Midwestern couples. She interviewed 32 couples in which one spouse came from a working class background, the other from the middle class. For comparison, she also interviewed 10 couples in which both spouses grew up in the middle class.

Streib defines working class as people raised by parents with high school educations; the middle class subjects were raised by college-educated parents.

Her findings run contrary to the notion held by many scholars that strivers can outrun a difficult childhood by getting a college degree and good-paying middle-class job.

While the findings suggest that a middle class upbringing isn’t required to excel in the American workplace, those upwardly mobile people from working class roots may still miss out on opportunities if they can’t or don’t subscribe to the unspoken norms of middle class culture, Streib notes.

Streib found that couples from different classes held onto their own, firmly-rooted beliefs regarding money and parenting, often negotiating fervently with each other over the proper amount of career planning and nurturing of children. Should children be left to grow and discover on their own, or should goals and schedules be set for them?

“Those are the sorts of tiny battles cross-class couples have all the time,” Streib said. “These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are certainly common and consistent.”

Source: Duke Univesity

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NCDC Releases 2014 U.S. Climate Report

The 2014 annual average contiguous U.S. temperature was 52.6°F, 0.5°F above the 20th century average. This ranked as the 34th warmest year in the 1895–2014 record. Very warm conditions dominated the West, while the Midwest and Mississippi Valley were cool.

The average contiguous U.S. precipitation was 30.76 inches, 0.82 inch above average, and ranked as the 40th wettest year in the 120-year period of record. The northern United States was wet, and the Southern Plains were dry; the national drought footprint shrank about 2 percent. 

In 2014, there were eight weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States. These eight events resulted in the deaths of 53 people. The events include: the western U.S. drought, the Michigan and Northeast flooding event, five severe storm events, and one winter storm event. 

This summary from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides to government, business, academia, and the public to support informed decision making.

Source: NOAA

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Victims of violence given voice in upcoming play

Members of the cast and production crew talk over a scene during a rehearsal for the Queen’s Drama Department’s upcoming staging of If We Were Birds at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. (Photo by Allie Gottlieb)

For its winter major production the Queen’s Department of Drama is staging one of the most powerful contemporary Canadian plays.

If We Were Birds is a Governor-General Award winning play by Erin Shields based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poem that also inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and is a poetic re-telling of the myth of sisters Philomela and Procne. In Shields’ work the ancient tale is transformed into a modern parable about violence against women in times of war as revealed through a chorus of testimonials of loss and suffering.

The play was selected as it has a large female cast explains drama professor and director Kim Renders, who points out that the department is comprised primarily of women. She also says the subject matter is particularly timely because of the ongoing conversation on campuses across the country, including Queen’s, surrounding sexual assault.

It’s a powerful play, Renders says, and a great script,

As a result, one of the main challenges in the production has been how to handle the powerful testimonials. There are times when the material is so heavy that a lighter touch may be required, Renders says.

“Dealing with this script at various times, that’s the balancing act,” she says. “When do we really punch it in and drive it home to the audience with hair pulling and chest beating and when do you need to hold back and just let the words do the work by themselves.”

Months of preparations are down to the final weeks and days but there is an eagerness to take to the stage. Renders, a co-founder of Nightwood Theatre and former artistic director of Theatre Kingston, says she is impressed by how the students are approaching the play from acting and production perspectives as well as the three student assistant directors.

“I’m feeling people are taking a very responsible approach to the material, very mature, professional,” Renders says. “People are quite dedicated to the work, and there is a ton of work because one of the students, Adrienne Miller , is choreographing the chorus and another student, Deanna Choi, is creating a soundscape that goes all the way through the entire production. And she is also playing music live.”

For the assistant directors it’s a further learning experience as they step off the stage and take on wider responsibilities.

“I think that being an assistant director is a very interesting learning experience because we are observers on one part, where we are watching and learning from Kim and her decisions as well as the actors,” says Holly Molaski (Artsci’15). “With such a big cast they have so many ideas too. So I’m really trying to observe and get ideas from everyone else.”

For Colleen Rush (Artsci’15) seeing the wider scope of the production has been valuable.

“What I’ve found interesting is seeing how quickly the images take form,” she says. “I also find interesting that Holly and I have a lot of input and it matches up. There’s a lot of agreeing.”

If We Were Birds will be staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Performances will take place in the Studio Theatre Feb. 4-7 and 12 at 8 pm, with a matinee on Feb. 8 at 2 pm. The play will be staged in the Grand Lobby on Feb. 10 and 11 at 8 pm as well as a special “Sunrise Performance” scheduled for the morning of Feb. 7. The time has yet to be finalized.

Tickets are $22 for general admission, $15 for students and seniors and can be purchased online at theisabel.ca/tickets, at the Isabel box office (12:30-4:30 pm), or at the door prior to performances.

Source: Queens Unviersity

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How an innovative grants program (and Belgian beer mixers) at Johns Hopkins fuels discoveries about the human brain

A neuroscientist, an electrical engineer, a surgeon, and an education researcher walk up to a bar.

This could be the start of a joke, or it could be a scene from a recent Science of Learning Institute event at Johns Hopkins University. At the institute's four-times-yearly Belgian Beer Events, scientists from far-flung fields—and often from far-flung parts of the university itself—present their research to each other in short, digestible chunks. Their creativity and conviviality stimulated by a cup of ale or lager, the researchers strike up conversations and form connections that range widely across disciplinary boundaries, from classroom learning to machine learning, from recovery from stroke to memory formation in the brain.

Such conversations can be all too rare at a university where faculty are spread not just across a campus but throughout a large city and beyond. The result, for an inherently interdisciplinary subject like the science of learning, is that projects that could address fundamental and important questions can be hard to conceive and get off the ground. And too often, promising basic research doesn't get translated into the settings where it could help real-world learners.

The Belgian Beer Events, conceived shortly after the institute launched in 2013, are helping change that. They provide an informal space where basic researchers can meet translators, where machine-learning experts can meet early-childhood educators, where cognitive scientists can meet smartphone app developers. The events rotate between locations: October's was at the School of Education, and December's was hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering; previous ones were held at the School of Medicine and in Homewood's Levering Hall. Computer scientist Greg Hager likens the events to "an intellectual mixing bowl."

Beyond generating lively conversation, the gatherings are sparking collaborations between researchers who otherwise might never have met. At an event in 2013, neurologist Bonnie Nozari presented her work on speech and language processing disorders. Computer scientist Raman Arora then spoke about his work on machine learning and speech recognition. Recognizing a mutual interest in speech, the two chatted. The next day, they began planning a joint project to see if computers can predict how humans will pronounce words, and then provide feedback to people seeking to learn a new language, or to relearn how to speak after a stroke.

It sounds like a lucky encounter, but in fact electrical engineer Sanjeev Khudanpur, a member of the institute's steering committee, was at work behind the scenes. He conceived the Belgian Beer Events, and he made sure that Arora, his colleague in the Whiting School of Engineering, would be speaking on the same day as Nozari, of the School of Medicine. Later, when the two were ready to apply for funding, Khudanpur encouraged their ultimately successful proposal for one of the institute's research grants. "I see myself as a matchmaker," he says.

"It's that kind of really innovative, different seeding of projects that I think we've done really well," says Barbara Landau, the institute's director and the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The institute funded eight projects in 2013 and eight more in 2014, with projects receiving an average of $140,000 spread over two years. Funding goes to hiring graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, developing software, purchasing equipment, and supplying other research needs. The grants are competitive; the review committee has received around 30 proposals a year. The funded projects address a broad range of learning settings, from the classroom to the operating room to distance learning that can take place anywhere. The learners are not limited to humans, either; many of the projects include a strong component of "machine learning"—harnessing computers to recognize patterns in data and use them to develop new human learning applications. Other projects focus on developing animal models that can be used to study human learning.

The grant program allows researchers to get support for projects that might not be quite ready for a proposal to a traditional funding agency like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, says Landau. Almost without exception, an NSF or NIH review panel will want to see at least preliminary data demonstrating that an idea is viable. With Science of Learning Institute funding, scientists can do exploratory research that will provide the data needed to support a larger proposal to a more traditional funding agency. "It allows people to do things that they wouldn't necessarily be able to accomplish by a standard grant," says Landau. "The granting agencies tend to be somewhat conservative, and we're looking for innovation."

Like Arora and Nozari's collaboration, many of the funded projects harness existing technological applications to improve learning, often in novel ways. For example, Khudanpur and Hager are working with Gyusung Lee, an instructor of surgery in the School of Medicine, to develop computer software that can help teach surgeons how to use the da Vinci robotic surgical platform. The project grew out of an existing effort called the Language of Surgery, developed by researchers in the Whiting School of Engineering's Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Through this effort, which began in 2006, Hager, Khudanpur, and colleagues program computers to record and analyze the different kinds of movements that surgeons make while performing certain tasks with surgical robots. The researchers' goal was to find movements that could consistently be classified as either expertlike or novicelike. Novice surgeons are more likely to break a suture, for example, or to push or pull on tissue while using the robot to manipulate a surgical needle. The researchers were able to train computer software to recognize such expert and novice movements much as a surgical trainer would.

The next step is to have the assessment tool provide real-time feedback to surgical trainees. With the kind of application the researchers are envisioning, trainees could, in theory, receive an unlimited amount of individualized feedback on what skills they have mastered and where more work is needed. "We're putting the computer in the human learning loop," Khudanpur says. "The computer has certain abilities that are complementary to humans. [For example,] the computer doesn't get tired. The computer usually doesn't charge by the hour."

A few years ago, when the researchers applied for an NIH grant to develop such a learning application, the proposal was rejected because they had no data showing the idea had promise. Thanks to their Science of Learning Institute research award, the scientists are starting to collect that data. Backed by some preliminary results, they recently put in a new NIH proposal and are waiting to hear back.

Meanwhile, thanks to a talk Hager gave last fall, his team's research may soon spawn another effort, which would take Language of Surgery technology out of the operating room and into the classroom. Hager's presentation inspired Landau and Amy Shelton, a professor in the School of Education, who is also on the institute's steering committee, to wonder whether motion-tracking software could recognize the movements that young children make when learning to build toy towers out of blocks. Spatial skills like tower building, in addition to being important in their own right, are of interest to researchers because they often predict children's future abilities in math and other areas. Hager, Landau, and Shelton are now discussing a potential project to put motion sensors on blocks and use computers to track how children acquire manipulation skills, a tactic similar to the one Hager's team uses to assess the skills of aspiring surgeons.

Institute-funded collaborations between computer scientists and education researchers are also reaching far beyond traditional education settings like medical training. In a project funded in 2014, computer scientists Philipp Koehn and Jason Eisner are teaming with Chadia Abras in the School of Education's Center for Technology Education to develop a radically new way to learn a foreign language. The idea is based on macaronic language—a kind of text that mixes two languages into a Spanglish-like hybrid. While such mixing has traditionally been employed by novice speakers or for satirical purposes, Eisner realized that coupled with recent advances in machine translation, it could also help introduce learners to foreign vocabulary and syntax in a gentle and piecemeal way rather than all at once, as in a typical foreign text read laboriously with the aid of a dictionary.

To implement the idea, the researchers are developing software that translates a text progressively, with more and more of the text appearing in the foreign language as the reader's comprehension improves. For an English-to-German learner, for instance, the English phrase "a loaf of bread" could start to appear as "ein Loaf of Bread." When the reader is comfortable with reading the German word "ein" instead of the English "a," the program could progress to "ein Breadloaf," resembling German in syntax but retaining English words. The text would then become "ein Brot loaf," and finally the fully German "ein Brotlaib*." The program will intermittently assess the student's reading comprehension and ability, and tune the amount of foreign language presented to the reader's progress; readers also can direct the program to make the translation easier or harder.

Since the concept still needs to be proved, it makes an ideal Science of Learning Institute project, says Koehn. Eisner adds, "It's a bet that this will work out and will not, for example, confuse people or give them bad habits." The researchers plan to develop an English-to-German application and test it on the Web and in Johns Hopkins classes in combination with more traditional classroom and textbook instruction. If successful, the software could also be made available on the Internet for independent learners.

The project exemplifies how interdisciplinary teams can merge cutting-edge research in machine and human learning, says Kelly Fisher, the institute's assistant director and an assistant professor in the School of Education. "It's a software program that is learning itself, learning about the learner."

Institute-funded research also targets learners far beyond those who are acquiring skills for the first time. Learning is critical for the millions of people who lose skills when they suffer strokes and other neurological conditions and then need to regain them, often through lengthy and complex rehabilitation processes. Research on how to more efficiently relearn lost skills could make a huge difference in how quickly such people can return to work and fully participate in society again.

Cognitive scientist Michael McCloskey recently discovered a new, debilitating, and apparently very rare reading deficit known as alphanumeric visual awareness deficit, or AVAD. McCloskey, a professor in Cognitive Science, identified the condition based on two cases that came to him in one year. One of them, a 61-year-old Baltimore geologist with a neurological disease, could see fine in general, but when looking at letters or numbers, he saw only blurs. McCloskey and his colleagues found, however, that by teaching the patient new characters to use in place of the digits, they could restore his recognition abilities. The researchers developed a smartphone calculator app and modified the geologist's laptop to allow him to do math with the new symbols.

Seeking to build on this work, McCloskey assembled a team of neurologists and cognitive scientists to look for more people with AVAD in order to study the condition using brain imaging and other techniques, and to develop apps and other technology that would help affected people make sense of letters and numbers again. But the researchers have run into a roadblock: They haven't found a single other case of AVAD beyond the original two. A woman in North Carolina who seemed to have the deficit turned out to have a somewhat different condition. "On the one hand, it's interesting that [AVAD is] so rare; on the other hand, it's not what we were hoping for," McCloskey says.

So he and his team have reoriented their project, broadening the scope to include more-common character recognition disorders. For example, some people cannot recognize a number or letter when it is presented to them whole but can recognize a character if they watch it being drawn. Perhaps, says McCloskey, a smartphone app could be developed to read signs and other important text, and draw each character in sequence for people with this deficit. His team is also starting to collaborate with a software developer, MicroBLINK, to make an app that would identify characters and then read the text aloud.

In addition to potentially helping people regain lost abilities, many institute-funded projects such as McCloskey's are aimed at teasing apart the different brain regions and processes responsible for seemingly coherent learned skills like reading. Along these lines but focusing on an entirely different brain function, psychologist Marina Bedny, of the Krieger School's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, is heading a team that received an institute grant to study how the brain can retool its hardware when the original purpose of one of its regions is no longer needed. In sighted people, around a quarter of the brain is devoted to visual processing; in blind people, these brain regions get repurposed. How does this work? Bedny wondered.

To investigate this question, she and colleagues in the Krieger School's Department of Cognitive Science and in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the School of Medicine are combining language comprehension assessments with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. They hope to learn whether brain regions normally devoted to sight are needed for language processing in blind people. The researchers recently collected data at a National Federation of the Blind convention and are in the process of testing a control group of sighted people. This effort would have been impossible without a source of support for interdisciplinary projects, Bedny says. "You just can't do this kind of research without an interdisciplinary team because you need so many different kinds of expertise," from linguistics to neuroimaging to TMS. "We really needed the whole team to make it happen."

In another example of institute-funded brain research, neuroscientist David Foster, of the School of Medicine, is taking on perhaps the most basic of all aspects of learning: memory formation. Specifically, Foster is interested in how certain kinds of memories are formed in a brain region called the hippocampus. He has studied this process in detail in rat brains, using dozens of implanted electrodes to precisely record electrical signals as the rats' neurons fire in sequences that represent stored memories. Foster would like to carry out similar studies in humans, but he cannot just go sticking electrodes deep into people's brains. So he first needs to develop less-invasive procedures.

Foster and William Anderson, an associate professor of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, are now developing such techniques, piggybacking on research that Anderson's group does on epilepsy patients wherein they collect and analyze electrical data gathered from the surface of the brain. By piloting their study on a small sample of patients, the researchers hope to strengthen their position for applying for a larger grant, possibly from the NIH.

Bedny and Foster, both assistant professors, say that institute funding has allowed them to take on projects that might have otherwise been too risky and uncertain for an untenured faculty member. "I probably would not do too much looking outside of my own area to collaborate if I wasn't pushed and incentivized to do so by this kind of mechanism," Foster says. "This allows me, and pays me, to invest in thinking outside of my own small area."

The research grant program is the Science of Learning Institute's first major initiative, and many of the projects from the initial funding round are close to reporting results. The institute plans to continue awarding grants for at least three more years, and possibly more, depending on funding. To assess the program's success, Landau and Fisher are tracking metrics such as publications that awardees produce and external awards that leverage institute-funded work.

The institute also just launched its second big initiative: the Distinguished Science of Learning Fellowship Program. This program will award around five postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships annually to students wanting to pursue interdisciplinary research in learning. Each fellow will have two advisers from different disciplines.

The fellows also will play a key role in the third prong of the institute's mission: translating and disseminating results beyond academia. Traditionally, much of the learning that occurs in the nation's formal classrooms and more informal settings is not as informed by research as it could be, says Fisher. To help change that, the Science of Learning Institute recently launched partnerships with the Port Discovery Children's Museum in Baltimore and the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York to develop exhibits that are based on the research into the science of learning. The institute also plans to hire a dissemination expert to help translate research results into classrooms and other learning settings.

The Science of Learning Institute's stated mission is "to understand and optimize the most essential part of our human capital: the ability to learn." The mission makes the institute a crucial catalyst at a university—a place dedicated to learning—where all the pieces are already in place to make major progress on one of the most important scientific questions of our time, says Landau. "One of the goals of the Science of Learning Institute," she says, "is really to sew together the parts of the university that haven't yet interacted—to make it, in President Daniels' words, one university."

Source: JHU

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Johns Hopkins student's neuroscience major inspires her first novel

First-time author Marlene Kanmogne IMAGE: MARSHALL CLARKE

One night, Marlene Kanmogne had a dream. She dreamed that she could change reality and shift what was happening around her just by thinking about it.

When Kanmogne awoke, she was overcome by a feeling of power and control, emotion and energy that was so vivid and captivating that she didn't want it to end.

So the junior neuroscience major, who grew up in Cameroon and Oklahoma, decided to write it down. Over the next four years, she transferred the ongoing dream of the girl who could make things happen with her mind into a series of spiral notebooks.

"When I write, it's like there's a film in my head that I transcribe to paper as quickly as I can so that I don't lose the film," Kanmogne says.

It wasn't easy. When school was in session and there was class or volunteering or work with the African Students Association, she was far too busy to write as much as she wanted. But she persevered, completed her story, and this summer even got it published. "I'm a planner—I like to set goals and complete them," she says. "Not finishing was not an option."

The result is The Mind Wanderer (Solstice Press, 2014), a 305-page young adult novel about a 15-year-old girl named Melissa who realizes she has a powerful mind-transforming ability that's much bigger than she is and must adapt to it and accept its consequences.

Kanmogne, 20, hopes to become a physician. She always viewed the book as a personal project. Even after its publication, she has some difficulty accepting notice for being a novelist. Instead, she'd rather discuss the intricacies of the brain. "I do like writing—it's a great hobby of mine. But I think what really drives me is the mind part, the brain part. It all starts and ends with the brain," she says.

Yet, with a year and a half of college, medical school, and residency still ahead, she's not willing to leave her writing hobby behind. The Mind Wanderer, she says, is only book one of three.

"I still have dreams that further the story, and I know what Melissa will do," Kanmogne says. "I see the path of her life, and I want to follow it. And that just keeps picking at me to the point where I have to put it down on paper."

Source: JHU

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Use Social Media in Study of E-Cigarettes

Five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will support project that is as much about data-gathering methods as it is about public health. Credit: UA

When Facebook announced in September that it would use all that personal data it collects to roll out a new ad platform to rival Google, privacy advocates groaned and marketers grinned.

But what if all that intelligence could be used to crack open one of today’s most pressing — yet least understood — public health issues?

That’s precisely the vision of the University of Arizona’s Daniel Zeng, MIS professor at the Eller College of Management, and Scott Leischow, adjunct faculty in the UA College of Medicine and professor of health services research at Arizona’s Mayo Clinic.

Fusing cutting-edge informatics and public health, their plan to scrape social media to create the world’s best data on e-cigarette usage and marketing recently won a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The project will tackle four distinct goals. It will:

Create a massive, real-time and continuously growing data set of what consumers and marketers say about e-cigarettes on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social media forums focused on e-cigarettes and "vaping."

Mine that content for insights into why people use e-cigarettes, how they believe they affect their health and whether they help them quit smoking.

Document the marketing landscape — all the ways brands and vendors use these channels to promote their products and how consumers respond.

Integrate all of that information in the world’s first one-stop resource for wide-ranging data on e-cigarettes as revealed through social media as a tool for other researchers, health care professionals and more.

While e-cigarettes are relatively new in the U.S. — they were introduced in 2007 — sales are doubling annually and were expected to reach $1 billion last year. Even so, any time public dollars fund research, two questions naturally arise: Why study this? And why study it this way?

"There’s so much we don’t know about e-cigarettes," Leischow says. "The scientific community has found mixed data on whether they’re helpful for smoking cessation. We have questions about how different flavorings impact use, particularly among minors. And many health professionals worry that e-cigarettes may ultimately lead to more young people taking up smoking. All of these blind spots around a product that is still totally unregulated make this a top-priority area for the FDA."

As for why it makes sense to study e-cigarettes in this way, Zeng’s MIS expertise holds the key.  By mining social media in real time, as Zeng and Leischow have proposed, there are a number of strategic advantages:

Data comes from people interacting naturally in their day-to-day lives, thus removing “presentation bias” problems intrinsic in surveys.

The data collection is automated, which means sample size is not constrained by how much money or how many eyeball hours researchers can muster.

The lack of constraint also makes anecdotal information scientifically relevant: One personal story is just that, but 10,000 or 100,000 personal stories over time equal robust statistical data.

Because content is processed by algorithms, not people, data is available in near real time, not months or even years after countless hours of labor-intensive review.

The world of e-cigarettes, like that of any niche product or interest, has its own specialized vocabulary of acronyms and slang, so the research team will first need to construct a base lexical dataset for “training” the computers that will collect and process content.

It’s also one thing to scrape words but a much more complex challenge to automate the process of extracting meaning, so that a computer can spot when someone cites a reason for using e-cigarettes or mentions how the products affect his or her health (both of which first require a computer to detect who is or isn’t a user) or correctly catalog the marketing strategy used in an advertisement.

"We basically will be creating a suite of novel technologies for this study using both established building blocks of informatics and methods that have yet to be developed," Zeng says, "including analysis and visualization tools that were developed here at the U of A. 
Beyond that, we’re relying on proven tools for pattern mining, group behavior prediction, social network analysis and a lot more, but in ways that have never been combined for this level of research and in this topic area."

For Leischow, the knowledge those tools will produce is invaluable.

"There are all kinds of messages out there, from how effective e-cigarettes can be to help smokers quit tobacco to how they’re totally harmless or taste like candy," he says. "It may be that e-cigarettes prove beneficial to public health, or they may be shown to do more harm than good. In either case, it often takes many years for experts to fully recognize how products are being used and how they impact well-being, and even longer for regulation to catch up.

"This time, it’s going to be different. This time, we’re getting out ahead."

Source: UA

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Cuba opens door to its health care system for visiting nursing students

Students and faculty from the UCLA School of Nursing visit Casa de Maternidad, where women with high-risk pregnancies can live to receive special care. Credit: UCLA

The timing couldn't have been better for 18 UCLA School of Nursing graduate students and two faculty members headed for Cuba on an educational mission. As they were boarding a flight to Havana from Miami on Dec. 17, big news was breaking: The U.S. was re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, mending a break that has lasted more than 50 years. 

One hour later, the UCLA group arrived in Havana, where they were greeted with exuberant hugs, kisses and tears of joy by an excited group of Cuban health leaders over the historic turn of events.

That was the auspicious beginning of a five-day, action-packed visit for the UCLA group. To learn about Cuba’s health care system, they met with physician-nurse teams, engaged in Pan American Health Organization-based discussions on major causes of illness and death, among other topics; and visited community-based consultorios, polyclinics and sex education centers as well as nursing and medical schools.

Eager to see different health care settings, they spent time at a home for seniors and a residence where women with high-risk pregnancies went to live to receive special care.

Ties between Westwood and Havana

This was not the first time that UCLA nurses have connected with their counterparts in Cuba. In 2011, Maria Elena Ruiz, assistant adjunct professor at the school, attended an International Health Conference in Cuba as a member of the American Public Health Association. Through those meetings, she saw firsthand how a first-world, prevention-focused primary health care system functions with third-world economics.

When she returned to UCLA, Ruiz, together with Adey Nyamathi, associate dean for international research and scholarly activities, developed a program that would provide similar experiences for nursing students, who would receive partial credit for a public health course, complete required readings, participate in pre- and post- conferences, and write daily reflective papers.

How do they do it?

Cuba, the UCLA nurses learned during their visit last December, is a third-world country with some impressive health outcomes, including an overall life expectancy that rivals that in the U.S. (78.4 years for Cubans versus 78.6 years for Americans), immunization rates that are nearly 100% and low infant mortality. Yet their health care costs per capita are nearly 15 times lower than that of the United States.

Primary care and an emphasis on prevention are key to the success of the Cuban health care system.  

“Their system shows how primary care really does work,” said student Vladimir Camarce.  “And when implemented correctly, you can see great outcomes. Historically, the U.S. system has been focused on acute and tertiary care, but we are now starting to see a shift with the Affordable Care Act.”

In Cuba, public service announcements about health are shown daily on television. “They don’t have traditional television commercials like we do here, so the government uses the opportunity to deliver messages about hygiene or reminders on vaccines,” observed student Stephanie Phan.

Another reason for Cuba’s success is its focus on personalized, community-based care. Doctors and nurses work as a team and live in the communities they serve.  They might see patients in a clinic in the morning, said graduate student John Scholtz, and then visit patients who can’t get to the clinic at home “to ensure that they are receiving their checkups and following through with the recommendations.”

The students also noted the personal nature of health care in Cuba. “Patients are referred to by name,” said Phan, “not by 'the patient in room 11' …  They told us, ‘They’re not patients, they’re people.”

There is also a strong integration of traditional, herbal and western medicine. It’s all considered good health care. “I believe we should find a way to incorporate that integration into our practices because we do get a lot of patients who use complementary therapies,” said Camarce.

What amazed the students was that the Cubans achieve all this with a scarcity of equipment and health resources. “They don’t have the equipment we have, the technology we have or the pharmaceutical industry,” noted student Jacqueline Marroquin. “They make do with so little, but they are able to accomplish so much.”

“What medical equipment is available resembles a scene from the old MASH television series,” said Ruiz. “And yet we were overwhelmed with the kindness and eagerness of our hosts to share their health experiences with us.”

Also surprising: On average, nurses and doctors make only $20-$30 a month.  But their education and housing are free or subsidized, and they don’t have student loans to pay off.

“In the U.S., you wouldn’t have a lot of people pursuing these professions for that kind of pay,” said Scholtz. “But in Cuba, you have a lot of people interested in being doctors or nurses. They go into it because they want to make a difference in their community.”

Part of the reason why the Cuban system works is the collectivist-based culture and the population perspective, the students said. Many things that have been adapted in Cuba, however, wouldn’t work in the U.S.  “We might be able to integrate some of the ideas in a micro-community,” suggested Marroquin.

Leaving hehind impressions — and hand sanitizers

While the students were there to learn, they also taught Cubans something about Americans.  “Our interactions showed them that we were open to ideas and willing to learn from them,” said Scholtz. On a more tangible note, the group left behind hand sanitizers.  And pens. Lots of them.  “There is a real need for basic hygienic supplies, everything we take for granted,” added Ruiz.

But more importantly, the UCLA visitors came away with a new resolve. “As nursing students, as nurses, we really need to understand what is going on across our borders,” said Marroquin.

Nyamathi added:  “These students are now motivated to make a difference, to learn more about other countries and to question our health system, health care costs, disparities, and what we can learn from others to improve health and health care in the U.S.” 

It’s also a hope that, with the dawning of warmer relationships with Cuba, the U. S. health care community may be able to learn a lot more from their neighbor, they said.

Source: UCLA

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