November 29, 2006, 4:48 AM CT

Public School Or Private School

In the first study to examine differences in learning gains at the kindergarten level, William Carbonaro (University of Notre Dame) finds that publicly schooled kindergarteners post the same or greater learning gains than privately schooled kindergarteners. These findings come as a surprise because, as Carbonaro writes in the recent issue of the American Journal of Education, Both the financial costs of private schooling and other self-selection factors ensure that the private schools will have a more advantaged population of students than public schools.

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Carbonaro points out that gains at higher academic levels are greater among privately schooled students. On the one hand, it is reassuring that public kindergartens do as well or slightly better than private kindergartens in producing learning gains, Carbonaro writes.

Conversely, this remains something of a hollow victory because private school students still have substantially higher test scores at the end of kindergarten than public school students.

Carbonaro suggests that public schools may want to seriously consider instituting all-day kindergarten to catch up to private school achievement levels, as this would provide more learning opportunities without reducing the amount of time spent in school on nonacademic material.........

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November 29, 2006, 4:30 AM CT

Survival Of Many Universities At Risk

The survival of a number of developing country universities, particularly in Africa, is at risk if they are not quickly strengthened and geared to help address regional development problems through research, warns the head of advanced studies at the United Nations University.

Speaking at UNESCOs Paris headquarters Nov. 29, Prof. A.H. Zakri, Director of UNUs Yokohama-based Institute for Advanced Studies, appealed for international help to foster relevant research programmes in the developing world, where the pressures are greatest, the need most acute and it is really a matter of life and death.

A number of developing country universities are not relevant, he says, citing Dutch research showing a major disconnect between research in developing country universities and regional economic development priorities, as well as weak linkages between knowledge producers and users and between knowledge production and innovation.

A universal characteristic of university success is relevance or research utility, says Dr. Zakri. Universities and the research they undertake needs to be relevant to their Governments policy, to their peoples educational needs and to their communitys needs. Universities that are not relevant will not survive.

He told an international conference of higher education experts that rising poverty, falling Gross Domestic Product and political upheaval in Africa are a function in part of paltry national R&D investment through universities in that part of the world. As per Dr. Zakri, Asia accounted for 31.5% of world R&D expenditure in 2001; Africa accounted for 0.6%.........

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November 29, 2006, 4:25 AM CT

Don't Understand Prescription Medicine Labels?

When Michael Wolf paged though dusty, yellowing pharmacists logs from the 1890s at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, he found the following entry about a druggists encounter with a confused patient: Shake well, a patient apparently read out loud to the pharmacist from his prescription bottle label. Does that mean I shake myself".

It sounds like the punch line of a bad joke, but it wasnt. And the confusion experienced by that patient more than a century ago hasnt changed much.

A number of people still dont fully understand the seemingly simple label instructions on their prescription medication, as per a new study of low-income patients by Wolf, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine. The study was published Nov. 29 online in Annals of Internal Medicine (www.anals.org). Wolf is presenting a position piece on how to improve those labels Nov. 29 at the American College of Physicians Foundation conference in Washington, D.C.

Wolf observed that nearly half of the patients in the study misinterpreted at least one or more out of the five prescription labels they were shown. Patients with low literacy made the most mistakes and frequently were unable to grasp four out of five label instructions. But even people with a high-school education and higher had problems.........

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November 28, 2006, 8:48 PM CT

Old Engravings Of Animals Are Charmingly Strange

Mark Frauenfelder:

Bibliodyssey has an excellent gallery of 18th century engravings from 'Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen' at Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Lyon (named as 'Histoire naturelle des quadrupedes'.

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.........

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November 28, 2006, 5:06 AM CT

Smarter inventory control of spare parts

Smarter storage of spare parts is now possible thanks to a new inventory model, based on extensive cooperation between different warehouses. This method ensures the integration of inventory control for all parts in stock at several warehouses. This way both the number of parts in stock and the waiting time for spare parts can be reduced, with theoretical savings of up to 50%. This is possible thanks to fundamental mathematical models developed by PhD candidate Bram Kranenburg MSc. With his research Kranenburg hopes to obtain a doctorate from the Technical University Eindhoven (TU/e) on Thursday 23 November.

Big Business

The storage of spare parts is big business in the Netherlands, involving billions of euros every year. Every branch of industry or service that works with complex machinery needs spare parts. Just think of electronics, hospitals, industrial machinery, and the car industry. One small, defective part can put a complete machine out of operation for quite some time. That is why there have always been strict requirements for stocking and distributing spare parts.

Pooling storage facilities

A great deal of research has already been done to optimize the entire logistic process. Still, inventory control is usually done separately for each warehouse. ASML approached the TU/e to find out if there was not a smarter way to do this and this question became a central theme in Kranenburgs PhD research. Kranenburg: "The crux of my model is the pooling of different warehouses. If a local warehouse does not have a certain part in stock, it can contact another local warehouse instead of the central warehouse. If you want to do this on a structural basis, there is much to be won by planning your inventory control around this. But if you want to do this right, it becomes very complex mathematically to work this all out. That is the problem I worked on in my PhD research and ASML has been able to implement my model and algorithms right away.........

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November 28, 2006, 4:36 AM CT

Brains Respond Better To Name Brands

Your brain may be determining what car you buy before you've even taken a test drive. A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has observed that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains. The findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

"This is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test examining the power of brands," said Christine Born, M.D., radiologist at University Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Gera number of. "We observed that strong brands activate certain areas of the brain independent of product categories".

"Brain branding" is a novel, interdisciplinary approach to improve the understanding of how the mind perceives and processes brands. Using modern imaging methods, scientists are now able to go beyond marketing surveys and gather information on how the brain responds to a particular brand at the most basic level.

"Brain imaging technologies may complement methods normally used in the developing area of neuroeconomics," Dr. Born said.

Dr. Born and his colleagues used fMRI to study 20 adult men and women. The volunteers were all right-handed, had a mean age of 28 years and possessed a high level of education.........

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November 28, 2006, 4:20 AM CT

First Robot-assisted Weight Loss Surgery

UT Southwestern Medical Center surgeons are the first in North Texas to perform robotically assisted laparoscopic gastric-bypass and colon-resections surgeries.

The procedures were performed using DaVinci, a four-armed robot controlled by the surgeon via a joystick. DaVinci can provide better camera views and more precise surgical manipulations than are available in traditional laparoscopic surgeries.

The robot can offer easier access to some of the more inaccessible places in the body such as abdominal and gastrointestinal areas. As a result, laparoscopic surgeons expect the robotic procedures to grow in popularity for colon, gastric and esophageal operations, said Dr. Edward Livingston, chairman of GI/endocrine surgery.

Surgeries for colon cancers are on the rise, while gastric bypass procedures also are becoming more common.

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in America with more than 106,000 new cases in 2006.

Gastric bypass has become more popular as obesity among the nations population increases. More than 140,000 gastric bypass procedures are performed annually in the United States.

Laparoscopic surgeries, also called minimally invasive surgeries, are performed via several tiny holes rather than one long incision. This commonly results in fewer complications, shorter recovery times and less post-operative pain.........

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November 26, 2006, 7:58 AM CT

Dramatic Shift In Marine Ecosystems Occurred 250m Years Ago

The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.

Ecologically simple marine communities were largely displaced by complex communities. Furthermore, this apparently abrupt shift set a new pattern that has continued ever since. It reflects the current dominance of higher-metabolism, mobile organisms (such as snails, clams and crabs) that actually go out and find their own food and the decreased diversity of older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms (such as lamp shells and sea lilies) that filter nutrients from the water.

So says embargoed research would be published in Science on November 24, 2006. An accompanying article suggests that this striking change escaped detection until now because prior research relied on single numbers--such as the number of species alive at one particular time or the distribution of species in a local community--to track the diversity of marine life. In the new research, however, researchers examined the relative abundance of marine life forms in communities over the past 540 million years.........

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November 26, 2006, 6:55 AM CT

Impact of climate change in Africa

Africa is the continent that will suffer most under global warming. Past history gives us lessons on the likely effects of future climate change. Of greatest concern are the 'large infrequent disturbances' to the climate as these will have the most devastating effects. In a remarkable study from the Kenyan Tsavo National Park published recently in the African Journal of Ecology, Dr Lindsey Gillson uncovers evidence for a drought that coincided with the harrowing period of Maasai history at the end of the 19th century termed "Emutai" meaning to wipe out.

"Severe disturbance events and rapid environmental change tend to occur infrequently, but can have a lasting effect on both environment and society" says Dr Gillson. This was no-where more evident than in the case of the Maasai "Emutai". The period 1883-1902 was marked by epidemics of bovine pleuropneumonia, rinderpest and small pox. The rains failed completely in 1897 and 1898. The Austrian explorer Dr Oscar Baumann, who travelled in Maasailand in 1891, wrote chilling eye-witness accounts of the horror experienced during a large ecological disturbance:

"There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of starvation glared. warriors scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders. Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims." (Baumann 1894, Masailand).........

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November 23, 2006, 5:27 AM CT

The 'Freakonomics of food'

Do you hate Brussels sprouts because your mother did" Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel" Why do you actually overeat at healthy restaurants".

"You can ask your smartest friend why he or she just ate what they ate, and you wont get an answer any deeper than, 'It sounded good,'" says Brian Wansink, Ph.D.), author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," and Professor and Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

Dubbed the "Freakonomics of food" by the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, Mindless Eating, uses hidden cameras, two-way mirrors, and hundreds of studies to show why we eat what and how much we eat. "The unique thing about his work is that it cleverly answers everyday questions about food and shows translates them into Good News how we can improve it," said Seth Roberts, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Take how much we eat. Wansink claims we typically dont overeat because we are hungry or because the food tastes good. Instead we overeat because of the cues around us family and friends, packages and plates, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers.

Consider your holiday ice cream bowl. If you spoon 3 ounces of ice cream onto a small bowl, it will look like a lot more than if you had spooned it into a large bowl. Even if you intended to carefully follow your diet, the larger bowl would likely influence you to serve more. This tricks even the pros.........

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