Penicillin, not the pill, may have launched the sexual revolution

The 1950s were not as prudish as they seemed on the surface, says economist Andrew Francis. 

By Carol Clark

The rise in risky, non-traditional sexual relations that marked the swinging ‘60s actually began as much as a decade earlier, during the conformist ‘50s, suggests an analysis recently published by the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

“It’s a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitudes of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill,” notes Emory University economist Andrew Francis, who conducted the analysis. “The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline in syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era.”

As penicillin drove down the cost of having risky sex, the population started having more of it, Francis says, comparing the phenomena to the economic law of demand: When the cost of a good falls, people buy more of the good.

“People don’t generally think of sexual behavior in economic terms,” he says, “but it’s important to do so because sexual behavior, just like other behaviors, responds to incentives.”

Syphilis reached its peak in the United States in 1939, when it killed 20,000 people. “It was the AIDS of the late 1930s and early 1940s,” Francis says. “Fear of catching syphilis and dying of it loomed large.”

Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was not put into clinical use until 1941. As World War II escalated, and sexually transmitted diseases threatened the troops overseas, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment against syphilis.

“The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting,” Francis says. “That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic.”

Right after the war, penicillin became a clinical staple for the general population as well. In the United States, syphilis went from a chronic, debilitating and potentially fatal disease to one that could be cured with a single dose of medicine.

From 1947 to 1957, the syphilis death rate fell by 75 percent and the syphilis incidence rate fell by 95 percent. “That’s a huge drop in syphilis. It’s essentially a collapse,” Francis says.

In order to test his theory that risky sex increased as the cost of syphilis dropped, Francis analyzed data from the 1930s through the 1970s from state and federal health agencies. Some of the data was only available on paper documents, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) digitized it at the request of Francis.

For his study, Francis chose three measures of sexual behavior: The illegitimate birth ratio; the teen birth share; and the incidence of gonorrhea, a highly contagious sexually transmitted disease that tends to spread quickly.

“As soon as syphilis bottoms out, in the mid- to late-1950s, you start to see dramatic increases in all three measures of risky sexual behavior,” Francis says.

While many factors likely continued to fuel the sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, Francis says the 1950s and the role of penicillin have been largely overlooked. “The 1950s are associated with prudish, more traditional sexual behaviors,” he notes. “That may have been true for many adults, but not necessarily for young adults. It’s important to recognize how reducing the fear of syphilis affected sexual behaviors.”

A few physicians sounded moralistic warnings during the 1950s about the potential for penicillin to affect behavior. Spanish physician Eduardo Martinez Alonso referenced Romans 6:23, and the notion that God uses diseases to punish people, when he wrote: “The wages of sin are now negligible. One can almost sin with impunity, since the sting of sinning has been removed.”

Such moralistic approaches, equating disease with sin, are counterproductive, Francis says, stressing that interventions need to focus on how individuals may respond to the cost of disease.

He found that the historical data of the syphilis epidemic parallels the contemporary AIDS epidemic. “Some studies have indicated that the development of highly active antiretroviral therapy for treating HIV may have caused some men who have sex with men to be less concerned about contracting and transmitting HIV, and more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors,” Francis says.

“Policy makers need to take into consideration behavioral responses to changes in the cost of disease, and implement strategies that are holistic and longsighted,” he concludes. “To focus exclusively on the defeat of one disease can set the stage for the onset of another if preemptive measures are not taken.”

Images are vintage health messages from NIH National Library of Medicine.

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Your brain, in love and in lust

Chimps play fair in the Ultimatum Game

From Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness that was previously seen as uniquely human, finds a study by Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Georgia State University. The researchers played the Ultimatum Game with the chimpanzees to determine how sensitive the animals are to the reward distribution between two individuals if both need to agree on the outcome.

The findings, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest a long evolutionary history of the human aversion to inequity, as well as a shared preference for fair outcomes by the common ancestor of humans and apes.

Click here to watch a video of the experiment.

“We used the Ultimatum Game because it is the gold standard to determine the human sense of fairness," says lead author Darby Proctor, a post-doctoral fellow at Yerkes. "In the game, one individual needs to propose a reward division to another individual and then have that individual accept the proposition before both can obtain the rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions, such as 50 percent of the reward, to their partners, and that’s exactly what we recorded in our study with chimpanzees.”

"Until our study," adds co-author Frans de Waal, "the behavioral economics community assumed the Ultimatum Game could not be played with animals, or that animals would choose only the most selfish option while playing. We've concluded that chimpanzees not only get very close to the human sense of fairness, but the animals may actually have exactly the same preferences as our own species."

For purposes of direct comparison, the study was also conducted separately with human children.

Related:
Capuchin economics: Monkeys on unequal pay
Sharing ideas about the concept of fairness

Election markets take stock of presidential race

If buying shares in an election market sounds like online gambling, that's because it is, says economist Monica Capra. (Emory photo/video.)

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

Ever wonder how a presidential candidate's stock is trading?

As voters weigh the odds of their candidates prevailing in a close race, an Emory economist suggests that beyond pundits and pollsters, the curious may also consult a lesser-known crystal ball: election markets.

Through election markets, also called prediction markets, voters put their money where their mouths are by buying "shares" that reflect a candidate's chances of winning — essentially betting in an online futures market about the nation's election outcome.

Though rarely referenced by news programs or political analysts, election markets are actually a viable tool that can be used in conjunction with polls and statistical models to help predict election outcomes, says Monica Capra, an associate professor of economics at Emory with research interests in behavioral and experimental economics.

"Basically, the prediction markets are futures markets, exchanges in which people trade asset shares — candidates, in this case — based upon what they believe will happen in the future," says Capra, who teaches about the topic in her experimental economics classes. "The idea that presidential markets can predict election outcomes comes from the fact that markets are aggregators of individual beliefs," she adds. "It's a perfect application for elections — we know when the election will take place and who the candidates are. Trades are made on the belief of who will win."

Election trading typically takes place through online websites, such as Intrade.com, based in Ireland, Betfair.com in England, and the University of Iowa Electronic Markets, where spectators follow the fortunes of their candidates — or other real-world events — by tracking how they're "trading" in the eyes of the public, or bettors.

This week, for example, activity at Intrade.com showed the odds of President Barack Obama winning re-election improving throughout Tuesday night's debate, rising from 61.7 percent before the debate to 64.1 percent shortly afterward — a trend noted on the other sites, as well.

If it sounds like online gambling, that's because it is, acknowledges Capra, who doesn't play the market herself, nor require her students to play it. But as an economist, she does consult it: beneath the profit motive lies a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the American voter. And there can be value in listening to the betting public.

"The fact that there is money on the table gives people more inspiration to gather information and do some homework," Capra says. 

"Markets are information aggregators," she explains. "People arrive with different sets of information and beliefs that are revealed through their trading behavior and captured by the market. That idea is what makes predictive markets work. Basically, it's an economist's crystal ball."

The system works like this: Let's say you want to bet on the likelihood that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential race. You buy "shares" — this week, they're running around $3.66 on Intrade. If he wins, all shares jump to $10 each and you make money. If he loses, all shares immediately plunge to $0 and you lose.

Predictive market sites also post a probability for each candidate winning. This week, for instance, Obama's shares were running about $6.32, which puts him at a 63.1 percent chance of winning. In contrast, Romney's shares were selling at $3.67 each, with a 36.9 percent chance of victory. That can change in an instant.

With websites updating trading around the clock, "it's a market that never closes," Capra observes. However, she offers an important caveat: predictive markets traders don't necessarily represent the average voter. While a political pollster may seek a representative sample of the population, predictive market traders in the Iowa Electronic Market, for instance, tend to be predominantly male, younger, wealthier and more educated than the average voter.

"But as long as you have people informed and motivated to trade in order to make money, that's all you need for the market to work well," she adds, suggesting that traders are more likely to make choices based on solid data rather than emotional impulse when money is at stake.

Capra says she consults predictive markets every day. "Right now, Gallup polls give the edge to Romney," she notes. "But InTrade says Obama will win — his predicted percentage rose both during and after this week's debate. The fact that he did much better in this debate was reflected by people immediately buying shares. The second debate also appeared to stop the upward movement of Romney shares."

So how accurate are online election markets? Though researchers are divided on the topic, Capra says she considers them a valid predictive tool: "As an economist, you have three main sources for predicting election outcomes: forecasting models, daily polls and prediction markets. If I had to choose one, I would choose prediction markets."

Sharing ideas about the concept of fairness

You've got just two pieces of Halloween candy left in the bowl. Who are you going to give them to?

By Carol Clark

Ask a three-year-old to divide pieces of a favorite candy between himself and two other children and he will likely question why he should share any at all. “At that age, children basically self-maximize. They have a guiltless selfishness,” says Emory psychologist Philippe Rochat, who studies the emergence of a moral sense in children.

By the age of five, children tend to be more principled in the way that they regard others. A five-year-old, for example, may go so far as to split the candies in half to ensure everyone gets an equal share.

“Something else interesting happens around the age of seven,” Rochat says. “The earlier tendency to self-maximize regains power as children start aligning themselves with groups. They generate inequity by favoring their own group when it comes to sharing.” 

Emory is inviting the public to an October 18-19 event, the "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." An international group of scholars, from psychology, law, anthropology, ethics, philosophy, economics and politics will offer their views on the concept of fairness. Click here to see the full schedule and to register for the free event, to be held at the Silverbell Pavilion of the Emory Conference Center.

Fairness is the foundation of what makes us sociable and able to live together, but it can be hard to define.

“It is something that we often take for granted, as ingrained into our being,” Rochat says. “But ideas about what’s fair change through child development, across cultures and amid different political and economic circumstances. The conference aims to bring light and clarity to the subject from multiple scientific perspectives.”

Jerome Bruner, an educational psychologist from New York University, will give the keynote entitled “The Ambiguities of Fairness.” His presentation will cover how the violation of fairness was handled by the ancient Greeks, a group of islanders in remote Melanesia and in contemporary Sicily – the source of the proverb “Vengeance is a dish that must be served cold.”

In addition to Emory researchers, the speakers include scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Lebanese American University, and the Universidad Autonoma de Entre Rios, Argentina.

President Jimmy Carter will give a presentation at the conference entitled “Fairness and Equity in Politics and Human Affairs.”

The issue of fairness will grow increasingly important as the human population increases, Rochat says. Climate change, pollution, diminishing resources, global commerce and immigration are just a few of the issues that will put more pressure on the question of fairness.

“We want to give a scientific rooting to a problem that affects every part of society,” Rochat says. “Much of the tension in the current U.S. presidential election, for example, boils down to different views of what is fair. How much tax should the rich pay? How much support should the poor get?”

Related:
First blush: When babies get embarrassed

Images: iStockphoto.com.

Studying statistics pays off for poker player

Jonathan Schoder took up poker as a hobby when he was 13. “I’m pretty good with numbers,” he says, explaining why he was drawn to the game.

When he was accepted into Emory, at age 18, Schoder didn’t want to take out student loans. So he decided to defer entering school for a year to earn his tuition through poker.

“It was all online,” he says of his year-long poker quest. “I had three screens set up at home and I was playing 24 games at a time.”

Schoder, now a junior at Emory majoring in finance and economics, made enough to cover his college tuition during that year, and he continues playing poker in his spare time. He says that his academic focus on statistics has made him an even better poker player.

This past summer, he decided to test those skills by entering the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Friends pitched in for the $10,000 stake needed to enter the tournament. “I found backers by posting it on Facebook. It took me about four hours,” Schoder says.

The bet paid off, for Schoder and his friends: He placed 36th and won nearly a quarter-million dollars at the tournament.

“I have a deep understanding of statistics,” Schoder says of his poker success. “There’s a lot of statistical models that I had to run to figure out how my opponents were playing and then play a different style against every single person. It’s a lot of looking at different percentages and then knowing how to figure out those percentages. I would say that school helped me out with poker more than poker helped me out with school.”

After he graduates, Schoder plans to become a venture capitalist. “It’s something meaningful that I can be happy about doing at the end of the day,” he says. “While poker is a lot of fun, venture capitalism has both aspects of happiness and fun."

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Lottery study zeroes in on risk

Integration: A dream that's dying

A 1950s' stamp honoring desegragation.

Decades after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation, U.S. schools lack true integration, note sociologists Amanda Lewis, at Emory University, and John Diamond, at Harvard. They co-wrote an opinion piece on the topic for the Huffington Post. Following is an excerpt:

“Recent reports by the U.S. Department of Education and UCLA's Civil Rights Project describe alarming segregation levels for both Latino and black students nationally, with most attending schools that are majority non-white and almost 40 percent of both groups attending schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. Most experience ‘double segregation’ -- attending schools that are segregated by race and class. While most white children, even poor white children, don't attend high-poverty schools, most black and brown children, even middle-class ones, do. And high-poverty schools almost always lag behind in measures of resources and success -- they have less experienced and qualified teachers, more decrepit buildings, less access to technology and advanced curricula, and few or outdated textbooks.

“Beyond this lies a more obscured truth: Even ‘desegregated,’ schools are typically not truly integrated. Manifesting what social scientists call ‘second-generation segregation,’ these schools are re-segregated internally through ability grouping or tracking. In the post-Brown v. Board of Ed era, tracking has become what UNC sociologist Karolyn Tyson describes in her book Integration Interrupted as a ‘legally permissible way to separate students by race.’ And tracking matters.

“Decades of research has found vast differences in the quality of education in high and low tracks and shows that poor and minority students are placed disproportionately in the bottom groups or lower tracks.”

Read the whole article in the Huffington Post.

Related:
Analysis finds benefits to racial quotas in Brazilian higher education
Racial segregation fuels achievement gap in U.S. schools

Image: iStockphoto.com.

When doing favors, monkeys don't keep score

By Lisa Newbern

While exchanging favors with others, humans tend to think in terms of tit-for-tat, an assumption easily extended to other animals. As a result, reciprocity is often viewed as a cognitive feat requiring memory, perhaps even calculation. But what if the process is simpler, not only in other animals but in humans as well?

Humans may not be unique in the ability to assist strangers.

Researchers at Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center have determined monkeys may gain the advantages of reciprocal exchange of favors without necessarily keeping precise track of past favors. Malini Suchak, an Emory graduate student, and psychologist Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes, led the study. Their findings will appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

"Prosocial is defined as a motivation to assist others regardless of benefits for self,” Suchak explained. "We used a prosocial choice test to study whether direct reciprocity could promote generosity among brown capuchin monkeys. We found one monkey willing to do another favors if the first monkey was the only one to choose, and we found the monkeys became even more prosocial if they could alternate and help each other. We did not find any evidence that the monkeys paid close attention to each other's past choices, so they were prosocial regardless of what their partner had just done.”

Suchak and de Waal suggest the synchronization of the same actions in alternation creates a more positive attitude the same way humans who row a boat together or work toward a shared goal develop a more positive attitude about each other.

The capuchin monkeys were prosocial whether they were paired with a familiar partner from their own group or a partner from a different social group.

"This research has several implications for better understanding human behavior,” de Waal said. “First, we observed an increase in prosocial behavior as a result of reciprocity, but the monkeys did not develop a contingency between their own and their partners' behaviors. Like humans, the capuchins may have understood the benefits of reciprocity and used this understanding to maximize their own benefits. Second, that the capuchins responded similarly to in-group and out-group partners has implications for the commonly held view that humans are unique in their ability to cooperate with strangers.”

The researchers tested 12 brown capuchin monkeys in pairs on a prosocial choice task. The monkeys had the choice between a selfish token that benefited only them and a prosocial token that benefited themselves and a partner. By comparing each monkey's behavior with a familiar partner from the monkey's own group and a partner from a different social group, the researchers examined the influence of each monkey's relationship outside the experimental context on prosocial behavior. There was no difference between in-group and out-group pairs in any of the test conditions. To test the role of reciprocity, the researchers allowed the monkeys to take turns making choices and found this greatly increased prosocial behavior, but the researchers did not observe any tit-for-tat behavior.

The researchers also tested whether the monkeys could overcome their aversion for inequity by creating a situation in which both individuals could provide each other with superior rewards, making reciprocity an even more attractive strategy. The monkeys did, but again without keeping track of each other's choices.

Finally, through a series of control conditions, the researchers established the monkeys were responding to their partners' behaviors, rather than the rewards delivered by their partners, and that the monkeys understood the values of the tokens and were flexibly responding to changing conditions throughout the test sessions.

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Capuchin economics: Monkeys respond to unequal pay
Hugs go way back in evolution

Analysis finds benefits to racial quotas in Brazilian higher education

“For a long time, Brazil was known as a racial democracy with little discrimination, but social science research in recent decades has shown that view was way off," says economist Andy Francis.

By Carol Clark

A racial quota system at one of the leading universities in Brazil raised the proportion of black students from low-income families, without decreasing their efforts to succeed in school, a major new study finds.

“Critics of affirmative action policies often argue that making it easier for people to get into college lowers their incentive to try hard academically. That argument doesn’t stand up to our data,” says Andrew Francis, an economist at Emory University and co-author of the study.

Francis conducted the research with Maria Tannuri-Pianto, an economist at the University of Brasilia. Their analysis of the short-term impact of racial quotas was recently published in the Journal of Human Resources.

Affirmative action has been in place for decades in the United States, but it remains controversial, especially in regards to higher education. Some states have even taken steps to weaken the policy, which does not include racial quotas.

On October 10, the debate will come back to the forefront, as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. A rejected white student brought the challenge to the admission policies of UT, a flagship public university.

Boys playing soccer in a slum in Rio de Janeiro, a city of extreme poverty and wealth and the host of the 2016 Olympics.

Brazil offers a diverse and vibrant environment to study how incentives affect education and race. The country’s status as a rising star on the world stage was boosted by its winning bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

More African slaves were brought to Brazil than to all of North America. Many of their descendants have intermarried with other races in Brazil, including indigenous people and those of European and Asian descent.

“For a long time, Brazil was known as a racial democracy with little discrimination, but social science research in recent decades has shown that view was way off,” Francis says. “Generally, the darker your skin in Brazil, the less education and money you have. Brazil is a country of stark contrasts.”

Brazil is just beginning to experiment with its own brand of affirmative action. In 2004, the University of Brasilia became the first federal university to have a racial quota system. All students must pass an admissions exam in order to gain entrance to the university. The racial quota requires each department at the university to reserve 20 percent of its admission spaces for students who self-identify as black.

In order to conduct a comparative analysis, the researchers looked at two admission cycles before the quota system was enacted, and three admission cycles following implementation. The university cooperated with the researchers, giving them access to admissions scores, grades and other pertinent information.

"Brazil is a country of stark contrasts."

More than 2,000 students were interviewed over the course of the study. They were asked to self-identify as belonging to one of five racial groups, from white to black and gradations between. Photographs were taken of more than 700 students. The photos were shown to a panel of Brazilians who were asked to rate the skin tones on a scale of one to seven, from lightest to darkest.

The results showed that the racial policies boosted the numbers of the darkest-skinned students overall, from 5.6 percent to 9 percent. The successful applicants were from lower socioeconomic status families than the displaced applicants.

To analyze how the racial quota impacted student effort, the researchers looked at whether the students took a college preparation course, how many times they applied, and whether they applied to more competitive academic departments, like law and medicine.

“Based on our analysis of those factors, there was no evidence that students reduced their efforts due to racial quotas,” Francis says.

The researchers also did a comparative analysis of grades. “The policy did not impact the grades of black students,” Francis says. “There were some racial disparities before and after, with black students on average getting lower grades than white students, but the policies didn’t exacerbate this difference.”

Another aspect of the study was how the racial quotas affected racial self-identity. “We found some evidence that people misrepresented their racial identity after the quota system was enacted,” Francis says. “Some of the students told the university that they were black, but during interviews for our study, they told us that they were not black. People of intermediate skin tone were more likely to make this switch.”

People of the darkest skin tone, however, were more likely after the racial quota policy was implemented to identify themselves as black, both on their university application and for the study survey. “The racial quota policy caused them to see themselves in a different way,” Francis says. “It seemed to reinforce and foster investments in a black identity. Race is flexible and contextual, and our data shows that public policy can have an impact on racial self-identification.”

In a recent case, the Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the racial quota system, giving the federal government a green light for implementing more racial quotas as it seeks to correct economic imbalances.

“We hope our data helps shape Brazil’s racial policy,” Francis says, adding that additional policy interventions need to be pursued. “College entrance exam scores are lower for blacks in Brazil for many reasons,” he says. “If society is really committed to erasing inequality, policies have to impact people earlier in life than college.”

Related:
Racial segregation fuels achievement gap in U.S. schools
Legacies of slavery and higher education move into the light
How college shapes health behaviors

All photos by iStockphoto.com.

Capuchin economics: Monkeys on unequal pay

Outrage in the face of inequity goes way back in our evolutionary history, suggests research by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal.

In a classic experiment, de Waal demonstrated that capuchin monkeys reject unequal rewards. In a video clip from a recent de Waal talk for TED (see above), you can see what happens when one monkey receives a cucumber for a task, while another monkey receives a grape for the same task.

“It’s basically the Wall Street protests,” de Waal says.

De Waal will be one of the featured speakers at a major Emory conference devoted to the topic of fairness, set for October 18-19. “What is Fair? An Interdisciplinary Relection on the Meanings of Fairness” will bring together psychologists, ethicists, lawyers, anthropologists, economists and former President Jimmy Carter to explore the many layers of a complex subject.

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Pastoralism key to Horn of Africa's future

The livestock trade generates an estimated $1 billion a year in exports for the Horn of Africa.

Mark Tran writes in the Guardian's Poverty Matters blog about a new book, "Pastoralism and Development in Africa: Dynamic Change at the Margins." Following is an excerpt, referencing a chapter by Emory anthropologist Peter Little:

 "...Peter Little argues that despite its many challenges, mobile pastoralism will continue throughout the Horn for the simple reason that a more viable, alternative land-use system for these areas has not been found. But he predicts that the nature of pastoralism in 2030 will be very different from today.

"Although it will remain the economic foundation of the region, pastoralism will not be practiced by many. Little sees former pastoralists investing in local fodder farms, urban-based markets and services that serve the livestock sector, educating their children and engaging in small-scale trading and other self-employed enterprises. Many would also work for livestock producers as hired herders. Ideally, fattening operations for export animals and meat-processing facilities would be located nearer to pastoral production areas, generating additional employment for local non-pastoralists.

"'In this scenario, the normal occurrence of drought would no longer result in widespread food shortages and hunger as makrets would function effectively and local incomes would be sufficient to purchase needed foods,' writes Little."

Read the whole article on the Guardian web site.

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What we can learn from African pastoralists
Climate change, from the hooves up

Image: iStockPhoto.com.

Crime may rise along with Earth's temperatures

By Hal Jacobs, Emory Quadrangle

When most people think about global warming, they envision rising temperatures and sea levels. Robert Agnew, a professor of sociology at Emory, thinks about rising crime rates.

It was in the early 1990s, while focusing on the causes of crime and delinquency, that he began to see that certain strains, or stressors, increase the likelihood of crime – including economic deprivation, discrimination, criminal victimization, harsh or erratic discipline, child abuse and neglect. These strains can foster a range of negative emotions such as anger, frustration and depression that put people under pressure to take corrective action. Some of those actions are criminal.

During the last few decades, Agnew’s research on general strain theory has become one of the leading explanations for crime, and he has become its chief architect. He is among the most frequently cited criminologists in the world, and was recently elected president of the American Society of Criminologists.

Agnew believes the pressures caused by climate change will become “one of the major forces – if not the major force – driving change as the century progresses.” He lists strains such as increased temperatures, heat waves, natural disasters, serious threats to livelihood (think farming, herding, fishing), forced migrations on a massive scale and social conflicts arising as nations and groups compete for increasingly scarce food, fresh water and fuel. Especially in the developing world, he believes crime will become a critical issue, making it more difficult to keep the peace in megacities heavily populated by immigrants.

Agnew’s background in criminology isn’t purely academic. He grew up in the Atlantic City of the 1950s and 60s, before casinos brought tourist dollars and jobs. “There was a lot of race and ethnic conflict a lot of crime and delinquency in high school, and I drew very much on those experiences when I came to criminology.”

Read more about Agnew’s youth in Atlantic City here.

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Top image: istockphoto.com.

Nurses go into fields to serve 'invisible' people

Each summer, nurses from Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing head to international sites in the developing world – and U.S. sites with conditions similar to the developing world – to spend several weeks caring for “invisible” people mired in abject poverty.

"Service learning trips teach students more than just clinical care,” says Linda McCauley, dean of the nursing school. “They offer students the opportunity to develop respect for unfamiliar cultures while facing real-world health-care challenges such as working with interpreters and medical supply shortages."

Just four hours south of Atlanta in Moultrie, Georgia, the nurses join the Migrant Farm Worker Family Health Program, where they treat adult farm workers in the evening and their children during the day. Watch the video reports from past trips, above and below, to learn more.



The migrant workers “are very appreciative, this may be the only health care they get during the year,” says Judith Wold, director of the Farm Worker Family Health Program. “And it’s a life-changing experience for many of these students, who don’t know where their food comes from.”

The experience is “a reality check,” agrees Maeve Howett, assistant professor in the school of nursing. For many Emory students, she says, “it’s hard to know what it’s like to work 16 hours in 100-degree temperatures. These are the people who bring the food to our table.”

The nurses are the first contact many of the migrant children have to a health care professional. “Especially, working with the children you realize while their parents may be undocumented, these children are the next cohort of our citizens," Howett says. "Reaching out to them and making sure they have good health care and food and housing is just a really important piece of our stewardship to the community.”

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Suprising nuggets about poultry farming

Tom Philpott writes in Mother Jones about a new report on poultry farming from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry. An excerpt from Philpott's story:

"The poultry industry has alighted upon Georgia in a way it hasn't in any other individual state. According to the report, which is lavishly footnoted and was prepared with the help of grad students from Emory University's Department of Environmental Health, the U.S. now produces 8.84 billion broilers (meat chickens) every year—of which 1.4 billion, or nearly one in six, are produced in Georgia.

"The state's annual broiler flock, roughly equal in number to the human population of China, takes place on just 2,170 farms—meaning that each one produces a mind-numbing 640,000 birds, collectively churning 2 million tons of chicken litter (feces plus bedding and other waste).

"Concentrating so much waste, laced as it is with arsenic and antibiotic-resistant pathogens along with algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorpus, is bound to cause problems, which are well laid out in this report."

Read the whole article on Mother Jones.

Related:
Nurses go into the fields to serve migrant workers 

Photo: iStockphoto.com.

Higher tax lowers smoking during pregnancy

By Jennifer Johnson, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Higher taxes and smoke-free policies are reducing smoking among mothers-to-be, a new study by Emory University finds. The results will be published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The researchers evaluated smoking bans and taxes on cigarettes, along with the level of tobacco control spending, and found that state tobacco control policies can be effective in curbing smoking during pregnancy, and in preventing a return to smoking within four months on average, after delivery.

"We know from prior research that nearly one-fourth of all women in the United States enter pregnancy as smokers and more than half continue to smoke while they are pregnant which results in excessive healthcare costs at birth and beyond," says lead investigator Kathleen Adams, associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. "This is one of the first studies of pregnant women's smoking in the new era of more restrictive state tobacco control policies, and we found a sizable increase in the quit rate. In addition, tax policies appear to be effective in keeping these women from relapsing in the first few months postpartum, and the implementation of a full workplace smoke-free policy also increases quits."

Sara Markowitz, associate professor of economics at Emory University co-authored the study.

Investigators determined that a $1 increase in taxes and prices increases the probability of quitting by the last three months of pregnancy by 4.8 percentage points – from 44.1 to 48.9 percent. The probability of having sustained nonsmoking four months after delivery is increased by 4.2 percentage points or from 21.3 to 25.5 percent, with a $1 increase in real taxes. A full ban on smoking at private worksites increased the probability of quitting smoking during pregnancy by 4-5 percentage points.

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What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets

By Carol Clark

When your dog gazes up at you adoringly, what does it see? A best friend? A pack leader? A can opener?

Many dog lovers make all kinds of inferences about how their pets feel about them, but no one has captured images of actual canine thought processes – until now.

Emory University researchers have developed a new methodology to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species. The technique uses harmless functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) published the results of their first experiment, showing how the brains of dogs reacted to hand signals given by their owners.

“It was amazing to see the first brain images of a fully awake, unrestrained dog,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project. “As far as we know, no one has been able to do this previously. We hope this opens up a whole new door for understanding canine cognition and inter-species communication. We want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog’s perspective.”

Callie wears ear protection as she prepares to enter the scanner. The research team includes, from left, Andrew Brooks, Gregory Berns and Mark Spivak. Photo by Bryan Meltz.

Key members of the research team include Andrew Brooks, a graduate student at the Center for Neuropolicy, and Mark Spivak, a professional dog trainer and owner of Comprehensive Pet Therapy in Atlanta.

Two dogs are involved in the first phase of the project. Callie is a two-year-old Feist, or southern squirrel-hunting dog. Berns adopted her at nine months from a shelter. McKenzie is a three-year-old Border Collie, who was already well-trained in agility competition by her owner, Melissa Cate. Both dogs were trained over several months to walk into an fMRI scanner and hold completely still while researchers measured their neural activity.

The researchers aim to decode the mental processes of dogs by recording which areas of their brains are activated by various stimuli. Ultimately, they hope to get at questions like: Do dogs have empathy? Do they know when their owners are happy or sad? How much language do they really understand?

Callie, a two-year old Feist, is one of two dogs involved in the initial phase of the project. Photo by Carol Clark.

In the first experiment, the dogs were trained to respond to hand signals. One signal meant the dog would receive a hot dog treat, and another signal meant it would not receive one. The caudate region of the brain, associated with rewards in humans, showed activation in both dogs when they saw the signal for the treat, but not for the no-treat signal.

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” Berns says. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”

Berns is a neuroeconomist, who normally uses fMRI technology to study how the human mind works. His human brain-imaging studies have looked at everything from why teens engage in risky behavior to how adults decide to follow, or break, established rules of society.

Callie training in a scanner mock-up. 

Dog lovers may not need convincing on the merits of researching the minds of our canine companions. “To the skeptics out there, and the cat people, I would say that dogs are the first domesticated species, going back at least 10,000 years, and by some estimates 30,000 years,” Berns says. “The dog’s brain represents something special about how humans and animals came together. It’s possible that dogs have even affected human evolution. People who took dogs into their homes and villages may have had certain advantages. As much as we made dogs, I think dogs probably made some part of us, too.”

The idea for the dog project came to Berns about a year ago, when he learned that a U.S. Navy dog had been a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. “I was amazed when I saw the pictures of what military dogs can do,” Berns says. “I realized that if dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters and airplanes, we could certainly train them to go into an fMRI to see what they’re thinking.”

All procedures for the dog project were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Emory. “From the outset, we wanted to ensure the safety and comfort of the dogs,” Berns says. “We wanted them to be unrestrained and go into the scanner willingly.”

The dogs were trained to wear earmuffs, to protect them from the noise of the scanner. They were also taught to hold their heads perfectly still on a chin rest during the scanning process, to prevent blurring of the images.

“We know the dogs are happy by their body language,” says Mark Spivak, the professional trainer involved in the project. Callie, in particular, seems to revel in the attention of breaking new ground in science.

“She enters the scanner on her own, without a command, sometimes when it’s not her turn,” Spivak says. “She’s eager to participate.”

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New institute taps the power of 'big data'

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

Quantitative research hasn't traditionally been considered a major facet of a liberal arts education, but times have changed. In a quiet corner of the Emory campus, a bit of scholarly revolution is taking shape.

The new Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods (QuanTM) is unfolding plans to offer new statistics courses, undergraduate fellowships, workshops, a statistics help desk, a speakers series and, by next summer, a major conference, all focused on the theme of "big data."

There is growing interest in the role of computational, quantitative techniques within the humanities "to explore ideas and understand the dynamics that are shaping the culture," says Robin Forman, dean of Emory College.

QuanTM (pronounced "quantum") is directed by Clifford Carrubba, a political science professor who also directs Emory's Center for the Study of Law, Politics and Economics.

Carrubba cites advances in the digital humanities movement and computational linguistics, which allow scholars to identify literary characteristics — such as sentiment or mood — and write computer programs to study that aspect in hundreds of thousands of books.

"I can imagine having undergraduate humanities majors, social and natural scientists in the same class using the same skill set for very different purposes — an English major may be using the same skills that a biologist uses," Carrubba observes.

Read the full story in Emory Report.

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Census data center: 'A nerd's trip to Nirvana'

Census data center: 'A nerd's trip to Nirvana'

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

Erik Nesson, an Emory doctoral candidate in health economics, was seeking detailed data for his dissertation into how both heavy and light smokers respond to tobacco control policies.

Turns out, his timing couldn't have been better.

The Atlanta Census Research Data Center (ACRDC) opened last fall within a secure computer room at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to provide restricted data for social, economic and health research.

Now, Nesson joins the first wave of Emory researchers to be granted a rare opportunity — the chance to study a virtual smorgasbord of government microdata not readily available to the general public.

From economic, business, trade and labor data to household and crime surveys, health statistics and manufacturing reports, the available material "goes far beyond what you would immediately associate with census data," says Nesson, who describes working at the center as "a nerd's trip to Nirvana."

Sifting through national health data, Nesson found that light smokers weren't really changing their behaviors, but heavy smokers were — reducing the number of cigarettes they smoked, but also inhaling more intensely and switching brands, so the level of nicotine in their systems never really changed.

Access to restricted data, he says, made all the difference.

"It's a huge competitive advantage," Nesson explains. "It's hard enough to think of ideas for dissertations, things no one has done before or ways to improve on what people have done before. The ridiculous amount of data they have [at the ACRDC] will be a great recruiting tool for people interested in really any field."

Research trips to the next closest centers — in North Carolina or Maryland — would cost both time away from the classroom and travel funds, says David Frisvold, assistant professor of economics at Emory, who is working with the ACRDC for research into soft drink taxes and childhood obesity.

Although the data Frisvold needs are available elsewhere, he has had to pay steep fees to access what he can now examine at the ACRDC at no cost. "It makes a big difference," he says.

Data at the center are restricted primarily due to privacy concerns. Researchers must submit to a rigorous background check, receive data security training, and submit a formal application to win approval for their projects in order to work in the highly secure computer lab.

When the ACRDC opened, Frisvold was already studying how sales taxes on soft drinks —a strategy to reduce childhood obesity and raise revenue for budget-strapped states — affect childhood obesity. He not only needed regional tax information, but a complete portrait of consumers: where people lived, their height, weight and soft drink consumption patterns.

With access to restricted data, "we have a very precise estimate on the impact of soft drink taxes on body mass index," says Frisvold, whose project also involves colleagues at Yale University and Bates College.

Read the whole article at Emory Report.

Photo credit: iStockphoto.com.

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Mathematicians add logic to the lottery

The $540 million Mega Millions jackpot created a national lottery frenzy, despite the staggering odds of a one-in-175-million chance of winning.

“You are about 100 times more likely to die of a flesh-eating bacteria than you are to win the lottery,” Emory mathematician Aaron Abrams told NPR host Robert Siegel.

Abrams, and Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi, wrote an article in American Mathematical Monthly called “Finding Good Bets in the Lottery and Why You Shouldn’t Take Them.”

Picking your birthday numbers, picking numbers that have won before or buying your ticket in a small town does not help, the mathematicians say.

“You can’t change the odds of winning a jackpot by the way you pick numbers.” Garibaldi said on ABC’s 20/20 news program. “As a mathematician, I think that’s beautiful.”

Math trumps luck when it comes to the lottery, but Garibaldi admits that he bought five Mega Millions tickets himself.

A waste of money? “Yes, but so is buying a candy bar,” he says. “In fact, buying the candy bar is worse because you’re eating the candy bar, which is bad for you. I’m just losing the money with the lottery tickets.”

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On the trail of black flies and river blindness

The parasite that causes river blindness, Onchocerca volvulus, is transmitted through the bite of the black fly. In the above photo, the parasite can be seen emerging from the antenna of a black fly. (Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

Onchocerciasis, better known as “river blindness,” is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in the world. More than 18 million people suffer from river blindness, the vast majority of them in Africa.

The disease is caused by parasitic worms that are spread to humans through the bite of the black fly. The symptoms include itching so severe that those infected have been known to claw their skin off – or even commit suicide. The disease can also harden the eye tissue, leading to permanent blindness.

A documentary called “Dark Forest Black Fly” is tracking the efforts of the Carter Center and its partners to wipe out river blindness in Uganda. If successful, Uganda may become the model for eliminating river blindness Africa-wide. (Watch the film's trailer, below.)

The filmmakers and scientists involved will describe their on-the-ground experiences of this historic public health effort on Tuesday, February 7, at the Carter Center in Atlanta. The program will include exclusive footage from “Dark Forest Black Fly,” to be completed this year. Click here for details of the event.

And click here to visit the Science Scene, where you can learn about more great science events at Emory and in metro Atlanta.

Chinese war secrets: Beyond 'Guns, Germs and Steel'

Emory historian Tonio Andrade explains why he wrote his latest book, “Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West,” in this column for Rorotoko.com:

"In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t. His explanation was geographical—it depended on where those societies were located and what ecological resources they had available to them. Eurasians (that is the people of Europe and Asia) were unusually blessed just because of where they lived, and so they developed techniques and technologies that enabled them to expand around the world.

"It’s a great book, but it leaves open an important question: why did Europeans rather than other Eurasians become so powerful on the world stage in modern times—i.e., after around 1500? After all, Asians—most notably the Chinese—had been world leaders in science and technology for centuries. What accounted for the sudden leap in European power vis-à-vis Asia in recent centuries?

"Historians and sociologists have been vehemently debating this question, but with little progress.

"It seemed to me that one way to help answer it was to look at warfare between Europeans and Chinese. So I did. And the war that I describe in this book is a fascinating and exciting one. It really is an 'untold story'—the first ever major conflict between western European and Chinese forces, and the last one until the famous Opium War of the 1800s.

"The Chinese lost the Opium War. They won the Sino-Dutch War. Why? How? Technology, weather, and leadership."

Read the whole article in Rorotoko.com.