A Somali girl pursues her passion for math

By Patrick Adams, Emory Magazine

Maaria Osman is small and slight, with hazel eyes and a round face framed by a tight-fitting hijab, the traditional head cover worn by women throughout the Muslim world and by all female teachers and students at Abaarso Tech. The school in a remote area of Somaliland is an experiment in education started by Jonathan Starr, who graduated from Emory in 1999 with a degree in economics.

Shy and reserved, Osman speaks softly in halting English. She is not yet fluent in the language.

Yet at 12, Osman is one of the best math students in the school. Last year, she had the highest score of the math section of the national exit exam, the test administered to all eighth-grade students around the country in the last days of what is, for the vast majority of Somali students, their final year of formal education.

Photo of Osman, left, by Patrick Adams.

That Osman even took the exam was unusual. According to a recent survey by UNICEF, only slightly more than a quarter of Somali girls of primary school age are enrolled in school. That figure is attributable in large part to the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991 and the decades of conflict that ensued. But the biggest obstacle to Somali girls’ enrollment, says UNICEF, is the tendency of mothers to keep their daughters home to share the burden of domestic labor.

For all of their daughter’s ability in the classroom, her uncommon facility for multiplying fractions, for instance, Osman’s parents had just such a plan in mind. It wasn’t that they weren’t aware of Abaarso Tech or the fact that Osman could attend the school for free. It was that her curricular achievements were immaterial to the family’s immediate needs.

But Starr persisted. Enlisting the help of some of his best female students and their mothers, he mounted a recruiting strategy worthy of a Big Ten football program. And at last, the effort paid off.

In the eight months since her arrival, Osman has exceeded expectations. Not only has she outperformed many of her peers, including a handful of diaspora students from the U.S. and the U.K., she’s exhibited a work ethic bordering on obsession.

“She does math problems in her spare time,” says math teacher Mike Freund. “Literally every night, she’ll finish her homework and come to me to ask for more. She’s incredible.”

Read the full article in Emory Magazine about the unique economic model for Abaarso Tech, which has brought a biochemistry lab, dedicated teachers and a scholarship for study in America to a parched patch of earth, in a region best known for its piracy and poverty.

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How to parent a college freshman

Watch the classic video, above, of the talk Emory psychologist Marshall Duke gives to parents during freshman orientation.

“Nowadays, ‘going off to college’ isn’t just about a teenager leaving home. It’s also about parents learning to let go,” writes Jenna Johnson in the Washington Post.

“College administrators have found that today’s millennial students – along with their late-Baby Boomer and early-Generation X parents – often need more hand-holding than generations before.”

Johnson conducted an online chat on the topic today with Marshall Duke, an Emory psychology professor who, for 25 years, has delivered an annual lecture to parents of freshman about what to expect when they leave their child at college for the first time.

Regarding a question about move-in day at the dorm, Duke advised parents not to sweat the small stuff and to focus on communication.

“Saying goodbye is the most important thing of all in my mind,” he responded. “Do not take this lightly. This child starts college only once. The moment is a powerful one. It allows for the communication of very high sentiments. Do you want to waste it on things like, ‘Make your bed every day?’”

You can read the whole discussion here.

Related:
Parenting a college student: What to expect

Can meditation calm your kids?

Credit: iStockphoto.com/skynesher

“It calms my mind,” says a regular meditator named Sam. That statement wouldn’t be too surprising, except that Sam is in elementary school.

He was one of the children ages 5 to 8 at Atlanta’s Paideia School featured in a recent report on meditation by Dan Harris of ABC News. The students are part of an Emory study into the effects of compassion meditation, a secular form of meditation aimed at helping people reduce stress and think kindly of others.

As Harris points out, studies show that compassionate people tend to be happier, healthier and more successful at work.

And Sam finds a practical use for it while in an Atlanta traffic jam with his mother at the wheel. “My brother’s screaming, my mom’s cussing, and I’m meditating,” he says.

Watch the ABC News report.

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Banana split: Chimps show they share

Credit: iStockphoto.com

Helen Fields writes in Science Now about the latest discovery from Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center:

Despite our wars and crime, humans tend to be nice. We bake for our neighbors, give directions to strangers, and donate money to far-off disaster victims. But does the same go for our closest cousin, the chimpanzee? A new study suggests that it does.

People who study chimpanzees in the field have known for a long time that the apes console their comrades when they're upset and support each other in a fight. And when one chimp has a good hunting day and kills a nice, juicy monkey, it shares the meat with the other members of its group.

But scientists have found that chimps don't share in lab experiments, creating a bit of a primatology mystery. … Comparative psychologist Victoria Horner of Emory University in Atlanta thought she knew the reason why experiments didn't find sharing: the experimental setups other scientists used to test the chimps were just too confusing—"tables with pulley systems and whatnot."

With her colleagues at Emory, including renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, Horner devised a new way to test chimps' generosity. "We did the same basic idea but from a more chimpy perspective," she says.

Read the full article in Science Now.

In the experiment, chimpanzees were trained to exchange tokens for food. One color token would buy a packet of food for the chooser, while another color would buy a packet for the chooser and her partner in the experiment. The chimpanzees were more likely to pick the generous color. Illustration by Devyn Carter.

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A wild view of apes

Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past

By Carol Clark

Paleontologists have discovered a group of more than 20 polar dinosaur tracks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, offering a rare glimpse into animal behavior during the last period of pronounced global warming, about 105 million years ago.

The discovery, reported in the journal Alcheringa, is the largest and best collection of polar dinosaur tracks ever found in the Southern Hemisphere.

“These tracks provide us with a direct indicator of how these dinosaurs were interacting with the polar ecosystems, during an important time in geological history,” says Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin, who led the research. Martin is an expert in trace fossils, which include tracks, trails, burrows, cocoons and nests.

The three-toed tracks are preserved on two sandstone blocks from the Early Cretaceous Period. They appear to belong to three different sizes of small theropods – a group of bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs whose descendants include modern birds.
Photos of the tracks, above and below, by Anthony Martin.

The research team also included Thomas Rich, from the Museum Victoria; Michael Hall and Patricia Vickers-Rich, both from the School of Geosciences at Monash University in Victoria; and Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, an ecologist and expert in spatial analysis from Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies.

The tracks were found on the rocky shoreline of remote Milanesia Beach, in Otways National Park. This area, west of Melbourne, is known for energetic surf and rugged coastal cliffs, consisting of layers of sediment accumulated over millions of years. Riddled with fractures and pounded by waves and wind, the cliffs occasionally shed large chunks of rock, such as those containing the dinosaur tracks.

One sandstone block has about 15 tracks, including three consecutive footprints made by the smallest of the theropods, estimated to be the size of a chicken. Martin spotted this first known dinosaur trackway of Victoria last June 14, around noon. He was on the lookout, since he had earlier noticed ripple marks and trace fossils of what looked like insect burrows in piles of fallen rock.

“The ripples and burrows indicate a floodplain, which is the most likely area to find polar dinosaur tracks,” Martin explains.

The second block containing tracks was spotted about three hours later by Greg Denney, a local volunteer who accompanied Martin and Rich on that day’s expedition. That block had similar characteristics to the first one, and included eight tracks. The tracks show what appear to be theropods ranging in size from a chicken to a large crane.

“We believe that the two blocks were from the same rock layer, and the same surface, that the dinosaurs were walking on,” Martin says.

The small, medium and large tracks may have been made by three different species, Martin says. “They could also belong to two genders and a juvenile of one species – a little dinosaur family – but that’s purely speculative,” he adds.

The Victoria Coast marks the seam where Australia was once joined to Antarctica. During that era, about 115-105 million years ago, the dinosaurs roamed in prolonged polar darkness. The Earth’s average temperature was 68 degrees Fahrenheit – just 10 degrees warmer than today – and the spring thaws would cause torrential flooding in the river valleys.

The dinosaur tracks were probably made during the summer, Martin says. “The ground would have been frozen in the winter, and in order for the waters to subside so that animals could walk across the floodplain, it would have to be later in the season,” he explains.

Lower Cretaceous strata of Victoria have yielded the best-documented assemblage of polar dinosaur bones in the world. Few dinosaur tracks, however, have been found.

In the February 2006, Martin found the first known carnivorous dinosaur track in Victoria, at a coastal site known as Dinosaur Dreaming.

In May 2006, during a hike to another remote site near Milanesia Beach, he discovered the first trace fossil of a dinosaur burrow in Australia. That find came on the heels of Martin’s co-discovery of the first known dinosaur burrow and burrowing dinosaur, in Montana. The two discoveries suggest that burrowing behaviors were shared by dinosaurs of different species, in different hemispheres, and spanned millions of years during the Cretaceous Period.

For more details of the discovery, check out Martin's blog, The Great Cretaceous Walk.

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Dinosaur burrows yield clues to climate change
Dinosaurs make a comeback in the Outback