Culture

Ever get stuck trying to solve a puzzle?

You look for a pattern, or a rule, and you just can't spot it. So you back up and start over.

That's your brain recognizing that your current strategy isn't working, and that you need a new way to solve the problem, according to new research from the University of Washington. With the help of about 200 puzzle-takers, a computer model and functional MRI (fMRI) images, researchers have learned more about the processes of reasoning and decision-making, pinpointing the brain pathway that springs into action when problem-solving goes south.

"There are two fundamental ways your brain can steer you through life -- toward things that are good, or away from things that aren't working out," said Chantel Prat, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Cognitive Science. "Because these processes are happening beneath the hood, you're not necessarily aware of how much driving one or the other is doing."

Using a decision-making task developed by Michael Frank at Brown University, the researchers measured exactly how much "steering" in each person's brain involved learning to move toward rewarding things as opposed to away from less-rewarding things. Prat and her co-authors were focused on understanding what makes someone good at problem-solving.

The research team first developed a computer model that specified the series of steps they believed were required for solving the Raven's Advanced Performance Matrices (Raven's) -- a standard lab test made of puzzles like the one above. To succeed, the puzzle-taker must identify patterns and predict the next image in the sequence. The model essentially describes the four steps people take to solve a puzzle:

Identify a key feature in a pattern;

Figure out where that feature appears in the sequence;

Come up with a rule for manipulating the feature;

Check whether the rule holds true for the entire pattern.

At each step, the model evaluated whether it was making progress. When the model was given real problems to solve, it performed best when it was able to steer away from the features and strategies that weren't helping it make progress. According to the authors, this ability to know when your "train of thought is on the wrong track" was central to finding the correct answer.

The next step was to see whether this was true in people. To do so, the team had three groups of participants solve puzzles in three different experiments. In the first, they solved the original set of Raven's problems using a paper-and-pencil test, along with Frank's test which separately measured their ability to "choose" the best options and to "avoid" the worse options. Their results suggested that only the ability to "avoid" the worst options related to problem-solving success. There was no relation between one's ability to recognize the best choice in the decision-making test, and to solve the puzzles effectively.

The second experiment replaced the paper-and-pencil version of the puzzles with a shorter, computerized version of the task that could also be implemented in an MRI brain-scanning environment. These results confirmed that those who were best at avoiding the worse options in the decision-making task were also the best problem solvers.

The final group of participants completed the computerized puzzles while having their brain activity recorded using fMRI. Based on the model, the researchers gauged which parts of the brain would drive problem-solving success. They zeroed in on the basal ganglia -- what Prat calls the "executive assistant" to the prefrontal cortex, or "CEO" of the brain. The basal ganglia assist the prefrontal cortex in deciding which action to take using parallel paths: one that turns the volume "up" on information it believes is relevant, and another that turns the volume "down" on signals it believes to be irrelevant. The "choose" and "avoid" behaviors associated with Frank's decision-making test relate to the functioning of these two pathways. Results from this experiment suggest that the process of "turning down the volume" in the basal ganglia predicted how successful participants were at solving the puzzles.

"Our brains have parallel learning systems for avoiding the least good thing and getting the best thing. A lot of research has focused on how we learn to find good things, but this pandemic is an excellent example of why we have both systems. Sometimes, when there are no good options, you have to pick the least bad one! What we found here was that this is even more critical to complex problem-solving than recognizing what's working."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - For Black girls in the juvenile justice system, attention from a caregiver might amount to too much of a bad thing, a recent study suggests.

Though parental attentiveness would generally be considered beneficial to troubled youths, the finding hints at the possibility that a history of trauma in a household's adults may filter down to younger generations, researchers say.

The study, examining how family and peer social support influenced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in Black girls who were in detention, found that lower self-esteem, less optimism about the future and higher negative behaviors by peers were associated with greater PTSD symptoms in these girls. But one more factor also correlated with those symptoms: a higher level of caregiver support.

"This finding really pushed me to focus on parents and the girls, because initially it was just the girls," said Camille R. Quinn, lead author of the study and assistant professor of social work at The Ohio State University. "So I started digging. And research I found explained how this could be an intersection between moms and girls. If mom had a history of violence, how she coped or didn't cope with that trauma influenced the girls.

"More and more, I saw that this described parents with experiences of not just present-day, but historical, trauma. And if they had a limited ability to resolve or heal, that would dictate their perception of their child's suffering. So they might say, 'Get over it.' And the girl might say, 'OK, fine.' But she's still struggling."

Quinn has applied for a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to follow up by working with Black girls and their parents and caregivers on proposed interventions that would equip these girls with faith in their own power to heal while also acknowledging the historic victimization of Black girls and Black women.

The study is published in a recent issue of the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior.

Quinn will discuss the paper and its implications for social work practitioners in a plenary talk at 11:30 a.m. (Eastern) Sunday, March 7, at the annual conference of the New Jersey chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. The talk is titled "The Strength of Justice-involved Black Girls and Women in Spite of Adversity: Identifying Assets to Enhance Well-being."

Girls are the fastest-growing group in the U.S. juvenile justice system, and Black girls are overrepresented in that detained population. Their higher likelihood to have a history of abuse also predisposes them to PTSD symptoms, such as hypervigilance, reliving trauma in nightmares, and seeing a threat at every turn. In most cases, however, chances are that they are not diagnosed, and therefore receive no help in learning how to get through the day, Quinn said. They might abuse drugs, steal food or hit someone and end up in trouble, when they are really trying to survive - what is called survival coping.

With an eye toward improving interventions for youths who engage in law-breaking behavior, Quinn conducted a secondary analysis of data that had been collected from 188 Black girls for an earlier study. The girls were age 12 to 17 and living in a detention center before their criminal cases were heard.

Using a variety of established research measures, the survey collected data on the girls' PTSD symptoms, history of abuse, caregiver support, negative peer norms such as friends who skip school or steal, self-esteem and future orientation - how optimistic they were about, for example, graduating from high school or being respected in their communities.

More than half of the girls, 56%, reported being subjected to emotional abuse, 43% experienced physical abuse and 24% reported sexual abuse. As a group, their symptoms for PTSD were considered clinically relevant. The analysis looked at how factors individually and in combination were associated with PTSD symptoms, with higher rates of caregiver support, higher negative peer norms, lower self-esteem rates and lower future orientation rates correlated with greater PTSD symptoms.

In the paper, Quinn suggested that comprehensive treatment programs for delinquent Black girls should include caregivers and peers, and emphasize healing to bolster self-esteem and hopefulness. In her talk, Quinn will note the need for practitioners to recognize the historical context of trauma and violence in the lives of Black women and girls, and give thought to societal barriers these clients may have encountered on the way to seeking help.

"The population we're talking about are the least likely to receive any kind of services, the least likely to be referred, because they can be seen as scary," said Quinn, a longtime practitioner before becoming a professor. "They're perceived as aggressive. But if you think about it historically, they're also some of the individuals who have been the most victimized and the most dehumanized. And that is how they then become criminalized. I want my work to humanize them and help them heal."

A series of weekend workshops that integrate strategies for both reducing risky alcohol use and preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) led to an increase in safe sex and decrease in drinking among young Black women, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"By designing an intervention that didn't treat sex and alcohol use as two separate risk factors, young women were empowered to make healthier decisions and better communicate with their partners," said Ralph DiClemente, professor and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU School of Global Public Health and the study's lead author.

"This groundbreaking study illustrates the power of contextualizing issues of safe sex, alcohol use, and STIs, within the reality of young African American women's lives. Future research aimed at addressing these stigmatized public health issues may benefit by addressing sociocultural determinants of health," said Gina Wingood, the Sidney and Helaine Lerner Professor of Public Health Promotion at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the study's senior author.

Alcohol use can increase sexual risk-taking, elevating the chance of getting or spreading STIs, including HIV. Black women are at disproportionately greater risk for STIs than women of other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

DiClemente and colleagues previously developed a culturally tailored sexual health intervention named Horizons, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designated a "best practice," evidence-based HIV prevention program. Using modeling and role play, Horizons increases STI and HIV knowledge while building assertive communication skills and instilling gender and ethnic pride among young Black women.

When studying Horizons, DiClemente and Wingood found that it was effective at reducing STIs, but much less so among young women who consumed alcohol. So, they modified the workshops to address both safe sex and alcohol use, illustrating how drinking impacts sexual risk.

To test this new model, the researchers recruited 560 Black women--18 to 24 years old--from community settings in Atlanta, including malls, public transit stops, and outside of nightclubs. Participants enrolled in the study if they reported recent unprotected sex and recent alcohol use.

The study randomly assigned the women to one of three groups: Horizons, Horizons+, or the control group. The control group participated in a one-hour educational session on STI prevention with an informational video, a question-and-answer session, and group discussion.

The Horizons group met on two consecutive Saturdays for five-hour workshops on STI prevention. The Horizons+ group completed the same workshops, plus a one-hour session addressing risky alcohol use. The added session used group motivational enhancement therapy, a type of group therapy based on principles of motivational psychology that takes an active rather than passive learning approach to produce rapid, internally motivated change. Motivational enhancement therapy has been shown to be successful at changing substance use behaviors.

The group therapy aimed to increase participants' awareness of the consequences of alcohol use and its effects on decision-making, presented strategies to reduce alcohol-related sexual risk behavior, and aimed to help women effectively communicate their intentions to use condoms or abstain from sex, especially when using alcohol. Using role play, participants rehearsed how to have these tricky conversations with sexual partners and practiced how to safely resist or leave situations involving risky drinking.

Following the weekend workshops, Horizons and Horizons+ participants received follow-up phone calls and text messages to reinforce the content that they learned. The researchers then measured several outcomes: safe sex, STIs, and problematic alcohol use, including binge drinking.

Both interventions significantly reduced alcohol use: Horizons+ reduced the odds of weekly binge drinking by 59 percent and Horizons by 48 percent.

Participants in Horizons+ had 45 percent greater odds of safe sex than did the control group; Horizons alone did not differ from the control group. The interventions did not reduce incidence of STIs, likely because rates were low to begin with in the study population, unlike previous studies of Horizons where participants were recruited from STI clinics.

"The expanded intervention focusing on risky drinking creates a framework for addressing challenges and problem-solving within sexual partnerships; our findings suggest that using a combined approach of sexual health promotion and alcohol reduction, which reinforce each other, can significantly reduce both risky sex and drinking," said DiClemente.

HOUSTON - (March 4, 2021) - Federal and state governments auction leases to oil and gas companies to extract natural resources from public land. A revamp of the auction system -- utilizing a new model developed by a Rice University economist -- could lead to more competitive bids and, ultimately, more money for governments.

Yunmi Kong, an assistant professor of economics at Rice and the study's author, discussed her model in "Sequential Auctions with Synergy and Affiliation Across Auctions." The article appeared in the January 2021 edition of the Journal of Political Economy.

"Much of the oil- and gas-producing land in the U.S. is on state or federal property," Kong said. "And there's a lot of interest from oversight organizations in how the government utilizes and makes money from these resources. My desire to make this process more efficient is what led to the development of this model."

Kong's model evaluates the synergy of oil and gas properties going up for auction, or the degree to which the parcels of land complement one another.

Parcels located next to each other that could utilize the same workers and equipment, for example, have greater synergy than properties that are not. Knowing the synergy of these properties, Kong said, can help governments decide if it's more advantageous to package them or auction them separately.

"Bundling property guarantees that whatever synergy there is between two pieces of land can be realized," Kong said. "If these pieces of land are leased separately, firms might be afraid of winning one property but not getting the complementary property. This means they wouldn't get the full value of both properties, and this might lead them to not bid as aggressively."

Properties with less synergy that are packaged together may be less attractive for bidders.

"Bundling properties gives up the flexibility of allocating these items to different bidders, especially if there's a bidder who values one property very highly but a second property not as much," Kong said. "This is a definite downside to bundling, because you're forcing one bidder to take all of the properties when it might be more profitable to auction each piece of land separately."

Scientists from Skoltech and MSU have investigated antibiotic nybomycin that could prove effective against bacteria resistant to other antibiotics. Their research was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

All bacterial cells contain topoisomerases, an important group of enzymes that help deal with spatial difficulties stemming from bacterial cell division associated with circular DNA replication. Topoisomerases can be of two types, I and II, depending on breaks they produce in DNA (one strand or double strand). Type II often acts as a target for antibiotics, including fluoroquinolones (FQ), a common group of antibiotics that comprises levofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, and others. Unfortunately, bacteria easily acquire resistance to FQs through mutations in topoisomerase-encoding genes. The emergence of resistant pathogenic strains is a global problem in healthcare, therefore, identifying alternative pathways to thwart their persistence is the current frontier in drug discovery. Nybomycins reported to be "reverse antibiotics" are capable of blocking fluroquinolone resistant DNA-gyrase (one of the type II Topoisomerases). Previously, this effect was observed in gram-positive bacteria only (bacteria can be either gram-positive or gram-negative, depending on their cell wall structure).

A team led by Olga Dontsova, a professor at Skoltech and Moscow State University, has demonstrated the impact of the "reverse antibiotic" on gram-negative bacteria and showed for the first time ever that nybomycin can also be effective against unstable topoisomerases.

"Interestingly, the first inhibitors of topoisomerases of type II were found among quinolones, artificially synthesized molecules. Now increasingly more natural molecules are found that are effective against the same target. Nybomycin, a natural inhibitor of topoisomerases II, disrupts fluoroquinolone-resistant gyrases, which means that it can be used when fluoroquinolones, the classic gyrase inhibitors, do not work. This is the first study that looks into the details of inhibition of topoisomerases II in gram-negative bacteria using nybomycin which has been shown to block fluoroquinolone-sensitive and fluoroquinlone-resistant forms of gyrase in Escherichia coli," Ilya Osterman, a principal research scientist at Skoltech Center for Life Sciences, explains.

According to Olga Dontsova: "Finding ways to overcome bacterial resistance to antibiotics is especially important in pandemics, when secondary bacterial infections that are difficult to fight often develop".

CLEVELAND (March 5, 2021)--An international team of bioethicists and scientists, led by a researcher at Case Western Reserve University, contends it may be justified to go beyond the standing 14-day limit that restricts how long researchers can study human embryos in a dish. Going beyond this policy limit could lead to potential health and fertility benefits, and the authors provide a process for doing so.

In an article published March 5 in Science, Insoo Hyun, a bioethics professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the paper's lead author, and colleagues urge policymakers and the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) to consider "a cautious, stepwise approach" to scientific exploration beyond the 14-day limit.

"But first," they write, "one must appreciate the scientific reasons for doing so. Any such proposed research must serve important goals that cannot be adequately met by other means."

ISSCR is expected to soon release updated guidelines for stem cell and embryo research.

Among the potential benefits of studying human embryos beyond the 14-day limit include understanding how early development disorders originate and developing therapies that address causes of infertility, developmental disorders and failed pregnancy.

Since the first successful birth from in vitro fertilization in the late 1970s, human embryo research has been subject to limits of time and developmental benchmarks. The general rationale for imposing those limits was that, although considered acceptable to benefit human health and improve reproduction, in vitro research should conclude 14 days after fertilization--about when implantation in the womb is normally completed.

National guidelines, laws and international norms have prohibited scientists from culturing human embryos for research after 14 days, or beyond the appearance of a structure called the "primitive streak," which defines the period when principal tissues of the body begin to form and an embryo can no longer divide into identical twins. Thus, the 14-day limit allowed research to proceed until the human embryo in a dish starts to become biologically unique.

When this limit was put in place, there were no methods to culture embryos in a dish for anywhere close to two weeks.

But research since 2016 shows that it is likely possible to culture human research embryos past the two-week limit, and suggests that doing so will yield scientific insights that could prove important for human health and fertility.

The authors acknowledge that researchers should adhere to the 14-day limit, "unless a strong scientific justification can be offered to culture human embryos longer in locales where it would be legally permissible to do so. Any such proposed research must serve important goals that cannot be adequately met by other means."

Hyun and colleagues propose six principles that can be used to weigh whether research on human embryos can move beyond the 14-day limit, in incremental, measured steps. They note their principles apply for extending the 14-day limit, but also for other complex research.

Among their principles, they emphasize that extended embryo culture should begin in small steps, with frequent interim evaluations. For instance, it would first be necessary to assess feasibility of culture past 14 days, and, if so, to assess whether those newly permitted experiments were informative enough to justify the further use of human embryos.

Their other principles include advocating for research proposals to be peer-reviewed by qualified and independent science and ethics committees; for public dialogue at the local institutional level and, more broadly.

"Realistically," they conclude, "an incremental approach seems to be our only path forward, both from a scientific and a policy standpoint."

Did you daydream as a kid, maybe even get in trouble for it? If you find it harder to be pleasantly lost in your thoughts these days, you're not alone.

"This is part of our cognitive toolkit that's underdeveloped, and it's kind of sad," said Erin Westgate, Ph.D., a University of Florida psychology professor.

The ability to think for pleasure is important, and you can get better at it, Westgate says. The first step is recognizing that while it might look easy, daydreaming is surprisingly demanding.

"You have to be the actor, director, screenwriter and audience of a mental performance," she said. "Even though it looks like you're doing nothing, it's cognitively taxing."

Another obstacle revealed by Westgate's research: We don't intuitively understand how to think enjoyable thoughts.

"We're fairly clueless," she said. "We don't seem to know what to think about to have a positive experience."

Westgate wants to help people recapture that daydream state, which may boost wellness and even pain tolerance. In a study published today in the journal Emotion, Westgate and colleagues Timothy Wilson, Nicholas Buttrick and Rémy Furrer of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University instructed participants to think meaningful thoughts. Westgate anticipated that this would guide the thinkers into a rewarding experience, but they actually found it less enjoyable than their unguided thoughts.

"I was so confused," she said. Then she took a look at the topics the participants reported thinking about.

"It was heavy stuff. It didn't seem to occur to them that they could use the time to enjoy their own thoughts."

When we're nudged to think for fun instead of meaning, we tend to default to superficial pleasures like eating ice cream, which don't scratch the same itch as thoughts that are pleasant but also meaningful. But when Westgate provided participants with a list of examples that were both pleasant and meaningful, they enjoyed thinking 50% more than when they were instructed to think about whatever they wanted. That's knowledge you can harness in your everyday life by prompting yourself with topics you'd find rewarding to daydream about, like a pleasant memory, future accomplishment, or an event you're looking forward to, she says.

Daydreaming can be an antidote to boredom, which Westgate's work has shown can induce people to bully, troll and show sadistic behavior. In one experiment, participants opted to kill bugs with a coffee grinder to alleviate their ennui. (The bugs weren't actually hurt, but the participants didn't know that.) In another study, 67% of men and 25% of women preferred to give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts. Sure, our devices provide an endless stream of distraction, but in certain situations, electronic entertainment is unavailable or unsafe. ("If you're at a stoplight, I'd much rather you reflect on a nice picnic you once had than reach for your phone," Westgate said.)

Aside from its boredom-fighting abilities, thinking for pleasure can be its own reward. "It's something that sets us apart. It defines our humanity. It allows us to imagine new realities," Westgate said. "But that kind of thinking requires practice."

Here's how to master it.

Trust that it's possible to have a good experience if you prime your brain with topics you'll find pleasant. "This is something all of us can do once you have the concept. We give 4- and 5-year-olds these instructions, and it makes sense to them."

That said, "This is hard for everybody. There's no good evidence that some types of people are simply better thinkers. I'm the world's worst person at this: I would definitely rather have the electric shock," Westgate said. "But knowing why it can be hard and what makes it easier really makes a difference. The encouraging part is we can all get better."

Don't confuse planning things with thinking for pleasure. "People say they enjoy planning, but when we test it, they do not."

Choose the right time to try. Research shows we're most likely to daydream when our minds are minimally occupied with something else, like showering or brushing our teeth. "The next time you're walking, instead of pulling out your phone, try it," Westgate says.

As you build your ability to daydream, you'll have a source of enjoyable thoughts at your disposal during stressful times, Westgate says.

"What we feel is a function of what we think. Thinking for pleasure can be a powerful tool to shape our emotions."

Using data collected in a NASA Langley Mach 6 wind tunnel, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign replicated the hypersonic flow conditions of a compression ramp flow by means of Direct Numerical Simulation. The simulation yielded an abundance of additional data, which can be used to better understand the phenomena that occur surrounding vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds.

"Data from experiments are somewhat limited--for example taken from pressure probes at a few locations on a test object. When we run a numerical simulation, we acquire information - such as pressure, temperature, density, and fluid velocity - about the entire flow field including the vehicle surfaces. This can help explain some of the things that experimentalists have found but couldn't quite explain because of a lack of data," said Fabian Dettenrieder, a doctoral student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois.

The study simulated a control surface at the end of a wing used to maneuver an aircraft. In this case, it simulated a flat plate including the leading edge, with a 35-degree compression ramp configuration that had previously been experimentally tested in the Langley hypersonic wind tunnel.

Dettenrieder explained that hypersonic flows are complex. The high energy of the flow results in substantial pressure and heat loads which - in addition to shocks - creates challenging problems both experimentally and numerically. The flow configuration considered in this study involves a super-critical ramp angle resulting in a separation bubble that is inherently unsteady. Accurately capturing this phenomenon is complex as it is highly susceptible to its environment, such as acoustic noise and turbulence. Furthermore, the thinner the panels on the exterior of a vehicle are - typically motivated by weight optimizations - the more likely they are to start deviating from a perfectly rigid behavior, which results in an interaction with the flow and can create additional complexity of the fluid-structural system.

And, in addition to the contributors to turbulence in a natural environment, the wind tunnel itself causes acoustic disturbances which can trigger unsteady fluid motions that lead to turbulence.

"We believed a discrepancy that was found between the experimental data and a previous 2D simulation was due to the lack of the acoustic radiation generated by the walls of the wind tunnel. In this 3D simulation, we replicated the wind tunnel experiment under both quiet and noisy conditions--noisy by introducing freestream disturbances at the far-field boundary of the computational domain.

"The impact of acoustic disturbance has been studied before, but not in the context of this hypersonic ramp configuration," he said. "We were able to accurately prescribe acoustic freestream perturbations." He said what they observed adds to the fundamental understanding of the unsteady flow phenomena observed in the experiments.

The simulation was run on Frontera, a National Science Foundation-funded supercomputer system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dettenrieder's faculty adviser is Blue Waters Professor Daniel Bodony, who received an allocation of 5 million node hours on Frontera to study fluid-thermal-structure interactions.

Dettenrieder said the simulation continues to run on Frontera and is not finished yet. "It's very labor intensive and time consuming," he said. "I check it a couple of times a day to make sure it's running properly. It's continuing to acquire more data that will contribute more information to help us understand the complexities of hypersonic flow."

A new data-driven study from Texas A&M University casts serious doubt on the stereotype that male students perform better than female students in science -- specifically, physics.

A team of researchers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy analyzed both the midterm exam scores and final grades of more than 10,000 Texas A&M students enrolled in four introductory physics courses across more than a decade, finding no evidence that male students consistently outperform female students in these courses.

The work was led by Texas A&M physicist and Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence Tatiana Erukhimova.

With help of nearly two dozen departmental colleagues, the Texas A&M team built a database reflecting the complete introductory physics educational spectrum: the calculus-based course sequence primarily taken by engineering and physics majors as well as the algebra-based course sequence typically taken by life sciences and premed majors. Their final analysis shows that exam performance and final letter grades are largely independent of student gender -- results which Erukhimova says show promise in ending gender stereotypes that negatively impact so many female students in STEM.

"There is no consistent trend on male students outperforming female students," Erukhimova said. "Our study also provides new knowledge regarding whether statistically significant differences based on gender occurred on each exam for four introductory physics courses as the semesters were progressing -- an area that has not previously been studied, at least not for such a large data set and over a long period of time."

When differences in final letter grades for a course were observed, there were no persistent differences across that course's exams, she said. Conversely, when researchers found differences on exams within a course, they observed no differences for final letter grades in that course. In algebra-based mechanics, they found that female students outperformed male students by a small but statistically significant margin.

Their findings were published recently in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review Physics Education Research and highlighted in a related Physics Magazine News and Commentary feature.

Prior to the team's study and others similar to it, Erukhimova says it has been an open question as to whether significant differences between male and female students could show up on particular exams but remain slight enough so as not to affect final course grades. For the past 25 years, the physics education profession has relied on inventory tests -- optional surveys intended to assess conceptual understanding and retention of key physics concepts -- to answer that question, effectively substantiating the argument for gender differences in student performance by default because men tend to score higher on them.

"In the field of physics education research, the majority of existing studies report a persistent gender gap with males performing significantly better than females on introductory mechanics concept inventory assessments, such as the Force Concept Inventory," Erukhimova said. "The results of prior studies on the gendered differences in student performance based on course grades and examinations are less consistent. While a number of studies indicate that male students outperform female students on the exams and course grades, other groups found no significant gendered difference in student performance."

The team applied multiple statistical analyses to the course-level data they collected to study whether there were performance differences based on student gender. To see how their findings aligned with student perceptions, they also took a snapshot of the students' feelings about course performance, inclusion and contributions using a short anonymous questionnaire distributed to 1,600 students in fall 2019.

"Responses indicated that female students had lower perception of their performance than their male classmates," Erukhimova said. "The only class where female students perceived their performance as equal to their male classmates was algebra-based mechanics, in which females typically outperform males. Additionally, we found that although male and female students may feel differently regarding their performance and in-class contributions, they feel equally included in class."

Although the team's study represents clear progress to Erukhimova, she acknowledges it comes with its own limitations -- the most significant being that it relies solely on course-level data collected from faculty and does not analyze the possible impact of non-academic factors on student performance. In the future, she says the team would like to connect as much of their data set as possible to university-level records to see how prior preparation, such as SAT scores, affects these results.

"We believe that all students should have equal opportunities and chances for success in physics," Erukhimova said. "The results of this work may help with fighting the gender stereotype threat that negatively impacts so many female students. By contributing to the body of knowledge about how gender relates to student performance, we hope that our work, which would not have been possible without our colleagues' data, can be another step in dismantling the preconceived notion of a societal bias based on gender in physics."

Exercise has long-been recommended as a cognitive-behavioral therapy for patients of depression, yet new evidence from the University of California of San Diego suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of the relationship between physical activity and mental health.

In a study of college students conducted before and during the pandemic, findings revealed the average steps of subjects declined from 10,000 to 4,600 steps per day and rates of depression increased from 32% to 61%.

The research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also revealed short-term restoration of exercise does not meaningfully improve mental well-being.

"This raises many possible explanations, including that the impact of physical activity may require a longer-term intervention," said co-author Sally Sadoff, associate professor of economics and strategy at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management. "At the same time, our results clearly show that those who maintained physical exercise throughout the pandemic were the most resilient and least likely to suffer from depression."

Sadoff added there is a 15 to 18 percentage point difference in depression rates between participants who experienced large disruptions to their mobility, compared to those who maintained their habits.

Sadoff and coauthors from the University of Pittsburg and Carnegie Mellon University point to the alarming trend of increased depression among young adults (ages 18-24) during the pandemic, which is two-times higher than the general population.

The students in the study answered repeated surveys about their well-being and time use over the course of a semester. From March to July 2020, depression rates skyrocketed by 90%, compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Fitbit data helps fill in the gaps in understanding mobility's role in mental health

The study enrolled multiple cohorts of hundreds of U.S. college students from February 2019 through July 2020. In addition to filling out surveys, participants received wearable devices (Fitbits) that track their activity levels. Participants in the 2020 cohort began the study in February and continued participating after their university moved all classes online in March and encouraged students not to return to campus.

Among the subjects, sleep increased by 25 to 30 minutes per night, time spent socializing declined by more than half (less than 30 minutes per day), and screen time more than doubled to five or more hours per day.

The researchers found large declines in physical activity during COVID-19 was most strongly associated with higher rates of depression. Physical activity minutes translate to about 10 minutes in which the heart rate is raised enough to burn at least 1.5 times as many calories as it does at rest.

Those who experienced declines of one to two hours of physical activity per day were most at risk for depression during the pandemic, while participants who were able to maintain their daily habits were at the lowest risk.

"This relationship is one that only emerges during the pandemic," the authors note. "Before the pandemic, there was not a very strong connection between changes in physical activity and mental health, but our analyses suggest that disruption to physical activity is a leading risk factor for depression during this period."

Short-term restoration of exercise habits does not provide mental health relief

In order to examine whether a policy intervention could help counteract some of the pandemic's adverse impacts to mental health, the researchers implemented a randomized experiment.

Half of the participants were incentivized to walk at least 10,000 steps per day for two weeks. The strategy significantly increased their average steps by about 2,300 steps per day and physical activity by almost 40 minutes per day, compared to the other half of subjects. However, the impact of exercise did not translate into an improvement in mental health, nor did it encourage the students to keep up the physical activity after the two-week period ended.

"Physical activity may have important interactions with other lifestyle behaviors such as social interactions," the authors write. "It could also be the case that the relationship between physical activity and depression is driven more by mental health than it is by lifestyle habits."

They conclude more research is needed to understand how to improve both physical and mental health during such periods of large disruption.

Adding, "The pandemic tightened the relationship between the maintenance of lifestyle habits and mental health."

During the first half of 2020, the U.S. Intermountain West region of the United States experienced four significant earthquake sequences, spanning multiple states. In the new issue of SRL, 15 papers characterize these major earthquakes and discuss how they are helping seismologists gain new insights into the tectonics of the region.

The Intermountain West is bounded by the eastern margin of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east. While its earthquake risk is often overlooked in comparison to those in California and the Pacific Northwest, the region contains several major fault systems and a growing urban population, particularly near Salt Lake City in Utah.

Last year's four major earthquakes in the region include the 18 March magnitude 5.7 Magna, Utah earthquake; the 31 March magnitude 6.5 Stanley, Idaho earthquake; the 15 May magnitude 6.5 Monte Cristo earthquake in Nevada and the 24 June magnitude 5.8 earthquake near Lone Pine, California. In all cases, these earthquake sequences were the largest to occur in the area for several decades.

The focus section papers cover the overall seismotectonics of the region and examine the specific fault geometry, aftershocks, ground failure and other aspects of the major earthquake sequences. The research reflects the expanded "toolkit" of seismologists, including GPS stations, satellite and geophone data and machine learning, that helped the researchers quickly characterize the seismic activity--while contending with work and travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most people have heard of stem cells, cells from which all other cells with specialized functions are generated. Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are the architects of blood cell development and are responsible for blood cell formation throughout the life of an organism. HSCs are also used in the treatment of cancer and immune disturbances.

Previous research into HSC transplantation has involved the use of adult and fetal mice. This has involved the removal of recipient HSCs using approaches including irradiation and the administration of DNA damaging drugs. In a first of its kind, researchers from the University of Tsukuba devised a novel approach for HSC deletion in mouse embryos. This report provides the first description of embryonic HSC depletion and transplantation of donor HSCs into the embryo via the placenta.

In describing their approach, Assistant Professor Michito Hamada says: "We were able to exploit the genetics of HSC development in mice to generate mice that completely lack HSCs in the fetal liver, making these mice the perfect recipients for HSC transplantation." Mice lacking the Runx1 gene do not survive into adulthood and die at embryonic day 12.5, in part because they lack HSCs. The recipient mice developed by this team have Runx1 transgenes that partially restore the effects of Runx1 absence, and while these mice still lack HSCs, they can develop until embryonic day 18.5.

Using these recipient mice, the research team explored the effects of transplanting HSCs from the same species (allogenic) or from a different species (xenogeneic). The placentas of recipient mice were injected with donor HSCs at embryonic day 11.5, before the development of the immune system. Excitingly, over 90% the HSCs of recipient fetuses were from the donor, irrespective of species.

Analysis of the HSCs that developed in recipient mice after transportation revealed that they contributed to the development of both white and red blood cells. Furthermore, additional transplant of these cells into adult recipients revealed that the HSCs were functional and had retained normal abilities.

"These results are really exciting," explains Professor Satoru Takahashi. "These mice represent a new tool that can be used to advance HSC research. The ability to perform HSC transplants at an earlier developmental stage really allows us to explore fetal hematopoiesis and, in the future, this model could be 'humanized' using human HSCs. The applications appear endless."

SMU Office of Research and Tech Transfer - One of the motivations for the recently published Journal of Accounting Research paper "Politically Connected Governments" was the daily experience with the subway system in New York City.

The author of the paper, SMU Assistant Professor of Accounting Kim Jungbae, told the Office of Research & Tech Transferthe research question for the paper which examines the consequences of powerful political connections for local governments, was inspired by the New York Times article "The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth" (January 24, 2018).

"The article suggests that the NYC subway system is not fully efficient in part due to the political connection between labor unions and local politicians," Professor Kim explains. "They exchange benefits with each other and sacrifice the welfare of those who use the transportation system." Although this story does not directly speak to the main message of the published paper, it brought the researchers' initial attention to the possibility that the quality of public services might suffer when local governments have ties with powerful politicians.

Professor Kim's research interests lie in financial reporting, auditing, regulatory intervention, and the political economy. He is particularly interested in how financial reporting and auditing shape the incentives of economic entities, either corporations or governments, and lead to certain consequences.

Purpose and relevance

Professor Kim argues that as voters and taxpayers, we need to pay attention to how local governments spend public funds and be aware of factors that may lead to corruption or misappropriation of public resources. "This paper, based on the U.S. political system, focuses on the local governments' political connections as such a factor."

The study, he says, is relevant to the academic literature examining political connections for several reasons. First, the researchers show a cost of political connections, whereas prior studies generally show the benefits. Second, the study provides evidence about a largely unexplored type of "political connection" that manifests through the representation of shared constituents. In particular, local government officials and members of Congress each advance their political success by ensuring their shared constituents are satisfied.

Third, the paper draws attention to the idea that a range of organisations are affected by political connections. By contrast, prior studies have largely focused on the effects of political connections for corporations.

"The paper shares similarities with many other academic papers in that they examine the consequences of political connections. However, by examining the consequences on local governments, it differentiates itself from prior studies, which examine the consequences of political connections in the corporate sector," Professor Kim expounds.

"Also, most of prior studies document positive results, whereas our paper is one of only a few exceptions in the literature that document negative consequences of political connections."

Methodology

Local governments in the U.S. that receive more than $750,000 direct fund allocations are obliged to receive an audit each year. The researchers used the outcomes of these audits to construct a quantitative measure of stewardship.

"This measure is based on whether a local government has an unmodified audit opinion, no material weakness, no significant deficiency, no material noncompliance, and the timeliness of audit reports," explains Professor Kim. "We augment this main measure of stewardship with a news-based measure by counting the number of news articles that mention a local government's corruption each year." They found that their main measure was positively correlated with this news-based measure.

So how was the strength of members of Congress determined for comparison?

According to Professor Kim, the members of Congress yield their power by engaging in the legislative process at congressional committees. "Therefore, our basic notion of the strength of members of Congress is that they are more powerful if they serve on powerful congressional committees for a longer period of time."

To determine which committee is powerful, following prior studies, the researchers use the transfer of members of Congress. For example, if a politician moves from committee A to committee B, it suggests that the latter committee is considered more valuable and influential.

The above measure of strength is determined at politician-level. A city or county government in the U.S. has three politicians (i.e., two Senators and one House member) who represent its interest in Congress. Later, the strength of political connections at local government-level is aggregated by adding up each politician's strength in Congress.

Findings

The main finding of this paper is that local governments' ties with powerful congressional members lead to a decrease in stewardship over public resources. Ex ante, the researchers had two opposing predictions.

On the one hand, powerful politicians are subject to greater scrutiny in the form of government audits and media attention, Professor Kim avers. On the other hand, local governments may care less about how well they serve the public because powerful politicians provide preferential access to federal resources.

"Our finding is consistent with the latter prediction. Although local politicians care about reelection prospects, the increased resources brought by powerful congressional representation allow local governments officials to reduce stewardship."

In addition, the researchers were the first to provide evidence about the effects of powerful political connections in the context of U.S. local governments. Professor Kim writes: "Our study highlights room for improvement in the stewardship over public resources at the local government level, despite recent reports that show the United States is in the bottom 10 percent of corrupt countries. As such, the study is relevant to the literature examining state and local government reporting and governance choices such as those by Zimmerman [1977], Gore [2004], and Beck [2018]." The findings complement this literature by showing a distinct channel - powerful representation in Congress - that adversely affects local governments' governance efforts.

Universal application

Could this U.S.-based study help other countries especially those that are culturally different like those in Asia, where local governments and members of Congress interact differently?

Professor Kim says the study relies on several institutional features in the U.S. where local governments receive funds from the federal government and, in turn, local governments receive an audit to ensure that they use federal funds as intended. Also, members of Congress represent the population in a certain geographical region.

"I think these features are present in many countries including my home country, South Korea," observes Professor Kim. "The implication of our study may be different for some countries, depending on the extent to which local governments are financially reliant on federal governments and how autonomous local governments are."

He adds that although the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (2017) ranks the U.S. in the bottom 10 percent of corrupt countries, they still found that there is room for improvement in how well local governments serve their constituents. "In this sense, the extent to which political connections hurt the quality of public services may be greater in other countries."

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, charts and graphs have helped communicate information about infection rates, deaths, and vaccinations. In some cases, such visualizations can encourage behaviors that reduce virus transmission, like wearing a mask. Indeed, the pandemic has been hailed as the breakthrough moment for data visualization.

But new findings suggest a more complex picture. A study from MIT shows how coronavirus skeptics have marshalled data visualizations online to argue against public health orthodoxy about the benefits of mask mandates. Such "counter-visualizations" are often quite sophisticated, using datasets from official sources and state-of-the-art visualization methods.

The researchers combed through hundreds of thousands of social media posts and found that coronavirus skeptics often deploy counter-visualizations alongside the same "follow-the-data" rhetoric as public health experts, yet the skeptics argue for radically different policies. The researchers conclude that data visualizations aren't sufficient to convey the urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic, because even the clearest graphs can be interpreted through a variety of belief systems.

"A lot of people think of metrics like infection rates as objective," says Crystal Lee. "But they're clearly not, based on how much debate there is on how to think about the pandemic. That's why we say data visualizations have become a battleground."

The research will be presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May. Lee is the study's lead author and a PhD student in MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as well as a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Co-authors include Graham Jones, a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow in Anthropology; Arvind Satyanarayan, the NBX Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and CSAIL; Tanya Yang, an MIT undergraduate; and Gabrielle Inchoco, a Wellesley College undergraduate.

As data visualizations rose to prominence early in the pandemic, Lee and her colleagues set out to understand how they were being deployed throughout the social media universe. "An initial hypothesis was that if we had more data visualizations, from data collected in a systematic way, then people would be better informed," says Lee. To test that hypothesis, her team blended computational techniques with innovative ethnographic methods.

They used their computational approach on Twitter, scraping nearly half a million tweets that referred to both "Covid-19" and "data." With those tweets, the researchers generated a network graph to find out "who's retweeting whom and who likes whom," says Lee. "We basically created a network of communities who are interacting with each other." Clusters included groups like the "American media community" or "antimaskers." The researchers found that antimask groups were creating and sharing data visualizations as much as, if not more than, other groups.

And those visualizations weren't sloppy. "They are virtually indistinguishable from those shared by mainstream sources," says Satyanarayan. "They are often just as polished as graphs you would expect to encounter in data journalism or public health dashboards."

"It's a very striking finding," says Lee. "It shows that characterizing antimask groups as data-illiterate or not engaging with the data, is empirically false."

Lee says this computational approach gave them a broad view of Covid-19 data visualizations. "What is really exciting about this quantitative work is that we're doing this analysis at a huge scale. There's no way I could have read half a million tweets."

But the Twitter analysis had a shortcoming. "I think it misses a lot of the granularity of the conversations that people are having," says Lee. "You can't necessarily follow a single thread of conversation as it unfolds." For that, the researchers turned to a more traditional anthropology research method -- with an internet-age twist.

Lee's team followed and analyzed conversations about data visualizations in antimask Facebook groups -- a practice they dubbed "deep lurking," an online version of the ethnographic technique called "deep hanging out." Lee says "understanding a culture requires you to observe the day-to-day informal goings-on -- not just the big formal events. Deep lurking is a way to transpose these traditional ethnography approaches to digital age."

The qualitative findings from deep lurking appeared consistent with the quantitative Twitter findings. Antimaskers on Facebook weren't eschewing data. Rather, they discussed how different kinds of data were collected and why. "Their arguments are really quite nuanced," says Lee. "It's often a question of metrics." For example, antimask groups might argue that visualizations of infection numbers could be misleading, in part because of the wide range of uncertainty in infection rates, compared to measurements like the number of deaths. In response, members of the group would often create their own counter-visualizations, even instructing each other in data visualization techniques.

"I've been to livestreams where people screen share and look at the data portal from the state of Georgia," says Lee. "Then they'll talk about how to download the data and import it into Excel."

Jones says the antimask groups' "idea of science is not listening passively as experts at a place like MIT tell everyone else what to believe." He adds that this kind of behavior marks a new turn for an old cultural current. "Antimaskers' use of data literacy reflects deep-seated American values of self-reliance and anti-expertise that date back to the founding of the country, but their online activities push those values into new arenas of public life."

He adds that "making sense of these complex dynamics would have been impossible" without Lee's "visionary leadership in masterminding an interdisciplinary collaboration that spanned SHASS and CSAIL."

Combining computational and anthropological insights led the researchers to a more nuanced understanding of data literacy. Lee says their study reveals that, compared to public health orthodoxy, "antimaskers see the pandemic differently, using data that is quite similar. I still think data analysis is important. But it's certainly not the salve that I thought it was in terms of convincing people who believe that the scientific establishment is not trustworthy." Lee says their findings point to "a larger rift in how we think about science and expertise in the U.S." That same rift runs through issues like climate change and vaccination, where similar dynamics often play out in social media discussions.

To make these results accessible to the public, Lee and her collaborator, CSAIL PhD student Jonathan Zong, led a team of seven MIT undergraduate researchers to develop an interactive narrative where readers can explore the visualizations and conversations for themselves.

Lee describes the team's research as a first step in making sense of the role of data and visualizations in these broader debates. "Data visualization is not objective. It's not absolute. It is in fact an incredibly social and political endeavor. We have to be attentive to how people interpret them outside of the scientific establishment."

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - Even before countries began rolling out their vaccination campaigns, Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca's announcements had already proved fortifying shots. Stocks rallied and healthcare workers celebrated in the wake of the vaccine news late last year. But months on, that early euphoria has somewhat evaporated, replaced by uncertainty and debate over vaccine safety, possible side effects and varying degrees of citizen reluctance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and health experts modelling COVID-19's spread have warned that for vaccines to be useful in curbing the pandemic, a significant percentage of the population must be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. But, as SMU's Vice Provost of Research Professor Archan Misra pointed out at an AI-centred panel discussion, held in conjunction with the SMU- Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) on 15 January 2021, from a purely self-interested point of view, each person would be best served if all the others got vaccinated and they themselves did not have to vaccinate - because that would stop the spread of the virus without their having to take on the possible risks of side effects.

To account for these considerations, Professor Misra explained, the most powerful AI-based epidemiology models actually need to incorporate concepts from the behavioural sciences and game theory. "To solve a practical problem, you can't just solve the computational piece, you have to incorporate the human behavioural piece," he said.

An interdisciplinary approach to AI

The vaccine conundrum effectively illustrates the difficulties involved when we bring machine learning and AI into the real world, where it meets our complex and messy human systems. Discussing the influence of social sciences such as economics and psychology on AI, the panel, comprising SMU School of Computing and Information Systems' Professor David Lo, Associate Professor Akshat Kumar and Assistant Professor Qianru Sun, concurred that AI researchers need to approach their work from an interdisciplinary angle and integrate knowledge from other fields to solve problems holistically.

"[AI researchers] can learn a lot from cognitive psychology, especially in explainable AI," Professor Lo said. Traditionally, AI systems have been thought of as black boxes, with data processes that have been difficult for researchers and programmers to interpret. Yet when these experts bring AI into the real world and use it to solve practical problems, they have to answer questions such as why the AI made a specific prediction or decision, and whether it gives enough confidence for us to act on it. Explainable AI therefore helps to make decisions actionable, Professor Lo pointed out, and established methods and principles of cognitive psychology can be applied to design solutions that can make AI black boxes more comprehensible.

For AI to be effective at real-world problem solving, domain knowledge is crucial, Professor Kumar added. When AI researchers work with domain experts, they can break through traditional constraints in the relevant fields, he said, raising the example of using AI to optimise decision-making in maritime transportation systems, which radically improved both productivity and safety instead of having to sacrifice one for the other.

Singapore's ports regularly experience heavy traffic, and sometimes it may result in unsafe navigation behaviour, Professor Kumar explained. By modelling the maritime transportation system, he and his collaborators found that if they adjusted the vessels' schedules slightly using AI-based coordination algorithms, they could significantly reduce traffic hotspots while keeping the traffic throughput high. "We still maintain the productivity of the system, but we also increase the safety," he said.

An ecosystem of collaborators

Professor Kumar shared that while working on the maritime project, they have consulted domain experts, and government agencies were critical in facilitating such access.

Not only are local public institutions willing collaborators, they are also significant funders of AI projects, according to Professor Sun. "The government agencies are quite generous in terms of their support of AI research. Some of them even offer the full funding for the project. They're also quite willing to deploy the applications yielded from the research of the project for public use," she said.

This ample support has led to Singapore becoming a hotbed for AI technology and development. In 2019, the city-state topped the list of 105 cities most ready for AI disruption, beating places such as London, San Francisco and Beijing - and attracting both researchers and companies hungry for talent from across the world. Explaining how industry partners could benefit from collaborations with researchers, Professor Lo said, "They have the data, they have the domain knowledge and they want to use AI. But industry players may not know how to put that data, domain knowledge and AI together to improve the quality of their products. That's where they may benefit from collaborating with AI researchers."

Professor Sun added that unlike their commercial counterparts, university researchers have the privilege of spending a longer amount of time building deep expertise in AI methodologies, but they may not have the computing resources and data to apply them. "[The companies] have more real data collected, so they can provide us with a more realistic testbed for our proposed methodology and theories," she said. In doing so, researchers and their industry partners will bring novel AI approaches developed in the lab one step closer into the real world.