The findings, published May 16 in the open-access online journal PLoS ONE, suggest that we unconsciously make gay and straight distinctions.

"It may be similar to how we don't have to think about whether someone is a man or a woman or black or white," said lead author Joshua Tabak, a psychology graduate student at the University of Washington. "This information confronts us in everyday life."

Vivian Zayas at Cornell University is the other author of the paper. Funding was provided by Cornell University and the National Science Foundation.

Tabak says that our ability to spontaneously assess sexual orientation based on observation or instinct conflicts with the assertion that if people just kept their sexual orientation to themselves then no one else would know and discrimination wouldn't exist, an argument frequently used by opponents of anti-discrimination policies for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Examples of faces used in the gaydar experiment.

Tabak JA, Zayas V (2012) The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36671.

In the study, 129 college students viewed 96 photos each of young adult men and women who identified themselves as gay or straight. Concerned that facial hair, glasses, makeup and piercings might provide easy clues, the researchers only used photos of people who did not have such embellishments. They cropped the grayscale photos so that only faces, not hairstyles, were visible.

For women's faces, participants were 65 percent accurate in telling the difference between gay and straight faces when the photos flashed on a computer screen. Even when the faces were flipped upside down, participants were 61 percent accurate in telling the two apart.

At 57 percent accuracy, they had a harder time differentiating gay men from straight men. The participants' accuracy slipped to 53 percent – still statistically above chance – when the men's faces appeared upside down.

The difference in accuracy for men’s and women’s faces was driven by more false alarm errors with men’s faces – that is, a higher rate of mistaking straight men’s faces as gay.

This may be because participants are more familiar with the concept of gay men than with lesbians, so they may have been more liberal in judging men's faces as gay, Tabak suspects. Another possibility is that the difference between gay and straight women is simply more noticeable than the difference between gay and straight men, Tabak said.

He was surprised that participants were above-chance judging sexual orientation based on upside down photos flashed for just 50 milliseconds, about a third the time of an eyeblink.

Don't think you have gaydar? You're not alone. Tabak says that in his experiments there are "always a small number of people with no ability to distinguish gay and straight faces."

It's unclear why some have better gaydar than others, since studies have only tested this aptitude in college students. Tabak speculates that "people from older generations or different cultures who may not have grown up knowing they were interacting with gay people" may be less accurate in making gay versus straight judgments.

###

For more information, contact Tabak at 415-787-0009 or tabak@uw.edu.

The Washington State Alliance for Child Welfare Excellence, publicly announced May 10, unites social work education resources from the UW School of Social Work, the social work program at UW Tacoma, Eastern Washington University School of Social Work and Children's Administration, which is part of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

"The alliance is a groundbreaking collaboration designed to strengthen the professional expertise of social workers, enhance caregiving skills of foster and adoptive parents, and create better futures for Washington state children and families," said Eddie Uehara, dean of the UW School of Social Work.

“This comprehensive effort will, for the first time, generate a statewide road map for social work training and education,” Uehara said. She added that it will also "leverage substantially more federal dollars for professional development and harness the deep expertise of Partners for Our Children, a School of Social Work-sponsored child welfare and policy analysis group."

Previously, professional development for the state's social workers involved in child welfare has been coordinated by Children's Administration, which provides services to approximately 9,500 children and 7,800 families each month. About 800 to 1,000 of those children receive services while living at home, and the rest receive services while in foster care.

"Our intent is to use the combined expertise of all the partners to design a comprehensive training and professional development system that is seamless as social workers move from school to practice," Denise Revels Robinson, assistant secretary at Children's Administration, said in a news release. “Ultimately this will help us to better serve the children and families involved with public child welfare.”

A memorandum of understanding is signed by Connie Ballmer, Partners for Our Children; Robin Arnold Williams, DSHS; Rodolfo Arévalo, Eastern Washington University; and Michael K. Young, University of Washington. Denise Revels Robinson of Children's Administration is in the top row fourth from left, and Eddie Uehara, dean of the UW School of Social Work, is in the top row far right.

UW

Uehara, Revels Robinson and UW President Michael K. Young joined educators, state legislators, child welfare professionals and philanthropists on May 10 to celebrate the partnership. They signed a memorandum of understanding to guide the activities of the professional development program.

"Now, more than ever, the people of our state need a social welfare work force that is fully equipped to guide our children and families through the challenges of life in the 21st century," Young said. "This partnership is an opportunity to leverage UW research and education expertise to improve our communities and enhance social well-being in our state."

Washington state will now join the majority of child welfare systems in the country that have a professional development program in partnership with the state universities. What makes the Washington system distinctive is that it includes a research component intended to evaluate social work training programs and design curriculum based on which programs work best.

That aspect of the alliance will be led by Partners for Our Children, a policy and analysis group that works in collaboration with UW School of Social Work, DSHS and private philanthropy.

The alliance aims to:

-          Provide a single, coordinated training system that pulls together professional development resources that work. Through a mix of online training sessions, webinars and in-person training, Washington state social workers can be better prepared to work with vulnerable families around the state.

-          Provide social workers in Eastern Washington, through the participation of Eastern Washington University in the partnership, with greater local access to training opportunities. Currently social workers attend training sessions held only in Seattle.

-          Have Children's Administration work with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to identify how to maximize federal funding for social work training and professional development.

The enhanced training and professional development system should be in place by July. The first stages will focus on supervisor and new social worker training with other components, including foster and adoptive parent training, to be added later.

###

For more information, contact Uehara at 206-685-2480 or sswdean@uw.edu.

As most caregivers would predict, it was a rough year. "I got so desperate, I read my own book," Lustbader, an affiliate associate professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington, said of "Taking Care of Aging Family Members," her 1994 work on caregiving co-authored with Nancy Hooyman, professor in the UW School of Social Work.

A part of the book on loneliness had particular relevance. Lustbader's mother-in-law had her rich community of friends back home, and Lustbader and her husband had been trying to make up for that loss by spending all of their leisure time with her.

"I read in the book that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much of your life you give up, you can't take away another person’s loneliness," Lustbader said. "The guilt that kept getting in the way of our going out on our own Saturday nights lifted. We were released."

Lustbader is a nationally known speaker on how to cope with aging, disability and end-of-life issues. She draws upon her caregiving experience and her expertise as a counselor to give lectures and workshops for caregivers around the United States and Canada.

She'll speak at the Washington state ''Challenges in Caregiving: Giving Care, Taking Care" conference, to be held June 4 in Tukwila, Wash. (Pre-registration is required and space is limited. See sidebar for more details.)

"No one understands like a fellow caregiver, and this event will be a chance for people to experience an incredible community of family caregivers," Lustbader said of the conference. "It's a marvelous relief to be with others who really understand how you feel.”

Lustbader will give practical advice on how caregivers should take care of themselves, something caregivers often neglect. One caregiver proudly told her, "I kept a slice of selfishness for myself." Lustbader agrees. "I'm going to advocate for people to keep that slice. That reduces bitterness and resentment," she said. "And, who wants to be taken care of by someone who is resentful?"

She suggests that at least one day a week caregivers should set aside time when they're "back in life somehow." It could be a weekly card game, a part-time job or something else. "We get patience from the perspective which comes from getting away," she said.

Caregivers should also hold on to their hopes and dreams, which is the topic of Lustbader's keynote talk at the June 4 conference. To this end, she advises caregivers to understand how guilt and resentment can bubble up when people have to put their own lives on hold.

"It helps people be honest with themselves, that it is natural to feel thwarted and captive when they can't pursue their own aims. Everything is for the sake of the person whose illness has taken center stage," Lustbader said.

Wendy Lustbader

Grief can arise during situations of giving and receiving care, stemming from many sources, she added. Spouses of people with Alzheimer's often yearn for the personality their partner once had. Sometimes people coping with chronic pain turn inward and become entirely self-oriented, leaving family caregivers bereft with the feeling that the person they love and have depended upon has vanished.

Lustbader urges caregivers to attend support groups where they can grieve openly and receive comfort.

In her 1993 book "Counting on Kindness: The Dilemmas of Dependency," Lustbader describes caregiving from the recipient's point of view and gives insights on what ill people wish their caregivers knew. One caregiver gave the book and a yellow highlighter to her mother, asking her to highlight anything that expressed how she was feeling.

"It spurred them to talk deeply, for the first time in their lives," Lustbader said. "Many people use this book as a tool of understanding. Some even read it long after the person they took care of is gone, and it helps them comprehend what went on during those difficult times.”

Lustbader will use humor and storytelling to convey her knowledge at the caregiver conference. “People don’t remember didactic material,” Lustbader explained. “They remember stories, and then the wisdom contained in the story comes to mind when they need it the most.”

Caregivers who seek Lustbader's counsel frequently have these questions:

I feel so guilty thinking ahead to when the caregiving will be over; does this mean I’m insensitive or unloving?

Lustbader says that caregivers should keep thinking about their own lives. "Think about how there will be life after caregiving, and don’t feel guilty about it." She encourages caregivers to think about what they will do after the responsibility is over, even though that time will bring sadness. "Looking forward to when you're free is totally natural and people should indulge quietly in this; it brings perspective. Lift your head from your labors and see life as a whole."

Why does my mom yell at me when I'm being so good to her?

"Don't take it personally when a dependent person takes out their anger and frustration on you. This is a universal problem: we bite the hand that feeds us," Lustbader said. "We do it because the caregiver is the safest person. We have nowhere else to let out the frustration of being dependent."

I'm resentful toward family members who aren't helping – what do I do?

Emotions often run high between siblings in caregiving situations, especially when old rivalries and resentments present themselves. Lustbader says, "You never regret the care you give, but people do regret the care they didn't give." She points out that research shows that the grief process is relatively simple for those who have provided care to a loved one, but it's more complicated for those who weren't involved. Also, there is solace in knowing that our children are learning from our caregiving. "I think that's why the Fifth Commandment says you will get length of days when you honor your father and your mother," Lustbader said. "Caregiving gives you hope that when your time comes, people might go out of their way to help you."

###

For more information on Lustbader's work: www.lustbader.com.

The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.

"People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case," said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.

The study's findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don't believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.

"Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having 'done the right thing' then are now letting other considerations prevail," said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.

In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled "automatic white preference" on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.

In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.

The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.

In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how "warmly" they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls – Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum – as well as Obama.

Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don't realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents' racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study's finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.

"The study's findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?" Greenwald said.

He suspects that Obama's power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have "brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008."

Another possibility is that Republican candidates' assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency "may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation," Greenwald said.

Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people's attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters' comparisons of Romney with Obama.

They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

Other collaborators on the Decision 2012 IAT project are Teri Kirby and Kaiyuan Xu, both at UW, and Brian Nosek and Sriram Natarajan, at the University of Virginia. Nosek and Banaji have collaborated with Greenwald in developing uses of the Implicit Association Test since the test's creation in the 1990s.

###

For more information, contact Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Banaji at 617-384-9203 or mahzarin_banaji@harvard.edu, or Nosek at nosek@virginia.edu.

"We now need to think of how to prevent these behavior problems and conditions early in life because they don't only cause problems in adolescence, they can launch health issues across life," said Richard Catalano, director of the University of Washington’s Social Developmental Research Group, which is part of the School of Social Work.

In a new paper, Catalano and colleagues provide examples of cost-effective policies and programs that rigorous research shows can prevent a variety of behavior problems and conditions contributing to poor health. The article was published April 25 by The Lancet, as part of a series on adolescent health.

"Despite the growing prevention science research base and the shift in in importance of behavioral problems implicated in noncommunicable disease worldwide, communicable disease prevention and treatment of behavior problems get the vast majority of resources dedicated to child and adolescent health," Catalano said.

One recommended intervention is to implement programs that encourage school attendance. This photo is of children in school in Zambia.

Wikimedia user Kozuch

The practices have been developed, tested over the past 30 years in high-income countries, with more recent testing in lower- and middle-income countries.

Catalano and his co-authors argue that these prevention policies and programs could be used more widely by both high-income and lower- and middle-income nations, to prevent worldwide adolescent behavior problems and states that are related to lifelong morbidity and mortality.

Samples of their recommended programs are:

-          The Nurse-Family Partnership program, which provides regular home visits with nurses to poor, first-time mothers. The program resulted in 43 percent fewer subsequent pregnancies and decreased the mothers' welfare use, smoking and arrests. As the children grew up, they drank less alcohol, were less likely to be arrested and had fewer sex partners than children whose mothers were not in the program.

-          The Gatehouse Project, comprising a curriculum focused on building social, problem-solving and coping skills in schoolchildren and fostering positive classroom and school-wide environments, led to decreased smoking and other substance use and delayed the onset of sexual intercourse in adolescents.

-          The Conditional Cash Transfer programs, which paid school fees in low-income countries and gave about $10 a month to mothers to ensure their children would attend school. As a result, more girls stayed in school and adolescent pregnancies declined.

Catalano and his team also recommend some prevention policies:

-          Driving laws and safe roads could make a big difference in traffic crashes, which are the leading cause of death in adolescents. Licensing requirements that restrict the number of peer passengers and nighttime driving for new drivers and require more driving practice before licensing have been associated with fewer crashes.

-          Establishing a legal minimum drinking age of 21 and placing higher taxes on alcohol have led to less drinking and fewer traffic crashes in studies the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The biggest challenge is getting governments, schools and parents to buy into effective prevention programs and policies, the authors write. One tack is to choose programs based on local need, which can be assessed with the Communities That Care youth survey.

Cost should also be factored in. Catalano and his team included six programs in their review that have demonstrated a return on investment ranging from $2 to $42 for every dollar invested.

"Prevention science requires you to think systemically across society to see the savings," he said. "If we ward off adolescent behavior problems and states that impact adolescent and adult health, like smoking, drinking and risky sex, that means we will likely have less health care expenses, as well as better workers, students, parents and scientists, all involved with making the world a better place."

Co-authors are Abigail Fagan, University of South Carolina; Loretta Gavin, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Mark Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University; Charles Irwin, University of California, San Francisco; David Ross, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and Daniel Shek, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

###

For more information, contact Catalano at 206-543-6382 or catalano@uw.edu.

Some argue that robots do not have free will and therefore cannot be held morally accountable for their actions. But psychologists at the University of Washington are finding that people don't have such a clear-cut view of humanoid robots.

The researchers' latest results show that humans apply a moderate amount of morality and other human characteristics to robots that are equipped with social capabilities and are capable of harming humans. In this case, the harm was financial, not life-threatening. But it still demonstrated how humans react to robot errors.

Arguing with Robovie over the robot's mistake while playing a game.

HINTS lab, UW

The findings imply that as robots become more sophisticated and humanlike, the public may hold them morally accountable for causing harm.

"We're moving toward a world where robots will be capable of harming humans," said lead author Peter Kahn, a UW associate professor of psychology. "With this study we're asking whether a robotic entity is conceptualized as just a tool, or as some form of a technological being that can be held responsible for its actions."

The paper was recently published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

In the study, Kahn and his research team had 40 undergraduate students play a scavenger hunt with a humanlike robot, Robovie. The robot appeared autonomous, but it was remotely controlled by a researcher concealed in another room.

After a bit of small talk with the robot, each participant had two minutes to locate objects from a list of items in the room. They all found the minimum, seven, to claim the $20 prize. But when their time was up, Robovie claimed they had found only five objects.

Then came the crux of the experiment: participants' reactions to the robot's miscount.

"Most argued with Robovie," said co-author Heather Gary, a UW doctoral student in developmental psychology. "Some accused Robovie of lying or cheating."

(Watch a video of one of the participants disagreeing with Robovie.)

When interviewed, 65 percent of participants said Robovie was to blame – at least to a certain degree – for wrongly scoring the scavenger hunt and unfairly denying the participants the $20 prize.

This suggests that as robots gain capabilities in language and social interactions, "it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes," the researchers wrote.

They argue that as militaries transform from human to robotic warfare, the chain of command that controls robots and the moral accountability of robotic warriors should be factored into jurisprudence and the Laws of Armed Conflict for cases when the robots hurt humans.

Kahn is also concerned about the morality of robotic warfare, period. "Using robotic warfare, such as drones, distances us from war, can numb us to human suffering, and make warfare more likely," he said.

The National Science Foundation funded the study. Co-authors at UW are Nathan Freier, Jolina Ruckert, Solace Shen, Heather Gary and Aimee Reichert. Other co-authors are Rachel Severson, Western Washington University; Brian Gill, Seattle Pacific University; and Takayuki Kanda and Hiroshi Ishiguro, both of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan, which created Robovie.

###

For more information, contact Kahn at pkahn@uw.edu or Gary at 206-221-0643 or hgary@uw.edu.

But parents usually have to figure out for themselves which strategies to try. Many feel isolated and overwhelmed. And while early interventions can remediate some developmental delays, the waiting lists for clinical services can be several months long.

Clinicians at the UW Autism Center realized that training parents to do behavioral interventions with their kids could bridge that waiting time and give kids with an autism spectrum disorder a quick start in learning skills in advance of enrolling in clinical services.

They designed a half-day program, Stepping Stones, to teach parents, grandparents and other caregivers of kids up to 5 years old who are recently diagnosed.

"We're teaching parents how to work with their kids on skills during typical family routines," said Robin Talley, a behavior and education consultant at the UW Autism Center. "We give them tips for how to set up their home environment to increase opportunities for communication."

Talley and Ashley Berger Penney, also a behavior and education consultant at the UW Autism Center, led the inaugural Stepping Stones workshop on March 31. Other Saturday workshops are planned for July 14 and Oct. 13. To encourage interaction and participation, registration is limited to 14 individuals per session (see sidebar for more details).

The workshops focus on four types of critical skills:

-          Requesting, such as how to appropriately ask for a snack.

-          Protesting, such as teaching a child to appropriately convey that he does not want apples as a snack, but prefers raisins instead.

-          Social communication or joint attention, including how to share interests, like saying "Look!" and pointing to an airplane overhead. "Children with an autism spectrum disorder often require specifically designed instruction to demonstrate this skill," Berger Penney said.

-          Encouraging playtime that is social, functional and interactive.

"For a child with autism, play can sometimes only be about them and an object, not about sharing the experience of play with other people," said Berger Penney. She explained that a child with an autism spectrum disorder might just spin the wheels of a toy car rather than making the whole car roll.

Ashley Berger Penney and Robin Talley lead Stepping Stones workshops at the UW Autism Center.

UW

"Teaching children to play with objects the way that they're meant to be used means that kids with autism will be better able to interact with other kids who play with a toy in the same way," she said.

The strategies taught in Stepping Stones are based on Applied Behavioral Analysis, an autism intervention that has the most evidence demonstrating gains in play, communication and social interactions and behavioral changes, Talley said.

Parents attending Stepping Stones also learn from each other, sharing strategies that have worked for them and their kids. They share their frustrations too.

"Not only have the hopes and dreams you may have had for your child changed, but your life has changed," Talley said of parents coping with autism diagnoses. Their communities often change too, as friends and family may distance themselves because they don't know how to respond to the challenges of autism. She recommended a story called "Welcome to Holland" as a way to explain how expectations change with autism.

"It's such an upheaval for parents to get an autism diagnosis for their child," said Wendy Stone, director of the Autism Center. "Early intervention makes all the difference, and parents generally want to get as much information as possible. We hope our workshops not only help parents guide their child's social and communication development, but also show them how to have more fun with their child."

###

For more information or to register for Stepping Stones workshops, contact Berger Penney at 206-221-5232 or aberger2@uw.edu or Talley at rtalley@uw.edu.

Sign us up, parents might say.

Human-like robot babysitters are in the works, but it's unclear at this early stage what children's relationships with these humanoids will be like and what dangers lurk in this convenient-sounding technology.

Will the robots do more than keep children safe and entertained? Will they be capable of fostering social interactions, emotional attachment, intellectual growth and other cognitive aspects of human existence? Will children treat these caregivers as personified entities, or like servants or tools that can be bought and sold, misused or ignored?

A study participant and Robovie share a hug, one of the social interactions in the UW experiment.

American Psychological Association

"We need to talk about how to best design social robots for children, because corporations will go with the design that makes the most money, not necessarily what’s best for children," said Peter Kahn, associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington. "In developing robot nannies, we should be concerned with how we might be dumbing down relationships and stunting the emotional and intellectual growth of children."

To guide robot design, Kahn and his research team are exploring how children interact socially with a humanoid robot. In a new study, the researchers report that children exchanged social pleasantries, such as shaking hands, hugging and making small talk, with a remotely controlled human-like robot (Robovie) that appeared autonomous. Nearly 80 percent of the children – an even mix of 90 boys and girls, aged 9, 12 or 15 – believed that the robot was intelligent, and 60 percent believed it had feelings.

The journal Developmental Psychology published the findings in its March issue.

The children also played a game of "I Spy" with Robovie, allowing the researchers to test what morality children attribute to the robot. The game started with the children guessing an object in the room chosen by Robovie, who then got a turn to guess an object chosen by the child.

But the humanoid robot’s turn was cut short when a researcher interrupted to say it was time for the interview part of the experiment and told Robovie that it had to go into a storage closet. Via a hidden experimenter's commands, Robovie protested, and said that it wasn't fair to end the game early. "I wasn't given enough chances to guess the object," the robot argued, going on to say that its feelings were hurt and that the closet was dark and scary.

When interviewed by the researchers, 88 percent of the children thought the robot was treated unfairly in not having a chance to take its turn, and 54 percent thought that it was not right to put it in the closet. A little more than half said that they would go to Robovie for emotional support or to share secrets.

But they were less agreeable about allowing Robovie civil liberties, like being paid for work. The children also said that the robot could be bought, sold and should not have the right to vote.

The findings show that the social interactions with Robovie led children to develop feelings for the robot and attribute some moral standing to it. This suggests that the interactions used in the study represent aspects of human experience that could be used for designing robots.

The researchers added that robot nanny design should also factor in how agreeable a robot should be with a child. Should a robot be programmed to give in to all the child's desires, play whatever game is demanded? Or should it push back, like Robovie did when the I Spy game ended early?

Kahn believes that as social robots become pervasive in our everyday lives, they can benefit children but also potentially impoverish their emotional and social development.

The National Science Foundation funded the study. Co-authors at UW are Nathan Freier, Rachel Severson, Jolina Ruckert and Solace Shen. Other co-authors are Brian Gill of Seattle Pacific University, and Hiroshi Ishiguro and Takayuki Kanda, both of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, which created Robovie.

###

For more information, contact Kahn at pkahn@uw.edu; or Shen at 206-221-0643 or solaces@uw.edu.

"Websites that list sex offenders may make it seem that there are a lot of them living among us. It makes it hard for the public to discern risk," said Alissa Ackerman, assistant professor of social work at the University of Washington Tacoma. Improving the accuracy of sex-offender registries also means "better use of law-enforcement resources to watch the people who actually need to be watched," she said.

Ackerman is lead author of a study examining sex offender counts compiled by Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York and Texas – states with large sex-offender registries. She obtained the counts from last year's state records, which are available to the public.

Ackerman discovered that the registries include people who are not actually living within the community, such as individuals who have died, been deported, are in jail or have moved out of state. Across the five states in the study, she found that only 43 percent, or 114,690 out of 201,135 sex offenders listed, were actually living in the communities designated by the registries.

By state, Ackerman found:

-          Florida had the greatest discrepancy, reporting 56,784 sex offenders when only 22,877 – a 60 percent difference – were living in Florida communities.

-          New York, at 52 percent, had the second-highest discrepancy, listing 32,930 offenders in the registry with just 15,950 living in the community.

-          Illinois had a 48 percent difference, with 25,088 registered offenders and 13,066 actually residing in the community.

-          Georgia had a 36 percent difference, 20,212 listed on the registry and 7,201 living in the community.

-          At 25 percent, Texas had the lowest discrepancy, with 49,786 actual residents from the 66,121 sex offenders listed.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice.

States differ in data collection and reporting procedures, and that can lead to inflated numbers and make it difficult for the public to distinguish the level of risk, Ackerman said. For instance, states vary in whether they include all levels of sex offenders. New York lists only levels 2 and 3, the offenders most likely to commit sexual crimes again. Florida, on the other hand, lists all offenders regardless of risk level.

"Registries are helpful if they are properly and accurately maintained and include only those individuals living in the community," Ackerman said. "Then we are able to discern risk in our communities and the public can be better aware of offenders living near them."

She added that more than 90 percent of victims know their offender, and listed family members, stepparents, close friends and acquaintances as common perpetrators. "We look at strangers on the sex offender registry websites, but it's really the people who we know who we need to worry about."

Co-authors of the study are Jill Levenson of Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., and Andrew Harris of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

###

For more information, contact Ackerman at 253-692-4373 or ackerma1@uw.edu.

But new research shows that Tsimane ("chi-MAH-nay") men have a third less baseline testosterone compared with men living in the United States, where life is less physically demanding. And unlike men in the U.S., the Bolivian foragers-farmers do not show declines in testosterone with age.

"Maintaining high levels of testosterone compromises the immune system, so it makes sense to keep it low in environments where parasites and pathogens are rampant, as they are where the Tsimane live," said Ben Trumble, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Washington.

That men living in the U.S. have greater circulating levels of testosterone represents an "evolutionarily novel spike," Trumble said. The spike reflects how low levels of pathogens and parasites in the U.S. and other industrialized countries allow men to maintain higher testosterone without risking infection.

Trumble is lead author of a paper published online March 28 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Trumble also pointed out that whereas men in the U.S. show a decline in testosterone as they age, and testosterone drops serve as a sentinel for age-related disease, Tsimane men maintain a stable amount of testosterone across their lifespans and show little incidence of obesity, heart disease and other illnesses linked with older age.

Despite lower circulating levels of testosterone under normal conditions, the forager-farmers do have something in common with U.S. men: short-term spikes of testosterone during competition.

Trumble and his co-authors organized a soccer tournament for eight Tsimane teams. The researchers found that Tsimane men had a 30 percent increase in testosterone immediately after a soccer game. An hour after the game, testosterone was still 15 percent higher than under normal conditions. Similar percent increases have been shown in men living in the U.S. or other industrialized nations following sports competitions.

The study suggests that competition-linked bursts of testosterone are a fundamental aspect of human biology that persists even if it increases risk for sickness or infection.

As for whether higher levels of the male hormone would offer a competitive advantage in sports, Trumble suspects that because U.S. men "are taller, and weigh more than Tsimane men, and tend to be exposed to fewer parasites and pathogens, they would probably have a competitive advantage regardless of circulating testosterone."

"What's interesting is that in spite of being in a more pathogenic environment, it's still important to raise testosterone for short-term bursts of energy and competition," said Michael Gurven, co-author and anthropology professor at the University of California Santa Barbara.

The lives of the Tsimane offer a glimpse of how our species survived before industrialization and modern amenities. "Our lifestyle now is an anomaly, a major departure from our species' long-term existence as hunter-gatherers," said Gurven, who co-directs the Tsimane Health and Life History Project with Hillard Kaplan, co-author and an anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico.

The work was funded by the National Institute of Child Health & Development and the National Institute on Aging and conducted in the UW Biological Anthropology and Biodemography Lab.

Other co-authors are Kathleen O'Connor and Eric Smith, both professors in UW's anthropology department and UW's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology; Daniel Cummings, University of New Mexico; and Christopher von Rueden, University of California Santa Barbara.

###

For more information, contact Trumble at 206-708-9012 (cell) or btrumble@uw.edu or Gurven at gurven@anth.ucsb.edu.

Such was likely the case with an Emmy-winning female bandleader who rose to fame in the 1930s and led bands until the 1960s. Known as "the blonde bombshell of rhythm," this sex symbol hailing from Chicago had security to protect her from the men who mobbed her performances.

See why they were so enchanted:

Ina Ray Hutton, who died in 1984 at age 67, also had a secret that could have damaged her stardom.  A reporter from KUOW radio, with help from the UW libraries, recently revealed the secret. It turns out that the blonde bombshell had more than hair-dye to hide.

The ‘blonde’ as a brunette

In 2007 Phyllis Fletcher, now an editor at KUOW, was choosing music for the radio program "The Swing Years and Beyond," hosted by Amanda Wilde. A CD by Hutton caught Fletcher's eye. On one side of the CD's cover, Fletcher saw a curvaceous blonde. On the other side, Hutton appeared as a brunette.

"That chick is black," Fletcher thought. Hutton is known as white, and her Wikipedia entry claimed an Irish American ancestry.  But the shape of Hutton's face, her big cheeks and round lips, struck Fletcher as black features.

She should know. Blue-eyed with curly light brown hair, Fletcher is half black and half white. When Fletcher saw a brunette Hutton, she saw traces of herself.

"I have that big ol' forehead; I have big cheeks and round lips," Fletcher said in her radio story that divulged Hutton's secret. "White people think I'm white all the time, but I'm white and black."

Fletcher will receive a Gracie award for her radio story, "Secrets of a Blonde Bombshell," this spring. She did the story for "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen," a public radio program on pop culture and arts.

If Hutton were indeed black, that is not how she is remembered. And this bit of trivia was probably not known to the white men who swarmed performances during her heyday as a bandleader.

Revelations from the library

Curiosity piqued, Fletcher began looking for records of Hutton’s race. She started on Ancestry.com, and purchased her own account on the genealogy site to do the research (she later learned that UW libraries has a subscription, too). She found census records, which become public after 72 years. (Next up is the 1940 census, to be released April 2.) She also unearthed birth certificates and a marriage license.

Fletcher examined the 1920 and 1930 census records, the two from Hutton's lifetime that are public. She found inconsistent listings for Hutton's race, because the Census Bureau changed the terms used for race. In the 1920 census she is listed as "mulatto," which was then dropped in later years. Then in 1930 she is recorded as "negro." Her parents' records also showed inconsistencies in race.

Fletcher tried another direction to determine Hutton's race. She used Hutton's birth name, Odessa Cowan, to search for records of Hutton as a child.

She examined archives of the Chicago Defender, a national black newspaper in circulation since 1905, for the birth name. If the star-to-be or her family members were mentioned in this newspaper it would indicate that they were part of the black community. This turned out to be the key to revealing Hutton's race.

Fletcher typed "Odessa Cowan" into the archive and up popped a list of articles mentioning the starlet as a child. There she was in articles about her recitals – she started her career as a tap dancer. And in 1924, the paper published a "Dancing Beauties" photo of the budding star at age 7 with two other black girls, all wearing dance costumes.

ProQuest

The mentions of Hutton and her family in the Chicago Defender showed that they "socialized as black in a segregated city in a segregated time," Fletcher said. "You didn’t have to be a big shot" to be in the Defender, she said.

Along with The New York Times, the Chicago Defender was the first fully digitized newspaper collection the UW libraries bought, said Glenda Pearson, head of the library's microform and newspaper collections. Ethnic and minority newspapers reveal how  communities view particular issues that affect them. "It makes a difference who's writing the story," Pearson said.

In 1925, when Hutton was 8, mentions of her in the Defender ceased, according to Fletcher's findings. That's around the time when a white vaudeville producer discovered Cowan and she became Ina Ray Hutton.

Hutton's skin color was light enough to pass – that is, let people believe she was white. Within the black community, Hutton's black ties were an open secret during her life. Back then "so many people know that you're passing for white, but they aren't talking about it," Fletcher said.

Family surprised by black heritage

But though it may have been a widely known and kept secret back then, it wasn't known to everyone, such as Hutton’s closest living relatives.

Fletcher tracked down obituaries for Hutton and her sister using the UW libraries' access to The New York Times digital archives. She found that Hutton did not have any children. But her sister June had a daughter.

June’s daughter is white and lives in Oregon. Did she know that she was part black?

One Sunday night in January 2011, Fletcher called her. The niece did not know about her black ancestry. She reacts to this surprise in Fletcher's radio story.

"Ina's mother's choice for her and June to pass is part of a historical context – it was a reaction to Jim Crow, in a very real way," Fletcher said. "The fact that someone would make this choice for her child before she could make it for herself is dramatic."

Fletcher clarified the bandleader's record. She changed Hutton's Wikipedia entry to indicate her African-American, not Irish-American, descent. Fletcher also wrote about Hutton's black heritage on BlackPast.org, directed by UW history professor Quintard Taylor.

Her discovery highlights how some secrets that once seemed so important to hide can eventually become non-issues. "Discrimination against blacks still exists, but it's not codified in a way that has the potential to destroy a career, or quash it before it starts," Fletcher said. "You don’t officially lose access to, say, an audience or a venue or a hotel or a restaurant simply because you're black. But back then, you did."

Other secrets, like out-of-wedlock children and single motherhood, were once shunned too. Fletcher added that these days there could be other forms of "passing," such as concealing disabilities, sexuality and certain ethnicities.

Hutton hid the truth of her race "to the grave," Fletcher said. At that highly segregated time, she was a black woman hiding as white in plain sight: up on stage, performing for white audiences and waving a baton as well as her behind.

"I don't care what her ethnic background was – she was smoking hot!!!!," summed up one commenter in response to a video of Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears performing "Doin' the Suzy Q."

And as Hutton is credited as saying, "I'm selling the show as a music program, not on a sex-appeal basis. … But if curves attract an audience, so much the better."

Molly McElroy
UW News and Information

Adolescents who try drinking or other drugs before age 14 are more likely to have substance abuse and other health problems later in life. Figuring out how to delay drug experimentation has become a key to heading off problems before they start.

New research shows that teachers have a larger role in middle school students' use of drugs than previously thought. Middle school students from the sixth to the eighth grade who felt more emotional support from teachers reported a delay in alcohol and other illicit substance initiation.

"We have known that middle school teachers are important in the lives of young people, but this is the first data-driven study which shows that teacher support is associated with lower levels of early alcohol use," said Carolyn McCarty, a research associate professor at UW's Department of Pediatrics and at Seattle Children's Research Institute.

The study was published in online in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

McCarty and her co-authors also found that youths who reported higher levels of separation anxiety from their parents may be less susceptible to negative influences from peers, including experimentation with risky behaviors like alcohol use.

"Teens in general seek new sensations or experiences and they take more risks when they are with peers,” said McCarty. "Youth with separation anxiety symptoms may be protected by virtue of their intense connection to their parents, making them less likely to be in settings where substance use initiation is possible."

McCarty talks about emotional health predictors of alcohol and illicit substance use in youth, and offers tips for parents in this video:

McCarty and the research team analyzed data from the Developmental Pathways Project, a longitudinal study of 521 youth sampled from the Seattle Public Schools. Researchers analyzed the effects of depression, anxiety, stress and support on initiation of substance use, which was measured at five different time points between sixth and eighth grade. Teacher support was defined by how close students felt to teachers or being able to talk with a teacher about problems they are experiencing.

The study also found that youth who initiated alcohol and other illicit drug use prior to sixth grade had significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms. This suggests that depression may be a consequence of very early use or a risk factor for initiation of use prior to the middle school years.

"Based on the study and our findings, substance use prevention needs to be addressed on a multidimensional level," McCarty said. "We need to be aware of and monitor early adolescent stress levels, and parents, teachers and adults need to tune into kids' mental health. We know that youth who initiate substance abuse before age 14 are at a high risk of long-term substance abuse problems and myriad health complications."

Co-authors on the paper are Elizabeth McCauley, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and UW; Elise Murowchick, Seattle University; Isaac Rhew , UW's Social Developmental Research group; and Ann Vander Stoep, UW.

Pediatricians responded to case scenarios involving medical treatments for white and African American patients for four common pediatric conditions.

"We're talking about subtle, unconscious attitudes that are pervasive in society. Because these are unconscious attitudes, doctors aren't aware that their racial attitudes may affect their treatment decisions," said Janice Sabin, a UW research assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, a part of UW's School of Medicine.

She is lead author of the study published online March 15 in the American Journal of Public Health.

Sabin's previous research showed that pediatricians display less unconscious race bias than other medical doctors or the general population. Still, unconscious beliefs can affect how doctors interact with patients, and the current study reveals that those attitudes can influence doctors' treatment decisions.

"Coupled with known racial and ethnic disparities in health care, our findings suggest that well-meaning physicians may unconsciously treat people differently in some areas of care," said Sabin.

Among the 86 pediatricians who participated in the study, 65 percent were female, 82 percent were white and 59 percent were medical residents or fellows. They completed three Implicit Association Tests to measure unconscious attitudes and beliefs.

The test was developed in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald, a co-author and a UW psychology professor. The test measures implicit attitudes by asking participants to quickly classify several series of words or visual images as they appear on a computer screen. The patterns of speeds in response to varied classification instructions can reveal automatically operating biases.

Sabin chose four conditions commonly treated by pediatricians – asthma, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, urinary tract infections and pain. Case scenarios were created for each condition for both an African-American and a white patient.

For the asthma, ADHD and urinary tract infection case scenarios, doctors did not show an association between unconscious attitudes about race and treatment decisions for the two patients. However, recommendations for optimal pain treatment decreased for the African American patient as doctors' pro-white bias increased.

"Implicit biases are surprisingly pervasive, and in certain circumstances they can affect how people behave," Sabin said. She said her findings "indicate that more research should be done to see if unconscious biases affect real-world medical care and treatment decisions, especially for pain management."

"This is exactly the type of result that was anticipated by the Institute of Medicine's landmark 2002 Unequal Treatment study," Greenwald said. "That study and other studies found, among other indications of troubling health care disparities, underuse of pain medication for African American patients."

Because physicians are likely unaware of unconscious attitudes and beliefs and the unintended disparities that may result, incorporating awareness of personal bias and methods to avoid the influence of bias on decision-making into medical education, continuing medical education and training of health professionals is necessary for health sciences education, Sabin suggested.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institute of Mental Health and a University of Washington Magnuson Health Scholars Award funded the study.

###

For more information, contact Sabin at 206-616-9421 or sabinja@uw.edu.

But the assumption overlooks a policy from the era of Chinese leader Mao Zedong that restricts the upward mobility of its rural citizens, says a University of Washington geographer.

This calls into question China’s strength in the global market and its ability to overtake the United States as a global superpower, according to Kam Wing Chan, a UW professor of geography.

Skyline of Shanghai, the largest city in China. China's urban population is expected to reach 1 billion in the next 15 years.

tyler_haglund, Wikimedia

His findings are published in the current issue of the journal Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Studying China’s population statistics, Chan found that unlike many Western countries, where urbanization has generally progressed hand-in-hand with growth of middle-class urban dwellers, China’s increasing number of urbanites is largely due to higher concentrations of impoverished laborers who move from the countryside to cities for employment. These laborers usually end up in low-paid factory and service jobs. With little disposable income, they have limited prospects of moving up to the middle class.

The workers who move from the countryside to cities are also confined by a residency system, established in 1958, that created a two-tier, rural-urban divide that remains largely unchanged today, Chan said.

The system, called “hukou,” designated an urban class eligible for social welfare and a second-rank rural, peasant class, ineligible for basic social benefits largely found in the city. Forbidden to go to cities during Mao’s era, rural hukou holders were restricted to the countryside to grow food for urban workers.

Now rural workers can move to cities to work, but they cannot claim urban social benefits, including unemployment and retirement benefits, Chan said. Many employment and education opportunities are off limits to them and their family. Since hukou status is hereditary, children of rural hukou holders living in cities are not supposed to go to urban public schools. In a limited number of cities in which they are permitted in public schools, they have to pay much higher tuition fees.

Chan's depiction of the main components of Chinese society with respect to hukou type, location in urban (light gray) and rural (dark gray) areas. From Mao's era (left) to present day (right), Chan shows that now more people with rural hukou status are living in urban areas.

Kam Wing Chan

Analyzing population statistics from China’s National Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Public Security, Chan found that about 460 million people had urban hukou status in 2010, while the entire population of Chinese city-dwellers was 666 million. The difference – 206 million, or about two-thirds of the total U.S. population – is made up mostly of rural migrants, people with rural hukou status but who live and work in cities.

This is what “supplies China with a huge, almost inexhaustible, pool of super-exploitable labor,” wrote Chan.

He also found that a significant number of new additions to the urban hukou population, people who have succeeded in changing their designation, actually have only nominal urban hukou status. In other words, they received urban status but with limited or no urban benefits.

Between those lacking any urban designation and those with only nominal status, significantly more than 206 million people are living in Chinese cities without access to basic urban social benefits.

Chan said that the consequences of this social engineering under the hukou system is a greater income gap between rich and poor, and little growth of a middle class from rural hukou holders moving to cities.

“These migrant workers and their children have slim chances of improving their circumstances through education or getting higher-paid jobs under the current system,” he said.

###

For more information, contact Chan at 206-543-6994 or kwchan@uw.edu.

The meeting Feb. 16-20 featured thousands of other top scientists, engineers, educators and policymakers from 50 nations, according to AAAS. Hundreds of science journalists attended. Family Science Days offered hands-on activities and the chance to meet scientists, including a UW group from the Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis and the Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research centers. Elephant toothpaste, anyone?

Below are briefs on various UW talks.

Fishermen must feel that some benefits accrue to them when marine reserves are created.

Creating inclusive and successful marine protected area networks
Patrick Christie, marine and environmental affairs
Marine protected areas are among the most frequently used tools in marine conservation, according to Patrick Christie, UW associate professor of marine and environmental affairs and co-organizer of the session “The costs of conservation: Impacts on coastal livelihoods, health and equity.”

It turns out that marine protected areas can benefit and cost communities in unexpected ways. For example, although protected areas are promoted as ways to increase the number of fish both in and outside a reserve, the evidence for this is limited and individuals who feel they are being unfairly affected will resist. The resulting poaching runs up enforcement costs and affects biodiversity.

“Fishermen aren’t necessarily opposed to setting up reserves, but they must feel that some benefits accrue to them,” Christie said, using examples from the U.S. and Philippines. “They want to participate in the design and implementation. Then it’s fishermen who watch other fishermen and say, ‘Hey, we agreed not to fish here anymore.’”

Incorporating broader sociological perspectives into marine conservation efforts is especially important in the context of coral reef ecosystems, which sustain the livelihoods of millions of people in developing countries.

Invisible men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress
Becky Pettit, sociology
Young black men without a high school diploma are more likely to be in prison or jail than to have a job, and nearly 70 percent of young black men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives.

But national surveys and the social facts they produce are based on information that excludes inmates and former inmates. A UW sociologist argues that this selective sampling gives the impression that racial inequalities have improved since the Civil Rights era and masks enduring African American disadvantage in America.

“Because these populations differ in systematic ways from those living in households, data gathered through household-based surveys offer a biased glimpse into the American experience and obscure accounts of racial inequality,” said Becky Pettit, a UW professor of sociology.  Her book on this topic is due out in June.

Unemployment and high school drop-out rates, for example, would likely be higher if prison populations were included in surveys. Educational attainment and income are other social markers that falsely show a narrowing black-white gap. Voter turnout, too, is affected.

Climate variations and ecosystem regime shifts in the North Pacific
Nate Mantua, aquatic and fishery sciences
"It may surprise people to hear that the North Pacific has as many salmon in it now as at any time in at least the past century. Part of this increase in salmon is due to improved management practices and increases in hatchery production, but another big part of the increase in salmon is likely the 1977 shift in North Pacific climate," said Nate Mantua, associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.

Nate Mantua at AAAS.

That shift, related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, caused different parts of the North Pacific to warm or cool just a degree or two. The seemingly small difference in temperature is related to dramatic changes in such things as where salmon flourish: Mantua and UW’s Steven Hare found that Alaska salmon populations boomed after 1977 while the then-plentiful salmon runs returning to U.S. west coast rivers dwindled.

The fishing industry and managers need to remember that there is likely to be a climate shift back to pre-1977 conditions at some point, when both the amount of fish and the composition of the catch are likely to change. For example, today’s permitting causes fishermen to specialize – “Here, you’re permitted to be a salmon fisherman, and here you’re permitted to fish halibut” is how Mantua described it. How well will that system work if the abundance of salmon and halibut dwindles in response to climate changes that can last decades?

“One of the big mysteries surrounding climate impacts on marine ecosystems revolves around the ways that a noisy climate can trigger abrupt and persistent changes,” Mantua said.

What cognitive research tells us about engaging today’s undergraduate students
Mary Pat Wenderoth, biology
When faculty take the same hypothesis-experimentation framework used in labs and in the field and apply it to teaching, traditional lecturing is a loser.

Mary Pat Wenderoth, UW principal lecturer in biology, presented the latest research on how undergraduates learn during a session where the audience didn’t just sit but, instead, had to gather around tables, talk among themselves, vote on answers when Wenderoth posed questions – all tenants of active learning.

“We want students to be active, mentally,” Wenderoth has said. “We want them to be using the information and applying it all the time. They also need to be social, exchanging ideas, helping each other. Being passive and isolated is a recipe for trouble.”

Research and testing shows the average retention rate following lecturing is 5 percent. So in a 10-week quarter of 30 hours of classes, students retain 5 percent, or 1.5 hours of what’s presented. Using a discussion approach raises retention to 50 percent, or 15 hours out of a 30-hour course. Classes that involve practice and students teaching each other produce even better rates, up to 65 percent retention.

“It’s all about ‘ask, don’t tell’” she said.

Kuril Islands are just northeast of Japan.

The Little Ice Age and the Kuril ainu: A study in complex human ecodynamics
Ben Fitzhugh, anthropology
An archaeological study of how early inhabitants of an archipelago in the northern Pacific managed to eke out a living could reveal how modern day humans might adapt to extreme environments, such as those brought on by climate change.

About 4,000 years ago maritime hunter-gatherers took up residence on the isolated and treacherous Kuril Islands, just northeast of Japan. Few permanently live on the islands now.

Ben Fitzhugh, a UW associate professor of anthropology, has found that social networks with neighboring islanders and trade connections likely helped those living on the Kuril Islands survive an otherwise bleak environment with limited food sources and regular storms, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.

But between 1200 and 1400 AD, human settlements on the islands mysteriously declined. Fitzhugh said that this population drop was probably because of trade pressures from Japan and an increase in environmental hazards brought on by the “Little Ice Age.”

He compared the conditions with what today’s vulnerable communities might face with climate change. “What worries me is how decisions by powerful states in response to the perceived implications of climate change and similar crises could easily and unknowingly reap havoc on peripheral communities around the world,” Fitzhugh said.

Mentoring, mathematica, and moths: Undergraduates in research in biomechanics
Thomas Daniel, biology
Increasingly, the study of biology deals with tools that develop huge amounts of data, as well as very complex systems, and the costs of storing, analyzing and dispensing data have declined sharply, said Thomas Daniel, a UW professor of biology.

Those developments, Daniel said, have allowed biologists to examine problems they would not even have considered just a decade ago.

He spoke at a session that discussed how new collaborations among students and researchers at all career stages from laboratories around the world are needed to achieve the research results that will be needed in the future. He emphasized the potential of including undergraduates in all research laboratories, which would help students build a lifelong passion for biology.

Models for such biological research use innovation, mentoring and communication tools to understand how the scientific process works. Daniel spoke of mentoring environments within labs such as his own and the use of team research projects as part of core undergraduate classes. He focused on special challenges students face in interdisciplinary research, and how pairing students from different disciplines in research projects in biology classes and laboratories improves student skills.

Using school climate data to understand engineering retention and promote change
Elizabeth Litzler, workforce development
The Project to Assess Climate in Engineering  – or PACE – seeks to identify what affects persistence rates among engineering undergraduates, and to help participating schools improve the climate in their engineering colleges. PACE collects data at 22 U.S. engineering undergraduate programs, including more than 10,500 responses to student questionnaires.

Elizabeth Litzler, research director at the UW’s Center for Workforce Development, described PACE and shared new findings from the study. During the project, each participating school got a summary of its students’ responses to the survey, with recommendations to improve its students’ experiences. More than half have since implemented at least three of the suggested interventions.

The team followed up with the schools to study whether the recommended interventions had any effect. Results showed student experiences and perceptions to be more powerful predictors for continuing in a program than individual characteristics, such as gender or GPA.

“This new analysis confirms that interventions which target student experiences and perceptions can help override the risk of attrition, especially for students in their first year,” Litzler said.

Litzler and UW faculty member Suzanne Brainard also organized the overarching symposium, “Connecting Education and Research on Retention in Engineering.”

Impact of results on gynecological practice and women's choices
Susan Reed, obstetrics  and gynecology
Watch UW Today in coming days for an article on Susan Reed’s presentation about how evidence from the Women’s Health Initiative hormone therapy trials and related studies have changed health care for older women.

Researchers are looking for ways to carry large, biological molecules into cells.

siRNA delivery through advances in polymer carriers and notechnology
Patrick Stayton, bioengineering
The 11 years since the completion of the human genome project have seen advances in science and medicine. Many direct applications of genetic sequencing to medicine, however, still face hurdles.

One such area is gene therapy using small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs. These bits of genetic material direct how DNA is expressed and show promise as therapies for cancers, inflammatory diseases and other conditions. While RNA strands are easily synthesized in the lab, the challenge lies in delivering these large molecules to cells.

Patrick Stayton, a UW professor of bioengineering and director of the UW’s Center for Intracellular Delivery of Biologics, described different approaches for delivering siRNAs. Stayton’s research explores the use of “smart” polymers, made from new, bio-hybrid materials, to solve such complex drug delivery problems.

“Recent advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology have created a timely opportunity to develop truly transformative bioengineered delivery systems,” Stayton said. “This convergence will open up the intracellular disease target space to biologic therapeutics.”

Challenges in assessing impacts of extreme temperatures under global warming
David Battisti, atmospheric sciences
Climate warming caused by greenhouse gases is very likely to increase summer temperature variability around the world by the end of this century, new UW research shows. The findings have major implications for food production. See news release, “Models underestimate future temperature variability; food security at risk.”