Newswise — Scholars taking an avid interest in computational resources on the University of Chicago campus 10 years ago tended to be doing data-intensive simulations of exploding stars at the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. But the days when their colleagues in the biological sciences, social sciences or the humanities could store and analyze their data exclusively on their desktop computers are on the wane. They, too, seek to expand their computational resources.

Were seeing exponential growth in the number of people who want to compute, said Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute, a joint effort between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Part of that is were hiring people who have the interest. Part of it is that people are facing new problems.

The University installed a cluster of Linux servers called Teraport three years ago to facilitate their work. Teraport consists of 260 processors, each as powerful as a typical desktop computer.

Its not enormous, but its bigger than any other any other resource on campus, Foster said. Whats interesting is the number of people who are finding it useful and the breadth of demand that we see for it.

To date, nearly 800,000 jobs have run on Teraport, consuming more than 2.5 million hours of computing time, said Rob Gardner, Senior Research Associate in the Computation Institute.

On campus, nearly 120 users currently have access to Teraport. They represent more than a dozen local research groups and their collaborators from other institutions. Among these, 50 users are regular Teraport customers, each submitting more than 100 jobs with an average computing time of three hours.

Additional users have access to Teraport through the Open Science Grid, a national network dedicated to large-scale, computing-intensive research projects.

Through the Open Science Grid interface, access has been given to 15 different virtual organizations representing hundreds of remote users who collaborate on projects directly affiliated with the Computation Institute or within the OSG Consortium, Gardner said. This accounts for roughly half of the usage of Teraport.

Teraport might be analyzing genetic sequences one day while annotating literary texts the next. James Evans, Assistant Professor in Sociology and the College, uses Teraport for citation network analysis to identify patterns of interaction between universities and the industry. The work can occupy up to 30 processors at a time as Teraport compares the citations of every article with those of every other article in Evans database. In work that requires more computing power, Evans also analyzes the web of authors and organizations producing these documents and the words within them to identify the scientific subfields they address.

Distributed computing was possible at his doctoral institution, Evans said, but the computers on the network were of different sizes, had slightly different software and sometimes operating systems. Teraport offers a uniform operating system and software that, combined with other features, has in some cases saved Evans months of computing time, he said.

Last November, the first Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science convened to address the question of what scholars will do with a million digitized books. The potential challenges and opportunities presented by such a data mass moved closer to reality in June, when a consortium of 12 universities, including Chicago, announced an agreement to digitize up to 10 million books as part of the Google Book Search Project.

In digital humanities we will be facing massive amounts of textual material in the next three or four years, said Mark Olsen, Assistant Director of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). There are a number of teams, including the ARTFL Project, which are ramping up to adopt machine-learning technologies on how to handle a million books.

Olsen and his associates presented three papers at the 2007 Digital Humanities Conference at the University of Illinois in June. One of the three papers described their data-mining project pertaining to gender, race and nationality in black drama from 1850 to 2000.

In with Alexander Street Press, the ARTFL Project has compiled a database containing more than 13 million words from 1,200 works written by black playwrights since the middle of the 19th century. Scholars can mine this database to examine differences in language use in authors and their characters.
Initial work on lexical choices in this collection has revealed striking differences in the word use and sense between male and female authors and characters, as well as American and non-American authors, wrote Olsen and his co-authors in their paper on the data mining of black drama.

The amount of computer power that ARTFLs various projects require of Teraport are probably tiny compared to those from the sciences, Olsen said, but they are critical nevertheless. Even small tests on our machines would take 15 or 20 hours to run. These kinds of runs are much faster on the Teraport, Olsen said. It extends our capabilities quite a bit.

Newswise — Cooperation between the Democratic Party and antiwar activists helped Democrats in the 2006 congressional elections, say researchers at Indiana University and the University of Florida, but the upcoming presidential election could see this support wane because of divisions among the antiwar activists and the instability of the “Party in the Street.”

“Many Democratic candidates take the support of antiwar activists for granted,” said Fabio Rojas, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at IU Bloomington. “Growing disillusion with the Democrats might lead antiwar voters to stay home on election day, tipping the scales in favor of Republicans in close races.”

He and Michael T. Heaney, a UF political scientist, note that major antiwar groups plan to conduct large protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver next year, much like they did at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.

“The Democrats could find that their party is divided in 2008 much as it was in 1968, with many of its natural supporters on the ‘left ‘ camped outside the convention hall,” Heaney said. “This situation complicates the Democrats’ electoral prospects, to say the least.”

Neither political party is insulated from the pressures of the antiwar movement and the public’s unhappiness with the war, Rojas said. In the last few weeks, for example, two prominent Congressman, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., have openly criticized the administration’s handling of the war, creating more opportunities for antiwar activists.

Rojas and Heaney’s findings are published in the July issue of American Politics Research. The article, “Partisans, and the antiwar movement in the United States,” can be found at http://apr.sagepub.com/.

Roughly 40 percent of grassroots activists support the Democrats. Another 20 percent support a third party, such as the Green Party, while 39 percent are , and 2 percent support the Republicans.

The Democrats in the movement are more likely to work with organizations like MoveOn.org, the Progressive Democrats of America and Code Pink: Women for Peace, Rojas said. Non-Democratic activists are more likely to work with organizations like United for Peace and Justice, and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).

Rojas and Heaney wrote that when antiwar activists work closely with the Democratic Party and organizations like MoveOn.org, a new political space is created called The Party in the Street, which is an informal network of activists and organizations. Activists who are part of the Party in the Street are more likely to engage in lobbying and other political activities that help the Democrats.

In return, Democratic elected officials respond by helping sympathetic activists in the antiwar movement.

Rojas said the balance struck in the Party in the Street is unstable and could hurt the Democrats as much or more than it helps them. with Democrats has increased among antiwar activists in recent months, for example, as a result of Democratic support for continued war funding.

Data for the study is drawn from an ongoing three-year project involving surveys of more than 4,000 people at antiwar held across the United States. This study involves data from the analysis of around 2,200 of the surveys and was supported in part by the IUB Department of Sociology, the University of Florida, and the Institution for Social and Policy studies at Yale University.

“Partisans, Nonpartisans, and the Antiwar Movement in the United States,” American Politics Research, July 2007.

Newswise — Chinas reputation is buckling under news of food and product recalls. The recent discovery of high levels of chemicals found in frozen fish and pet food exports exposes a flawed regulatory system in the country.

This was bound to happen, says Nancy Childs, Ph.D., professor of food marketing at Saint Josephs University in Philadelphia. China, like many countries, lacks a and simplistic food regulation policy. What we have here are a multitude of infractions ranging from quality and hygiene issues to criminal adulteration.

In recent months, China has come under fire for a number of violations. has been tainted with a deadly agent; pet food containing melamine has killed a number of dogs and cats; lead paint has been used to paint childrens toys; and toxins have been detected in seafood exports from the country.

Dr. Childs explains that increasing consumer demand for bulk products at incredibly low prices is partly to blame. When you drive things to the lowest possible price in a developing economy with minimum standards, this is what happens, she says.

Newswise — A recent study done by two Alliant faculty members suggests government funding for relationship counseling will ultimately save taxpayers money through reduced divorce rates. The study, results of which were published in the July issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, also suggests that marital therapy, when paid for by insurers, will offset the increased health care expenses associated with divorce.

The study Preliminary Estimates of for Marital Therapy, is Co-Authored by Benjamin E. Caldwell and Scott R. Woolley of Alliant International University and Casey J. Caldwell of Arizona State University.

I have been looking for quite a while at the effectiveness of marital therapy and the research on that, said Dr. Caldwell, Assistant Program Director for Alliants Marital and Family Therapy (MFT) program in Sacramento. Our field has been steadily improving. Our techniques are getting more effective as we do more and better research.

The study began with a simple question: If the government or health insurers paid for the screening and treatment of 100,000 randomly selected heterosexual married persons (50,000 couples) from the general population, would the financial benefits outweigh the costs? The study considered two types of therapy, behavioral marital therapy (BMT) and emotionally focused therapy (EFT). Both are popular techniques that have been the subject of many MFT studies.

This is a projective study, a study, said Caldwell. We wanted to ask the question: What would happen if…

What would happen, according to the study, is that, for every $1 spent on the screening and treatment of marital distress, the government would receive a return of up to $1.85 in reduced costs of handling divorces. Government would experience a net savings even if only 16% of couples identified as distressed in the screening process went on to begin treatment.

The study also found that health insurers would benefit financially from decreased divorce rates resulting from MFT. Married people tend to take better care of themselves physically than single people of the same age, and health care costs go down significantly following marital therapy. The study concluded that health insurers could receive a return of up to $1.20 in reduced health-care expenses for every $1 spent on screening and treating marital distress. Even if only 41% of couples identified as distressed during screening went on to begin treatment, health insurers would still save money.

Another cost-saving technique the study proposes is the use of paraprofessional-non-licensed bachelor-level employee- to screen candidates for therapy. The paraprofessional would not treat the patient, but would screen him/her for therapy eligibility. Doing this via phone or internet would reduce the $80/hour screening fee, a number determined by a 2004 survey of California MFTs. This hourly rate, when applied to the studies 100,000 married persons (or 50,000 couples) amounts to $4,000,000, a number that could be considerably lowered if it were done by paraprofessional, via phone or Internet, according to the study.

Marital and family therapy is a relatively young field, with recent studies, like this one, helping to bolster its legitimacy and defend its effectiveness.

We want to be providing a service where we can tell people in the beginning this therapy has proven effectiveness, said Dr, Caldwell. I think that we are moving more and more toward a fully flushed out science of MFT. Which is to say that treatment gets based more and more on what we know to be effective approaches rather than theoretical impressions. Now it is more of a science then a theory. It gives clients confidence that when they go to see a marriage therapist or MFT that theyre going to be given proven effective treatment.

About the Authors

Dr. Scott Woolley is a Professor and Systemwide Marital and Family Therapy Program Director at Alliant International University. He has a clinical specialization in couples therapy and MFT supervision and has trained mental health professionals in Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and throughout the United States in couple therapy and/or supervision. In recent years, Dr. Woolley has worked closely with Dr. Susan Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and with the late Jay Haley, a senior founder of the field of family therapy. Dr. Woolley is licensed in both Texas and California, and is an AAMFT Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor.

Dr. Ben Caldwell received his masters from Alliant and is a 2004 graduate of its MFT PsyD Program in San Diego. Since he was licensed in Jan 2006 he has run an EFT private practice in Sacramento. He has been working with couples and families for 8 years. He currently has several research articles under review and is conducting legislative work for American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) - California. This year he taught MFT law and ethics, and MFT assessment.

Casey Caldwell was an MBA student at Arizona State University at the time of this study. He is now working for a private business in Phoenix, Arizona. His knowledge of business and economics was of great contribution to the study.

Newswise — Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring two school desegregation plans as unconstitutional is a serious blow to educational diversity, says the chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University.

Professor Laura Rendn said that while the decision may not have reversed the Court’s 2003 ruling upholding the right of colleges to use affirmative action in admissions, it made segregation far more likely.

“At a time when the racial segregation of students in schools is increasing, the Supreme Court decision to strike down programs that consider race in students’ school assignments virtually crushes the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka goal of eliminating racially separate public schools,” said Rendn.

“More than 50 years after Brown, the American educational system still suffers from segregated, separate and unequal schooling,” she added.

Rendn reports that the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that and Latino students are concentrated in predominantly minority schools where more than half of the students are non-white.

“Because of disparities in state funding and benign neglect, these racially isolated minority schools often lack basic educational resources such as highly-qualified teachers, well-stocked libraries, advanced classes, up-to-date laboratories and cutting-edge educational technology,” she said.

“Moreover, a fairly extensive body of research now documents that learning in integrated, diverse settings matters in very significant ways,” she continued. “Students become more engaged as they learn from and stimulate each others world views. Perspectives can be broadened and critical thinking and leadership skills can be enhanced. When white students learn only with other white students and when Latinos and African Americans learn only in racially segregated schools, one thing is assured: All students are harmed when diverse learning opportunities are denied.”

Rendn authored a commissioned paper last fall for the National Education Cooperative titled “Reconceptualizing Success for Underserved Students in Higher Education.” You may read it at http://nces.ed.gov/npec/pdf/resp_Rendon.pdf.

Laura Rendn, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, (515) 294-7093, lrendon@iastate.edu