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Findings

Reconciliation by radio

In the early 1990s, a Rwanda radio station began to broadcast messages of Hutu hatred for the nation’s Tutsi ethnic minority. Hate radio helped unleash the infamous 1994 genocidal rampage, resulting in the murders of some 800,000 Rwandans, mainly Tutsis. Today, radio programs designed to promote reconciliation among the survivors are being broadcast. According to a pioneering study by a Yale graduate student, the message is getting through.

Social psychologist Elizabeth Levy Paluck '00, '07PhD, now a research fellow at Harvard, had never been to Africa before she heard about a radio soap opera, Musekeweya, or “New Dawn,” created by a Dutch organization called La Benevolencija. In Rwanda, radio serves as the principal form of mass media; citizens typically gather in groups around the few radios in a village to listen and then discuss what they hear. La Benevolencija broadcasts entertainment programs with messages of tolerance and nonviolence, in hopes of bringing reconciliation.

For her doctoral research, Levy Paluck and a team of Rwandans spent a year bringing together 12 ethnically mixed groups of randomly selected adults (480 in total), in villages around the country, once each month, to listen to recordings. Half heard successive episodes of Musekeweya; the other half listened to public health programming. Nearly all of the listeners had been present during the genocide.

While the Musekeweya listeners showed little change in their personal beliefs, the program “did substantially influence listeners' perceptions of social norms,” notes Levy Paluck: they were more accepting of intermarriage, open dissent, and discussion of trauma than were the health program listeners. And, she adds, they were “more likely to speak out and ultimately to cooperate” on community issues.

“Media can affect local group norms and the kind of behavior that is acceptable,” she says. “You can turn hate radio on its head.”

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Not quite a quantum leap

The quantum computer, a device capable of solving currently intractable calculation problems, has moved a little closer to reality. “We figured out how to reliably move quantum information between two points in a circuit,” says Robert Schoelkopf, a professor of applied physics and physics.

In the September 20 and 27 issues of Nature, Schoelkopf and his colleagues report on a method they developed that uses tiny bundles of electromagnetic energy called microwave photons as a kind of information bus. In a traditional computer, data is stored and transferred in the form of bits—ones or zeros. But in a computer that can make use of the laws of quantum physics, information in the form of quantum bits (qubits) could exist as ones, zeros, and both—separately but simultaneously. This ability would multiply the device’s information capacity enormously, enabling it to handle huge numbers and perform, in an instant, calculations that Schoelkopf says “would take a Pentium a thousand years.”

The researchers worked with two qubits, each built from a trillion aluminum atoms. When cooled to near absolute zero, the trillion atoms behaved as a single atom. The scientists then showed that information from one qubit could be transferred to a microwave photon. Finally, they demonstrated that the photons could shuttle information between two qubits that were placed some distance apart (seven millimeters) on a circuit board. “It’s a small but significant step,” says Schoelkopf. But a usable quantum computer would need at least 10,000 interconnected qubits to do the kinds of calculations physicists hope for, he notes: “Don’t look for one on your desktop anytime soon.”

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Maybe it does take a village

For many expectant mothers, the standard model for prenatal care—one woman and one doctor—may not be the best way to ensure a healthy pregnancy. In a recent study, Jeannette R. Ickovics, professor of epidemiology and public health, and her colleagues showed that group prenatal care improved pregnancy outcomes and patient satisfaction for young women with low incomes—at no increase in cost.

In the first randomized clinical trial of a model developed by Sharon Schindler Rising '67MSN, Ickovics and her team compared its effectiveness with that of the traditional model. The study, conducted at hospital prenatal clinics in New Haven and Atlanta, involved 1,047 pregnant women, ages 14 to 25.

Women in the groups actively participated in their prenatal care with other women who had the same expected delivery month. Each of the ten two-hour sessions, facilitated by obstetricians, midwives, and nurses, began with individual clinical assessments and updating of medical records. During most of the session, the women and clinicians sat together for discussion, education, and skills-building in the areas of prenatal health, childbirth preparation, and postpartum and parenting roles.

In the August 2007 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the researchers reported a 33 percent reduction in the odds of preterm births among those receiving group care. (Preterm births account for 35 percent of all U.S. health care spending for infants, and are a major contributor to infant deaths.) The women in the group settings were also more likely to initiate breast-feeding.

“Every expectant mother wants a healthy pregnancy and baby,” says Ickovics. “For especially vulnerable women, group prenatal care looks like a good, economical way to help achieve this.”

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Don’t know much about … biostatistics

Almost every medical school student takes a course or two in biostatistics to learn how to understand research data. But Donna Windish, an assistant professor at the School of Medicine, has shown that the information often doesn’t stick. “A significant percentage of physicians-in-training do not understand the statistics they encounter in the medical literature,” she says.

Windish and her team evaluated how well internal medicine residents in 11 Connecticut programs could interpret and evaluate biostatistics and clinical research results published in medical papers. The residents scored an average of only 41 percent. Interns performed better (45.6 percent) than chief residents (38.1 percent)—in all likelihood, says Windish, because the subject is usually taught in preclinical years and not reinforced with practical applications in residency training. Residents who scored the highest had additional advanced degrees, such as a master’s in public health, a PhD, or previous biostatistics training. (The findings appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association's September 5 special issue on medical education.)

In her own teaching, Windish had seen that trainees often read only the abstracts, or “ignored the statistics and skipped right to the results.” This practice turns out to be common throughout the medical profession—and potentially troubling. “An abstract usually says little about methods of design, conduct, and analysis,” says Windish, citing an earlier study that showed frequent data mismatches between the abstract and the paper.

Windish and other Yale faculty are now developing and teaching a program of increased and improved biostatistical education for all three years of residency. Windish is currently analyzing test results from the initial program, which she expects will show a measurable increase in biostatistical fluency.

“Doctors don’t necessarily need to know how to do the mathematical calculations,” Windish says. “They need to understand the concepts and how to use them.”  the end

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

L&V
L&V

Little and lethal

Carbon nanotubes—single-walled pipes of carbon about a fifty-thousandth the diameter of a human hair—are superstrong materials turning up in products as diverse as bicycle frames and atomic force microscopes. Now Yale environmental engineer Menachem Elimelech has discovered a startling potential new use: killing bacteria.

Elimelech and his colleagues grew colonies of the common bacterium E. coli and added nanotubes. The cells in the scanning electron microscope picture at top (never exposed to nanotubes) are normal, healthy bacteria. The cells at bottom were exposed to the nanotubes in the background of the picture; after an hour, more than 80 percent of the E. coli were dead, their cell walls ruptured.

“The nanotubes appear to cause significant physical damage to the cell membranes,” says Elimelech, whose study appears in the August 14 issue of the journal Langmuir.

Hospitals might be able to exploit the antimicrobial powers of nanotubes by using them as coatings on surfaces, from doorknobs to the insides of artery-opening stents. But Elimelech urges caution: “Nanotubes are toxic to all sorts of cells. You have to make sure they stay put and don’t wind up elsewhere in the body or the environment.”

 

 

 

 

 

Noted

Lyme disease is typically unpleasant but easily cured. For some, however, the fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and memory and concentration difficulties don’t go away. The condition has been called chronic Lyme disease, but its very existence is controversial. In the October 4 New England Journal of Medicine, epidemiologist Eugene D. Shapiro and colleagues found no evidence for persistent infection by the Lyme bacterium. They concluded, “prolonged … antibiotic treatment is not warranted.”

 

Morning people are likely to be more emotionally stable than their “night owl” counterparts. Yale psychology postdoctoral researcher Colin DeYoung and his colleagues studied 279 students in an introductory psychology class at the University of Toronto and found a moderately strong correlation between “morningness" and character traits associated with stability. The research appeared in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences.

 

In a recent survey cosponsored by the environment school, a majority of U.S. citizens supported increases in taxes, utility bills, and home prices to combat global warming. A majority also favored zoning changes to encourage energy-efficient development. The survey results are available at environment.yale.edu/
news/5323/.

 

Many of the genetic variations between individuals may not be due to single-point mutations, says Michael Snyder, the Cullman Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Snyder and his colleagues found that variability in the human genome is more often the result of larger-scale structural changes involving the “rearrangement of big chunks of DNA. “ The researchers expect their findings, reported on September 13 online in Science Express, will help investigators find disease genes.

 
 
 
 
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