Culture

HOBOKEN, N.J. — Three members of the faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology recently collaborated on a paper focusing on free-space optical communication, which appears in the latest issue of Optics Express, a premiere optics journal currently in circulation. Dr. Paul Corrigan, a research associate at the MIRTHE Foundation and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stevens, working along with Stevens Associate Professor Rainer Martini and Professor Edward Whittaker, spent months researching and writing the study as part of their free-space optics test-bed established in the Physics Department…

When a marriage that has included violence ends, is co-parenting possible? It depends on whether intimate terrorism or situational violence was involved, says a new University of Illinois study published in Family Relations. "There's a tendency to treat all violence as if it's the same, but different types of violence require different interventions," said Jennifer Hardesty, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development. "In intimate terrorism, the goal is to control the other person, and the abuser may use not only physical violence but also psychological and financial…

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Humans excel at recognizing faces, but how we do this has been an abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look at how and why we fail. A new study from MIT looks at a particularly striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggests that a large part of the answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image feature. The work…

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Trainers have used it for decades to help athletes build muscle. Late-night TV commercials hawk it as an effortless flab buster. But a University of Florida engineering researcher says electrical stimulation — a simple, decades-old technique to prompt muscles to contract — can be combined with sophisticated computer learning technology to help people regain more precise, more life-like control of paralyzed limbs. Although his research is still exploring the fundamentals, his progress so far suggests computer-adapted electrical stimulation could one day help the estimated…

Washington, D.C.—March 18, 2009—In the last three decades, research across the social sciences has made great advances in the political economy of technological change (also called innovation or R&D). There exists a better understanding how domestic institutions shape R&D and innovation rates. However, the global system of production is rapidly changing, so there is a need to review the impacts of the international system on technological changes across many countries. A special issue of the journal Review of Policy Research attempts to make an understanding of the interplay of…

Toronto – Agencies selling marketing services are often faced with the dilemma of whether to sell a service exclusively to a single firm in a given market category or to work with more than one. Using a mathematical model, a new study by a professor from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management shows that choice should depend on how different the firms and products potentially being marketed are from each other; how much of their target customer market they are already capturing and; how much more of that market a marketing service company can reach for a firm. The study was…

New Haven, Conn.—Even in the midst of a growing economic crisis last fall, over 90 percent of Americans said that the United States should act to reduce global warming, according to a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities. The results included 34 percent who said the United States should make a large-scale effort, even if it has large economic costs. Two-thirds of Americans said that the United States should reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases regardless of what other countries do, while only seven percent said the nation should act only if…

New research carried out at the University of Leicester suggests that Barack Obama has become a 'glorious mascot' for biethnic people seeking to achieve in the workplace. The US president is seen to give inspiration and new impetus to biethnic people who seek to achieve 'against the odds.' Postgraduate researcher Rana Sinha has studied if a biethnic background provides any advantage to a biethnic adult in adapting to the modern international workplace. The study has been carried out at the University of Leicester Centre for Labour Market Studies. Rana says: "The number of biethnic or biracial…

MP3 players and digital cameras fill home computers with a data flood of images and music. The sector association BITKOM estimated that the number of music downloads in 2008 would exceed 38 million in Germany. Until now, anyone wishing to maintain an overview of their favorite music and photos had to laboriously assign keywords to everything using cumbersome administration software. A new approach is to sort the data according to moods. The mood player developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau compiles musical slide shows to match how the user feels at…

COLUMBUS, Ohio – While depression is often linked to negative thoughts and emotions, a new study suggests the real problem may be a failure to appreciate positive experiences. Researchers at Ohio State University found that depressed and non-depressed people were about equal in their ability to learn negative information that was presented to them. But depressed people weren't nearly as successful at learning positive information as were their non-depressed counterparts. "Since depression is characterized by negative thinking, it is easy to assume that depressed people learn the negative…