The social science magazine of Duke University Sponsored by the Social Science Research Institute spring 2010, volume 4, issue 1
gist f ro m t h e M i l l
digital durham
Local history comes alive on the web
greetings
social science research at Duke University. As always, this magazine highlights our resources and initiatives, as well as the activities and accomplishments of our affiliated research centers and other social and behavioral departments at Duke University. This issue includes articles illustrating the breadth and importance of social and behavioral science research at Duke. Trudi J. Abel (History) discusses Digital Durham, a website containing a collection of manuscripts and printed materials that allows students, teachers, and researchers to investigate the economic, social, cultural, and political history of a post-bellum southern community; Bruce Caldwell (Economics) oversees the Center for the History of Political Economy, which promotes the teaching of and research in the history of economics, or political economy, as it was known in the 19th century; Kevin LaBar and Nancy Zucker (DIBS) talk about their findings from a Research Incubator Award to study “interoception,” of gut feelings, with a focus on adolescent anorexics; Jeannine Sato (CCFP), discusses Durham Connects, the program striving to ease the burden and isolation many first-time parents feel after the birth of a child. As you know, SSRI supports research in two important ways. We provide services and resources through core groups. These cores serve our affiliates—social science research centers, groups of researchers, even individual social scientists. Being able to access centralized services and resources frees investigators to focus more of their resources and energy on their research
endeavors. Jerry Reiter (Statistics) has assumed leadership of the Data Services Core and Mark Leary (Psychology and Neuroscience) is now director of the DIISP Lab. Both have new projects underway: Reiter is creating new data sets to make important data collected by Duke faculty publicly available; Leary will put the NSF funded mobile research lab on the road in 2010. SSRI also incubates important new research projects through its Faculty Fellows Program, by providing support to emerging research teams, and through collaborations with other research institutes and centers. The 2010 Faculty Fellows Program led by Rachel Kranton (Economics) and Scott Huettel (Psychology and Neuroscience) is co-sponsored by the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS). SSRI and DIBS will continue to support this group’s efforts to develop a research agenda on the brain, the social environment and human behavior. The Faculty Fellows group has provided the initial interactions that will spawn a larger University-wide initiative linking the social and brain sciences, with Huettel taking a leadership role. SSRI also supports the development of the Duke University Population Research Institute (DuPRI)—an organization that is bringing together researchers from the biological, economic, mathematical, psychological, statistical, sociological, and policy sciences at Duke. DuPRI currently has more than 50 faculty associates from 12 departments, schools, and institutes; it seeks to advance demography and population science, as well as expand the current boundaries of demographic investigation.
Duke University Photography
to robustly fulfill SSRI continues its mission as a catalyst for
DuPRI will give Duke an internationally-recognized educational and research presence in these areas. SSRI is also supporting the development of a network studies group at Duke spearheaded by James Moody (Sociology). The purpose of the center is to draw together those currently using network approaches across the university to: (a) help make visible the world-class network scholarship already occurring at Duke, (b) promote new collaborations in network science across the triangle, and (c) introduce and train researchers in network approaches. These activities should produce innovative research, training and classes for students, and cement Duke’s position as a leader in this exciting frontier of interdisciplinary science. Read on, and look forward to our next issue, which will feature a review of 10 years of research and service contributed by the Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP), as well as notes from its 10th anniversary celebration, including a keynote address by Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman. Sincerely,
S. Philip Morgan Director
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features 6 Digital Durham 10 Reaching Out to New Moms and Dads
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12 New Center Promotes the History of Economics 14 Taking a Picture of Gut Sense
in every issue 2 In Brief 16 Profile: Faculty
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Editor: Courtney P. Orning Assistant Editor: Claire Cusick Designer: Regina Barnhill-Bordo www.bdesign-studio.com GIST Advisory Board: Karl Leif Bates Paul Dudenhefer Andrea Fereshteh Hallie Knuffman Richard Lucic Courtney P. Orning Ara Wilson
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17 Profile: Student 18 Ask the Social Scientist 19 Questions 20 Technology 21 The Strip Back Cover Final Note
Cover: Archival images courtesy of digitaldurham.duke.edu; computer image, istockphoto.com The Social Science Research Institute at Duke University is a part of
This publication is printed with vegetable-based inks on chlorine free paper containing 10% post-consumer fiber. Please recycle this magazine.
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news
in brief
Why continue tanning when it’s so dangerous?
Duke psychology professor tells why by Andrea Fe reshteh
Cancer experts have concluded tanning beds are as deadly
ance and had mild characteristics of obsessive-compulsive disorder. as arsenic or mustard gas, and people who begin using the ultravio- These people continued to work on their tans even though they were already as dark as they could ever become. let radiation beds before age 30 increase their skin cancer risk by “In one experiment, we presented young adults with one of two 75 percent. articles warning against excessive tanning. One article described the Mark Leary, Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of Duke’s social psychology program, has studied the motiva- health risks (cancer), and the other described the appearance risks (premature aging, leathery skin, scarring). The article saying that tions of people who tan despite knowing the health risks. tanning might make you look bad was significantly more effective in “Our studies found that social motives—being attractive, making changing attitudes toward tanning than the one warning of skin canpositive impressions and being evaluated favorably—trumped concer. In other words, people are more willing to risk their health than cerns with health by a large margin,” Leary said. “The most ‘tan-in satiable’ people were those who placed a high value on their appear- their appearance by tanning.”
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news
in brief
Patient Expectations by Michele Lynn
One of the questions with which cancer researchers and physicians struggle is whether patients participating in clinical trials fully understand the pros and cons of participating in such research efforts. Kevin Weinfurt—a Duke associate professor whose primary appointment is in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences—first became interested in this question in 1999 when he worked as a methodologist on a survey of patients in phase 1 oncology studies. “That’s when I discovered that there was a bioethical debate about the chance of patients’ benefiting from participating in these trials,” he said, “I hope that my research will bring some clarity to the bioethical and policy debates going on about informed consent.” Weinfurt’s current project, “Understanding Patient Expectations of Treatment Outcomes,” began in September 2009 with funding from the National Cancer Institute. “This work began with a question about whether patients who are enrolled in phase 1 clinical oncology trials have true informed consent,” said Weinfurt. In a phase 1 trial, patients are given drugs that have never been administered to people, with the goal of determining whether humans can tolerate the drug and the dosage that can be tolerated before serious side effects result. Weinfurt said, “The chance that a patient is going to get any medical benefit from a phase 1 trial is extremely low,” a fact that is relayed to the patient during the informed consent process. “This research addresses important questions that have been a worry in the bioethics literature and clinical trials literature: ‘Are we harming these patients?’ and ‘Are we doing something morally problematic by allowing these patients to participate in these trials?’” “The chance that a patient will get any medical benefit from a phase 1 trial is extremely low,” Weinfurt continued, and even though this fact is relayed to patients during the consent process, it has still caused worry. “This research addresses important questions that have been a worry in the bioethics literature and clinical trials literature,” he said. “Are these patients being harmed? Are we doing something morally problematic by allowing them to participate in these trials?” This quandary led to the second stage of the research, which Weinfurt and his colleagues—including Neil Meropol from Case Western, Daniel Sulmasy from the University of Chicago, Alan Astrow from Maimonides Medical Center, and Kevin Schulman and Damon Seils from Duke—are conducting at Duke and Case Western. “We are looking at whether expressing a high expectation of benefit does any harm to patients in phase 1 trials,” said Weinfurt. The researchers will elicit people’s expectations of benefit right after they consent to the phase 1 trial but before they start their experimental treatment.
Approximately eight to 12 weeks after they begin the treatment, the patients will receive a scan to examine the progress of their tumor. In addition, the researchers will measure the patients on a range of things: their feelings of anxiety, anger and depression; their trust in medical research and the research team; and how well informed they thought they were. “We might find, for example, that people who express high expectations of benefit at the beginning of the study are no worse off than the people who didn’t,” Weinfurt said. Data have never been collected on this topic even though this is a big concern for clinicians and investigators. “We struggle with the balance of trying to allow people to have hope while being concerned that patients are not fully informed or are going to be upset or harmed because of their high expectations.” Data collection will begin this spring and a preliminary analysis will be completed by fall 2011. “We will use this data set as pilot data for a much larger grant that we will submit which will involve more hospitals,” said Weinfurt. “It’s really important to note that this work has benefited and continues to benefit from the generous gift of time that the patients have given us,” said Weinfurt. “These patients have a lot going on and many of them are at the end of life. They are all active participants in this research and their generosity is what makes it possible.” “I would be most gratified if we presented this research to clinicians and phase 1 trial researchers and they said, ‘This is going to help me in my conversations tomorrow with my patients,’” said Weinfurt. “What we hope to do is to help doctors and researchers who are working with patients in clinical research to help the patients to understand what’s going on and also to cultivate healthy attitudes about their situation.”
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news
in brief
distrust of men doesn’t keep low-income mothers from romantic unions by Andrea Fe reshteh
Contrary to popular scholarship that attributes low rates of marriage among low-income mothers to their general distrust of men, a new study led by a Duke University sociologist finds that gender distrust may not be as influential in shaping these mothers’ unions. Although 96 percent of 256 low-income mothers surveyed expressed a general distrust of men, researchers found these feelings did not prevent the women from entering into a marriage, live-in or romantic relationship. Instead, researchers found that mothers established forms of interpersonal trust in their partners that allowed them to enter into often unhealthy relationships that had implications for themselves and their children.
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“To fully understand the intimate union behaviors of low-income mothers, researchers must move beyond primarily using general attitudes like gender distrust to explain trends in marriage and cohabitation,” said lead author Linda Burton, the James B. Duke Professor of Sociology at Duke. In order to facilitate romantic unions, mothers either suspended, compartmentalized, misplaced or integrated interpersonal trust in their partners. The mothers’ individual experiences with uncertainty and poverty, and their histories as domestic violence or sexual abuse victims directly determined the type of interpersonal trust they chose to enact, the study found. For example, 87 percent of mothers who engaged in misplaced trust had extensive, untreated histories of physical and sexual abuse. One 45-year-old white mother of four children, for instance, had a lengthy history of physical and sexual abuse and was involved in a series of abusive relationships with unrealistic expectations that put her and her children at great risk for harm and financial ruin. However, those who enacted integrated trust in their partners had substantially lower levels of histories of abuse. For example, a 26-year-old African American mother of one child had never experienced abuse in her life and indicated that in building a relationship with her husband she was realistic and took her time in learning to trust him. She “checked him out for a year to see how he handled his business and if he did what he said he was going to do—and he did.” This couple trusted each other in ways that sustained a healthy and enduring marital union. The study’s authors indicated these findings have implications for the romantic union-trusting behaviors of women and men regardless of race or social class. They also note the findings may have implications for marriage and family policies and programs. “The goal of promoting marriage among the poor and near-poor may be better served by urging them to take their time forming partnerships and to carefully examine how suitable their prospective partners are for lasting, intimate relationships,” Burton said. “The issue is not just getting women to start trusting men, rather, the issue also is getting them to stop trusting men in ways that are not conducive to stable partnerships.”
news
in brief
SSRI’s Faculty Fellows Study Decisions and Behavior by Nancy E. Oates
Imagine you’re stranded on campus armed only with genetic data of Puerto Rican monkeys, knowledge of social interactions among Durham high school students and familiarity with economic theory on networks. What can you make? Here’s what the nine intrepid faculty members of the Social Science Research Institute’s Faculty Fellows Program plan to make: an impact. The scenario has all the makings of a reality TV show. Call it “Decisions and Behavior: From Society to the Brain (and Back).” Scott Huettel, a Duke psychologist and neuroscientist, and Duke economist Rachel Kranton co-lead the group of seven other Duke faculty members specializing in a variety of disciplines: neurobiology, sociology, economics, psychology and law. The researchers’ goal is to pool their individual expertise to find ways that public policymakers, economists and education researchers can intervene to solve societal problems: apply what we know about biology to social science topics and see how we can use that to make public policy. “The goal is for this to be an incubator for several projects that have the same theme but require integration,” Huettel said. “You have people who might not normally talk to each other—theoretical economists and neuroscientists, say—who are now in the same room discussing different methods to attack these problems.” Last year was the planning year, when Huettel and Kranton selected interested faculty; this year is the working year, when the group will select research projects to pursue; next year will be the implementation year, when the researches will write grants, conduct experiments and collect data. The group has met every Wednesday during this academic year to brainstorm the low-hanging fruit—the projects that the group already
has the skills and resources to accomplish. “The idea is to identify large questions we could realistically tackle and make a significant contribution to,” Kranton said. For instance, one subgroup might look at risk-taking behavior in the form of teenage boys who drink and drive on icy roads at 2 a.m. “We want to figure out why kids do this, who are the kids doing this, what influence they have on other kids, and what recommendations we could make to policymakers and school administrators to intervene to help kids make better decisions,” Kranton said. The group could take the insights from a psychologist about personality traits of people who have strong influence on their peers. A cognitive neuroscientist could contribute information about how the brain processes stimuli, and a neurobiologist about brain maturation. A geneticist could talk about gene-environment interaction, and so on through the group. “This brings together a package of skills: biology, neuroscience, social network analysis, social psychology and economic decision-making,” Kranton said. Once the group identifies three or four problems to work on, members expect to recruit other faculty to contribute their expertise. The nine core members each receive a one-course reduction in workload and must make time for the group’s research projects. “We’re taking time away from what we would typically do in our own research to do this collective research,” Kranton said. “We want to transform our research and move it in new directions.” The participants have found it surprisingly easy to establish a common language and make connections with those in other disciplines, Huettel said. “Our next challenge is to move from the excitement of planning to the hard work of actually getting projects done.”
Scott Huettel, Psychology and Neuroscience Rachel Kranton, Economics Phil Costanzo, Psychology and Neuroscience Michael Platt, Neurobiology Philip Sadowski, Economics Seth Sanders, Economics Lynn Smith-Lovin, Sociology Duncan Thomas, Economics Neil Vidmar, Law
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d i g i ta l Online treasure trove of maps and materials provides glimpse into history by Shannon Hartsoe
O
n his way to becoming a lawyer in Washington, D.C., Jason He grew up there. He even attended
Duke University. But he didn’t know Durham, not really.
Not until
he was a student at Duke and enrolled in the undergraduate research service-learning seminar, Digital Durham and the New South. Through conducting research with original census data from the Digital Durham web site (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu) and materials from Perkins Library, Koslofsky gained a new perspective on his hometown. 6 gist from the mill • spri ng 2010
archival images courtesy of digitaldurham.duke.edu
Koslofsky discovered Durham.
“I was looking for history classes and saw the Digital Durham course as an opportunity to learn more about Durham,” said Koslofsky, who majored in math and history at Duke. “I grew up in Durham and really wanted to learn more about the history of the city and the area.” Koslofsky was one of the first students to enroll in a research course with a digital history angle. Students in Digital Durham and the New South had to use both digital materials from Digital Durham as well as analog sources for their research papers. The site, launched publicly in 2001, is open to Duke students and the public. It offers students, teachers and research-
ers a range of primary sources to use for investigating the economic, social, cultural, and political history of postbellum Durham. Visitors to the site can access information on more than 600 topics, including the history of African American business enterprise, the emergence of textiles, tobacco production and marketing, child labor, prohibition, evangelical revivalism, 19th-century medical practices, women’s experience of childbirth, and public and private education. In an effort to make history “more palpaple and immediate,” Koslofsky’s professor, Trudi Abel, started the Digital Durham web site in 1999. Two years later,
she established an undergraduate research seminar on Durham and the New South that incorporated new approaches in the digital humanities. Abel started the Digital Durham Project in 1999 using an incentive grant from the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) at Duke. The online resource featured population census data from 1880, a contemporaneous map and a few other primary documents, she said. She later used subsequent funding from CIT and from the vice provost for undergraduate education to create a beta website that she used in her undergraduate research course on Durham and the New South.
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Historic photos and maps are just some of the items available on Digital Durham, which is open to Duke students and the public. Visitors can access information on more than 600 topics, ranging from 19th-century medical practices to evangelical revivalism to tobacco production and marketing.
In 2005, Abel said she used a grant from the State Library of North Carolina to revamp the site’s architecture and expand its holdings by 1,000 images. This site—www.digitaldurham.duke.edu—has become a cornerstone of her undergraduate research service-learning seminar called “Digital Durham and the New South.” As the project approaches its 11th anniversary, Abel said new technologies—such as Google Earth and Google Maps—are further expanding opportunities for research and teaching. “We can layer the old maps with new technology and do some very interesting exploration of the City of Durham over
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time,” said Abel. “To me what is exciting is that we can talk more now about a city and its space, and think about how the use of space changes over time. What are the residential patterns that exist in the city in different historical moments?” Duke students select their own research topics, identify primary materials that they can use to substantiate their investigation, and then work to produce an original research paper. The website gives students a deep sense of the range of materials— printed sources, manuscript letters, business ledgers, government records like census data and wills—that can help their investigations.
Abel said Koslofsky is a perfect example of how students can use the information for original research and turn it into something so much more. “Jason was an interesting example of a student who had gone to high school in Durham, grew up in Durham, but really didn’t know this place,” she said. “He went through the course and learned about the community and then what’s exciting is that he gave back. He did original research on a topic that’s fascinating—youth and education in Durham during industrialization, from 1880 to 1910. Then he created a lesson plan that teachers across the state are still using. It’s a great example of an undergraduate student doing original research that eighth-graders are now using in their studies. There’s the wonderful circle.” Duke students aren’t the only benefactors. Abel has seen school teachers, architects, historic preservationists, genealogists, and historians from Durham to Boston, and across five continents, benefit from the resource. It’s also provides a special benefit to the “town-gown” relationship of Duke and Durham. The Digital Durham website has “become a crucial tool for Durham community residents,” said Abel, a visiting assistant professor in history and director of the Digital Durham Project. “It is a well-used resource by folks within the Durham community as
“ What is exciting is that we can talk more now about a city and its space, and think about how the use of space changes over time. What are the residential patterns that exist in the city in different historical moments?”
—Trudi Abel
they are researching either the history of their home or neighborhood or their family. We have avid users who are very interested in understanding the history of their neighborhoods. We also have users whose family roots go back into the 19th century, and they will consult the website for material about their family history. And, of course, school teachers are using materials on the website in their social studies classes in North Carolina.” Abel shares a story of an elderly Durham woman who researched the history of the Bull City by making frequent trips to the library. She studied maps, census records and other documents to piece together the rich tapestry of Durham’s past and how it has become its present. But her age eventually made driving too difficult for this amateur historian. Now, thanks to the Digital Durham Project, she can peruse those same documents in digital format, from the comfort of her own home. Abel launched an updated site in 2006, and released an expanded map collection in May 2009. She’s now building a summer academic exploration project for seventh- and eighthgraders who live in Walltown, a historic neighborhood just north of Duke’s East Campus where George Wall and other African Americans settled at the earliest development of Duke University. Working with Gail Taylor of the Carter Community School and Victoria Szabo of the ISIS
(Information Science and Information Studies), Abel is developing a collaborative effort between Duke students and their middle-school counterparts on a digital mapping project. “My experience, based on having worked with middle-school students, is it is a little challenging to get them fired up about local history, they feel like they’ve done it before and it’s kind of old and it’s not connected to them,” she said. “Through the collaboration, we hope to strengthen the skills and knowledge of Walltown’s middle-school students in the area of post-Civil War history while giving students a solid foundation in the technology skills necessary for successful career development in the 21st century. The project will enable Duke students to design and teach a new curriculum, work with middle-schoolers, and will help the Duke participants make new discoveries about the history of the Walltown neighborhood.” The students will use Google technology, historical data from city directories and other elements to learn about the area in the 1920s. They will reconstruct the neighbor-
hood and take digital photos of the neighborhood today, and then upload the images into an interactive map of the community. “They’ll see who lived in the community in the past and document visually what kinds of landmarks are there, what kinds of things are important to the students we are working with,” Abel said. Like Koslofsky, they’ll learn about the history of their city and gain a new appreciation for Durham. “I think an investigation into the history of Durham is important for the community because I think it’s important to understand where Durham comes from and how the city got to where it is,” said Koslofsky, a 2002 Duke graduate who earned his law degree from Washington University in 2006. “It’s easy to miss the history, but there’s a long fascinating history of the city which reflects industry in the South, education, and other unique factors to Durham. “Hopefully, by using primary documents students can get a better understanding of what was happening at the time in a direct manner that a textbook might miss.”
Late nineteenth-century Durham, North Carolina makes an ideal case study for examining emancipation, industrialization, immigration, and urbanization in the context of the New South. Learn more: http://digitaldurham.duke.edu/
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reaching out to new moms and dads
P r o g r a m L i n k s Pa r e n t s w i t h C o m m u n i t y R e s o u r c e s by Marla Vacek Broadfoot
b
ecoming a parent means suddenly being responsible for the care of another human being 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So it may come as a surprise to new moms and dads when the addition of a family member leaves them feeling lonely and isolated. A program called Durham Connects works to relieve this sense of isolation by visiting parents and babies in their own homes and connecting them with community supports. “Taking care of a newborn can be so isolating,” said Jeannine Sato, director of Durham Connects. “You are really in your head, and at times you are just trying to cope hour to hour, keeping the baby alive. Sometimes parents just need a friendly nudge, to remind them that they are not going through this alone. That is why we are here—to help them make connections to other people who can in turn help them become a better parent.” Durham Connects is a collaborative effort funded by the Duke Endowment with the purpose of improving child well-being in Durham County. Its roots lie in the Durham Family Initiative, a collaboration between Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy
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and the local nonprofit Center for Child and Family Health. By providing in-home nurse visits to high-risk children, the Durham Family Initiative has helped to lower the rates of child abuse and maltreatment in the county. In its next iteration, the Durham Family Initiative has partnered with Durham County’s health and social services departments to create a universal program— Durham Connects—that targets all of the children in Durham County. Sato said the hope is that Durham Connects can have an even greater effect on child well-being across the entire community. In the first phase of the program, officially launched in July 2008, Durham Connects hired 10 nurses to visit half the newborns in Durham County—those born on evennumbered days. The second phase of the program should begin in January 2011, with the hiring of an additional 10 nurses to eventually cover all of the families in the county. Though the program is optional, about 80 percent of parents have elected to have a nurse come to their home. The nurses make their home visits when the baby is about three weeks old.
In addition to checking to make sure both mother and child are healthy, the nurses also spend time with the parents finding out what they might need to help them cope with the challenges of raising a child. They ask about a number of topics such as their financial resources, social support system, access to parenting information and understanding of child development. When they find areas where the parents could use additional help—such as if they are having a rough time with feeding issues or crying bouts—they can then connect them with the relevant resources in the community. “Parenting is hard, and you do need support,” said Sato. “But many parents are just so overwhelmed with taking care of their child that they don’t have the time or simply don’t know where to look for help. Luckily, we have access to a database full of many wonderful community resources that we can refer new parents to.” An entire support staff is dedicated to maintaining and updating that list of resources. In the database are hundreds of agencies that can assist families with questions relating to childcare, health care, parenting and financial issues. But as
Jeremy M. Lange
comprehensive as that list may be, there are some services that simply do not exist. One of the goals of the program is to identify these gaps in services and try to fill them. Early in the program, the nurses discovered that many of the babies they visited were sleeping on soft mattresses, with other children, or in their parents’ beds, which increases their risk of a SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) death. So Durham Connects affiliated itself with a national program called Cribs for Kids, which enabled them to provide parents with a safe place to put their newborns to sleep. With personal donations from the community, the program purchases Pack ’n Play cribs and distributes them to parents for only a $10 co-payment. Another need that often comes up during the nurse visits is that of social support for parents. No baby books or parenting guides can compete with the advice of a fellow parent or grandparent who can share what methods—conventional and otherwise— worked for them. The program has connected parents with peers and mentors, whether through a parenting group, play dates at a local church, or a phone advice network. It also created the Grandparent Network of
Durham specifically to meet the needs of parents who do not have family in the area. Thus far, Sato said the feedback from parents has been overwhelmingly positive, with more than 95 percent of parents surveyed responding that the program was helpful to them and their babies. Sato and others at Durham Connects are now compiling data from the community to see if parent and child well-being are better off as a result of the intervention. They are looking at child maltreatment rates and emergency room visits in Durham County and comparing them to that of five other counties in North Carolina. “We are documenting every detail of the program and its impact with the idea of creating a model that can be replicated in other counties,” said Sato. “So if Wake or Chatham County wanted to start a program of their own, we will have already worked out all of the kinks and can provide them with a model of how to do it from start to
New mother Meghan Leypoldt, left, speaks to Jane Schwarting, a Durham Connects nurse, as Schwarting checks daughter Piper’s heartbeat.
finish, which they can then modify for their own community.” Sato is particularly attuned to the challenges—and joys—of new parents. She found her position at Durham Connects shortly after the birth of her first child, and was pleased to become a part of such a family-friendly enterprise. She said she wished a program like Durham Connects existed when she brought her first baby home. “I would have been thrilled to have the help,” said Sato. “If there is ever a time you need to ask for help, that is the time. There are so many questions people have, and they just pop up. It is never in the pediatrician’s office when you have 10 minutes with them; no, it’s in the middle of the night when you’re alone. It is good to have a network of people and resources you can rely on.”
Learn more about how Durham Connects is striving to increase child well-being by supporting parents through community resources at: http://durhamconnects.org/
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New Center Promotes
by Paul Dudenhefe r
the History of Economics
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The Center for the History of Political Economy was created in 2008 with a generous donation from the John W. Pope Foundation. It promotes the teaching of and research in the history of economics, or political economy, as it was known in the nineteenth century. “Very few economics departments have historians of the discipline on the faculty,” said Caldwell, who was at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before joining Duke in 2008. “So the center plays an important role, especially for young scholars, as it allows them to pursue their research among sympathetic colleagues who know the history of the field.” In addition, the center sponsors a summer program in which junior fellows spend eight to 12 weeks working with archivists in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Duke has the largest collection of economists’ papers in the world, and the fellows make an initial pass through unprocessed materials in the collection and record what is there. They then consult with archivists to create a finding aid. “Working with archives is an indispensable part of being an historian,” Caldwell said. “This program not only allows our
young scholars to get that experience, but it brings the perspective of the economist to that of the archivist.” The major teaching initiative will be the summer institute, but as Caldwell explained, center faculty members are committed to teaching history to engage students both within and outside of economics. As examples of the latter, E. Roy Weintraub and Caldwell teach in the Focus program, Kevin Hoover and Neil De Marchi teach courses that are cross-listed in philosophy and political science, respectively, and Craufurd Goodwin teaches a course on the Bloomsbury Group in the Graduate Liberal Studies program. Indeed, the center is selfconsciously interdisciplinary. Its steering committee includes not only economists but political scientists, historians, and philosophers. Research fellows have included scholars in political philosophy, geography, and sociology. In part through Goodwin’s interest in Bloomsbury, the center collaborated in 2009 with the university’s campus-wide program “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury” by producing a panel discussion on John Maynard Keynes, the great prewar economist
archival images courtesy of the Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection at Duke University
When Bruce Caldwell, the director of Duke’s new Center for the History of Political Economy, learned in 2008 that the center had been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he knew it was big news. “That kind of recognition coming from the leading foundation associated with the humanities was a coup,” Caldwell said. “The NEH is not the first place most economists think of to apply for support, and likewise, economics is not a discipline that the NEH typically thinks of funding.” The grant funds a summer institute that will bring 25 scholars to Duke in June 2010 to get a crash course in the history of economics. Economists as well as non-economists can apply to take part. “It’s a three-week boot camp, if you will, on the history of economics and on methods for teaching that history,” Caldwell explained. “The idea is to encourage professors to incorporate the history of the field into their existing courses or to offer a course on the history of political economy in its own right. As far as I know, this is the first time something like this has been done in economics, at least in the states. We hope to make it an ongoing part of our program.”
and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. The discussion, which was held in the auditorium in the Nasher Museum of Art, was a “big hit,” Caldwell remarked. “The auditorium was packed, and the topic couldn’t have been timelier, as Keynes was a name the public had been hearing a lot in the media’s coverage of the financial crisis.” Caldwell, who is the leading authority on the economist, social theorist, and liberal thinker Friedrich Hayek, came up with the idea for the center several years ago as he became increasingly concerned about what was happening to the field. Once a central part of an economist’s training, the history of economics is now seen by many practitioners as irrelevant: they maintain that economics as it exists today is the product of an evolutionary process in which whatever is right or true has been preserved and whatever is wrong or false has been discarded. So why study the history of the discipline? That is a question Caldwell loves to answer. “In the first instance, students of economics enjoy finding out where their field came from. In addition, they come to appreciate that many of the debates of today had antecedents in the past. Especially on the big questions, there is much ‘old wine in new bottles’ in economics. The history of economics is also an essential part of the liberal education of economists. It provides a language and a set of reference points that enable them to talk to people outside the discipline. As an added benefit, when you study the history of the field, you commune with the best minds not
only in the discipline itself, but in the intellectual tradition of the West. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek, among others, are known as great economists, but they also all made contributions beyond economics proper.” What’s more, classes in history force students to read and write and think critically to a degree that many conventional economics courses do not. “Certainly there is much value in learning mathematical techniques for solving particular economic problems,” Caldwell pointed out, “and indeed that is how economics is done today. But when students grapple with literary texts such as the Wealth of Nations or Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, all sorts of questions open up that may not otherwise if students stick to the more traditional approach.” Duke was the natural choice for the center, as the university has long been the best place to study the history of economics. The economics department has always had historians on its faculty, and several of today’s leading scholars are here now. The first and preeminent journal devoted to the history of economics (History of Political Economy) is published by Duke University Press, and, as noted above, the most significant collection of economists’ papers are in the library here. The collection, which already has the papers of several Nobel Prize winners, will soon receive the papers of another Nobel Prize winner and the towering figure of 20th-century economics, Paul Samuelson. When thinking about the future of the
(From left) Chair of the economics department, Patrick Bayer; director of the Center, Bruce Caldwell; and previous chair of the economics department, Thomas Nechyba.
Upcoming events
April 16, 2010, 3:30 - 5:00 pm History of Political Economy Workshop Ann Marie May (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) will discuss “Women in the Archives of the AEA”. April 23 - 25, 2010 The History of Econometrics This conference is one of a series of annual conferences that, starting in 1989, have been held each spring on a particular topic in the history of political economy. 2011 A History of Observation in Economics Organizers: Mary Morgan, London School of Economics; Harro Maas, University of Amsterdam; Duke Contact: E. Roy Weintraub
Learn more about the Center for the History of Political Economy’s mission to promote and support research in, and the teaching of, the history of economics. http://econ.duke.edu/HOPE/ CENTER/home.php field, Caldwell conveys an unmistakable sense of mission. “I feel fortunate to be in a position to try to turn the tide, to try to get history reintroduced into the curriculum,” he said. “It’s a real challenge to say the least, and I’m fully committed to doing it. But my immediate goal is simple: I want to build a great center.”
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Taking a Picture of
‘Gut Sense’ 14 gist from the mill • spri ng 2010
Duke Psychologists Watch Mind-Body Reactions in Real Time by Karl Leif Bates
If you’ve ever felt your heart pound just before speaking to a room full of people or had the sense that your stomach suddenly dropped upon hearing shocking news, you’ve experienced something called “interoception”— the ability to feel one’s inner workings. Lots of folks just call it “gut sense.” Duke psychologists Nancy Zucker and Kevin LaBar are embarking on a new series of studies to see exactly where in the nervous system and brain this gut sense is wired and how it may differ from one person to the next. Interoception is an old idea, going back more than a century in the literature, but only recently have the tools become available to watch this mind-body interaction in real time. With startup research support from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and a federal stimulus grant, Zucker and LaBar are recruiting study subjects for an unprecedented examination of what gut sense really looks like in the brain, feels like in the viscera of adolescents, and how it plays into decision-making. Zucker, an assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of the Duke Eating Disorders Program, is particularly interested in the gut sense of adolescents and people with anorexia nervosa. Anorexics seem to be “exquisitely sensitive” to their inner selves in some ways, yet they are somehow able to live through deprivation that would have most people climbing the walls. “Acute anorexics seem oblivious,” Zucker said. Not only should their gut be crying out for nourishment, but in advanced stages of the disease, the heart rate slows alarmingly. Anorexics have “rigid convictions” about their body image, despite all evidence to the contrary. “It’s what they feel to be true,” Zucker said. “What is it about them that they would continue to have these sorts of visceral reactions that defy all logic?” It seems possible that adolescents in general and anorexics in particular may have difficulty detecting or interpreting
interoceptive signals, Zucker said. While studies of adults have found wide variability in interoception between individuals, there is little data on adolescents. The researchers will simultaneously monitor adolescent subjects with functional MRI to see brain functions, and a network of sensors called an electrogastrogram, which takes measures of a churning gut from a network of pads attached to the skin, like an electrocardiogram does for the heart. Test subjects will be put through tests of rapid decisionmaking, judging the trustworthiness of faces, interacting with family members, and riding a simulated roller coaster. Zucker comes at these questions from a clinical perspective, as someone who has been treating the behavioral and medical issues of anorexia nervosa. LaBar, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, is in it mostly for the brain imaging. Pulling a plastic model of a human brain to the center of his desk and demonstrating its detachable lobes, LaBar points out the insular cortex, or insula, where interoception is thought to reside. It lays in two thumb-sized lobes on either side of the brain, beneath the frontal cortex, the higher brain that makes humans what they are cognitively. Being deeper like this probably indicates that the insula came into use further back in our evolutionary history. Among other things, the insula is the home of the signals for disgust. In fact, it lights up when merely viewing an image of disgust. These are ancient sensations that must have aided survival, LaBar said. The disgust reaction, for example, may be a way to avoid spoiled or poisonous food. Other interoception has been linked to the insula as well,
including the sense of a full bladder, warmth on the skin, and pain. There are also intriguing clues that it plays a role in anxiety and emotion. And true to the figure of speech—following one’s gut intuition—interoception also is likely to play a role in decision-making. Zucker suspects that adolescents who are more sensitive to their gut are going to be better at intuitive decision-making. She’s going to test them on rapid pattern recognition and see if there’s a link between performance and “visceral sensitivity.” “Maybe the gut remembers,” Zucker said. Adolescents also will be exposed to rapidfire photos of various faces in a standard test of how a person measures trustworthiness, while watching the brain and gut work the problem. “We can have these judgments and we can’t explain why,” Zucker said. LaBar has done some of these experiments already and found that adolescents aren’t as good at picking out angry or threatening faces as older people. “I always say that’s why you have to get red in the face with adolescents,” LaBar said. He’ll be looking at how the “gut sense” lights up when a person is asked to make decisions. Zucker’s study will draw on a cohort of 50 anorexics and 125 normal controls, all female. With post-doctoral fellow Steven Stanton, she’ll also be looking at estrogen levels and DNA expression patterns. The search for these “biomarkers” of interoceptive differences is backed by a $993,000 NIH grant from the ARRA stimulus funding. In another series of experiments, LaBar is watching interoceptive signals as teenagers interact with their parents. They talk through a video-conferencing setup so that he can track eye movements. He’ll be looking for interoceptive markers of sympathy, empathy and conflict while monitoring heart rate, gut motility and sweaty palms. “Then we’ll do some fancy statistics to compare the parents’ responses to the kids’ responses.” The way people talk about their intuition and gut sense, it always sounds like it’s something that’s “just there.” Zucker and LaBar hope to see it in action.
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facult y
profile
Sunshine Hillygus: Watching ‘Dog Whistle Politics’ Political Scientist Looks for the Nuances in Public Opinion by Camille Jackson
If you went to political science professor Sunshine Hillygus’ web site while she was teaching at Harvard, you would have heard a hog call—woo pig sooie!—and seen an animated image of a grunting, scratching hog. The unexpected graphic is homage to the University of Arkansas Razorbacks and to her hometown of Fayetteville, Ark. She’ll demonstrate the hog call herself if you catch her during a Razorback game. Hillygus’ web site is currently being updated, so she hasn’t outed herself as a hog caller at Duke yet. Still, her school spirit runs deep. She named her 20-month-old son, Jacob Dickson, after Dickson Street, Fayetteville’s lively college strip. (The daughter of free-spirited parents, Hillygus was named after a popular John Denver song from the 1970s.) It was at the University of Arkansas that she first got turned onto politics. It was 1992, the year her governor ran for president. “As a college freshman I had a front-row seat to the presidential campaign,” said Hillygus, who left her faculty post at Harvard to become associate professor of political science at Duke this semester. The Clinton campaign got her excited about politics, but these days she remains non-partisan, putting her passion for the topic into the study of American political behavior, public opinion, and campaigns and elections. Just recently released in paperback,
Hillygus’ most recent book, The Persuadable Voter (Princeton University Press, 2009), was awarded the 2009 Robert E. Lane award for the best book published in political psychology. In it, she analyzes the way voters make up their minds in a campaign and the strategies candidate use to sway their opinions. In the book, she and co-author Todd Shields show how emerging technologies have enabled the use of “microtargeting,” when politicians use personal information from their constituents to send individualized campaign messages. “Candidates use direct mail, email, and so on to engage in dog whistle politics,” she said, in which candidates communicate messages that can be heard only by intended targets, like the highpitched dog whistle that can be heard by dogs but is not audible to the human ear. Hillygus is teaching an introductory public opinion class this semester. “It is so rewarding to see students learn skills they can actually put to use,” she said. We are inundated with polls these days, so it is worthwhile to learn when you can or cannot trust those numbers.” She is also starting a survey initiative at Duke, applying knowledge of survey methods she gained first as a graduate student at Stanford University and later as director of the Program on Survey Research at Harvard. “Duke is a terrific place to study survey methods because there are so many survey scholars and practitioners in the area,” she said. Since moving to Durham, her first few months have been busy with unpacking boxes, traveling for conferences, and preparing for classes, but Hillygus has been looking forward to the milder Southern climate so she can return to triathlon training. In the meantime, she’s happy to be a sports spectator and is gradually learning to cheer for Duke. “One of my fondest memories of all time is the 1994 national championship game when the Razorbacks beat Duke,” in basketball, said Hillygus. “But I went to the Sweet 16 game in Boston last year and cheered on Duke. I’m just happy to be some place that has real college basketball.”
16 gist from the mill • spri ng 2010
Duke University Photography
Political scientist Sunshine Hillygus talks with a student following an undergraduate class.
student
p rofile
Claire Musiol International Conversations about Race and Homelessness By Mary-Russell Robe rson
“We don’t speak about race in France,” said Claire Musiol, a
Duke University Photography
native of France who is spending the 2009-2010 academic year doing research at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences (REGSS). “There is no count—we don’t know how many blacks, how many whites are in France. A lot of information is missing.” Furthermore, she said, “We don’t have any real data on homelessness. France doesn’t try to count homeless people as the United States does.” It’s a difficult situation for someone like Musiol, who is studying race and homelessness at the French Institute of Geopolitics at the University of Paris 8. When it came time to work on her master’s thesis, Musiol’s advisor Frederick Douzet suggested she come to REGSS and investigate race and homelessness in Durham. “It’s easier to study here because you have numbers,” she said. “The city has numbers; the [local nonprofit] organizations have numbers too.” Musiol is focusing on the Hayti and Rolling Hills redevelopment projects as case studies to examine how different groups interact and wield power while working to solve the problem of homelessness. The city, the state, and local organizations have different priorities, different constraints, and different goals. For example, the organizations that serve homeless people in Durham are pushing the city to reserve 10 percent of the units in the redevelopment projects for special populations, including people who are homeless, people with mental illness and disabilities, and people who do not qualify for public housing. “Without these organizations, I’m not sure whether the city would do it,” Musiol said. It’s a complex interplay to observe and document, especially for someone coming from another country. The French government provides more social services and support to its citizens, so there are fewer homeless people. In the United States, the response to homelessness is also more diverse, with state governments, city governments, and local nonprofits taking different approaches in different places. Two approaches that Musiol is particularly interested in are the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, which many U.S. cities use (Durham’s plan began in 2007), and the housing first model, which seeks to provide housing to homeless people before connecting them with support services to help them become self-supporting. Musiol says she spent much of her early time in Durham just getting used to cultural differences, especially as related to homelessness and race. “Arriving here I was surprised that everyone speaks about this subject [race],” she said. “It was a bit hard for me at first to speak about it because I come from this country where it is taboo. It is also surprising here that even with all the efforts, with all the laws, the differences between African Americans and whites still exist so much, especially in the South—and you can
Visiting researcher Claire Musiol says even though her home country of France and the U.S. are both wealthy western nations, each handles homelessness differently.
see it a lot when you study poverty and homelessness. Most of the homeless people in the United States are African American.” She says Durham has a growing population of homeless Latinos as well, although they tend not to be as visible, even to the organizations that serve the homeless. Another interesting difference she noticed is that it’s more common here to do volunteer work to help the poor and the homeless. “Volunteering is not as important in France as in the United States. We mostly rely on the state,” she said. Although Musiol knew before she arrived that France and the United States provide very different social safety nets, she was shocked to learn some of the specifics—for example, that landlords here have the right to evict someone in the wintertime. The differences are what fascinate Musiol. She wants to explain the American approach to poverty and homelessness, as it plays out in Durham, to her audience in France. “Both the United States and France are western rich countries, but being poor in the United States is different than being poor in France,” she said. Her advisor, Professor Paula McClain, who is co-director of REGSS, says Musiol’s presence has enriched the Center this year: “She’s been a tremendous addition—she’s added to the intellectual discussion and debate about race. She brings a perspective to us that is critical to understanding how race plays out in the rest of the world.”
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a sk th e social sci e ntist
As the War on Terror continues, some military families are dealing with a parent being deployed numerous times, extended tours, or both parents who are in the service being deployed at the same time. What policies could be put in place to ease the burden on the military family? From the perspective of promoting children’s
Before I could answer the question about policies
adjustment and well-being, one policy that could ease the burden on military families would be a stipulation against having both parents deployed at the same time. Children of all ages benefit from stability and consistency in their environments and routines. If both parents are deployed at the same time, children are more likely to have to move (at least temporarily) and change schools to be with other caregivers, in addition to experiencing the stress of being separated from their parents. Policies that enable parents in the military to use modern technology can help military families cope with long separations. For example, many military families are using Skype to be able to talk and even see each other using webcams for very little cost. Being able to communicate frequently can reduce fears associated with the separation and enable the family to stay emotionally connected, even at a distance. Both informal and formal social support can help ease the burden on military families. Informal support from family and friends can help with both the practical and emotional challenges families face when a parent is deployed. In addition, each branch of the service offers a number of resources and formal supports to help families prepare for and cope with deployment, as well as adjust to reunification at the end of the deployment.
I would need to know a great deal more about the specific problems that are encountered. I would begin by talking with military officials who are knowledgeable about the problem. However, I would then find a convenient sample of affected families and interview them in person to get an initial in-depth perspective on the problem. Next I would build a survey around what I had learned and then I would develop an in-depth survey, ideally a face-to-face survey but certainly by phone rather than by questionnaire, to get a more representative view of the problems. Only then would I recommend policies. Following my own advice, for this essay I conducted a brief interview with one of my Duke Law colleagues, a former military officer. He said that the most important policy is continuing support by the local military community, including base commanders and non-commissioned officers. It must be a systematic and continuing effort to reach out and ensure that families are doing okay. Wives and husbands, and often their children, worry deeply about their deployed spouse and just talking helps. The problem has been that some spouses, wives and children especially, live off the base and sometimes have financial difficulties that add to the stress. Yet, they sometimes fall off the radar. The military already has a strict policy requiring that if the soldier is a single parent, or if both parents are to be simultaneously deployed overseas, arrangements must be made for the children before they can be deployed. Usually the surrogate parent is a grandparent or adult sibling of the soldier. My officer colleague told me about a single mother who had made arrangements for her children to live with her mother. However, at the last minute the grandmother said she couldn’t do it. The frantic mother missed her plane and, as result, faced a court martial. The charges were eventually dropped and the mother was discharged from the military. This is the kind of example that I would hope my research would uncover before I recommended any policy.
Jennifer E. Lansford Associate Research Professor
Neil Vidmar Russell M. Robinson II Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology
18 gist from the mill • spri ng 2010
que stions
J. Lorand Matory A chat with cultural anthropologist and new chair of African & African American Studies. by Courtney Orni ng
Q: What are your plans for the Department of African & African American Studies and how has your background prepared you for the challenging position of chair? A: The Department of African & African American Studies at Duke assembles an extraordinary array of scholars studying the literature, performing arts, cultural anthropology, history, politics, and economics of Africa and its diaspora. We have organized ourselves into interdisciplinary “synergy groups,” which will host lively lecture series, working-paper sessions, social interventions, and out-of-the-box learning experiences for students of “Gender and Sexuality,” “Slavery, Diaspora, and the Atlantic World,” “Visual, Popular, and Performance Studies,” and “Careers and Interventions in the Afro-Atlantic World.” We are on the verge of a curriculum revision and of a series of major new hires intended to deepen and amplify the conversations in those synergy groups and in the classroom. After a period of faculty growth, we plan to establish an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in African & African American Studies. I suppose the greatest strengths that I bring to this job are, first, major research experience and writing about the U.S., Latin America and Africa, as well as the connections among these locales, and, second, a compulsive work ethic. I don’t know how to abandon a project until it is absolutely the best that it can be. Q: You were at Harvard for more than 18 years and recently made the move to Durham. Why such a big move at this time in your career and what have you found to be different from Cambridge? A: As a pre-condition of my move, Duke committed the resources necessary for Duke’s Department of African & African American Studies to become the best on the planet—through the radical expansion of an already-stellar faculty and through major funding for research and the dissemination of our ideas. I loved and love Harvard. But my former institution is as anemic in its support for African studies as it is strong in its commitment to African American studies. Next, Duke gave me an incomparable opportunity to make a difference. Finally, for all of its greatness, Harvard has been resistant to diversify its faculty and administration. By comparison with any elite US university, Duke is a city on a hill. Duke is the future. A half-dozen tenured Harvard colleagues announced their readiness to join us here. One of them has already come, and another is coming next year. Even in the near future, he won’t be the last.
Q: You plan to write an ethnography of a white supremacist group in the United States. Is there a particular group you plan to focus on? What do you think will be different about this book than other books written about white supremacy groups? A: I have not yet decided which group I will study. What I have decided is to conduct my research ethnographically, which is what will make it distinctive. My aim will not be to trash or to praise my hosts but, first, to grasp their point of view in their terms; second, to contextualize their ideas and conduct in a broader cultural and political economy; and, third, to compare them to other populations globally that have a stake in proving or enforcing their superiority to their neighbors. I expect my position—as an elite black person—to create special conditions for the unveiling of the emotions, the motives, the symbolic foundations, and the contradictions of white supremacy and other forms of supremacy. If I am to survive this ultimate professional challenge, I will have to invent some novel techniques of field research.
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Duke University Photography
Q: Performance is a big part of your life—does that spill over into your professional work? A: Boy, have you done your research. Indeed, I am a musician and a dancer. Perhaps for that reason, I regard the art of a good lecture as much like music. It is not, or should not be, mere reading aloud. The crescendos and decrescendos, the staccato and the
legato, the noise and the silence, the rhythm and the poetry of the lyrics are all key to its effectiveness. My lecture notes look almost like a marked-up musical score, and I rehearse long enough so that I only occasionally look at the page. I also regard lecturing and teaching as a dance. That’s why I use little PowerPoint. In my experience, students feel my message most deeply and memorably when they can see the thoughts and feelings in my moving body and thereby feel them in their own bodies.
tech nology
New SSRI servers:
faster data analyses from your desktop
by Angela Spivey
A recent update of the high-performance computing servers housed at SSRI means that Duke social science researchers can access faster, more powerful data analysis from their own desktops. The new servers double both the RAM and the processing speed of the old servers, said Josh Smith, IT Manager at SSRI. The upshot for users: analyses run faster, and it’s easier to run multiple programs at the same time. Jacob Montgomery, a graduate political science student, said that because the new servers can run multiple programs simultaneously so easily, using them has cut his analysis time in half. Montgomery uses the servers for his research on how responsive U.S. senators are to the preferences of various subsets of their state constituencies. “In particular, I am studying the extent to which senator’s vote in accordance with the average voter in their state versus the preferences of partisan activists,” Montgomery said. “In order to do this, I used a data set of senate roll calls on specific issues from 1999-2001.” The total data set for his project isn’t huge compared to some—about 30,000 observations. But when Montgomery began applying that model, the calculations multiplied. “The model I am using estimates where each senator and roll call fits into a policy space. You might think of it as how liberal or conservative the senators are, or how consistently they support their party. In total, the model estimates six parameters for each senator and six for each
roll call. This adds up quickly, and in my case, there are more than 1,000 parameters. This made running the model too computationally expensive to run on my personal laptop,” he said. Montgomery uses two of the statistical analysis programs available on the server—wingubs and R. Others available at this time include STATA10, ArcGIS, textpad, pajek, C++, and Stat Transfer. Other packages may be added in the future, and researchers may be able to run packages they own on an as-needed basis as long as software licensing requirements are respected, Smith said. As previously, Duke users may access the servers remotely from any computer with an Internet connection. “Whether investigators are working on campus or off, they can get their statistical analyses accomplished, and now with the capability to manage larger datasets at faster speeds,” said Alexandra Cooper, Associate Director for Education and Training at SSRI. Researchers can sign up to use the servers on the SSRI web site: http://www.ssri.duke.edu/hpcs.php. SSRI may soon offer expanded uses, including analysis of data that require greater security. “We definitely want to grow this service,” Smith said. He would like to hear from users about their experiences with the servers, good or bad. “Most people access the servers, and we don’t hear from them. We may be able to bring greater functionality to the resource if we have more of a dialogue.”
For more information contact Josh Smith at josh.smith@duke.edu.
20 gist from the mill • spri ng 2010
THE STRI P “Is Social Behavior Genetic?”
by Sue Li
Social Science @ Duke Social Science Departments
University Institutes and Centers (UICs)
African & African American Studies www.aas.duke.edu/aaas
Duke Global Health Institute globalhealth.duke.edu
Cultural Anthropology ca-www.aas.duke.edu
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences www.dibs.duke.edu
Economics www.econ.duke.edu
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy www.genome.duke.edu
Program in Education www.duke.edu/web/education
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi
History www-history.aas.duke.edu
The Kenan Institute for Ethics kenan.ethics.duke.edu
Political Science www.poli.duke.edu
Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions www.nicholas.duke.edu/institute
Psychology & Neuroscience pn.aas.duke.edu
Social Science Research Institute www.ssri.duke.edu
Public Policy pubpol.duke.edu Sociology www.soc.duke.edu Program in Women’s Studies www.duke.edu/womstud w w w. ss r i . d u k e . e d u
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gist f ro m t h e M i l l
final note
NEW DIRECTOR
Seth Sanders named to lead Duke’s Population Research Institute by Courtney Orni ng
Economics professor Seth Sanders has been named the new director of the Duke University Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of the Social Science Research Institute, the provost’s office announced. DuPRI’s research focus includes aging, health and family, fertility, and migration. Its mission is to organize all population research at Duke, attract to the Duke faculty some of the field’s most acclaimed researchers and new talent, and to expand the intellectual activity at Duke devoted to population research in the classroom, laboratory and field. Sanders takes over for James Vaupel, the founding DuPRI director. Sanders was recommended by a committee headed by economics professor V. Joseph Hotz. “We have collected at Duke a most unusual group of interdisciplinary faculty who can, and will, do extraordinary collaborative work that cuts across disciplines in the social sciences and beyond,” said Susan Roth, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies.
“Seth has a creative vision and a brilliant strategy to bring this group of researchers together around research topics that bear on some of the most important societal challenges.” Sanders joined Duke in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Economics and the Sanford School of Public Policy. In his previous position at the University of Maryland, he played a vital role in the success of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC), which has similar goals as DuPRI. Over the past few years, Sanders has been involved in four broad research programs: the economic and health consequences of migration and immigration; economic shocks and the effects on workers and families; gay and lesbian families and their performance in the U.S. economy; gender and racial wage differences among the highly educated. “Our challenge is to leverage the individual contributions of our scholars into a collective enterprise that will yield science that is new, innovative and extends our knowledge in ways that scholars working independently cannot,” said Sanders, who praised Vaupel’s leadership in establishing a direction for DuPRI.