New Publisher Rodney A. Erickson, Dean of the Graduate School, was named Vice President for Research (and publisher of Research/Penn State) in March 1997. As professor of geography and business administration at Penn State, Erickson teaches courses in urban geography and metropolitan analysis, dealing with labor and housing markets, transportation, and the location of public facilities. His current research explores the structural and spatial influences on an industry's export behavior. See the profile, "Regional Outlook," in the December 1995 R/PS. New Math The key to improving American students' math scores seems to lie in changing the way mathematics is taught. With a four-year, $1 million-plus grant from the National Science Foundation, Martin A. Simon and Ron Tzur of the College of Education are both effecting and studying that change: Their Mathematics Teacher Development program offers teachers-in-training at Penn State and elementary and middle school teachers in the State College Area School District a series of five mathematics education courses to help them make the transition away from "conventional notions" of mathematics. Simon and Tzur will study the teachers' progress as a group and through individual case studies. Color Photos The first photographs were a disappointment. People could not understand how a medium that rendered shapes and textures in exquisite detail could fail to render them in realistic color. So photographers turned to older arts, coloring their images with water colors, oils, chalk, even crayons. The Painted Photograph, 1839-1914 captures the history of this blend of arts. Published in 1996 by Penn State Press, the book by Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch features 131 illustrations and discussions of such exotica as overpainted death portraits (most commonly of children) and the origin of the picture postcard. Smallest of All? The smallest bird, a hummingbird, is 64 millimeters long. The smallest mammal, a shrew, is 35 mm long. Both are large compared to the smallest lizard (a West Indian gecko) and salamander (a Mexican plethodontid), which measure 17mm, according to biologists Alberto Estrada (from the Cuban Instituto Investigaciones Forestales) and Blair Hedges of Penn State. But the smallest tetrapod of all is a frog. Found by Estrada in the leaf litter on the humid slopes of Monte Iberia in Cuba (while he was searching for the rare ivory-billed woodpecker), and determined by Estrada and Hedges to be a new species, Eleutherodactylus iberia stretches all of 10 mm from snout to vent. Its only rival for the smallest crown is a similarly diminutive frog from Brazil. Heartbeat Penn State's Hershey Medical Center was awarded $7.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to test the long-term reli-ability of its new completely implantable total electric artifical heart. The system consists of a compact electric motor-driven artificial heart, an implanted electronic control system, a device for transmitting power across intact skin, and a shoulder-bag battery pack. Each battery can power the heart for roughly four hours; patients can also plug the heart's battery pack into an outside power source, for instance before going to sleep. "This contract allows a very experienced team that has been in place since 1970 to do all the preclinical studies to bring the electro-mechanical artificial heart to the point where we can apply to the Food and Drug Administration in the year 2000 for permission to test the device in humans," said William S. Pierce, director of surgical research at Hershey. The device is designed for five-year reliability and is expected to allow a human patient to lead a relatively normal lifestyle. Five calves have now lived more than 100 days with the device; one lived for 160 days. Take the Bus You pay the phone bill, the electric bill, the water bill, the garbage bill ‹ why not the bus bill? An undergraduate honors thesis by Jennifer Huey, now a graduate student in marketing, suggests that a monthly payment system (with a discount for high users) might make more people take the bus. "People feel they immediately receive most of the benefits of car travel," Huey found, while bus riders "feel they immediately receive most of the disadvantages. You have to wait outside even in nasty weather, have exact change, and maybe stand up the whole ride in crowded conditions. So the fact that using the bus reduces pollution and congestion just doesn't overcome the potential inconveniences for most people." Huey worked with Peter Everett in the Smeal College of Business Administration. Sensing Failure "Smart" sensors can and ought to be used to prevent sudden cardiac death or broken bones due to osteoporosis, according to Robert J. Hansen of the Applied Research Lab (ARL). "We recognize that people are not machines and that this is not an easy problem." Yet he believes that many of the sensors, signal processors, automated reasoning systems, and data fusion methods in modern weapons and surveillance systems could be used to combat human disease. Hansen chairs one of eight Predictive Diagnostic Teams studying the possibility; the teams were assembled in 1996 by Sandia National Laboratory under the sponsorship of the Koop Foundation and DARPA. Elephants as Dinosaurs Elephants aren't extinct, but as the last of the Proboscideans their decline looks a lot like that of the dinosaurs, according to undergraduate Joey Eichelberger and paleontologist Roger Cuffey. During the late Miocene, some 30 types of mammoths, mastodons, stegodons, and elephants roamed the earth; five million years later there are two species left. "Interestingly, at their height dinosaurs also have a diversity of about 30 species," Cuffey says. "If we look at the last five million years before extinction for both dinosaurs and proboscideans, we find a surprisingly similar pattern of extinction." Comparing them, "we can learn something about the decline of the dinosaurs from the more recent decline of the elephants." La Nausée Nausea means different things to different people. What one might call queasiness, another identifies as butterflies. Feeling upset, lightheaded, ill ‹ it's all lumped under nauseous. In a multi-year study of 1,695 students, graduate student Eric Muth and his colleagues identified 17 descriptors to medically define nausea. These clustered into three groups: somatic or body distress (lightheadedness is one kind), gastrointestinal distress (queasiness), and emotional distress (upset). Being able to separate the various components of nausea "will allow researchers and clinicians to differentiate what was previously assumed to be a homogeneous state or condition and to focus on appropriate treatments," write Muth and his coauthors, gastroenterologist Kenneth Koch and psychologist Robert Stern. Bored is Bad Freed from homework and given time to pursue their own interests, many teens show creativity and promise. Others just get bored. And then what do they do? In a survey of 2,756 high school students, Linda Caldwell and Edward Smith of the College of Health and Human Development found that "41 percent of the females and 59 percent of the males in the Œbored' group also said they spent their free time on anti-social pursuits." Only 8 to 9 percent of the students overall were bored. Twice as many said they used their free time to actively reject adult authority. But it was the crossover that the researchers found troubling ‹ and not only for social peace. "These two factors in tandem were also associated with higher rates of smoking, alcohol abuse, and attempting suicide."