Mason Media Blog

Mason Professor Emerita of Physics Eugenie Mielczarek currently writes and lectures on the frontiers of physics and biology.

Her research in solid state physics and biological physics conducted at Mason for 33 years has been published in prestigious journals such as the Physical Review, the Journal of Chemical Physics and the Biology of Metals. In May 2009, she was honored with an award for distinguished research in biological physics from the Washington Academy of Sciences.

Lately, Mielczarek has focused her efforts on an issue of science policy.

Mielczarek recently wrote a report that was published by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Inquiry (CFI) titled “A Fracture in Our Health Care: Paying for Non-Evidence-Based Medicine.” The paper focuses on why federal funding should not be used to support unproven alternative therapies, such as distance healing.

According to Mielczarek, she used simple physics formulas to disprove alleged claims made by distance healers that biomagnetic fields from their hands can cure diseases such as cancer. In the report, Mielczarek notes that healers’ claim of a two milligauss field strength is 18 orders of magnitude below the energy needed to affect any biochemistry.

“Therapeutic touch practitioners claim that they can feel and manipulate human energy fields by making massaging movements in the air just above the surface of the patient’s body. But this was a no-brainer for me. When I saw these claims, I checked to see if anyone had analyzed the data to see if there was enough energy emanating from human hands to significantly alter human biochemistry. The basic laws describing electromagnetic fields and thermodynamics that run our universe show it’s just not possible,” says Mielczarek.

To read more, visit http://cli.gs/p9J7G6.

Special Master for Executive Compensation in the Department of the Treasury, Kenneth Feinberg will visit George Mason University to discuss his decisions and methodology regarding executive compensation in a talk titled “Executive Compensation: Promises and Pitfalls.”

Feinberg is an attorney specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He was appointed special master of the U.S. government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Currently, as the special master for TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) Executive Compensation, he oversees the compensation of top executives at companies that have received federal bailout assistance.

WHEN:
Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

WHERE:
Research I, Room 163
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030

MEDIA RSVP:
Media outlets and reporters interested in attending this event are required to RSVP to Jennifer Edgerly at jedgerly@gmu.edu or 703-993-8699by 10:00 a.m. on Thurs., Dec. 17.

Dan Cohen and Sean Takats of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at Mason have been awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of their Digging into Data Challenge competition.

Cohen and Takats’s project, “Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent,” will develop tools and models for comparing, visualizing, and analyzing the history of crime, using the Old Bailey Online, which contains extensive court records of more than 197,000 individual trials held over a period of 240 years in Great Britain.

The two are part of a team that includes scholars from the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. and the University of Alberta in Canada. The team was awarded a total of approximately $300,000 for their project.

The Old Bailey Proceedings comprise 120 million words of structured text, representing the largest body of printed descriptions of behavior ever published, either in print or online. Scholars have gravitated toward this collection as a rare and expansive storehouse of human activity, made more important by its unique record of the activities of ordinary citizens who are otherwise absent from the official record.

Given its emphasis on crime, and hence on behaviors thought unacceptable and deserving of punishment, the Old Bailey Proceedings are filled with unusual and compelling stories. Historians have picked through these stories to illustrate the social, cultural, and intellectual history of a given era; half a dozen book-length academic case studies have been based on events most fully documented in single trials recorded in the proceedings.

And yet, despite this wealth of scholarship, Cohen says, the use of these legal records by historians remains little different to how a solicitor or attorney might have approached them centuries ago. “Scholars still sift through these documents one at a time, hoping to discover an unusual or indicative case, or relying on rough, partially manual keyword hit counts to discern patterns of criminal behavior that might support a thesis,” says Cohen.

The project will use tools such as Zotero, developed by the Center for History and New Media, to analyze the types of language used in court and how they changed over time. They will also compare these “data mined” patterns to those found in tagged data to create a whole new way of charting change in crime reporting and prosecution and benchmark a new methodology for the consistent discovery of related descriptions.

“The significance of this project therefore runs beyond the discipline of the history of crime, and addresses historical scholarship more broadly,” says Cohen. “Through this project we will show that there are not only new insights to be gained, but also a greater historical rigor to be achieved by moving from the anecdotal to the comprehensive; by moving from the single trial or narrow run of relevant examples to an analysis of statistically significant textual patterns found in this source as a single, massive whole.”

The team was one of eight international research teams that were awarded grants for projects that promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.  Four leading research agencies sponsor the international competition:  the Joint Information Systems Committee from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from Canada.

“Trying to manage a deluge of data and turn bits of information into useful knowledge is a problem that affects almost everyone in today’s digital age,” said NEH Chairman Jim Leach.  “With this international grant program, NEH is hoping to seed projects that will not only benefit researchers in the humanities, but also lead to shared cultural understanding.”

George Mason University professors from the Center for Climate and Society are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) which is being held in Copenhagen now through December 18.

According to Paul Schopf, associate dean for research and computing in the College of Science and director of the Center for Climate and Society, who is heading the delegation, the following people from Mason are attending the climate summit as credentialed nongovernmental observers:

• Susan Crate, assistant professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy

• Jonathan Halperin, executive director of the Environmental Education Media Project and assistant research professor, Center for Climate and Society

• Andrew Light, professor and director of the Center for Global Ethics

• John D. Liu, director of the Environmental Educational Media Project and assistant research professor, Center for Climate and Society

• Iliriana Mushkolaj, PhD student, Center for Climate and Society

• John Qu, associate professor and director of the Environmental Science and Technology Center

During COP15, the group will screen the film “Hope in a Changing Climate.” Filmed on location in China, Ethiopia and Rwanda, the documentary tells the story of how large-scale ecosystem restoration can stabilize our changing climate, reduce poverty and make sustainable agriculture a reality.

Developed by Liu, the film was directed by the BBC’s Jeremy Bristow, producer of the acclaimed “The Truth About Climate Change” series with David Attenborough.

The film will be shown in Copenhagen at the Natural History Museum on Dec. 17. Pre-screenings are also scheduled at the Danish Film Institute on Dec. 16,  and the University of Copenhagen’s Agriculture and Rural Development Day on Dec. 12.

The film was broadcast by BBC World for the first time on Nov. 27,  and five more global transmissions are planned for Jan. 1, 2010.

In addition, 45 organizations in 19 nations are hosting facilitated discussions and screenings of the film, which were organized by the Environmental Education Media Project and the Center for Climate and Society.

For more information, visit www.eemp.org and www.hopeinachangingclimate.org.

As of September of this year, 14.4 percent of borrowers were either in foreclosure or delinquent on their mortgages. According to a Deutsche Bank research report they expect 25 million homes, or 48 percent of mortgages, to be in a negative equity position —meaning a homeowner will owe more on a mortgage than the home is worth — before the housing recession ends.

On Tuesday, Dec. 8, Distinguished Professor of Real Estate Finance Anthony Sanders will testify as an expert witness before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. The topic for the hearing is the private sector and government response to the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Sanders will focus his testimony on the Obama administration’s “Making Homes Affordable Program.”

Sanders has been asked to assess the extent and effectiveness of the federal government’s programs and initiatives for addressing the mortgage default and foreclosure crisis and for creating more sustainable mortgage payments for at-risk homeowners; the performance of private sector participants, including mortgage investors and servicers, in making loan modifications and in participating in the Making Home Affordable Program; and reasons why there appears to be a low level of principal write downs for underwater mortgages, including suggestions to increase such actions.

In his testimony, Sanders will cite several reasons why so few loans under this program will make the transition from temporary modification to successful permanent modification. Some of those reasons are: the degree to which many residential loans in the United States are in a negative equity situation; the unemployment rate; and what he refers to as the documentation problem.

Sanders will also suggest accounting changes to permit financial institutions and investors to remove their distressed assets from their books.

“Helping financial institutions and investors dispose of their distressed assets was one of the original purposes of TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] and we should now consider the wisdom of cleaning up financial institution balance sheets rather than judicial interventions,” says Sanders.

Musical instruments can be expensive and out of reach for many young musicians. During this season of giving, what could be more rewarding than giving the gift of music to a student in need of an instrument?

Now in its second year, Mason’s Instruments in the Attic program has collected and distributed more than 80 instruments that have impacted the lives of more than 500 young people. The program also has plans to give much-needed instruments to elementary and middle school students in public schools in Fairfax and Prince William Counties.

To further its efforts to provide refurbished musical instruments, representatives from Instruments in the Attic will announce the launch of a year-long fundraising campaign at the annual Mason Holiday Concert on Sunday, Dec. 13. Concert attendees are encouraged to bring an instrument to donate (new, used or in need of repair).

“Research has shown that children who learn to play a musical instrument or participate in music programs perform better in both school and life,” says John Kilkenny, faculty member in Mason’s School of Music. “This program was extremely successful in its first year and we hope it will continue to grow.”

For more information about the Instruments in the Attic campaign, click here.

Martha Washington

Want a closer look into the life of the first First Lady of the United States? The Center for History and New Media and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens have launched a new web site chronicling the life and material culture of Martha Washington.

Martha Washington: A Life examines Washington’s life and relationships by making available rare documents and historical artifacts for scholars, teachers and students.

The biographical exhibit was written by Rosemarie Zagarri, professor of history at Mason, and highlights the major milestones of Washington’s life as a young woman, bride, mother, First Lady and widow.

The site also makes available more than 450 documents and items in the largest digital archive devoted to Martha Washington and her life. The letters, documents, images and material culture objects in the archive provide users with a glimpse into the world of Virginia’s 18th-century planter class.

For more information about the web site, click here.

With the holiday season upon us, many new movies will be opening. One of those movies, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, tells how Nelson Mandela, newly elected as president, used the South Africa national rugby team (the Springboks) to unite his country.  While many know of Mandela and what he did for South Africa, few know the story behind the movie.

Although South Africa had been torn apart by apartheid for decades and Mandela himself had been imprisoned for more than 25 years, he came to power with a hope for peace and unity for his country. With the 1995 Rugby World Cup set to take place in South Africa, Mandela seized upon the opportunity to use the Springboks, a team synonymous with the old separatist South Africa, to achieve unity through sport.

Mason sport management professor John Nauright, who was living in South Africa when Mandela was released from prison, is an expert on sport and the role that it can play in societies in transformation.  Nauright has written several books about the role of sport, including: Sport, Cultures and Identities in South Africa and Rugby and the South Africa Nation.

“Using rugby to try to unite South Africa was a huge political gamble on Mandela’s part. Along with gaining the trust of the whites, Mandela also had to have the support of the blacks,” says Nauright. “Part of what he was trying to do was based on the belief that the Springboks would be successful in the World Cup. He took a risk and it paid off. “

As for South Africa stands today, Nauright notes that while Mandela’s plan to unite the country through rugby worked in the short term it is still a highly unequal society.  He also points out that there are still some white fans who are using the Springboks as a sort of retreat, a way back to how things used to be.