 | ||||||||
| Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2004 > November-December 2004 | ||||||||
| ||||||||
11/18/2004 3:30 AMDiscoveries: U Research Findings
Mealtimes Matter
Young people who regularly eat meals with their families are emotionally healthier, do better in school, and engage in fewer risky behaviors, a large University study has determined. Almost 5,000 students at 31 Twin Cities-area junior high and high schools were surveyed about their attitudes and their mealtimes and behaviors over the past week. In some behaviors, the differences are stark: Girls who didn’t eat with their family at least once a week were almost three times more likely to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol and four times more likely to smoke marijuana than those who ate at least seven meals with the family. The differences were less marked but still significant for boys. Researchers also found better grade-point averages and fewer symptoms of depression or suicidal thoughts among the frequent family meal group. Each additional family meal per week had a positive impact, researchers found. They theorize that the opportunity for routine communication afforded by family meals both keeps parents informed and makes young people feel more comfortable in talking to parents. The study was published in the August issue of The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
A Link to Lupus
University researchers have identified the first genetic variation known to correlate to systemic lupus erythematosus. The common gene variation, PTPN22, is found in about one in six healthy caucasians in the United States but is almost twice as common in those suffering from lupus. PTPN22 is also associated with type-1 diabetes and other diseases. Lupus is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks several of the body’s otherwise healthy organs. It is believed that multiple gene variations are responsible for lupus, so identifying those associated with the disease is a first step in developing better diagnosis and treatments. The study was published in the September issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
All the Presidents’ Personalities
Successful U.S. presidents are intelligent, assertive, and energetic, but not especially straightforward, according to a University psychologist. Deniz Ones, an international expert in personality measurement in employment, worked with the authors of the new book Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents (Brassey’s, 2004). The authors analyzed all U.S. presidents and rated them on numerous traits. Successful presidents, Ones found, are intelligent, achievement oriented, assertive, optimistic and enthusiastic, active, and tender minded or empathetic. They rate low in straightforwardness and vulnerability. The traits predict not only successful job performance in office but also historic greatness. The authors found that Theodore Roosevelt was highest in their typical success factors. They also found there has been a distinct personality shift from the early presidents to our contemporary leaders; presidents today are more extroverted, less intellectually curious, and lower in character. Jimmy Carter is the only modern president to resemble early leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt appears to be the template for today’s leaders, with researchers rating him similarly to John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.
-Chris Coughlan-Smith
U Enrollment Up, Down, and Up Again
Students who attended the University’s Twin Cities campus in the late 1970s and early ’80s will recall that they were among more than 60,000 students on campus each year. And in October 1979, Minnesota magazine reported that the Twin Cities campus was officially the world’s largest single university with 63,223 students.
But apparently those figures were unintentionally inflated. According to Peter Zetterberg, director of the U’s Office of Institutional Research and Reporting, until the late 1980s the University double-counted thousands of day students who took evening classes through what is now the College of Continuing Education.
A better way of measuring enrollment is to look at full-year equivalent (FYE) students, a measure that weights part-time students according to their credit load. According to Zetterberg, U enrollment by this measure peaked in 1981–82 at 50,966 FYE. Undergraduate numbers have moved up and down since, largely in response to Minnesota high school demographics and a conscious decision to limit enrollment in order to improve the undergraduate climate on campus. FYE bottomed out in 1999–2000 at 40,471. But with climbing high school graduation numbers and a new emphasis on students taking full course loads, FYE was up to 47,496 last year.
Now a fall 2004 count of total enrollment (which is higher than FYE) puts the U’s Twin Cities campus at number two in the nation, up one spot from last year. Ohio State University at Columbus is first with 50,995 students, while the U is right behind with 50,954 (1,420 more than fall 2003). The University of Texas–Austin, with 50,403, had been second last year but has begun working to reduce its total enrollment.
Despite a shrinking number of transfer students, Minnesota’s enrollment rose because of a 3 percent increase in graduate students and an unexpectedly large 7.8 percent increase in first-year students. The U had already admitted more freshmen than usual, but in an ordinary year about 12 percent of admitted freshmen change their minds. This fall only about 10 percent did.
-CCS
Sick from Birthdays
In one Twin Cities household, an otherwise healthy boy with a late September birthday suffered numerous ear infections every winter, twice undergoing surgery to implant tiny tubes in his eardrums to aid in fluid drainage. Yet his younger sister, with a mid-March birthday, often made it through an entire winter without a single such infection. While this may be a coincidence, public heath researchers have noted that in places with cold winters, children born in early fall appear to have an unusually high number of ear infections, while those born in spring have significantly fewer. University professor Chap Le and his colleagues from the School of Public Health shed light on the matter in a 2003 study published in the journal Statistics in Medicine.
Examining umbilical cord blood samples from 611 Twin Cities infants, researchers found that those born in spring had more than twice as many pneumococcal antibodies as those born in fall. Pneumococcal bacteria can lead to a host of diseases, among them ear infections.
Researchers theorize that in harsher climates, an expectant mother is likely to spend a lot of time in a sealed house through the winter, exposing herself to indoor air pollutants such as pneumococcus. She builds up antibodies and transfers them to her unborn child through the placenta. Thus, babies born in spring have the benefit of a high level of antibodies and are less apt to get sick. In the study, antibody levels in newborns reached their lowest on September 30 and their highest on April 1.
While researcher don’t suggest prospective parents ought to aim for spring babies, Le, an expert in health statistics, believes these findings and knowledge of infant antibody levels might be applied in explaining other perplexing public health phenomena.
-CCS
A Tour of Ethnic Markets
One of the greatest delights of traveling abroad is sampling local dishes made with exotic ingredients and traditional methods. One of the greatest disappointments of returning home with a souvenir cookbook is trying to locate, say, powdered shrimp or lotus root on a grocery store shelf. Or knowing whether Canadian bacon can be substituted for Hungarian bacon. Or what one could substitute for tiger lily buds or African pigeon peas.
Staff members at the University’s office for International Student and Scholar Services know where to find the answers to such cooking quandaries. They recently compiled a guide to 72 ethnic food markets in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs, many of them personal favorites.
Markets listed include Lebanese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, Latin American, Jamaican, West Indian, Italian, Greek, Turkish, East African, Central European, Eastern European, Russian, and Scandinavian (including Finnish and Icelandic). The guide also notes co-ops and markets that sell kosher, halal, and pareve foods.
"International Specialty and Grocery Markets in the Twin Cities" can be found at www.isss.umn.edu (click on "Useful Links"). Those who enjoy eating but not cooking might be interested to learn that several of these shops also house delis or sell ready-to-eat fare.
-Shelly Fling
Web Hit: Dislocate
A regularly published literary journal can be the perfect complement to a university’s writing program, and students in the University of Minnesota’s creative writing M.F.A. program hope Dislocate will be just that. Dislocate "provides students the chance to build a literary magazine of national reputation and to be involved in all aspects of the publishing process, from fund-raising to editorial work," says Rachel Moritz, an M.F.A. candidate and co-editor of Dislocate. "And for the department, Dislocate can be a valuable asset to attract future students and allows the University a chance to have more of a voice in the national literary scene."
The fall 2004 online issue features work from renowned California poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who read as part of the U’s Poetry Festival last fall, and Anna Cypra Oliver (M.F.A. ’97), who recently published a memoir, Assembling My Father: A Daughter’s Detective Story. It also features work from students, alumni, and others in poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, as well as a lengthy interview with Herrera.
Dislocate took its name from the idea of challenging preconceived positions—in short, dislocating them. It was first published online in 2001 and for three years was maintained and occasionally updated by Neil Kozlowicz (M.F.A. ’02). Recognizing what a national literary journal can mean to a creative writing program, Moritz and fellow M.F.A. students Shana Youngdahl and Jen Johnson took up Dislocate and revitalized it. Although currently only an online journal, fund-raising is under way for a print edition in spring. And, Moritz says, the editors are getting first-year M.F.A. students involved in Dislocate and working toward establishing it as a tradition for students in the program.
-CCS
Dear Clarence Darrow
As the University of Minnesota Law Library closed in on acquiring its millionth volume—and becoming only the eighth law library in the nation to reach that milestone—the search began for an appropriately momentous holding to mark the occasion.
"We watched what was coming up for sale, things like Blackstone [1700s-era Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England] and copies of the Magna Carta," says law professor and library director Joan Howland (M.B.A. ’97). "Well, we already have those."
Instead, the U’s law library settled on a much rarer find. With the purchase of The Papers of Clarence Darrow, which includes 900 original letters and other documents, the library—already one of the top research and teaching libraries of its kind—immediately became the world’s leading resource on one of America’s most famous trial attorneys. Darrow is best known for successfully arguing against the death penalty in the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924 and defending academic freedom in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.
Howland, rare books curator Katherine Hedin (M.L.S. ’79), and others worked with the Darrow family to purchase the collection, which had been found in boxes in their Illinois home a few years earlier. The family agreed to sell to the U for far less than what the letters could have brought on the open market, in large part because of how the library plans to handle and archive the papers and its vow to keep the collection together. The library, located in Mondale Hall on the West Bank, is raising private funds to cover the cost of the letters (more than $100,000) and to expand its Darrow holdings. In October, Hedin acquired Darrow’s original Scopes trial transcript that includes his notations.
Darrow’s papers include letters from early 20th-century luminaries Helen Keller, Henry Ford, and presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Librarians are just beginning to transcribe the papers and hope to have an index ready next year; they may create a full-text online database after that. Thus far, Hedin, who led the search for the millionth volume, has been one of the few to skim the letters. "One thing that really struck me is how his compassion comes through in the letters," she says. "The other thing is his wit. Some of his letters back and forth with Sinclair Lewis are very witty."
The Darrow papers will be surrounded by other momentous holdings in the law library. The 999,999th volume acquired was one of the first printings of Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s revolutionary 1776 tract on freedom of expression. And for number 1,000,001, the library looked toward the future: an electronic database of all cases and law articles that cite Clarence Darrow and his cases.
-CCS
Overheard on Campus
"Every time I hear about one of these reporters going in to speak about their sources, my stomach drops to my shoes. We’re in a crisis on this. I’m absolutely terrified about how this is going to turn out for media credibility."
—Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University, quoted in the New York Times about journalists being questioned in the investigation to find who disclosed to journalists the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
"Of the 28 states that have Indian gaming operations contributing to the $16.7 billion national [gaming revenue] figure, Minnesota is small fry compared to the larger and wealthier markets in southern California, Connecticut and Florida. In fact, all of Minnesota’s casinos together would fit inside just one of the Indian casinos in Connecticut."
—Kevin Washburn, law professor at the University and former federal gaming regulator, in a Star Tribune editorial about his belief that $10 billion in Indian gaming revenues in Minnesota is an inflated number.
"Any one of those health problems doesn’t sound very dramatic. But the women had an average of six of these symptoms."
—Patricia McGovern, associate professor in the University’s School of Public Health, on her study of new mothers who return to work six weeks after giving birth and suffer from fatigue, headaches, backaches, constipation, hemorrhoids, and other postpartum ailments.
"Religious denominations should be free to refuse to recognize marriages that contradict their moral precepts, as they do now. But as a legal matter, no person’s marriage has ever required religious approval to be valid."
—Dale Carpenter, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, in a Star Tribune editorial about same-sex marriage.
"Everyone wants a free T-shirt. But then when you end up with five credit cards and lots of debt, who cares about the
T-shirts?"
—Jennifer Klecker, University principal collections representative, in a Minnesota Daily article on a new University on-line class, "Cash or Credit: You Need to Know."