University Research

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 31 may 2014

Researchers from MIT, Lisa Freed and Martin Kolewe, used fabrication techniques from microelectronics industry to make thin sheets of biorubber with microscale rectangular holes of uniform dimensions and then stacked these with precise positions of pores one over the other. The stacking process was done with the help of a programmable machine adapted from electronics industry used to stack thin material layers to build circuit boards and integrated circuit (IC) packages. Researchers demonstrated pore patterns that could produce 'interwoven musle-like bundles' out of mouse muscle cells and rat neonatal heart cells. According to Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic of Columbia University, this new scaffolding allowed the researchers to form tissue that mimics an important structural quality of heart tissue called 'anisotropy'. Freed and Kolewe say that their research provides unprecedented level of control over arrangement of pore networks and can lead to 'a whole new design space' to further experiment the 3-dimensional factors that influence cell alignment and tissue formation and could serve as a platform for the development of implantable organ tissue. Read on...

MIT Technology Review: A Manufacturing Tool Builds 3-D Heart Tissue
Author: Mike Orcutt

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 15 may 2014

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) holds a promise to expand educational reach to those with limited resources to pursue education in colleges and universities. Research has suggested some concerns for this education tool as the completion rates are low and those who access them already have substantial learning experience and prior education. Professor Jennifer M. Morton of City University of New York provides a perspective on how MOOCs can possibly influence and alter the dynamics of the current socio-economic class structure that traditional college education entails. According to her, college education is considered to be the first place where students with low-income families have to consistently engage with middle-class students and professors and navigate middle-class social norms. Moreover, in addition to cognitive skills like mathematical, scientific and historical knowledge, college education also imparts practical skills like social, emotional and behavioral competencies. But full adoption of MOOCs by large public universities can potentially harm the prospects of the students for whom college education is essential to elevate their status into middle-class. Online education may not provide them social and practical skills that are considered a necessity in highly competitive workplace environment. Tenacious, confident and socially competent employees have an edge over equally cognitively talented employees who lack practical skills. Professor Morton suggests that with extensive adoption of MOOCs by institutions that provide an environment to disadvantaged students to break the barrier of poverty and deprivation, the socio-economic segregation of the US educational system will further expand to the postsecondry level and widen the gap between haves and have-nots. When these students that lack social skills apply for employment with degrees they will more likely be considered lacking competencies by their prospective employers and unfit to effectively contribute to their organizations. Read on...

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Unequal Classrooms - What Online Education Cannot Teach
Author: Jennifer M. Morton

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 05 may 2014

Case studies are an important learning tool for students to gain insights into the functioning of companies in variety of industries and the decision making processes that make or break them. Most business schools provide case studies in their curriculum to give students practical knowledge that relates with their theoretical learning. Michael Pich of INSEAD Business School explains his perspective on writing case studies and its value to students in their business learning. According to him, combination of academic research with practical insights is essential for writing good cases. He explains the importance of case studies and its value to students - 'Case study provides a description of 'what' the firm or protagonist was doing, and the context for the challenge presented in the case. It also provides then the context for discussing the 'why', the theory and frameworks through which we can develop deeper insights into what is really going on in the case. Finally, it leads to further discussion of how this issue raised in the case applies to other contexts; contexts that are more relevant to the particular students or executives in the case discussion.' Read on...

The New Indian Express: A 'Case' for Effectiveness
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 01 may 2014

For ethical decision making both quantitative and qualitative approaches have to be considered for better results. Research by Dr. Chen-Bo Zhong of Rotman School of Management advocates a decision strategy that gives importance to both reason and intuition. He suggests that organizations can improve their decision making strategies as they plan and develop incentive structures by balancing economy with psychology and they should emphasize the value of people's intuition and emotions. In today's socially networked and interconnected world consequences of people's actions are more significant and impact wider society. So it becomes important to study unethical behavior and understand why it happens and how we can counteract it. Most current theories in ethical decision making are based on Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development that holds that moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable development stages - two stages within three levels. (1) Pre-conventional level - judging the morality of an action by its direct consequences. (2) Conventional level - judging the morality of actions by comparing them to society's views and expectations. (3) Post-conventional level - is marked by a growing realization that individuals are separate entities from society and individual's own perspective may take precedence over society's view. The ethical decision-making research that follows in the Kohlberg tradition considers decision-making as very linear and cognitive, with it broken into discrete steps: recognize the moral dilemma -> reason based on your moral principles -> make a moral judgment -> act on that judgment. But Dr. Chen-Bo Zhong's research challenges the idea that moral reasoning is so much systematic and linear. It builds on NYU Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's findings, that first questioned the rationality-based moral judgment. Dr. Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory considers the way morality varies between cultures and identifies six foundations that underlie morality in all societies and individuals. He names them using pairs of opposites to indicate that they provide continua along which judgments can be measured: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; respect for authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. Haidt showed that oftentimes, moral judgement follows not from the analysis of harm, but from a very instinctive and intuitive reaction of disgust, and as a result, moral judgment is often based on intuition. Based on this line of research, moral judgment and decision-making is not just a systematic process: peoples' affect, or emotion, plays an important role in these judgments. Dr. Zhong's research shows that there are two distinct processes involved in moral decision-making: one is very reasoned and systematic, while the other is more intuitive and affective. He believes that our affective reactions actually play a role in regulating our ethical behaviour. This is in line with University of Southern California Professor Antonio Damasio's work on 'somatic markers'. Prof. Domasio has shown that reactions such as guilt, disgust and happiness play an important role in regulating behaviour. Dr. Zhong further explains that as economics is substantially based on rationality, reason and incentives, its education influences people towards numbers and calculations i.e. to quantify things. Economics tends to under-emphasize things that are less tangible, less quantifiable, and that can have impacts on multiple domains. Research shows that when people are asked to use a numeric metric to evaluate a product it actually dampens people's enjoyment of the product. This is even recognized by economists. Robert Frank showed that students trained in economics tend to be more competitive and often make more selfish choices. It is possible that being reminded of money, a standard quantitative measure of value, automatically activates a calculative mindset that suppresses emotional influence and disinhibits unethical behaviours. Dr. Zhong's hypothesis is that over emphasis on reason and excessive deliberation might actually have negative ethical consequences. Read on...

Forbes: The Downsides of Deliberative Decision Making
Author: Chen-Bo Zhong

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 28 apr 2014

Most robotic components that are currently used are hard, large and heavy and therefore limit their speed and motion. But researchers like Saul Griffith are trying to change that. He is using soft, inflatable materials that are lighter, faster and even substantially strong. Soft in this context would signify lighter weight, lower cost, more efficient, more resilient, higher dynamic range, and tunable. Some of the examples of soft engineered robots in the current research include gripping eggs (George Whitesides at Harvard University), inflatable robotic arm, inflatable vehicle etc. Moreover the research have potential to be utilized in medical applications - prosthetics, aiding stroke victims, lessening spinal cord injuries, soft external muscles for aging population etc. Read on...

Engineering: Rethinking Rigidity in Design
Author: Tom Spendlove

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 27 apr 2014

Healthcare collaborations work towards bringing academia and industry together by pooling their resources and expertise to save costs and to bring breakthrough research, products and services for the benefit of society. To create such a collaborative ecosystem, three entities - Spectrum Health, Michigan State University and Van Andel Research Institute - have come together. A new lab is being developed to have basic and translational research to already existing Spectrum's competence in patient care and clinical trials. It brings academic focus as biomedical research is essential for medical advancements and developing novel treatments. According to Jeff Dwyer of Michigan State University, 'Life sciences and biomedical research linked to the clinical healthcare environment has really been growing already. It's been going so well, there is just need for more of this kind of space.' VP of research for Spectrum, Dr. Sandra Rempel says, 'The ability for us to bring new doctors opens up the door for future growth. The whole aim is to be able to come up with new discoveries we can publish and disseminate to the world and bring new information to enhance the field and cure illness.' In addition to their duty as clinicians they would now have an opportunity to focus more on research as principal investigators. Another goal is to create and build an academic framework for physician-scientists, medical students and graduate and undergraduate students to work together through established partnerships with VARI and MSU's College of Human Medicine. Dr. Rempel further explains, 'One of the things that really attracted me here is a very strong collaboration that already exists between all of the institutions. That kind of synergy allows us to grow beyond what each of us can do on our own. From collecting data to securing grants, the collaborations go beyond practical lab experience. We now have researchers who can take them into their labs. We see this as a great win-win situation for all the institutions involved. The whole idea is that when we collaborate, we get together as a group and exchange all our clinical and scientific ideas. We can write papers together, put grants together. MSU might get a grant, or we might get the grant and they would help... If we had a project, postdocs and students would come in and work on that project.' Read on...

Rapid Growth: Good Medicine - Medical research collaboration booms
Author: Marla R. Miller

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 08 apr 2014

A team of economists, Esther Duflo & Abhijeet Banerjee (both from MIT) and Arun Chandrashekhar & Matthew Jackson (both from Stanford), in their research paper 'The Diffusion of Microfinance', explain the effects of providing information first to the well connected people on the popularity of socially beneficial programs. They termed this new measure of social influence as 'diffusion centrality'. Researchers examined the spread of microfinance in India through word of mouth and found that when socially well connected individuals were the first to know and gain access to these programs it increased the participation by 11%. The surveys for the study were mainly conducted in the select villages of the state of Karnataka in India. The study also found that participants in the microfinance programs are more effective in dissipating information to others - 7 times more than those who know about the programs but not participating. The research can be utilized by microfinance institutions and nonprofit poverty alleviation groups to evaluate the most effective methods to introduce and implement such programs in local settings. Read on...

Asian Scientist: How Anti-Poverty Programs Go Viral
Author: Peter Dizikes

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 17 mar 2014

Social media, search terms, blogs, online surveys etc are becoming new methods for researchers to analyze data and get insights into various aspects of human behavior. According to James Pennebaker, President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), 'these technology tools provide capability to capture people's thinking, communication patterns, health, beliefs, prejudices, group behaviors etc'. Article provides examples of studies conducted through various web-based media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google etc that have considerable impact on the understanding of personality and social psychology. Analysis of 400,000 Facebook posts by scientists points out the differences in the communication pattern of parents while interacting with their children versus their friends and how they deal with their adult vs teen children. Scientists analyzed 36,000 tweets during the three months leading up to the births and some 40,000 tweets for three months after the births to detect changes in mood and behavior, and found 376 new mothers who might be at risk of postpartum depression. Scientists J. B. Michel and Erez Aiden of Harvard University, used millions of books digitized by Google to build a scientific tool to measure trends in our shared culture, history, and language going back hundreds of years. Roxane Cohen Silver of University of California at Irvine has been using online surveys to study how people cope with trauma in the aftermath of disaster. She is now planning a project with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, to use mobile app for the study of communities at-risk due to severe weather events. Read on...

PsychCentral: Using Social Media as New Tool to Explain Human Behavior
Author: Name

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 18 feb 2014

Nitrogen, the largest component of air, is the essential requirement for crop growth but most of it is provided by fertilizers. The only exceptions are some legumes that can absorb nitrogen directly from air with the help of bacteria. Professor Edward Cocking of University of Nottingham is now developing an innovative technique, termed as N-Fix, to put a nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant roots that would fulfil its nitrogen requirement from air. The research has critical implications for agricultural practices. According to Dr. Edward Cocking, 'The world needs to unhook itself from its ever increasing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers produced from fossil fuels with its high economic costs, its pollution of the environment and its high energy cost'. The first European Nitrogen Assessment (ENA) launched in 2011, mentions the cost of damage caused by nitrogen across Europe as 70-320 billion Euro while the benefit of using nitrogen fertilizers in European agriculture is only 20-80 billion Euro. Read on...

The Times of India: A new technology may make fertilizers irrelevant
Author: Subodh Varma

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 27 jan 2014

Harvard University's Center for Nonprofits estimates that US-based nonprofit organizations have about US$ 40 billion fraud losses every year. While a Washington Post analysis of filings from 2008 to 2012 found that top 20 nonprofit organizations have a combined loss of more than half-billion dollars due to unauthorized uses of funds. Professor Eugene Fram of Rochester Institute of Technology have some suggestions for the boards of charitables - Audit committee to review annual audits; Supervise executive compensation & other financial activities; Annual review of conflict of interest policies; Honesty background of new hires; Interactions with external auditors without the presence of management. He also suggest a list of questions that should be asked with the auditors to ascertain any financial wrongdoings and ensure fraud prevention. Alert, attentive and proactive boards can create environment of honesty and deter happenings of fraud. Read on...

Huffington Post: Nonprofit Fraud Robs Charities of Substantial Dollars
Author: Eugene Fram

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