Renovations to UVM’s Billings Library are the featured example in an article by The Chronicle of Higher Education that reports on a growing trend among colleges and universities: overhauling museums and libraries to incorporate active learning.
Source: UVM News
Reuters Health covered a large national study coauthored by UVM’s Erika Edwards in JAMA Pediatrics that analyzed nearly 90 percent of all preterm and low-birth-weight babies born in the U.S. between January 2014 and December 2016. Their data revealed that when it came to the most underweight babies, “minorities tended to end up at different hospitals than whites and that black babies were more likely to be treated at a lower-quality NICU than white babies,” Reuters reports.
Source: UVM News
Conservation biologist, Gund Institute fellow and ‘editor ’n’ chef’ of Eat the Invaders Joe Roman makes the case to expand our palates (and the menu) to include invasive species. Roman advocates to consume these harmful creatures as way to control their spread. “They taste good, they’re pretty easy to sell, and now most people have heard of it’ through derbies and other outreach efforts,” he tells the Christian Science Monitor in an article about eating the invasive lionfish.
Source: UVM News
A provocative essay by Anthony “Jack” Gierzynski, chair of UVM Political Science Department, grabbed the attention of “Game of Thrones” fans ahead of the long-awaited premiere of the show’s final season. Gierzynski’s essay, which made the case for an unhappy ending to the hit show “because, sadly, unhappy endings mimic reality,” appeared on Salon, Quartzy, The Hill, The Week, and Business Standard, among other media outlets. The essay first appeared in The Conversation.
A May 27 article in Foreign Affairs about what real-world lessons “Game of Thrones” offers foreign-policy makers and foreign-policy analysts also referenced Gierzynski’s research with students about the politics depicted in the show.
Source: UVM News
Book critic Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” rounds up her 10 favorite books of the year, including “Black Is the Body” by UVM professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies Emily Bernard.
“In this outstanding essay collection, Emily Bernard writes with depth, poetic intensity and humor about growing up in the South and living and teaching in the snow globe state of Vermont. Bernard’s autobiographical writing about race never hews to safe or expected paths,” writes Corrigan.
Revisit Corrigan’s full review of Bernard’s book upon its release.
Source: UVM News
With a camera in-hand, Hilary Byrne ’11 trailed closely behind the characters of her latest documentary, weaving in and out of their ski tracks to get the shots. But as challenging as filming and simultaneously bombing down a mountain may sound, “that wasn’t the hard part; that came with the territory,” the outdoor sports filmmaker says.
What challenged Byrne instead and kept her awake at night was the anxiety she felt for her film’s characters: documented and undocumented immigrants. Her short film “The Quiet Force” sheds light on large populations of Latinx immigrants and their families who live, work and ski year-round in resort towns like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Mammoth, California.
“They are the silent force that’s holding up the service economy in these ski towns. They really put their heads down, work hard and have kind of gone unnoticed in these communities,” Byrne says. She estimates that Latinx immigrants account for 30 to 40 percent of residents in these destination ski towns. “When we started the project, there were people who didn’t realize that.”
Byrne and her co-director Sophie Danison got the film off the ground in 2016 after building trust with individuals connected to those communities, but quickly hit a rough patch. “We started developing the idea,” Byrne explains, “and then Trump got elected. And then it became even more relevant. The story shifted from being less about Hispanic integration and the outdoors to being more about the bigger picture of immigration and immigration policies. We kind of went for it a little more.”
Photo by Leslie Hittemeier
They interviewed restaurant servers, carpenters and hotel staff — all immigrants — as well as children of immigrants, nonprofit organizations, law enforcement officials and business owners for the film. What they discovered and depict in “The Quiet Force” is just how inefficient and complex U.S. immigration laws truly are, and how they directly compete with employment and economic needs in these towns.
One local business owner in the film explains that it took him more than four years and nearly $20,000 to sponsor his kitchen manager, whom he describes as a model citizen. “It’s really difficult and arduous and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t have access to that kind of capital,” he says in the film.
Meanwhile, an immigration attorney in the film says that since 9/11, immigration laws have all but forced her clients to go undocumented if they wish to stay in the U.S. permanently. “Frankly the law is set up so that we cannot get the necessary worker visas that we need. We cannot get the permanent resident cards the way that we need,” she explains.
Cognizant of the risk they put their characters in, Byrne and Danison worked with the immigration lawyer to ensure they protected identities of those in the film. “The hardest part was sleeping at night and not knowing if we were doing something that was going to help and not hurt these people. At the same time, the political rhetoric was rapidly changing and it became more of a scary thing. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids became more prevalent and that made it scary for some people. We really had to tiptoe,” she says.
Byrne and Danison cut the tension with powerful shots of the outdoors and narratives about what skiing means to this unique community—a sentiment Byrne can relate to as an avid skier. They followed Diana, a psychology student and server, on an arduous ski tour that helped take her mind off the stress of waiting for her DREAM Act application to process. For her, the physical, mental and financial challenge of skiing “pushed me to be somebody I wanted to be,” she says.
This is the part of the story that Byrne hoped to and felt most compelled to tell. Both she and Danison originally teamed up for the project after ruminating together over the uninspiring confines of the productions they worked on at their day jobs in the outdoor adventure industry. Byrne wanted to pivot her outdoor filmmaking skills toward a story that had “some more meat to it.”
Admittedly, that appreciation for storytelling was something she had to develop over time. Byrne recalls being more interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking as a student at the University of Vermont than the theories and underpinnings of storytelling emphasized in her curricula. In hindsight, she’s grateful her courses ingrained in her a timeless skill rather than a mastery of temporary technology.
Like all good stories, Byrne’s experience came full-circle when she screened “The Quiet Force” at UVM for an audience of students, faculty, staff and community members in the spring. A panel discussion with faculty experts and immigration professionals followed the screening and offered viewers a chance to learn more about what they could do to assist members of their own communities who might be facing similar conditions right here in Vermont.
“We need to be good neighbors,” Byrne says. “These people are human, too, and want the same things and desires out of life. Why should that be so much harder for some people?”
Source: UVM News
As critics weigh in on the best work of 2019, Emily Bernard, Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor in UVM’s Department of English, has not gone unrecognized. Her recent collection of essays Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine was named today by Kirkus as one of the “Best Books of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia.” The book also was named one of the top ten “unputdownable reads” of 2019 by noted author and critic Maureen Corrigan. Corrigan cited Bernard’s book on the December 3rd edition of Fresh Air, the daily WHYY program hosted by Terry Gross and heard in NPR stations across the country.
“Bernard writes with depth, poetic intensity and humor about growing up Black in the South and living and teaching in the snow globe of Vermont,” Corrigan notes. “Her personal essays on race never hew to the same or expected paths.”
Kirkus declares Black is the Body is “almost devoid of jargon. Instead, the writing is deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning.”
Bernard’s book unpacks her experience with race in America, having grown up Black in the south in Nashville and now raising two Black daughters in one of the whitest states in the United States.
In one essay, Bernard describes overhearing her twin daughters, who were five at the time, chat about a commercial on TV during Black History Month.
“One of them says to the other one, ‘See, we’re Black.’ And the other one says, ‘No, we’re brown,’ pointing to her skin. And the first one says, ‘No. Well, yes, but they call it Black,”’ recalls Bernard.
She remembers being impressed with their learning at the time, but also being struck by the fact that she had not yet taught them about race, and how different their lessons would be from hers growing up.
“I realized my introduction to the language of race was about trauma. It was racism. I learned that I was Black. I learned that I was always in danger. I learned that was I vulnerable,” she says. She likens her adolescent years and progressive Nashville community to “cogs on the great wheel of that whole machine. It was an important time, but it was also a scary time.”
Bernard holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Non-fiction. Her first book Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Source: UVM News
Going pro early may be a no-brainer for exceptional, young basketball stars like former Duke freshman and 2019 NBA draft first-pick Zion Williamson. But a study in the “International Journal of Sport Finance” by two UVM sports-enthused professors proposes a new salary structure that might entice most other college players considering the NBA to graduate before trying their hand at going pro.
“Zion Williamson is a classic example of a strangely strong signal that foregoing the remaining time in college is rational—from a basketball perspective, we’re not talking about his education or degrees—but from a basketball learning perspective, he had nothing more to gain from playing for Duke. So he should go to the pros and get the contract,” says Michael J. Tomas III, finance professor at the University of Vermont and co-author of the study with UVM accounting professor Barbara Arel.
Noting that the average NBA career length is just 4.8 years, Arel and Tomas reimagined the NBA’s rookie salary scale—which currently awards the highest salary to the player picked first in the draft and dwindles down with each successive player picked—in a way that considers both draft pick position and class year.
“This is our attempt to show that you could alter the NBA draft schedule to try to incentivize students to stay. There’s been a big discussion about people leaving early to go to the NBA draft and I think that revolves around the idea of wanting to see them get an education,” says Tomas.
Their study proposes a pay scale that locks in salary gains as athletes advance toward graduation and incorporates yearly bonuses into their salaries determined by class year. Specifically, it offers a drafted freshman 60 percent of the current NBA rookie salary base and ratchets up to 120 percent for a drafted graduate in that same position.
Inspired by a ratchet option or cliquet option in the finance industry, the sports-enthused professors say that ratcheting up rookies’ salaries this way would ultimately “provide the incentive for players to delay entering the draft until they are ready to contribute to the NBA, but still allows an early exercise decision to remain rational for the very top prospects,” like Williamson, for example, who are likely to be picked first and go on to earn multiple contracts throughout their NBA careers. For these players, the sooner they are drafted, the sooner they can earn non-rookie salaries and contracts.
Subsequently, the researchers argue, the NBA’s labor market would improve as a whole as drafted athletes enter the NBA more prepared for the professional league following those additional years of experience playing college basketball. Though the cost and burden of additional training would shift from the NBA to colleges and universities, those schools would retain top talent that might otherwise leave, while the NBA bears the brunt of the financial incentive that keeps players in college.
“With this system you wouldn’t have universities that are already facing financial difficulties, trying to pay players to come and make their sports teams better,” says Tomas, adding that it also maintains the competitive landscape and possibility for underdog victories and March Madness upsets that fans have come to appreciate.
“Ratcheting Up: Adjusting the Incentives in the NBA Draft,” by UVM’s Barbara Arel and Michael Tomas, is featured in the November issue of the “International Journal of Sport Finance.”
Source: UVM News
To most people, last summer’s breach of Capital One, which exposed the financial records of nearly 106 million of the San Francisco-based bank’s customers, was more of the same: the latest in a numbing string of hacks that seem to threaten personal security more every year.
But in an important way, it was different – and more alarming – than past hacks, like the Equifax breach of 2017.
Capital One stores its customer data not on computers it owns that are housed on its premises but, in a trend that has leapfrogged traditional cybersecurity defenses, in “the cloud,” immense clusters of offsite servers managed by third parties.
“There’s been a lot of progress in defending internal computer systems against external attack, the way you’d secure a castle,” said Chris Skalka, chair of UVM’s Computer Science department and director of the university’s Center for Computer Security and Privacy. “But cloud security is very different and presents entirely new challenges.”
At the frontlines of this new cybersecurity war is a company founded and led by UVM alum Brian Ahern called Threat Stack, which Forbes magazine profiled as an emerging leader in cloud based security that is “eating the lunch” of legacy firms like IBM. Last year the company saw its revenues grow 100 percent and now has 150 employees in its Boston headquarters.
“We are in the midst of a massive migration to the cloud,” said Ahern, who graduated from UVM in 1990 with a degree in electrical engineering. “Most of the companies in the process of migrating are having difficulty understanding where their data – particularly sensitive information – is located, which is a significant risk both for organizations and their customers. Threat Stack was developed specifically to solve the unique security challenges of the cloud, so we’ve been able to drive the pace of innovation in the cloud security space.”
AI-Enhanced
This fall Threat Stack and UVM began a relationship with the potential to offer significant benefits to both the company and the university.
Skalka, fellow Computer Science faculty member Joe Near and postdoctoral student John Ring have begun a project designed to enhance Threat Stack’s threat assessment process with artificial intelligence that could make cloud-based cybersecurity more efficient and accurate and lengthen the company’s lead in the marketplace. Threat Stack has provided $100,000 to support the research project, which will subsidize a fellowship for Ring.
This fall Ring was embedded at the firm for two weeks to learn its technology first-hand. He and his UVM colleagues are now conducting research to determine if they can use machine learning to prioritize the anomalies Threat Stack’s software identifies as potential threats, some of which are false positives, so human oversight can better concentrate on those that deserve attention. If the project is successful, UVM’s work may allow the company to more reliably identify false negatives, as well.
The work is a good match for UVM’s expertise, Skalka said.
“We have a track record in cybersecurity and in using machine-learning to preserve privacy in large, cloud-based data sets,” he said.
In the classroom
Partnering with the company offers the university another advantage: a chance to bring leading edge cloud-based cybersecurity expertise to UVM computer science classrooms.
Like the cybersecurity industry itself, computer science departments at most universities have been slow to adapt their cybersecurity curriculum to the growing ubiquity of the cloud.
With Ahern’s and Threat Stack’s help, that could change. Skalka has already invited Threat Stack’s chief security officer, Sam Bisbee, to present a lecture in an advanced Computer Science class next spring.
“We’re optimistic that the academic partnership can evolve and grow,” he said.Ahern sees clear benefits for UVM. “Today’s workforce has a lot of cloud experts and a lot of security experts but very few cloud security experts,” he said. “Incorporating cloud security in UVM’s computer science curriculum is great for students and something businesses will be looking for as cloud usage continues to grow.”
Skin in the Game
The UVM/Threat Stack partnership is the latest pairing in a program called the UVM Business Fellowship Program developed by the university’s Office of the Vice President for Research, which contributed $40,000 to the partnership.
“The goal of the program is to build relationships between businesses and the university,” said Richard Galbraith, UVM’s vice president for research. “In this case, it’s the ideal situation. Both the company and UVM have invested in the relationship. We both have skin in the game; that kind of commensal arrangement is good for everyone and increases the chance of success.”
“Collaboration between business and higher education is a critical piece of moving technology and business forward,” Ahern said. “By collaborating with leading universities like UVM, companies like Threat Stack can accomplish two goals simultaneously: continue driving the pace of innovation and preparing students for the reality of a cloud-first job market.”
Source: UVM News
Most people who experience severe trauma recover their health. But 23 percent develop PTSD, a difficult-to-treat illness that combines intrusive thoughts about the trauma, avoidance of reminders of it, low mood and an exaggerated startle reaction. Which trauma victims will develop the disorder and which will be spared is not well understood.
A study just published in the journal Depression and Anxiety both offers new clues on identifying potential PTSD candidates among the population of trauma sufferers and suggests potential interventions that could prevent its development.
The study is the first to gather extensive data from trauma victims during the first 30 days after the traumatic event, a critical period says Matthew Price, associate professor of Psychological Sciences UVM and lead author of the study.
“Getting PTSD is not like the flu where you wake up one day with a virus and feel sick,” Price said. “It’s a complex system where a range of symptoms develop, build on themselves and influence each other over time. After about a month, the die is cast, so to understand and prevent PTSD, it’s very important to map the dynamics of how things develop early on.”
The nature of the disease has made that difficult, Price says. Researchers either had little access to trauma victims, who often left the hospital abruptly, or weren’t comfortable being interviewed numerous times during the acute post-trauma phase.
The new study took a novel approach. Using a mobile phone app, a non-intrusive method of gathering information, researchers were able to text trauma victims a series of questions, which they answered when it was convenient, in each of the 30 days after the trauma event.
The questions were crafted so they yielded day-by-day information about the key symptoms that characterize PTSD and were asked in such a way that researchers could track their development over time.
Two independent tracks
Then the research team used a statistical technique called short term dynamic modeling to determine which symptoms acted as influencers, causing other symptoms to develop and gain strength, which symptoms arose from those influencers and which operated independently.
“For one series of symptoms, the symptom chain looked a lot like fear conditioning,” Price said. “People first had intrusive, unpleasant thoughts about what happened to them, which led them to avoid doing things that remind them of their trauma, and that avoidance led to hypervigilance.” The sequence reflects a commonly accepted theoretical framework for PTSD development.
But feelings of depression seemed to operate independently of the fear conditioning symptoms, Price said.
“Depression wasn’t influenced by other symptoms and wasn’t an influencer; it was off on its own and self-perpetuating.”
That’s very different from full blown PTSD, Price said, where fear conditioning and depression are tightly integrated, and suggests a treatment approach that is very different from what is currently done.
“The most commonly used strategy right now is to wait and see,” he said. “The research shows that, by contrast – as challenging as it is to treat victims soon after the trauma – it’s critically important to intervene early to head off the development of full blown PTSD. Prevention is a preferred strategy because many individuals who go on to develop PTSD do not seek out treatment right away. Instead, these folks can suffer for months or years before getting the help they need.”
The research suggests that intervention could happen along two tracks, Price said.
On the hand one hand, patients could undergo a form of exposure therapy to address the fear-based cluster of symptoms. On the other, a more cognitive-based approach could address developing depression.
Which trauma victims are most likely to develop PTSD?
The research findings suggest that those who are “having a strong reaction to trauma cues, who shortly after a trauma seem to be very reactive to things that remind them of their trauma, would probably be good people to look out for,” Price says.
But the questions around PTSD are still very much unanswered, Price said.
“This research is trying to piece together what this process may look like as it unfolds so that we can start to develop treatments that might be able to deliver it in this very acute phase. There is much more work to do.”
Source: UVM News
