Spring 2018

Without access to care, 'Hispanic health paradox' reverses

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 18:03:58 +0000

Without access to care, 'Hispanic health paradox' reverses Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/22/2018 - 11:03

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Foreign-born less likely to receive treatment, manage conditions, CU Boulder researchers find

Almost everywhere in the world, lower socioeconomic status is a reliable indicator of higher mortality rates and worse population health.

Almost.

Emily Bacon

For decades, surveys have shown that Hispanics living in the United States have relatively better health and lower mortality rates than other racial groups with similar, or even higher, socioeconomic status, including non-Hispanic whites. The effect—known as the “Hispanic health paradox”—is especially pronounced in foreign-born Hispanics.

Recent research, however, is casting new light on this phenomenon—particularly for foreign-born Hispanics and African Americans, whose health outcomes fall below those of non-Hispanic whites and U.S.-born Hispanics.

The research, led by �鶹��Ƶ researchers and published in the journal Biodemography and Social Biology, found that foreign-born Hispanics were less likely to get treated for hypertension, and more than twice as likely to manage their condition, due to one important cause: a lack of access to affordable health care.

“It’s very disheartening,” Emily Bacon, lead author of the study, says. “There is a dire situation for migrants in U.S. when it comes to accessing health care. Despite their pretty good health patterns overall, it’s completely reversed when looking at management. … That’s how much health care matters.”

Researchers have sought to identify various drivers of the “Hispanic health paradox” for years, including the “salmon effect”—immigrants may return to their own countries if they become sick—and the fact that less-healthy people are less likely to immigrate in the first place.

But Bacon, a PhD candidate in sociology at CU Boulder, wanted to know more about what happens to those who do live with illness.

We know there’s a paradox,” she says, “but does that extend to actually managing illness once Hispanics get sick?”

To find out, Bacon and her co-investigators at CU Boulder’s Institute for Behavioral Studies, Richard Rogers, professor of sociology, and Fernando Riosmena, associate professor of geography, analyzed a large data set from the bi-annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The research found that foreign-born Hispanics, when compared to non-Hispanic whites, were 38 percent less likely to receive treatment for hypertension, and if they did, were 60 percent less likely to actually stick to the regiment.

“Not only does the (NHANES) questionnaire survey thousands of people every other year, but they do clinical exams” that document blood pressure, height, weight, heart rate, cholesterol levels and other factors, Bacon says.

“This means we could look at people who say they are diagnosed with hypertension and their blood-pressure readings. If the readings are high, we can say they haven’t successfully managed the condition; if it’s pretty low, you can say, ‘OK, they have.’”

The research found that foreign-born Hispanics, when compared to non-Hispanic whites, were 38 percent less likely to receive treatment for hypertension, and if they did, were 60 percent less likely to actually stick to the regiment.

“It’s actually the opposite of the Hispanic health paradox,” Bacon says. “It’s not good.”

However, when adjusting the statistics for access to health-care, the disparities in hypertension control was drastically reduced between foreign-born Hispanics and non-white Hispanics.

The reason for that isn’t surprising, Bacon says.

“We know this group in particular faces a lot of challenges, especially with health care, and most did not benefit from the ACA (Affordable Care Act),” she says. “There are many barriers to access, unless they pay out of pocket. Most don’t have access to Medicaid or Medicare.”

In short, lack of access is the primary reason foreign-born Hispanics don’t manage hypertension well—and potentially, by extension, any other condition.

But there is an upside, too: “It provides a direct point of targeted intervention. We have to develop better systems of getting people access to care,” she says.

Bacon recognizes that immigration has been a political flash point for some Americans since the 2016 presidential election. But, she says, political forces on both right and left recognize the critical role immigrant labor plays in the economy, and an immigration-free future is not in the cards.

“We are paying for people’s health care one way or another anyway, so we have to decide: Do we want to keep people healthy to begin with, before they get sick, or spend much more money when they get very sick later?” she says.

And where the federal government may fall short in supporting immigrant health care, many local communities are stepping up. Boulder County’s Clinica Family Health and Denver’s Inner City Health Center, for example, serve immigrant populations at no charge.

“By investing in organizations that provide care to everybody, we are seeing more negative health patterns among most disadvantaged reversed, or good ones continued, despite the relatively dire national scene,” Bacon says.

Foreign-born less likely to receive treatment, manage conditions, CU Boulder researchers find

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For better health, urbanites find help from trees

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:55:58 +0000

For better health, urbanites find help from trees Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/22/2018 - 10:55

City trees benefit human health more than grass, CU Boulder research finds

The growing body of research establishing that “green space” benefits human health and wellbeing, both physical and mental, will come as no surprise to anyone who finds solace in hiking in the mountains, strolling through meadows or even snoozing in the shade of a tree.

Thus far, living or working near green space has been found to decrease mortality, improve mental health and reduce low birth weights, among other benefits, making new research from the �鶹��Ƶ, the first of its kind, striking.

Colleen Reid

Colleen Reid, assistant professor of geography at the �鶹��Ƶ, knows a little about green space. She grew up in a “leafy, green” suburb of Boston and spent summers hiking the rugged White Mountains of New Hampshire. Once she came west, she fell in love with the deserts of Arizona, the Sierra Nevada of California and the Rocky Mountains.

And as a researcher, she has focused on how environmental and social factors interact to influence human health. Green space is good for us, sure, but she wanted to better understand how different kinds of green space might affect wellbeing.

“We wanted to know, is having trees better than having larger areas with more grass and bushes,” she says.

The answer, at least in the Big Apple, may be yes.

“My study found that living in proximity to more trees is a bit more beneficial to health than living in proximity to grass,” Reid says.

In “Is All Urban Green Space the Same? A Comparison of the Health Benefits of Trees and Grass in New York City,” published in the October issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Reid and colleagues from Drexel University, the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University found that trees are more correlated with reports of “good” or “excellent” health than grassy areas.

The researchers also found that trees are associated with better health among urban denizens of both low and high socioeconomic status; for grass, there were benefits to those of high socioeconomic status, but not low. And in general, lower income urban neighborhoods often have fewer trees.

The research focused on New York City because it had developed “really great spatial data that can identify what every three-meter pixel is covered by,” Reid says. Most other studies rely on satellite imagery to identify green space in urban areas, but the resolution isn’t high enough to differentiate between grassy areas and trees

This study is the first to compare the associations for trees versus grass with self-reported health in an urban setting.

Trees may be more likely than grass to provide shade or reduce noise pollution. Trees also release terpenes, many of which demonstrate anti-inflammatory, anti-tumorigenic, and neuroprotective effects in toxicological studies.

“It needs to be studied in other places, but for a preliminary finding, I thought it was pretty interesting,” Reid says. “We hope to be able to look at other cities.”

The mechanism for the association remains a mystery, though Reid and her colleagues have pondered various explanations.

“Trees, for example, may be more likely than grass to provide shade or reduce noise pollution. Trees also release terpenes, many of which demonstrate anti-inflammatory, anti-tumorigenic, and neuroprotective effects in toxicological studies,” the authors write. “Trees have also been shown to be associated with other benefits such as reduced crime, which may be related to psychological pathways to health.”

If confirmed by further research, the findings suggest that cities could improve public health by planting trees, “a relatively affordable and simple solution.”

“These health benefits would be in addition to the numerous environmental benefits of urban tree planting related to mitigating, through sequestering carbon dioxide and reducing the need to cool buildings, and adapting to, through reducing the urban heat island effect, climate change,” the authors write.

City trees benefit human health more than grass, CU Boulder research finds

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What's up, and what's going down, with hogbacks

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 01:28:02 +0000

What's up, and what's going down, with hogbacks Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/21/2018 - 18:28

Jeff Thomas

‘The cool thing is that this was motivated by looking at the hogbacks right outside our windows; no one had explained their shape before,’ says Rachel Glade

Most Coloradans take the dramatic neighboring landforms for granted, including the iconic hogback hills of the Front Range. Perhaps that is because few wonder about why landforms look the way they do or think in terms of geomorphology. But not so for a graduate geology student at the �鶹��Ƶ.

A familiar hogback near Morrison, Colo.. Photo by Rachel Glade. At top of the page is an arial view of hogback formations near Fort Collins. Photo by Robert Anderson.

According to current geomorphology models that study how landscapes erode and change over time, most hills are convex, which means they are steep at the bottom then gradually level out on top, like a dome. Hogbacks found across the world and even on Mars look different. One side is straight and made of rock; the other side, which is concave, has a gradual slope at the bottom that gets steeper and steeper uphill, like half of a bowl.

“The cool thing is that this was motivated by looking at the hogbacks right outside our windows; no one had explained their shape before,” said PhD candidate Rachel Glade, who has recently published two papers on the subject, through the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union, respectively.

Glade said she was also inspired by her thesis advisor, Robert Anderson, a distinguished professor in the Geological Sciences Department of the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder and a fellow in the CU Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Anderson is a co-author on the two studies.

“Bob, my advisor, is always thinking about new, open questions in geology” Glade said. “One of these questions is about big boulders and blocks of rock. We don’t really know how they influence landscapes, including rivers and glacial environments, and we thought, ‘There are very few papers about these blocks on hillslopes.’”

Turns out, big blocks may be a big deal in how those hogbacks keep that iconic, concave shape.

In sedimentary formations, hogbacks are formed when the formation is tilted, like the Flatirons, and there is a softer layer of rock underneath a hard layer on the top. The softer layer is eroded more quickly, leaving way to the easily distinguished steep escarpments at the top of hogbacks, which are pretty much the entirety of the harder formation showing.

Rachel Glade at work in the field.

The erosion of the underlying soft rock, shale, is also undermining the support of the harder rock, sandstone, that forms the top of the hogback. That means that large pieces of the sandstone periodically cleave away, much the same way that tall glaciers entering the sea often dramatically calf off huge blocks of ice.

But here is where it gets interesting for geomorphologists. This situation is constantly, although slowly, changing, as erosion not only moves the hogback vertically, decreasing its elevation, but horizontally, as well. So how is it that they are able to maintain that concave form while they move?

“When these blocks fall off at the top of the hogback, we think that they sit there on the soil for a long time while they slowly break apart, and then slowly move down the slope,” Glade said.

“They are basically like big dams; soil builds up behind them, and has to go around them to move downhill. This makes the ground steeper; the bigger the blocks, the steeper the slope. As the blocks get smaller down the hillslope, the ground doesn’t have to be as steep, which is why it’s a much gentler slope at the bottom.”

Of course, there was some very complex geophysical modeling that went along with the two papers, but there was one more element about that study that all of us living around these landscapes can view and appreciate. “These big blocks make it harder to erode the landscape, leading to taller, more prominent hogbacks that can maintain a stable shape,” Glade said.

"That is, even as the blocks move downslope and begin to break up, they are causing the landscape to have more relief,” said Glade.

The papers are a reflection of her PhD thesis.

A video depiction of the numerical model of hogback formation

[video:https://youtu.be/WkkLo6pmkyM]

'The cool thing is that this was motivated by looking at the hogbacks right outside our windows; no one had explained their shape before,' says Rachel Glade

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Linguistics prof's memoir examines family life under Nazis, Soviets

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:02:26 +0000

Linguistics prof's memoir examines family life under Nazis, Soviets Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/21/2018 - 14:02

Clay Bonnyman Evans

'My idea was to show how two people went through the two greatest tragedies of the 20th century,' says Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Zygmunt Frajzyngier has published more than two dozen books and more than 140 scholarly articles over his half-century long academic career. But it wasn’t until his seventh decade that he decided to publish the story of how his parents survived under the two most murderous political regimes of the 20th century: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

With The Roads of Exile, he presents detailed oral histories of his parents, Emanuel “Emek” and Franciszka “Franka” Frajzyngier, who died in 2011, as well as his own recollections of the experience.

Franciszka “Franka” Frajzyngier before the war. Photo courtesy of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. At the top of the page is an image of the German Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where Zygmunt Frajzyngier's grandfather and two of his aunts were murdered.

“The purpose of the book is really to honor my parents,” says Zygmunt Frajzyngier, professor of linguistics at the �鶹��Ƶ. “My idea was to show how two people went through the two greatest tragedies of the 20th century.”

His father and mother were secular Jews living in a small town in eastern Poland when Zygmunt Frajzyngier was born in 1938. A decade earlier, his father had served three years in a Polish prison for passing out political fliers to commemorate May Day, a holiday celebrated by communist and socialist movements around the world.

“Why was the communist movement attractive to me?” Emek Frajzyngier remarked. “The year 1928 was a difficult year as far as the economy was concerned, and the conditions for Jewish young people were even more difficult than for young Poles… Everybody was reading literature about the need for social justice.”

The Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, divvying up the country with their then-ally the Soviet Union. Franka Frajzyngier soon witnessed the beating of Jews, and a Polish woman ominously told her, “You just wait and see what kind of destiny awaits you!” She knew it would not be safe to remain.

“Her first intuition was to flee. Her father, her brothers and all her relatives stayed. They thought, ‘Well, how bad can the Germans be?’ How wrong they were,” says Zygmunt Frajzyngier. His parents were the only members of their families to survive the war.

His father walked some 235 miles to Soviet-occupied Lvov in eastern Poland and Franka Frajzyngier followed in a horse-drawn cart with her toddler son shortly thereafter. Emek Frajzyngier took a job as an electrician in a coal mine in the Donbas region. But it soon became apparent that life under Soviet control was not the rosy picture painted by Communist propagandists.

Emanuel “Emek” Frajzyngier (standing at left) is seen in the only surviving image of him before the war. The Soviets destroyed all others. Photo courtesy of Zygmunt Frajzyngier.

“What we saw around us convinced us that what we imagined about the Soviet Union was about as wrong as it could be,” Emek Frajzyngier recalled. “People lived poorly, they wore the same poor-quality clothing every day, and there wasn’t much to eat.”

Emek Frajzyngier made the mistake of uttering his disappointment out loud. On the day the Nazis turned on the Soviets in June 1941, he was arrested, once more giving lie to fantasies of communist paradise.

“When they take you upstairs to the fourth floor,” another prisoner ominously told Emek Frajzyngier, “you will confess to everything they want you to confess to.”

First charged with being a spy, he was eventually convicted of conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to five years of hard labor, with no “right of correspondence” with his family. Loaded onto a boxcar with other prisoners, he was shipped to a prison camp in the frigid wastes near Novosibirsk, Siberia.

Life in the camp was much as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a daily routine of brutal labor, including digging in the frozen ground while enduring subzero temperatures and wind, scarce food and constant threat. Emek Frajzyngier learned quickly not to march behind smokers, who were sometimes shot by guards when they stooped to pick up cigarette butts.

Suffering bouts of pneumonia and pellagra, a debilitating disease caused by a lack of niacin in his diet, his father was “an old man at 31,” Zygmunt Frajzyngier writes. Ironically, poor health led to his early release after just three years in the camp.

Emek Frajzyngier learned quickly not to march behind smokers, who were sometimes shot by guards when they stooped to pick up cigarette butts.

“They didn’t want too many people to die in the camp. They were letting go those people who were on the verge of dying, so they would die outside of the camp,” Zygmunt Frajzyngier says.

Emek Frajzyngier was exiled to a remote Siberian village. He had no idea where his wife and son were—or even if they were still living.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier

As soon as her husband was convicted, Franka Frajzyngier was ejected from her apartment in Ukraine. She took her son by train to Central Asia, where she took a series of “extremely dangerous jobs in order to make sure there was some food available,” Zygmunt Frajzyngier says.

Franka Frajzyngier contracted typhus while working in a typhus hospital in the Uzbek Fergana Valley, and both she and her son came down with malaria while she was working in a pellagra hospital in Vanovsk, Russia. Finally, she worked barefoot and without protective clothing in a munitions plant in Kyrgyzstan that processed highly toxic antimony, a chemical element.

Unable to contact her husband in the prison camp, Franka wrote letters to central registration authorities seeking her brother-in-law. One day, she received a letter from her sister-in-law and was surprised to hear that Emek Frajzyngier had been released and “looking for you for more than a year.”However, since Emek Frajzyngier was still under exile, the family was forced to live in Siberia, where Zygmunt Frajzyngier began his schooling and his sister Wisia Frajzyngier was born. Zygmunt Frajzyngier suffered a bout with diphtheria, as well as at least one more-common childhood indignity, “Testing, with my tongue, whether the metal on the outside of the building where we lived was cold.”

He has just two memories of color from those cold, white early years of childhood: dragonflies, “their transparent wings … shimmering with delicate greens, blues, and pinks” in May, and decorations on a Soviet New Year’s tree.

After the war, the family returned to Poland, but anti-Semitic violence continued to rear its ugly head in a pogrom. Franka Frajzyngier and her son visited Israel, but were not inclined to emigrate.

Emanuel “Emek” and Franciszka “Franka” Frajzyngier in 2003. Photo courtesy of Zygmunt Frajzyngier.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier completed his schooling and went on to earn degrees in linguistics from the University of Warsaw and the University of Ghana, where he was an exchange student. In the late 1960s, his parents and sister left Poland for Sweden and he came to the United States.

“I was offered a position at (CU Boulder),” which he accepted knowing next to nothing about either the town or the school, he writes. “I knew only that it was about 2000 miles from New York and about 1,500 miles from San Francisco.”

After the death of their parents in 2011, Zygmunt Frajzyngier and his sister traveled to Lublin, Poland “to see the streets, and possibly the houses, where our parents grew up.” They also visited the site of a concentration camp where 70,000 people from the Lublin area were murdered, including their grandfather, uncles and other family members.

It was a sobering reminder that, if not for his parents’ hard choices and suffering, he might not be there at all.

“While my parents were alive, I was not aware what a source of strength they were for me. … Writing this book has become a source of strength for me, as if I was talking to them. So, through this book, they once again give me their support,” Zygmunt Frajzyngier concludes.

'My idea was to show how two people went through the two greatest tragedies of the 20th century,' says Zygmunt Frajzyngier

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Scholar wins top award in Medieval studies

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 23:06:02 +0000

Scholar wins top award in Medieval studies Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/19/2018 - 16:06

Brian Catlos is this year’s recipient of the Haskins Medal for his book Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614.

Catlos, professor of religious studies at the �鶹��Ƶ, will accept the medal, awarded by the Medieval Academy of America for a distinguished book in the field of medieval studies, during the group’s annual meeting in Atlanta next month.

Describing the award as “the most prestigious award in in medieval studies,” Catlos said he is honored and humbled by the recognition.

Brian Catlos. At the top of the page, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, is seen at night; it was a Greek Orthodox church and later an imperial mosque, now a museum.

The Haskins Medal committee noted the timeliness of the book’s topic of Christian-Muslim relations and praised Catlos for “resisting the temptation to over-sensationalize his material.” The committee praised the “admirable scope” and “commendable depth” of its scholarship.

Catlos’s book provides a historical synthesis that’s a distinctive and creative reinterpretation, the committee said, adding:

“It provides the thorough and nuanced analysis that we must have if we are to understand the fascinating vitality in an entire range of interactions as both sides faced challenges that emerged as Muslim societies continued through crusade and conquest to live within Christian territories.”

Catlos said the recognition suggests that medieval studies is moving away from its “traditional eurocentrism” and toward a “broader, more inclusive, more Mediterranean, view.” He wrote the book because no existing work brought together the history of minority Muslim communities within medieval Europe in one study.

Muslims “had effectively been written out of the history of Europe” despite the fact that large populations of Muslims lived in Spain, Italy, the crusader states and Europe for nearly 600 years and had a tremendous effect on European culture and society, Catlos said.

Although there were episodes of tension and violence directed at these Muslims, and their history was punctuated by expulsions, for the most part Christian-Muslim relations were peaceful and stable, he said.

“But when it was bad, it was really bad.”

In 1492, the Jews of Spain were given the choice to convert to Christianity or leave in exile; about 15,000 left. It’s less commonly known that between 1609 and 1614, all descendants of Spain’s Muslims, people who had been Christian for three generations, were all forcibly exiled, Catlos said, calling that purge an “an ethnic cleansing” that forced 300,000 people from the only home they had ever known.

Catlos’s vast body of scholarship is reshaping the field of medieval studies and the history of ‘the western civilization’ as he shifts our lens towards the Mediterranean, which is what he refers to as the ‘crucible of the west.'"

Catlos said most people also are unaware that slavery was common in medieval Europe, or that between 1050 and 1350, most of those slaves were Muslim captives.

The history of Muslims, Christians and Jews in this period is complex, he said, adding: “I wanted to tell it in as honest and a detached way as possible, without romanticizing or exoticizing this history, without moralizing or passing judgment.”

When Catlos took on the project, however, he didn’t fully appreciate its breadth. Cambridge University Press asked him to produce about 90,000 words, or a bit more than 200 pages. When he turned it in, more than two years behind schedule, it was 270,000 words, almost 650 pages.

Despite the book’s length, Cambridge published it, and before winning the Haskins Medal, it won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Prize.

“Most importantly, I learned a lot,” he said.

David Shneer, chair of the CU Boulder Department of Religious Studies, said Catlos has raised the status of the university and the department.

“Catlos’s vast body of scholarship is reshaping the field of medieval studies and the history of ‘the western civilization’ as he shifts our lens towards the Mediterranean, which is what he refers to as the ‘crucible of the west,’” Shneer said.

First presented in 1940, the Haskins Medal honors Charles Homer Haskins, a noted medieval historian, who was a founder of the Medieval Academy and its second president.

Catlos’ next book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain is due out on May 1. Aimed at a broader audience, the new book covers the history of Islam in Spain, from the time of the Arab conquest through the rise and fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, to the expulsion of the Spanish Moors.

Brian Catlos is this year’s recipient of the Haskins Medal for his book Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050-1614.

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CU Boulder appoints W.B. Allen, Stephen B. Presser visiting scholars in conservative thought, policy

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:07:48 +0000

CU Boulder appoints W.B. Allen, Stephen B. Presser visiting scholars in conservative thought, policy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/19/2018 - 12:07

W.B. Allen and Stephen B. Presser have been named as the 2018-19 Visiting Scholars in Conservative Thought and Policy at the �鶹��Ƶ.

Allen and Presser are scheduled to teach two courses per semester in fall 2018 and spring 2019. They will also be encouraged to foster discussion by hosting public events in the campus community and around the state.

W.B. Allen, left, and Stephen B. Presser.

Allen is emeritus professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University and emeritus dean at MSU’s James Madison College. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History, emeritus, at the Northwestern University School of Law, professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and member of the history faculty at Northwestern.

Allen, who has been observing the CU Boulder Conservative Thought and Policy Program since its inception in 2013, said he is eager to get started. “I anticipate happily entering a community of scholars—students and faculty—who believe that liberal education offers and expects from their labors increased understanding,” he said.

Allen added that CU Boulder “exemplifies faith in a future for higher education that delivers critical insight into the grounds of citizenship and prepares generations committed to human flourishing in an atmosphere of liberty.”

Allen, a Fulbright senior fellow, has served in many capacities, including director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia; professor of government at Harvey Mudd College, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and member of the National Council on the Humanities.

Allen’s research interests include the “national character,” an idea propounded by George Washington. Such scholarly inquiry, which Allen hopes to continue while at CU Boulder, probes the sources of “fragmentation” among American citizens and strives to “articulate the practices and principles that can reunite them as one people,” he stated.

Presser also praised Conservative Thought and Policy Program, which he termed “unique and offered in a uniquely well-run university.” After four decades in the academy, he concludes that “real diversity of opinion is increasingly rare in higher education,” he said.

“Those in charge in Boulder, whom I met when I interviewed for this position, have understood that bringing through a series of scholars committed to the search for timeless truths, and a deeper understanding of human nature, is a partial antidote to some of the difficulties now confronting our divided society,” Presser said, concluding:

“It is a an honor to follow those distinguished teachers who have held this position in the past, a privilege to be asked to participate in encouraging the conservation of what is best in our culture, and a joy to be invited to spend a year in a wonderful setting implementing Socrates’s adage that the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Presser is a recognized expert in the history of the law and the U.S. Constitution in the 18^th century, when the “founding principles of the United States took shape.” His published works emphasize the grounding of the Constitution and the American legal system in “the timeless principles of justice, philosophy and law, which made up what the authors of the Federalist described as the emerging ‘science of politics,’” Presser stated.

Robert Pasnau, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Western Civilization, Thought and Policy, which houses the Conservative Thought and Policy Program, praised Presser and Allen as “distinguished teachers and scholars who will make a profound impact on the campus and community over the year ahead.”

Pasnau added: “Thanks to support from many quarters, the center has grown dramatically over the last several years, becoming a vibrant community of scholars representing a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. Next year’s group of fellows promises to be the best ever.”

The visiting scholars were selected with input from an advisory panel that includes members of the faculty and community and is chaired by Pasnau. The committee has sought a “highly visible” scholar who is “deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thinking and policymaking or both.”

The Conservative Thought and Policy Program is supported by private funds.

W.B. Allen and Stephen B. Presser have been named as the 2018-19 Visiting Scholars in Conservative Thought and Policy.

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Smoke from distant fires darken the public health picture

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 23:04:56 +0000

Smoke from distant fires darken the public health picture Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2018 - 16:04

Cay Leytham-Powell

Questions remain about the respiratory risk posed to a fifth of the United States population by increasing wildfires—but a CU Boulder researcher is trying to clear the air

It had already been an exceptional fire season across the American West by the time Montana’s Rice Ridge fire ignited.

It began in July 2017 as many western wildfires do: with a dry lightning strike on a parched patch of plant litter. Immediately it stirred an inferno that stretched for miles and, by September, consumed an area of forest almost twice the size of Denver, producing enough thick smoke to choke half of the country.

“It’s been described to me in apocalyptic terms,” Sarah Coefield, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department, told the Washington Post at the time about the area surrounding the fire.

The orange plumes of ash were so dense that Coefield commented in that same interview that, “Visibility has been down to less than a block.”

Miles away from Montana, that same thick, orange haze, accompanied by the ash of other wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington, heaved its way across the rolling hills of the Midwestern tallgrass prairies—and they weren’t alone in their suffocation.

At the smoke's peak, its plume spread over 3,000 miles across the United States. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Before all was said and done, this smoke—accumulated from dozens of wildfires—had hijacked the meandering jet stream, getting a first-class ticket to blanket more than 3,000 miles of middle America. It ultimately traveled as far east as New York and Pennsylvania and as far south as Texas, and illustrated yet another example of a new normal for those in and out of the Smoke Belt.

Wildfire smoke—like wildfire itself—is becoming more common and more powerful due to a changing climate, affecting communities from California to the Pacific Northwest, and from the Pacific Ocean east to the Great Plains. And yet, the documented public health effects of smoke remain relatively unknown, and, for what does exist in the research, inconsistent with a few important exceptions.

But a researcher at the �鶹��Ƶ seeks to change that, particularly for those distant fires that share their smoke.

"When we think about all of the things in the future that might be changing that influence wildfire risk and health impacts, there’s so many things," said Colleen Reid, an assistant professor of geography at CU Boulder who studies the impact of wildfire smoke on public health. "You can’t keep fire at bay."

Colleen Reid, an assistant professor at CU Boulder, studies how changes in the environment affect public health. Photo by Cay Leytham-Powell/�鶹��Ƶ.

The difficulty in discerning the health effects of smoke stems from the very nature of the plumes, and the U.S. approach to tracking it. Currently, there are air pollution monitors set up by the Environmental Protection Agency across the United States—often near metropolitan areas—with the goal of assessing whether air pollution regulations are working. These monitors, however, don’t always measure every day, meaning that if the wildfire is moving fast or the smoke is only hovering temporarily, they could miss the data from the high levels of smoke altogether.

Reid, though, approached this problem from three perspectives in order to improve understanding of the potential health impacts: She conducted a critical review of all existing literature on the public health impacts of wildfire smoke exposure, she researched the birth weight of babies whose mothers were exposed to smoke while pregnant, and then she specifically examined the 2008 California wildfires and their corresponding respiratory health effects for downwind populations.

At the time, the 2008 California wildfires were one of the largest fire events in the state’s history. Ignited by more than 6,000 lightning strikes, this fire event consisted of thousands of blazes raging across 26 counties in the northern half of the state.

As structures and trees burned, fine particulate matter—or the incredibly small, easily inhalable solid and liquid particles suspended in the air during a high pollution event—coated the state.

These particles—or what makes the "haze" of wildfires—aren’t just the remains of burned trees. They can also be the debris particles of human products like plastics, electrical wires and spray foam insulation, or anything else that may have gotten in the fire’s path. And, while just one of the many hazards that accompany wildfires and air pollution more broadly, it is in many respects the most dangerous for human health.

Particulate Matter is often measured in two forms: Particulate Matter 2.5 (PM_2.5) and Particulate Matter 10 (PM₁₀). PM_2.5 are the fine inhalable particles that measure particles that are roughly 2.5 micrometers or smaller, while PM₁₀ are roughly 10 micrometers and smaller. These particles—which are roughly the length of an E. coli bacterium and a single fog, mist or cloud water droplet, respectively—are so small that they can easily penetrate the lung's alveolar sacs, which are partly responsible for exchanging oxygen between the lungs and the blood stream, and corrode its walls.

In other words, they are able to bypass all of the body’s defenses, going straight into the blood.

Particulate Matter's impact on the respiratory system is incredibly complex, but part of its danger is its potential to corrode alveolar walls and enter the bloodstream. Illustration courtesy of LadyofHats/Wikimedia Commons, Cay Leytham-Powell/�鶹��Ƶ.

Given this effect on the body, the World Health Organization has recommended that there be no minimum threshold where humans are safe to breathe in particulate matter from human-caused air pollution, which has been linked to 25 percent of lung cancer deaths, 8 percent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) deaths and 15 percent of heart disease and stroke cases.

And the effects don't stop there. While sensitive populations—the young, the old, the sick—are much more vulnerable, even perfectly healthy people can feel the impact of high particulate matter through irritation to the lungs, eyes and skin, an increased risk of respiratory tract diseases and cardiovascular diseases, reduced lung function, the development of an irregular heartbeat, nonfatal heart attacks, and even premature death.

With wildfire smoke, there is a widespread consensus among researchers that these plumes do exacerbate respiratory diseases such as asthma and COPD and can cause an increased risk of death for sensitive populations, but in terms of the other effects, there is still a lack of agreement—particularly for those impacted downwind.

Right now, the EPA has the daily limit of all pollution related to fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) set at 35 µg/m³ (micrograms per meters cubed). Ideally, with good clean air, the levels would be below 12 µg/m³. But, even at 35 µg/m³, most people (with the exception of sensitive populations) may not notice any sort of change or difficulty to their breathing.

"The fire that I studied, it (the particulate matter) maxed out close to 300 µg/m³. The Napa fires that were just happening… there were values in the 400s. So, it’s really, really bad," said Reid. "Even San Francisco and Oakland were getting levels that were in the high 100s, low 200s, and that’s an area that tends to have pretty good air quality. So, it’s much higher than they're used to."

For Montana, much like California, this was the summer of smoke, with Seeley Lake—near where the Rice Ridge fire took place—experiencing record levels of smoke at 18 times what the EPA deems safe, and even breaking the air monitoring device for five hours because the pollution was simply higher than the device's limit.

Despite this, the Front Range, and Colorado more broadly, was relatively clear and quiet. For most of the summer, the PM_2.5levels stayed within the healthy limit (normally between 0 and 20 µg/m³), well below the EPA's limit. When Montana’s smoke begun its thick descent into the Denver metro, though, the levels spiked to between 40 and 50 µg/m³. Boulder’s jump was even more impressive, getting above 50 µg/m³ for the week of exposure.

During that time, health officials at National Jewish Health in Denver told the Denver Post that they had seen an uptick in patients reporting a shortness of breath and coughing episodes, as well as Prednisone prescriptions—all of which are common during high air pollution events, called "Action Days," along the Front Range.

The possible health effects from those exposed during these Action Days—which are issued by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment for any number of air pollution issues, including any days with high particulate matter—are complicated, just like any issue related to public health.

When we think about all of the things in the future that might be changing that influence wildfire risk and health impacts, there’s so many things."

"Severity is more related to the severity of the underlying disease than to the intensity of the exposure," said Karin Pacheco, an allergist at National Jewish Health and an assistant professor in environmental and occupational health at the University of Colorado Denver.

Similar to how healthy individuals can have differing reactions to differing levels, those among the sensitive populations—and particularly children who breathe much faster and are much more susceptible—can also have different reactions despite the original source of the pollution.

"It all is equally as horrible for the lungs," said Lauren Massie, an undergraduate student at CU Boulder in English who suffered from severe, childhood asthma, and still suffers complications if the air pollution is too bad. "I still need to take precautions."

Those recommended precautions to avoid the pollution, outlined by the CDC, tend to revolve around avoiding particulate matter in particular. They suggest, first and foremost, to check local air quality reports and visibility guides (which can be an indicator as to the level of particulates in the air). And, if there is anything, to stay indoors.

"Unfortunately, keeping safe on high smoke days means avoiding exposure," commented Pacheco.

Even inside, there are a number of steps that can be taken to keep the air clear, including keeping the fresh-air intake closed, avoiding any activities that might increase indoor pollution (such as using your fireplace or burning any candles) and keeping your HVAC air filter clean.

While thus far there have been no long-term health impacts linked to smoke exposure (like what has been seen with other high-particulate matter events), the reality is that there just isn't enough information or research yet. And, with the length of the wildfire season projected to triple, and hit closer than ever to major urban corridors due to human interference, a public health crisis of toxic air may be looming for the western United States.

Researchers, including Reid, are working on documenting these health effects for those downwind by improving the literature and watching different fire events closely, but the work is slow, expensive and extensive—and, she said, important.

"We’re always going to have wildfires in the West," acknowledged Reid. "So, we need to figure out how to protect health."

Questions remain about the respiratory risk posed to a fifth of the United States population by increasing wildfires—but a CU Boulder researcher is trying to clear the air.

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CU Boulder scholars to lead effort analyzing China's huge infrastructure push

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 19:26:52 +0000

CU Boulder scholars to lead effort analyzing China's huge infrastructure push Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2018 - 12:26

Clint Talbott

Center for Asian Studies wins three-year grant from Henry Luce Foundation to conduct trans-Pacific studies in ‘lively research field’

As the United States steps back from international development, China is launching huge infrastructure projects as a way to broaden its global influence. For scholars at the �鶹��Ƶ, this trend raises new questions they aim to address with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.

The CU Boulder Center for Asian Studies has won a three-year Asia Responsive Grant from the Luce Foundation for a project called “China Made: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development.”

Asia Responsive Grants support collaborative research to improve understanding between the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. During the China Made project, the Center for Asian Studies will collaborate with the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

Tim Oakes

Studying the effect of new roads, airports and pipelines might seem narrow, but the issue has broad implications: In 2013, China launched the “Belt and Road” initiative, in which it has spent about $150 billion annually in 68 countries along the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road. This effort is part of China’s goal of becoming a leading global power by 2050.

China’s initiative raises questions in fields beyond political science, notes Tim Oakes, the center’s director. Oakes says there’s rising interest in infrastructure across the social sciences and even in the humanities.

“And that might seem kind of odd. Why would somebody in an anthropology department care about a pipeline or a road? But, in fact, it’s become a very lively research field.”

China likes to present itself as an alternative model in which it is saying, ‘We don’t need to get into ideology. ... We are simply there to help build things, and that’s a win-win for everybody."

At the same time, Oakes says, there’s a research gap: “There’s so much interest in this, and yet very few people who are writing about this are writing about China, and China is in many respects the world’s paradigmatic infrastructure state.”

China invests seven times what the United States invests in infrastructure, as measured by proportion of gross domestic product. “China’s entire foreign policy in many respects is all about building infrastructure in other countries.”

The United States has often tied its international-development expenditures to the promotion of human rights, democracy, “the kinds of values the United States likes to project abroad.”

“China likes to present itself as an alternative model in which it is saying, ‘We don’t need to get into ideology. We don’t need to get into the internal affairs of (other) states. We are simply there to help build things, and that’s a win-win for everybody.’”

Oakes and his collaborators, including Emily Yeh of geography, will focus on infrastructure development both in China and in other countries.

He emphasized that the research goal is not solely geopolitical. “We really need to look at the infrastructures themselves. We really need to draw from what’s been going on in infrastructure studies.”

Such qualitative research is labor intensive, requiring time on the ground, language skills, cultural knowledge. “You can’t just look at spreadsheets. You can’t just go in and see a dam or building and say, ‘This is what’s happening.’”

The goal is to study the effects of the new infrastructure in the social and cultural contexts in which they’ve been built, or, according to Oakes, to look at: “What kinds of political effects do they have, intended and unintended?”

Such questions arise as some academic world views are shifting, Oakes said.

“In terms of social theory, we’re in kind of a post-human or post-humanist moment in which the material world that we live in is viewed as an increasingly important part of how we analyze the social.”

Part of the change in perspective reflects an understanding that climate change is a part of the world we live in now, “and that any study of social processes needs to account for the dynamic environment we live in and how that has effects on how society is constituted and organized and how it changes.”

He added, “People who just thought of themselves as social scientists are increasingly interested in thinking about the broader environmental world or the non-human world that impacts human society.”

Infrastructure undergirds that “non-human world.”

The China Made project aims to shift the academic focus from broader geopolitical and international relations perspectives to a “finer grained analysis” of the infrastructures themselves and the on-the-ground social and cultural dimensions of their construction, Oakes states.

China Made will include new postdoctoral and graduate research positions, the development of online scholarly resources for project participants and the academic community, and three academic conferences—two of which will be hosted by the Center for Asian Studies.

Learn more about the CU Boulder Center for Asian Studies here.

China is launching huge infrastructure projects as a way to broaden its global influence. For scholars at CU Boulder, this trend raises new questions they aim to address with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.

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CU Boulder historian takes charge of Slavery Images website

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 19:06:03 +0000

CU Boulder historian takes charge of Slavery Images website Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2018 - 12:06

Henry Lovejoy, assistant professor of history at the �鶹��Ƶ, has been named the new director of slaveryimages.org.

Slavery Images is an online educational resource that is “the main website” used by most scholars, researchers, professors, teachers, students and the general public to view pictures, paintings and photographs of people and places associated with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades and slave life in diaspora. In the last year alone, it garnered more than a million new users and 12.5 million page views.

“The images illustrate the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported across oceans and the lives of their descendants in slave societies,” Lovejoy said, adding that all of the images are primary sources from the 19th century or earlier.

Henry Lovejoy is a historian at CU Boulder. At the top of the page is an image from Slavery Images: Painting by Alphonse Levy (1843-1918) in Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, Paris; published in the exhibition catalog Les Anneaux de la Memoire: Nantes-Europe-Afriques-Ameriques, Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne. Nantes, France, Dec. 1992-Feb. 1994.

Lovejoy, a specialist in the digital humanities and in curating historical material online, took over the direction of the site last month from Jerome Handler, who launched the site when he was an anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in the 1990s.

Lovejoy, however, is no stranger to this type of endeavor. Last year, he received $50,400 under a joint program with the National Endowment for Humanities and Andrew J. Mellon Foundation for his Liberated Africans project and website (www.liberatedafricans.org)—a clearinghouse of information regarding hundreds of thousands of African slaves who were liberated by British and international courts cracking down on the slave trade.

Liberated Africans is based on the collaborative efforts of an international network of academics, archivists and data scientists, he said. The goal is to document the lives of about 250,000 people who were freed during the global campaign to abolish the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades in the 19th century.

“These individuals were designated ‘Liberated Africans,’ although in fact those people who were removed from slave ships and coastal prisons were not actually freed but were forced into periods of apprenticeship that were often documented,” Lovejoy added.

Lovejoy says Slavery Images and Liberated Africans are complementary parts of a “cutting-edge network of digital-based projects related to the history of Africa and the African Diaspora.”

Praising Handler’s “major contribution to the field of African and African diaspora history,” Lovejoy said he plans to add more content to Slavery Images.

One possibility is to link in relevant images held in the Library of Congress. While that collection is immense, not all of the images relate to slavery. The idea would be to identify and form institutional partnerships so that people can access collections of images related to the African diaspora on a single website.

Another long-term goal is to develop Slavery Images as a platform that would host 3-D images of slavery-related world-heritage sites.

“This technology would not only enable users to be able to interact and visualize objects more clearly, but also be downloadable for virtual or augmented reality experiences,” Lovejoy said.

Tapping into 3-D technology and data clouds could have immediate benefits for the classroom, research and preservation of world heritage sites, he added.

In 1994, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee initiated a new global strategy for a more balanced and comprehensive list of world heritage sites reflecting the world’s diversity and historical complexity, according to Lovejoy. Also that year, UNESCO launched “The Slave Route Project” to “break the silence surrounding the history of slavery that has shaped the modern world.”

Many of UNESCO’s heritage sites are endangered. Their deterioration is mostly due to warfare, natural disasters and climate change, Lovejoy said.

“As a result, new methods for the digital preservation of such sites will generate a lasting digital record for future generations.”

Henry Lovejoy, assistant professor of history at the �鶹��Ƶ, has been named the new director of slaveryimages.org.

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Beth Osnes is turning cities a little green all over the world

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 20:44:08 +0000

Beth Osnes is turning cities a little green all over the world Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/09/2018 - 13:44

Durango Jenkins

Theatre professor aims to get people talking, rather than arguing, about climate change

On all seven continents, people are popping up covered head-to-toe in green.

These green people, who are taking pictures of themselves in front of familiar cityscapes and famous landmarks, are participating in Beth Osnes’ Green Suits Your City, which aims to spark conversation about climate change.

People in green body suits check out the mass-transit options in New Orleans. Photo of Chicago at top of the page by Marc Deely and photo of New Orleans by Rebekah Anderson.

This project gives people a chance to physically embody the concept of greening our cities, says Osnes, an associate professor of theatre and dance at the �鶹��Ƶ.

Green Suits Your City works to change the issue of climate change from an “intellectual concept” to an embodied experience by engaging both performers and non-performers in a form of socially active applied theatre.

Osnes says her project helps people relate to one another on climate-change issues in a way that “bypasses some of the defenses” that people naturally have. It does so by giving them a “relatable and delightful” experience from which to base their conversation.

“It matters how we start the conversation,” Osnes says. “If I start a conversation … with my finger pointed like I’m blaming you, we are going to have a very specific type of conversation.”

Osnes’ project provides an opportunity to start a conversation based on curiosity and not hostility. She challenges the idea that people are not acting on issues of climate change because of a lack of information, but instead because they may feel it does not relate to them.

Beth Osnes

The idea came from Osnes’ show, Shine, which she describes as “a mini musical for youth engagement in climate and energy issues.” In that show, children don green suits as a way to represent ancient plants.

“Something happens to the kids when they get into them. Their inhabitations change. Their behavior changes. Their performance in their own bodies changes. They get very physically expressive.”

Shine is a part of an initiative she co-founded and co-directs at CU Boulder, Inside the Greenhouse, which focuses on creative climate communication.

Osnes is an applied theatre practitioner, which means that she uses theatre in communities with primarily non-performers to stimulate social change. She obtained her bachelor’s in theology from Marquette University and her master’s and PhD in theatre from CU Boulder.

Osnes uses theatre in her work primarily with women and children to teach them how to use performance to empower their own voices. Currently her focus is on environmental challenges, but this expressive outlet brings her hope in the face of difficult work.

“For me, why I selfishly do this project is to keep myself joyful in this work,” Osnes said. “I have children, and I care so much about our world and our future, and it’s bleak when you look at our current trajectory … To sustain me in this work, I do this project because it is fun, and it’s visual, and it makes me smile again and again.”

On all seven continents, people are popping up covered head-to-toe in green. They're doing so at the behest of CU Boulder Associate Professor Beth Osnes

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