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Archive for July, 2010

RTP Week Ahead, August 2-6

Friday, July 30, 2010, 3:35 pm By Ross Maloney No Comments | Post a Comment

: Cyclists on the American Tobacco Trail

Monday, August 2

SCV Entrepreneur’s Breakfast

8:00 - 9:15am

Southern Capitol Ventures, 21 Glenwood Avenue, Suite 105, Raleigh, NC

Want to start a company? Starting a company? Already an entrepreneur? Come join us for bagels and coffee. Meet some of your peers.

Tuesday, August 3

Seminar: Regulation of androgen receptor transcription by MAGE-11

12:00 - 1:00pm

NIEHS, Rall Bldg. Exec. Conference Room

Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth M. Wilson - Prof. of Pediatrics, Biochemistry & Biophysics - Laboratories for Reproductive Biology - UNC Chapel Hill. Details.

Wednesday, August 4

Health Care Reform: Myths vs. Facts

7:30 - 10:00am

North Ridge Country Club, 6612 Falls of Neuse Rd., Raleigh

Health care reform is expected to transform one of the Triangle’s fastest growing industries. This panel will explore and explain the implications of the landmark legislation for patients, physicians and employers. Learn the facts, without the noise.

Cost: $30. More info.

Triangle Get Ready for Plug-in Electric Vehicles Education Forum

11:30am - 4:30pm

RTP HQ, 12 Davis Drive, RTP, NC 27709

Lunch will be provided. Space is limited so register today for this FREE forum to learn about plug-in electric vehicles and the infrastructure required to make electrified transportation a success!

Reserve your spot today.

Thursday, August 5

NC State University Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

8:00am - 5:00pm

McKimmon Center, 1101 Gorman Street, Raleigh, NC 27606

This 9th NC State University Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium showcases the hands-on scholarship of students from across the nation and from NCSU who have received funding from one of 20 different grants to conduct research during summer 2010. About 92% of participants are in biotechnology-linked disciplines.

Click here for details.

Durham Critical Mass Bike Ride

5:35 - 7:35pm

Ride Starts at the Bronze Bull Downtown Plaza, Durham

A monthly ride which calls attention to the rights of cyclist to the roads as a vital form of transportation.

Friday, August 6

Fault Lines in Global Health: Launch of CSIS Debate Series

9:30 - 11:00am

Live Webcast

On August 6, 2010, the CSIS Global Health Policy Center is launching a year-long debate series— Fault Lines in Global Health —intended to generate an informed, civil, bipartisan, and open airing of opinion on critical global health controversies. Ambassador Princeton Lyman will affirm the resolution.

Watch the live webcast from Washington D.C. here.

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To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

The science of forgetting

Thursday, July 29, 2010, 4:12 pm By DeLene Beeland No Comments | Post a Comment

In my house, if I don't write it down then it doesn't get done. Period.

Day-dreaming during work often means you miss out on what is going on around you while your mind drifts, but a new study suggests that day-dreaming may also impair your ability to retain information acquired just prior to embarking on your mental mini-journey.

Peter Delaney, a professor of psychology at the Univ. of N.C.-Greensboro, led a team of researchers in probing what’s called the “amnesic effect” of day-dreaming by doing two simple experiments with college students.

In the first experiment, the team asked the students to memorize word lists, then they asked them to day-dream about their parents’ house or about their own house. In the second experiment, they asked them to memorize word lists and then day-dream about either an international or a domestic vacation. In each experiment, the disparity in the cognitive meanderings was set up to test whether mental distance had any effect upon the mind’s ability to recall the word lists.

The results are intriguing because the students whose thoughts dawdled on long-distance vacations performed much worse at recalling the word lists than those that thought of domestic getaways. Likewise, the students who lingered on thoughts of their parents home tended to also fare worse at the memory recall tasks than those who day-dreamed about their own homes.

What might explain this disparity? According to the authors, the experiment did not test only physical distance. Rather, it was set up to test mental distance from the reality of a moment, whether that distance was induced by geography, time or even cultural context. Psychologists dub this the “context-change account” of directed forgetting. The authors explain, “The context-change account proposes that shifting one’s thoughts to something different such as a diversionary thought sets up a new mental context in which subsequent items are encoded.” And this mental-context shift causes your mind to peter out at recalling the information acquired from the previous mental context.

Because past research shows that physically moving from one environment to another can produce forgetting, the researchers wanted to look at what happens when people travel through mental space and time. They hypothesized that merely imagining a change in physical location might induce forgetting because people tend to “immerse themselves in the context of that event.” And they figured that the more difference there was between the reality of where a person is in space and time, and where they travel to mentally, then the greater degree of recently encoded information that might be nixed.

With the amount of day-dreaming that I do daily, this makes me wonder how I manage to remember anything at all. Oh yes, post-it notes. Lots of post-it notes.

Moral of the story? If you day-dream at work, and wish to keep your job, try to anchor that drifting mind closer to your cubicle.

NOTES:

Peter F. Delaney, Lili Sahakyan, Colleen M. Kelley, and Carissa A. Zimmerman. 2010. Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming. Psychological Science. 21(7) 1036–1042. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610374739.

Duke’s PottiGate: Another scandal

Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 9:41 pm By Sabine Vollmer 2 Comments | Post a Comment

Paul Goldberg

Dr. Anil Potti, the Duke University cancer researcher whose resume and research are under scrutiny, is the ideal target for Paul Goldberg, the editor of The Cancer Letter. Goldberg, who has an uncanny sense for hubris, is building a reputation for outing bad apples among cancer researchers, and he has dug up some interesting documents about Potti.

I met Goldberg a year ago at a training course the National Institutes of Health put on for science writers. He was one of the speakers and talked about a lung cancer researcher whose research was flawed and who failed to disclose the $3.6 million she had received from a cigarette maker.

After I read The Cancer Letter’s special issue about Potti, I called Goldberg and got his permission to link to the documents supporting the stories. Read more…

RTP Week Ahead, July 26-31

Monday, July 26, 2010, 8:51 am By Ross Maloney No Comments | Post a Comment

Monday, July 26

Health Care in the 21st Century

8:00am (Mon. 7/26) - 5:00pm (Thurs. 7/29)

The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708

Broaden your knowledge and your professional network by joining us for this four day intensive course on current health care issues and trends. Led by distinguished faculty from The Duke MBA Health Sector Management (HSM) program, the course is open to executives and managers from all industries.

To register, go here.

Certified ScrumMaster with Jeff Sutherland - Back in RTP!

9:00am (Mon. 7/26) - 5:00pm (Tues. 7/27)

Four Points Sheraton at South Point, 7807 Leonardo Drive, Durham, NC 27713

n this course, participants will learn how to stop thrashing and start executing along with everything necessary for getting started with Scrum. Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance.

RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub

Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pm By Sabine Vollmer 1 Comment | Post a Comment

North Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.

The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.

RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.

“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.

Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:

Lancet investigates claims of shoddy research by Potti, Duke colleagues

Friday, July 23, 2010, 2:25 pm By Sabine Vollmer 1 Comment | Post a Comment

Now, the scandal that’s been brewing at Duke University over a researcher and his research methods has expanded to the Lancet Oncology investigating potential errors in a report the medical journal published in December 2007.

Dr. Anil Potti, a Duke cancer researcher, was suspended last week after his claim to have been a Rhodes scholar could not be confirmed. Duke also halted enrollment in three clinical trials that Potti lead. The trials used gene-based test results of drug sensitivity to predict cancer patients’ responses to chemotherapy drugs.

Potti and colleagues at Duke also did the statistical analysis for a report published in the Lancet Oncology three years ago. The report was based on results from a clinical trial involving breast cancer patients. The published report was titled, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.”

The report, which had 19 co-authors, was an important step toward personalized medicine.

But the Lancet Oncology today expressed concern over errors that two of the report’s authors detected in the statistical analysis by Potti and his Duke colleagues.

Here it is: S0140673610701856

The Lancet investigation goes way beyond potentially false claims of one Duke researcher being a Rhodes scholar. Questions of research methods and errors reach beyond one possibly rogue researcher and potentially put patients’ lives at risk.

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Stephanie Willen Brown

Thursday, July 22, 2010, 1:32 pm By Bora Zivkovic No Comments | Post a Comment

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Stephanie Willen Brown to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m Stephanie Willen Brown, aka CogSciLibrarian living in the Triangle area in North Carolina. I’ve been a librarian since 1996, and I started calling myself the CogSciLibrarian in 2004, when I was the librarian for the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. I started the blog as a way of sharing cool cognitive science stories and books that I thought my colleagues would enjoy.

My scientific background is limited to that of a librarian, supporting faculty and students working in cognitive science, communications, and psychology over the years. I’d grown up intimidated by math and science, but cognitive / brain / neuroscience is so interesting AND there is so much good, accessible writing about it that I have become a fan.

My current reading interests include the effect of mindfulness on the brain, the development and use of language, and concussions in NFL and other athletes.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m thrilled to be working at my dream job, as director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It incorporates many of my interests, such as library science, journalism, marketing, and advertising. I am a consumer of mass media, and I love to be around academics who are studying various aspects mass communication.

Senergy helps NC farmers improve energy efficiency

Wednesday, July 21, 2010, 3:03 pm By Carlee Mallard 2 Comments | Post a Comment

Our world is undoubtedly becoming more and more concerned with energy efficient processes and renewable energy sources. And although it may not always be so obvious, the government is actually helping the cause.

In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture created the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP, then known as “Section 9006”) to provide grants to farmers and rural small businesses to cover up to 25% of the total costs associated with purchasing and installing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.

As with any government program however, there’s a tedious process to go through and paperwork to fill out before receiving the funds. One of the first steps in the process is having an independent professional engineer conduct an audit estimating the potential energy savings on the specific project that they’re applying for to receive grant money. Kurt Creamer, Ph.D., says that the “actual percentage energy savings, in some cases are quite phenomenal.”

That’s where Senergy Inc., the Apex-based company hired to conduct these energy audits, comes in. Kurt Creamer, PhD, president of Senergy, founded the company in 2003 in response to REAP while he was still enrolled in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering PhD program at North Carolina State University and working full-time at the school. Even though there was a new need for energy auditors, business remained relatively slow for a few years.

“In the early days farmers had to pay up front for the energy audits which were often times quite difficult for the farmers,” Creamer said. Business for Senergy spread solely through word-of-mouth and only those farmers that could afford to front the initial costs of an audit got on board for the first 5-6 years of the program.

But then, in 2008, the North Carolina Farm Bureau got involved. The Farm Bureau covers the costs of the audits up front so that the farmers are much more willing to go through the process of applying for the REAP grants. The program (and business for Senergy) skyrocketed. It’s “been a real boom to my business to have the Farm Bureau involved in the project,” Creamer said.

Senergy’s work

Senergy typically works with farmers in Eastern North Carolina specializing in grain farms, but has had the opportunity over the years to work with a variety of types of farms including tobacco farms, some on swine & poultry farms, and a handful of dairy farms, often times on some very nontraditional projects.

One particular project on a hog farm required comparing the energy efficiency of burning the dead hogs to composting them—composting is more energy efficient, in case you were wondering. Creamer has also worked on energy efficient organic dairy farm feed grinding systems, poultry barns, irrigation systems, and grain dryers. But he’s not just limited to working on energy efficiency projects. Kurt also works on some renewable energy projects, including one this fall where he’ll be working on a “project to look at the use of sweet potatoes in an anaerobic digester,” Creamer explained, that “could generate enough biogas from the sweet potatoes to meet the requirements of the farm.”

What’s next?

Creamer says that he would love to expand in several ways:

Geographically: There is still plenty of opportunity to pursue this program in other parts of North Carolina and beyond
Explore the energy needs of rural small businesses (outside of the farm base)
Take on more renewable energy projects
Improve his engineering methodologies

At the end of the day Creamer says he really enjoys the work he does and “it’s a really good program for the farmers, and a good program for the environment.”

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with William Saleu

Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 5:13 pm By Bora Zivkovic No Comments | Post a Comment

Today, I asked William Saleu to answer a few questions:

My name is William Saleu and I blog at BomaiCruz. I am from Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent island nation making up the eastern part of the island of New Guinea which lies immediately north of Australia. I am a research fellow at the Duke University Marine Lab (DUML) in Beaufort, North Carolina.

I am part of a team that studies population structure and species connectivity among invertebrates from hydrothermal vent systems from the western Pacific. Most of our samples were collected from PNG so as you can imagine I have naturally taken up a personal interest in this subject. My ultimate goal is to be able to use the results of this research and other similar work to help identify and design conservation strategies for these unique ecosystems in PNG.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

So one might wonder how I ended up doing this. To answer that question I will have to take you back to my final days as an undergraduate at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). I was a biophysics major and was almost at the end of my program when I realized that my options for employment after college were very slim and I decided to look at opportunities for post grad research at UPNG. I spoke to my physics advisor but he was not so enthusiastic about having me on his projects but told me to come up with my own project.

RTP Week Ahead, July 17-23

Friday, July 16, 2010, 2:09 pm By Ross Maloney No Comments | Post a Comment

Saturday, July 17 – Sunday, July 18

Dino Days! at Museum of Life + Science

Saturday 10:00am–5:00pm, Sunday 12:00pm–5:00pm

Museum of Life + Science, 433 Murray Avenue, Durham, NC 27704

If you dig dinosaurs, come and celebrate Dinosaur Trail’s first anniversary with a weekend full of fossils and fun! Meet local collectors from the North Carolina Fossil Club, talk with paleontology experts, find your own fossils or make fossil casts and meet Buddy from UNC-TV’s Dinosaur Train!

More info.

Monday, July 19

CED Personalized Leadership Development Program

All day through 7/23 (5-day event)

Website.

Seminar: Epigenetic mechanisms underlying estrogen-mediated gene silencing in breast cancer

10:00 – 11:00am

NIEHS, Rall Bldg. Room D350

To gain a better understanding of the role estrogen-regulated ncRNAs play in establishing and maintaining chromatin states of the ER± transcriptome, our lab is developing a novel strand-specific RNA sequencing protocol for the Illumina Genome Analyzer platform.

More information.

Tuesday, July 20

Entrepreneurship Webinar Series: The Business Plan

12:00 – 1:00pm

Online (www.ncimed.com)

Topics: 1. Why Do I Need a Written Plan?, 2. Mission and vision statements, 3. Elements of a Business Plan, 4. SWOT Analysis, 5. Tips for Success

TGHC Gender Working Group: “The Policy Environment for Gender and RH/HIV”

5:30 – 7:00pm

Cox multi-purpose room, RTI International, 3040 East Cornwallis Road, RTP

Mary M. Kincaid, Senior Policy Advisor at Futures Group, will provide an update on gender-related policy as it applies to USG programming in reproductive health and HIV/AIDS.

Wednesday, July 21

Structure Lab Durham

All day.

RTP HQ, 12 Davis Drive, RTP, NC 27709

A day-long experience in which participants explore how corporate structures and hybrid forms can enable or hinder their efforts. Participants leave with new tools and perspectives with which they can make better choices about financing, governance, growth, market interaction and exits.

Just 40 seats available! Reserve yours now.

Thursday, July 22

Refresh The Triangle July: Focus and Empathy – Two Keys to Designing Great User Experiences

6:30 – 8:00pm

Rotating. July: Railinc, 7001 Weston Parkway, Third Floor, Cary, NC 27513

A community of designers/developers working to refresh the creative, technical & professional culture of new media endeavors in their area through design, technology, usability, and standards. Speaker: Abe Crystal, MoreBetterLabs.com

Pulled from here.

Seminar: Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Intellectual Property

6:45 – 8:45pm

Wake Tech Northern Campus,6600 Louisburg Road Bldg D – Room 310, Raleigh, 27616

Do you have intellectual property or business products you should legally protect? If you have questions or just need an overview of the topics of discussion, this seminar is for you. Lawyers from NC LEAP present.

To register, click here.

Friday, July 23

Communicable Disease Conference: Quality Improvement Through Best Practice

8:00am – 4:15pm

William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education, Chapel Hill, NC

Conference participants learn about best practices for communicable disease programs in local public health agencies. Public health professionals and community partners interact with key leaders in communicable disease to discuss hot topics, outbreak response, and new initiatives.

More here.

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To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

Science in the Triangle

Archive for July, 2010

RTP Week Ahead, August 2-6

The science of forgetting

Duke’s PottiGate: Another scandal

RTP Week Ahead, July 26-31

RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub

Lancet investigates claims of shoddy research by Potti, Duke colleagues

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Stephanie Willen Brown

Senergy helps NC farmers improve energy efficiency

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with William Saleu

RTP Week Ahead, July 17-23

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Archive for July, 2010

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