News & Views

Here a Tick, There a Tick, Everywhere a Tick

Rhode Island was crawling with deer ticks last year, according to Thomas Mather, director of our Center for Vector-Borne Disease. The entomologist attributes their high numbers to the fact that Rhode Island experienced the wettest May, June, and July since 1982. And ticks like it moist. Their abundance puts more Rhode Islanders at risk for Lyme disease, babesosis, and anaplasmosis.

Population aside, these blood-sucking parasites are expanding their reach. When he first surveyed the state for ticks in 1993, Mather found them at only 60 percent of the sites he sampled. In 2006, ticks were present at all of the sites. That puts 68 percent of the Ocean State population within tick-biting distance.

To combat the increasing health threat posed by ticks, Mather and his team of researchers have initiated a prevention program that combines technology, public health outreach, and public participation.

To that end, the URI team has created the first tick bite prevention Web site in the nation, www.tickencounter.org. When going outside, don’t leave home without clicking.

Don’t think that you’re out of the woods if you don’t live in Rhode Island. Mather reports that deer ticks are thriving in 20 states.

Ghosts & Things That Go Bump in the Night

Reports of ghosts in certain URI buildings are as plentiful as candy corn on Halloween. But these ghosts aren’t seasonal.

One named Abigail reportedly haunts the house that Lambda Chi Alpha calls home.

“Oh, she’s here all right,” says Lambda Chi president Jeff Trainor, a political science major. “Just the other night, I turned my IPOD off and put it in the desk drawer. During the night, the IPOD began playing...inside the drawer.”

According to legend—urban or in this case suburban—Abigail, the daughter of a Rhode Island governor who rented the house at 29 Old North Road, either hanged herself or fell down the narrow stairwell.

Scattered handprints and the words “HELP ME” stain the stairwell wall. The wall has been painted repeatedly, but the stains always bleed through.

Mikko Hurley (left in photo), a junior studying chemical engineering, heard ping-pong balls bouncing around and running in the attic. When he looked, no one was there. “I never go up there alone,” he admits.

David Neal (right in photo), a senior majoring in marketing, recalls checking his cell phone in the basement and seeing no bars of service. The phone rang suddenly with an “unknown caller” displayed on the screen. When he answered it, he heard the voice of an elderly woman. “It gave me goose bumps,” he says.

Other Greek houses appear to be haunted as well. Chi Omega has a ghost named Sandra who died in a car accident during the ‘70s. Apparently, she haunts the new member room because no matter how hot the rest of the house becomes, that room is always cold.

The presence of a ghost named Patrick who died as a young child in the basement of the Alpha Phi sorority house on 29 Lower College Road is “a little creepy, but he’s never done anything wrong,” according to Alpha Phi president Amelia Marsh. “We like to say he’s just a prankster.”

Theta Delta Chi had Barbara, a ghost whose child bounced a ball on the third floor. The frat house was torn down last fall so their whereabouts are unknown.

The Will Theatre in the Fine Arts Center has been often cited as a house of horrors, yet Julius Galgoczy, a technical director in the Theatre Department for the past 33 years, has not seen anything that can’t be explained. “It’s fun to have a story,” he says of hauntings.

When pressed, Galgoczy recalls a time about 20 years ago when the number of people on the stage didn’t match the number of shadows on the wall. “It might have been an optical illusion,” he says, “or perhaps it was an optical delusion.”

College of Pharmacy Saves Prison $5 million

Our College of Pharmacy’s Health Care Utilization Management Center plays a pivotal role in reducing the state Department of Corrections pharmacy costs, saving nearly $5 million during the last four years.

The corrections department’s projected medication budget from 2003 through 2006 totaled $13.7 million, but its actual cost, thanks to the partnership between URI and corrections, was $8.8 million for the same period.

The pharmacy program coordinates the purchase and dispensing of drugs, serving as an in-house pharmacy. The result is the elimination of waste and better monitoring.

The prison averages 3,700 inmates daily, while its intake center processes 17,000 individuals per year. Inmates are more likely than the general population to have HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), hepatitis C, mental illness, and addiction disorders. All require expensive, complicated treatments.

E. Paul Larrat, associate pharmacy dean, and Rita Marcoux, assistant professor of pharmacy, oversee the program. Two URI pharmacy alumni, Larry Meyerson ’57 and Chloe Mako ’05, are part of the management team.

“We assist the Department of Corrections’ medical staff in ensuring that the program is receiving quality services at the best price,” Larrat said. “The program benefits URI students, taxpayers, and inmates.

“We spend a great deal of our time working with the doctors and nurse practitioners to manage patients with the most cost effective medication treatment,” Larrat said. “It can be as simple as switching from a brand name medication to a generic drug.”

Corrections Associate Director of Health Care Services Joseph Marocco said the partnership benefits URI and the corrections operations. “We now call these kinds of arrangements with other outside groups the ‘URI model’ because of its success.”

Intergenerational Talk

Ruthie Winkler, a Phyllis Siperstein Tamarisk Assisted Living Facility resident, had some advice for Steve Bator, a psychology student, when he visited the facility with his URI 101 class last fall. “Don’t get any tattoos below your elbow,” she said, admiring the body art on his bicep. “You’ll have more trouble at your job interviews if they see your tattoos.”

The 20 URI students spent the afternoon with the elderly residents assembling food packages for Crossroads Rhode Island while engaging in intergenerational conversation. The project was the idea of URI 101 instructor and URI Hillel Director Amy Olson and Tamarisk Director of Programming Lev Poplow, who thought that bringing college students and the elderly together would be a positive learning experience for both communities.

URI 101 is a required class for all first-year students at URI, who in addition to learning about the ins and outs of campus life, must engage in a service-learning project as part of their coursework.

“At first when I found out we were going to an old folks’ home, I was like, man, I don’t want to go there”, said Angelette Saygbe, “but I am glad I let myself experience it.” Saygbe spoke with Tamarisk resident Helen Silverberg, who recalled her return to URI as a student later in life. “If there’s one thing I want to tell the students it’s that you’re never too old to learn,” she said.

At the end of the visit, Bator, shown here with Dottie Lippman, summed up his experiences: “Dottie is such a nice lady as well as incredibly smart. I had so much fun and learned so much about these great people and their lives. I can’t wait to go back.”

Eating S l o w l y Translates to Eating Less

Mom was right after all. We shouldn’t gobble our food. Diet experts have been telling us for years that if we ate slower, we would consume less. Now Kathleen Melanson, director of the University’s Energy Metabolism Lab, has some data to back it up.

Melanson and her group of nutritionists invited 30 female students to lunch at the lab on two separate occasions. Each time, the women were served a large plate of pasta and told to eat as much as they wanted. When told to eat quickly, the women consumed 646 calories in nine minutes. When encouraged to eat slowly, put their spoons down between bites, and chew 15 to 20 times, the women ate just 579 calories in 29 minutes.

The women not only took in fewer calories when they slowed down, they reported feeling satisfied at the end of the meal and an hour afterwards. The moral? Mangia, mangia, but...lentamente!

Computer Sleuths Fight the Bad Guys

URI’s Digital Forensics Center helps law enforcement keep pace with computer crime by creating the latest detection techniques.

The center is developing software to help detect child pornography and steganography, a technique that can hide messages in innocent-looking digital documents such as photographs. The work is supported by two, two-year National Institute of Justice grants.

To prosecute child pornography, it has to be proven that the illicit image is an image of an actual child, a victim, not a computer-generated image, which is legal. For example, the woman in the top photo is computer-generated.

The center will create software to flag likely human images. Victor Fay-Wolfe, a professor of computer science and director of its digital forensics program, explains: “Our technique will automatically look for skin tones and edges indicative of humans in the image files. Our project should not only drastically reduce time and save money involved in trying to detect human images; it will also improve the accuracy of authentication, which is currently done by a pediatrician. Furthermore, the software will be user-friendly, eliminating a sharp learning curve and reducing the training time currently required of law enforcement officers.”

The second grant is to detect steganography, a technique that uses simple software tools to hide one digital document within another. Fay-Wolfe explains: “A terrorist group might hide a text message inside an innocuous digital photograph and then post the picture on eBay for its operatives to retrieve. It will look like an innocent picture to anyone who sees it.

“Steganography is done by altering bits in the ‘carrier.’ Changing one digital bit of a pixel in a digital photo changes the color of the pixel so little that it can’t be perceived. There are millions of pixels in a photo, so the bad guys can hide a lot of bits in a carrier document.”

The Digital Forensics Center will augment existing steganography detection techniques and develop software to detect steganography in carrier files and break it by retrieving the hidden data.

The center is closely affiliated with URI’s Forensic Science Partnership, the Rhode Island State Crime Lab at URI’s Kingston Campus, and the Rhode Island State Police Computer Crimes unit.

URI Makes News Worldwide

If you’ve heard about the unearthing of the Kingdom of Tambora that had been buried by the largest volcanic eruption in human history, that the North Pole was once balmy, or that eating slowly means eating less, then you’re one of the millions of people worldwide who are in the know about news from URI.

During 2006, the University placed stories in nine of the 10 top ranked newspapers in the country and appeared in 14 of the top 20.

The 4,500 stories published about the University’s scholars, students, and expertise appeared in publications in 48 states and 29 countries. Associated Press, Reuters, and the United Press International carried more than 1,200 wire reports about URI to its member outlets. International television, radio, and Web sites carried the stories even farther.

Locally, news of the University appeared regularly in Rhode Island press and radio and television broadcasts.

“The convergence of the extraordinary research under way here with the communication technology available and the strengths of our staff has amplified our reach to media sources around the globe,” said Linda A. Acciardo, director of the Department of Communications. “The outcome has fostered greater recognition of the University.”

Here are the top 10 URI newsmakers for 2006:

• Graduate School of Oceanography Professor Haraldur Sigurdsson’s findings from the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, the largest volcanic eruption in human history, appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, Newsday, The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and NPR Morning Edition.

• Chemistry Professor and explosives expert Jimmie Oxley’s comments on terrorists’ liquid explosives plot to down airplanes appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The Seattle Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Newsweek, The Washington Post, CBS News, ABC Nightline, BBC, and more.

• Associate History Professor Rod Mather’s search for Revolutionary and Civil War warships was broadcast on Australian radio and TV, BBC, Discovery Channel, and CNN.

• Professor of Oceanography Isaac Ginis discussed hurricane forecasting in The Dallas Morning News, The Boston Globe, Royal Gazette Bermuda, Bermuda TV, and New Jersey public radio.

• URI nursing students, use of PDAs (personal digital assistants) to provide better care to patients appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Newsday.

• Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Science Kathleen Melanson’s research conclusion that eating slowly equates to eating less appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, London Times, and China Daily.

• Graduate School of Oceanography Associate Dean Kate Moran’s discovery that the North Pole was once warm appeared in Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, The Washington Post, Associated Press, and The Star-Ledger, and was broadcast on BBC, CBC, CNN radio, and NPR.

• Professor of Plant Science Thomas Mather’s comments on ticks appeared in The Boston Globe, Newsday, and USA Today.

• Adjunct Professor of Physics David Browning’s horse vocalization research appeared in equestrian publications worldwide and was broadcast on the Discovery Channel and NPR.

• URI’s lobster computer model was mentioned in an Associated Press story that ran nationwide, including the Quoddy Times in Maine, The Kansas City Star in Missouri, The Fort Wayne News Sentinel in Texas, and the Monterey County Herald in California.