focUs BY ERIN DEMUTH JUDD
Ever wonder what Union professors are up to when they aren’t teaching? Just about everything, as it turns out. Nothing is beyond their collective reach or curious minds. Here’s just a glimpse of the diverse and intriguing work they do.
Courtesy of CDC/ Michael L. Levin
28 | UNION COLLEGE Winter 2012
Ticking off the savings Kathleen LoGiudice, associate professor of biology Stephen Schmidt, economics professor
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nvironmental conservation and cost-savings go hand-in-hand when a few blood-sucking parasites are added—well, more accurately, subtracted— from the mix. Kathleen LoGiudice, Stephen Schmidt and Scott Morlando ‘08 have discovered that habitat restoration in the Albany Pine Bush diminishes black-legged tick populations and thereby, hikers’ chances of contracting a disease that costs an average of $8,568 to treat. Restoration methods at the preserve are complex, involving removal of invasive black locust trees and soil adjustments to encourage native grasses, pitch pine and lupine to recolonize the area. Once restored, however, the land must be burned every five years to ensure ecosystem health and prevent the return of non-native trees. It’s a pricey process. In a recent Restoration Ecology article, the researchers projected remediation and controlled-burn aftercare of 556 locust-infested acres will cost $22.049 million. A whopping 98-percent fewer ticks are found in restored areas, though, and that may very well justify the expense. In 2009 in Albany County, there were approximately 640 cases of Lyme disease. It’s unclear how many of these resulted from Pine Bush tick bites, but avoiding one $8,658-case annually is worth spending $294,168 right now. The researchers arrived at this number using the present value calculation, which allowed them to approximate the cost of something that repeats every year—an $8,568-case of Lyme disease—in today’s dollars. So if just 75 of the 100,000 preserve visitors each year avoid illness, the remediation pays for itself in public health benefits. Because $22.049 million/0.294 = 75 and $294,168*75 = $22,048,999.
A staged fight in progress behind Christopher Chabris (Photo by Matt Milless)
Blinded by focus Christopher Chabris, assistant professor of psychology
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f you were a police officer chasing down a potentially dangerous suspect, would you notice another suspect being viciously beaten by other cops nearby? Even if it was dark out? Yes, you’re probably thinking, that would be difficult to miss. But it wasn’t for Kenny Conley. The Boston cop was convicted of perjury in 1997 when a jury didn’t believe he could run right by such a beating and not see it. Research by Christopher Chabris and University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons, however, says Conley might not have been lying. Their study, published in June in the journal i-Perception, asked 94 subjects to chase a runner through the Union College campus and count the number of times he touched his hat. About 1 minute into the 3-minute jog, a noisy, staged fight was occurring. “When we did this study at night, we had two students beating up a third, punching him and kicking him and throwing him to the ground,” Chabris said. “Only about a third of subjects reported seeing the fight.” Even in broad daylight, 40 percent still didn’t notice it. Researchers call this inattentional blindness, or the failure to see salient scenes while paying attention to something else. Chabris and Simons explain the phenomenon in detail in their popular book, The Invisible Gorilla. For more about their work, visit www.union.edu/news.