UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA SPRING 2016 / RESEARCH
BREAKTHROUGH
Blood, bones & brain waves Forensic techniques have their own story to tell
Also in this issue • When Conservation Met Tourism • Talking to the Public • The Ferguson Effect
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pg. 8 OFFICE OF RESEARCH UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA President Harris Pastides Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti Research Communications Manager Elizabeth Renedo Director of University Communications and Marketing/ Chief Communications Officer Wes Hickman
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Office of Communications and Marketing Creative Director Bob Wertz Editor Chris Horn Magazine Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributing Writers Craig Brandhorst, Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Liz McCarthy, Steven Powell Photographer Kim Truett Cover Artist Maria Fabrizio, ’08 BFA Website sc.edu/vpresearch To comment on an item in Breakthrough or to suggest an idea for a future issue, contact the University of South Carolina’s Office of Research at 803-777-5458 or email vpr@mailbox.sc.edu The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, genetics or veteran status. 16027 UCS 4/16
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The University of South Carolina is committed to sustainability in all facets of operation, including the production of publications such as this one, which is printed on paper certified by SmartWood to the FSC standards.
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IN THIS ISSUE
4 / In brief
6 / When conservation met tourism
8 / Blood, bones and brain waves From skeletal collec-
in the Serengeti History professor Tom Lekan explains the roots of modern ecotourism — and some of its unintended consequences.
tions to a blood-detecting lens and lie-detecting brain scans, USC scientists are up to their deerstalker caps in forensic research.
14 / Q&A with Susan Cutter Disasters, natural and
manmade, occur every year, and USC’s Hazards and Vulnerabilities Research Institute keeps track of every one.
16 / “Ending Zero Tolerance” A law professor’s take
18 / Talking to the public Academic bloggers take their
20 / The art of science Up close — really close — objects
23 / The Ferguson Effect — real or imagined? A crimi-
on school discipline policies.
research from the ivory tower to the public domain.
of nature become objets d’art.
nologist’s research finds evidence for and against the phenomenon.
24 / In the pipeline Going digital: an interdisciplinary team is bringing “The S.C. Encyclopedia” to the web and beyond.
Video at sc.edu/breakthrough
Cover illustration by Maria Fabrizio
Prakash Nagarkatti, Ph.D. Vice President for Research University of South Carolina www.sc.edu/vpresearch
Earlier this year, the Carnegie Foundation once again honored USC Columbia with its top research classification, “Highest Research Activity.” They also noted USC’s high level of community engagement through our curriculum, outreach and partnerships for the second time. This combination of designations reinforced our standing as one of the nation’s top research universities, and bolstered our status as South Carolina’s premier institution of higher learning. Only 44 other public universities in the United States can claim both the highest research activity and community engagement distinctions. The pages of this magazine will give you a glimpse into how USC continues earning such accolades. Our outstanding faculty in every discipline from tourism to philosophy, geography to astronomy, are hard at work in the lab, the field and the community, building a wide-ranging research portfolio of which we can all be proud. It is these individuals, coming together, generating new discoveries in nearly every field of study, applying for and winning major awards and training the next generation of outstanding scholars, who keep our university rising to new heights while providing world-class experiences for students at every level. This issue of the Breakthrough research magazine highlights some of the many ways that USC engages with the Palmetto State community, and the nation at large, to gather and disseminate information that can make a real difference in our neighbors’ lives, in public policy, in our understanding of the world and even our planet’s place in the galaxy. I invite you to read more about these efforts and learn more about how USC faculty are making a difference in how we understand hazards, investigate crimes and reach new audiences through the internet, among many other fruitful efforts. In short, I invite you to take a look at how Carolina changes everything.
2 / Breakthrough
Mevan Dissanayake, a graduate student in chemistry assistant professor Aaron Vannucci’s research group, records the yield of a new catalyst he made that could lead to more efficient production of pharmaceutical drugs.
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In brief
✁ FOOD STAMPS AND BEER — A CORRELATION THAT EXTENDS ONLY SO FAR It probably isn’t surprising that beer purchases rise just after food stamp recipients receive their benefit cards. It’s logical, after all, that getting the food stamp card frees up any available cash for non-food stamp purchases such as alcohol — and studies prove the correlation. Moore School of Business economics faculty Orgul Ozturk and John Gordanier started digging a little deeper into the data, thinking that if beer purchases rise when food stamp cards arrive, a rise in drunk driving fatalities might also be part of the equation. But instead of a positive correlation, they found a negative one — drunk driving fatalities actually decrease on the days food stamp recipients get their benefits, especially on weekdays. Their paper, written with Chad Cotti from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, will appear in the American Journal of Health Economics. The wife-husband team speculate that drunk driving fatalaties do not increase, even with the spike in beer purchases, because family members might be staying home to share the plentiful meals made possible just after food stamp benefits arrive. The thinking is that beer drinking might increase, but the drinkers are staying home with family, not driving. Another article, written with Cotti and Elena Castellari at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, examines the timing of food stamp distribution. It’s well documented that food stamp recipients tend to use up the once-a-month cards within three days of receiving them. By the end of the month, caloric intake in those households decreases by as much as 20 percent. “If the idea is to decrease food insecurity, maybe the monthly benefit should be spread out over two payments so that it’s not all spent — and the groceries all consumed — in the first few days of the month,” Ozturk says. “The concept of how and when food stamp benefits are distributed might give us new ways to look at food insecurity and other issues.” 4 / Breakthrough
Jennifer Frey
HAPPINESS GRANTED In academia, landing a $2.1 million grant is pretty exciting. But will it make you truly happy? USC assistant professor of philosophy Jennifer Frey and co-PI Candace Vogler of the University of Chicago landed just such a princely sum this past fall, and they’re hardly bummed about it. Their pursuit of happiness, however, is really just beginning. In fact, that’s what the two-year grant is all about. Awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, it is being used to study the connections between virtue, happiness and the meaning of human life. “Templeton likes the big questions,” says Frey, who hopes the grant will open a range of interdisciplinary inquiry. The team, which includes assistant professor of religion Mari Stuart, is organizing six public lectures and a series of working meetings at Carolina and in Chicago, and will bring together 30 scholars from psychology, religious studies and philosophy. “There’s an important connection between being good, being happy and finding meaning in one’s existence,” she says. “What the psychologists are finding is that the less that people focus on themselves and their own needs, the happier they are. Human beings really are fulfilled when they are working towards something that transcends themselves. “Part of our research is getting psychologists and philosophers talking about how to run empirical studies, frame the questions, develop the conceptual grounding and interpret the data.”
BREAKTHROUGH LEADERSHIP IN RESEARCH AWARD RECIPIENTS AND BREAKTHROUGH STARS NAMED
LEADERSHIP IN RESEARCH 1 Kirstin Dow College of Arts and Sciences 2 James Hébert
Six professors have been named recipients of the Breakthrough Leadership in Research Award, and 12 assistant and associate professors have been named Breakthrough Stars by the Office of Research. Now in its sixth year, the Breakthrough Stars program recognizes junior faculty whose research and scholarly endeavors have already achieved noteworthy success. Each cohort of Breakthrough Stars has included faculty members from academic disciplines across the campus. The Breakthrough Leadership in Research Award, now in its third year, recognizes leadership through activities including successful mentoring of junior faculty, establishment of research centers with university-wide impact, promotion of research at K-12 schools, community outreach through research and creation of programs aimed at increasing diversity. “These scholars reflect the innovation, research excellence and commitment to learning that are the hallmarks of a Carnegie tier-one research institution,” said Prakash Nagarkatti, USC’s vice president for research.
Arnold School of Public Health 3 Angela Liese Arnold School of Public Health 4 Dan Reger College of Arts and Sciences 5 Igor Roninson S.C. College of Pharmacy 6 Ralph White College of Engineering and Computing
BREAKTHROUGH STARS 7 Michael Beets Arnold School of Public Health 8 Saurabh Chatterjee Arnold School of Public Health 9 Maksymilian Chruszcz College of Arts and Sciences 10 Tanvir Farouk College of Engineering and Computing
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11 Michy Kelly School of Medicine 12 J. Brent Morris
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USC Beaufort
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13 Kasia Pawelek USC Beaufort
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14 Ryan Rykaczewski College of Arts and Sciences 15 Howie Scher
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College of Arts and Sciences
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16 Matthias Schindler College of Arts and Sciences
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17 Guoan Wang College of Engineering and Computing
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18 Miao Yu
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College of Engineering and Computing
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Environment & Sustainability
WHEN CONSERVATION MET TOURISM IN THE SERENGETI By Steven Powell PHOTO BY TOM LEKAN
P
icture what “wildlife conservation” looks like. Do human beings appear in your mind’s eye? Probably not — and there’s probably no chance that a gaggle of tourists might intrude on the scene you conjure up. But as University of South Carolina history professor Tom Lekan knows, or anyone passingly familiar with Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom would recognize, tourism and conservation have a long history of mutual influence. One might say the two have co-evolved, a symbiotic pairing of organisms having a predator (tourism) versus prey (conservation) relationship. The predator-prey relationship flourishes in nature. But the human constructs of tourism and conservation are products of human circumstances, and Lekan is working on a book that examines those circumstances in the decades after World War II. That was the start of a fertile period in global conservation, particularly in post-colonial Africa. It was a growth spurt that was in part predicated on the economic promise of tourism. In his book, Lekan chronicles the choices made by people with changing notions of how global conservation might be achieved and of how tourism could be implemented sustainably to support wildlife conservation.
6 / Breakthrough
The modern-day consequences of those conservation efforts include two renowned reserves in Tanzania, but they came at a cost, particularly to indigenous people, Lekan says. The Serengeti
The subject of Lekan’s research is the Serengeti, East Africa’s crown jewel of large-animal diversity. In the post-WWII years in Africa, even as nations were achieving independence, they were also being subjected to a new external influence. “Africa was on the brink of decolonization at a time when the Cold War was very hot,” Lekan says. “All of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa were kind of a testing zone between the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc. It was seen as an ideological proving ground.” For people concerned with wildlife, biological diversity and preservation of the natural world, Africa’s natural bounty appeared threatened. A prominent global conservationist of that era, Bernhard Grzimek, the director of the Frankfurt Zoo, saw potential disaster in the offing. “People were talking about African wildlife going the way of the American buffalo,” Lekan says. “Grzimek felt that Africa was on the brink of modernization, and that its wildlife would soon be destroyed.”
Germany’s Marlin Perkins?
Lekan originally thought that Grzimek would make an interesting chapter of his book, but the German eventually moved up in billing and became the main character in the manuscript, tentatively titled “Saving the Serengeti: Tourism, the Cold War, and the Paradox of European Conservation in Postcolonial Africa, 1950–1985.” Grzimek was as popular in Europe as Marlin Perkins of the “Wild Kingdom” TV series (1963-1985) was in America. Like Perkins, Grzimek was the star of a TV show that showcased animals in their natural environment and directed the Oscar-winning 1959 documentary “Serengeti Shall Not Die.” Grzimek was a key player in the Serengeti in the 1950s and ‘60s, influencing the formation of conservation areas in Tanzania. One of those areas involved the indigenous Maasai, a cattle-herding people who had lived in the Serengeti for generations. They were ejected from land that is now within the Serengeti National Park and relocated to what is now the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Displaced peoples
The decision remains controversial, and not only because an aboriginal people was evicted from their homeland. Some
modern ecologists argue that the Maasai are an integral part of the Serengeti ecosystem’s evolution — for example, burning brushland and grazing cattle — that helped shape the ecosystem. “These rangeland ecologists think that it was a misguided path to create a ‘fortress park,’ a place that nobody, except tourists, could use,” Lekan says. “It was a particular vision of Africa as an Eden, a people-less Eden, that shaped outcomes for people who lived there.” Other things contributed to the ideals underpinning the formation of ecotourist-friendly conservation areas, Lekan adds. Hunting preserves, where indigenous people were usually evicted and where mostly rich, white hunters paid top dollar for hunting privileges, were a common part of the pre-1950s colonial landscape. They were, in fact, an early attempt at conservation. Consuming for conservation
“It was the idea that you could save wildlife by consuming it,” Lekan says. “These colonial game preserves were often hated. They had alienated people from their land.” In this context Grzimek helped convince post-colonial leaders of the value of their ecological resources, and to transition to tourism that consumed visually, rather than viscerally. “Grzimek and a lot of other conservationists were advocating for these newly independent countries to create national parks to protect wildlife,” Lekan says. “And the carrot, for them, was tourism.” In part because of overly optimistic visions of tourism revenues (Disney
was at the height of its growth), the parks were established. And the Maasai were relocated, creating a problem that persists to this day. “There were unintended consequences of what was a well-intended effort to create a national park and move to this other form of tourism,” Lekan says. “A Maasai delegate to an international conservation summit in Bangkok told a shocked audience in 2004, ‘Now you have made us enemies of conservation.’ ” For Lekan, it’s a history that bears understanding today, as the population grows and a collective interest in protecting the natural world grows with it. “There’s a lot of hope that tourism can still serve a role in protecting wildlife,” Lekan says. “There is more of an awareness of the Serengeti case. And so there are a lot more attempts at what they call community conservation now. “The origins of that come out of this postwar moment around decolonization. The idea of a sensitive nature tourism is older than we might think. They didn’t call it ecotourism, but a lot of the rhetoric sounds very similar. They didn’t call it sustainable development, but that’s what it was.”
SUSTAINING THE GALAPAGOS The Galapagos are treasured as a historic landmark to Charles Darwin’s seminal work and for the islands’ qualities for studying biodiversity and evolution. But enthusiasm for the Galapagos is engendering considerable ecotourism, which poses threats to the islands’ ecosystems. To help safeguard the region’s long-term ecological viability, USC’s College of Hospitality, Retail and Sports Management is working with Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito to bring a sustainable tourism approach to the islands’ management. Representatives from Columbia visited Ecuador and the Galapagos in March, in part to finalize agreements that will launch a student exchange this fall. “They are the only university that has a campus on the Galapagos, and they have expertise in biology, ecology,” says David Cárdenas, an HRSM professor. “What they don’t have is expertise in sustainable tourism, and so they contacted us a couple of years ago to see if we were interested in developing a partnership.” Over the course of the next academic year USC faculty will develop sustainable tourism modules for short and semester-long courses that they will teach at the Galapagos campus on San Cristóbal island. A native of Ecuador, Cárdenas focuses his research on sustainable tourism primarily in South Carolina, but welcomes the opportunity to help preserve one of the world’s premier ecotourism destinations. “It’s an amazing location,” Cárdenas says. “If you think about going to a zoo with no walls, that’s really what it’s like. The wildlife is just unbelievable. There’s nowhere in the world that I’ve been that has the natural ecological environment like the Galapagos. It’s wonderful, but it will not stay that way unless it’s protected.”
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Front & Center
BLOOD, BONES & BRAIN WAVES USC scientists search for forensic clues in the past and present
PAST IS PROLOGUE The skeletal collections that Carlina de la Cova has relied on for forensic techniques have their own stories to tell. A lot of people have contributed to the creation of modern forensic science — and many of them did so unwittingly. Anthropologist Carlina de la Cova is part of a new generation of forensic scientists who want to do something about that. De la Cova’s research in biological anthropology often involves working with skeletal collections that were typically put together during the first half of the 20th century. She has made extensive use of the Hamann-Todd collection, for example, which comprises more than 3,100 individual skeletons and was assembled by professors of anatomy at what is now Case Western Reserve University. The skeletons were prepared from cadavers starting in 1893 and are now held in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. According to de la Cova, Hamann-Todd and similar collections were crucial to the development of modern forensic science. “These skeletons have given us the basic human identification techniques in our discipline,” de la Cova says. “They have been used to create the methods to identify sex, to identify age, to assess ancestry in this country from skeletal remains.” De la Cova knows about those techniques firsthand, using them in the field in her position as a deputy coroner for Richland County and as a forensic consultant in other states. The osteological collections that have proven to be indispensable to her discipline and to the detectives she supports do not, however, contain the remains of civic-minded individuals who donated their bodies to science. Rather, they represent in large part the final resting place of people of little means who died far from home. In the collections de la Cova has studied, bodies that were not claimed by relatives within 24 to 32 hours were sent to medical schools for dissection, she says. Some of those were then selected by the anatomists for preservation in their collections. De la Cova has spent time further identifying the individuals, working from their names and the hospitals from which they originated.
8 / Breakthrough
“They were indigent, they were immigrants, they were migrants,” she says. “In fact, a lot of the African-Americans I’m finding in these collections were part of the Great Migration.” The first wave of that large-scale movement of black Americans out of the South took place roughly between 1910 and 1930. “I’m finding that 32 to 40 percent of the white females, in the collections I’ve worked with, were in mental institutions,” she says. De la Cova is burnishing the dataset of these canonical collections, adding information about individuals, such as institutionalization status or medical histories, that perhaps ought be taken into account when forensic scientists estimate things like height, weight or age from skeletal observations or measurements. She thinks there might be fine details in individual skeletal histories that have the potential to make forensic predictions even more precise. But she’s also trying to develop with her colleagues a better sense of how to ethically work with the collections. “They’re not skeletons, they’re people to me because for some of them I know their stories,” de la Cova says. “I feel it’s my duty to tell the story of these individuals. “In the early history of the discipline, they were objects to be studied, to be objectified. The newer generation of bioarchaeologists, of biological anthropologists, are pushing beyond that,” she says. “The folks that we study, we have to think about who their descendants are, and we have to actively engage in discussions with their descendants. That’s the way the discipline is now moving.”
BLACK DEATH Why a horrific disease outbreak from more than 600 years ago might help us prepare for future outbreaks. An investigator approaches the workbench, opens a box, removes a pelvis, a skull, arm and leg bones, and other parts of a mostly complete skeleton. She makes a series of measurements and observations: femur length, hip shape, tooth development and many more. She examines each bone for clues. Was there an earlier fracture? Evidence of disease? Any signs of stress early in life? She’s collecting these data points to build as complete a profile as possible of the person whose skeleton she is examining: age, sex, stature, health status, whether the cause of death can be specified, and so on. So what kind of investigator is this? Forensic technician? Forensic pathologist? Forensic anthropologist? In Sharon DeWitte’s case, it’s none of the above. She is an anthropologist, specializing in biological anthropology, but you can’t find the word forensic anywhere on her vita.
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The adjective “forensic” indicates that the noun it modifies has something to do with the court system. That could mean a criminal case, or it could mean a legal determination about property rights involving remains in a cemetery. In DeWitte’s work, it doesn’t apply. She wants to use the tools of modern anthropology to understand the lives of people who died a long time ago rather than take on forensic cases. “I made a decision when I was in graduate school to work with remains that are the least contentious possible, so I actually do not work with Native American remains, for that exact reason,” DeWitte says. “I don’t think there’s anything that I can do that would trump the wishes of descendant populations, so instead, I work with dead British people.” Understanding those dead British people requires all the skills of a forensic investigator — skills that she helps teach the next generation of forensic scientists in the classroom. And she uses them as a matter of routine in studying people who died hundreds of years ago. DeWitte’s research focuses on the Black Death, the pandemic that ravaged London and most of the inhabited world in the 14th century, killing tens of millions and possibly more than half of Europe’s population in just a few years. That was a long time past, in a place far removed from the modern world, but DeWitte is drawing conclusions about pandemics that are relevant today, she says. The Black Death, for example, with a more than 50 percent fatality rate, was long thought to be an indiscriminate killer. If you came down with it, it was just a roll of the dice whether you survived. But DeWitte’s research has shown that the dice were, in fact, loaded: the Black Death was more virulent with children, the elderly and the infirm. It’s an insight that policymakers would be advised to bring to bear on modern-day outbreaks, DeWitte says. “By demonstrating that people varied in their risk of death during the Black Death, in what was one of the worst pandemics in human history, we should expect those same sort of patterns regardless of the cause of mortality,” she says. “I definitely think that, even in the case of something like Ebola, we can learn from past epidemics. There are mechanisms that we might put into place to prevent the kinds of levels of mortality that we’re seeing. “I actually mentioned this in a recent paper. The recent outbreak of Ebola killed 10 times as many people as all of the previous outbreaks combined, going back to 1975. The genetic variant that caused this outbreak was the same as previous outbreaks, the case fatality ratios were the same, the transmissibility was the same and the symptoms were the same. It also had a much wider geographical distribution than any previous outbreak, and that is entirely the result of human behavior. It was just that people engaged in behaviors that completely promoted the spread of the disease.”
10 / Breakthrough
STEAMING OUT LUMINOL’S WRINKLES A new technique called ‘steam thermography’ could replace a traditional chemical in detecting blood at crime scenes. Luminol, a chemical used to detect blood, gets trotted out on TV crime shows, but a new technique might someday compete with the storied forensics tool as a means of solving real crimes. Carolina chemistry professors Michael Myrick and Stephen Morgan are showing that what they call “steam thermography” has the ability to spot blood spots where luminol can’t. Myrick and Morgan use a hand steamer in combination with thermal imaging in their new visualization method, which can make even a highly diluted blood sample stand out from its background. Their laboratory work has roots in the technology of night-vision goggles, which contain an infrared sensor that differentiates between areas from which large and small amounts of IR radiation, commonly referred to as heat radiation, are emanating. The device converts the data into a visible image distinguishing between warm and cool areas — perfect for making a hot-blooded creature stand out from the background. Myrick, Morgan and their students have been carrying that idea further, working to develop IR-sensitive cameras into instruments that highlight more than the difference between warm and cold. The light radiation that any object emits is a function of the molecules that make it up, so the research team has been refining the ability of IR-sensitive cameras to recognize chemical contrast; to “see” the difference between chemically distinct objects that are otherwise indistinguishable in an image. Exhibit A in that effort is blood. Using grant money from the National Institute of Justice, the researchers are developing a system to make blood spots stand out from the background in a thermal image. In the course of trying different approaches to enhance contrast, they found one that was eye-popping. By first treating a piece of bloodspattered fabric with a hand steamer, the team showed that droplets of even 1/1,000-diluted blood would stand out brightly in thermal imaging under the right conditions. And the contrast enhancement is evident in real time — an observer can watch blood spots emerge on the IR camera’s viewscreen as steam is applied. The team has worked with trained forensic scientists who verified that highly diluted bloodstains that their “steam thermography” technique reveals are not visible with standard light visualization. That would make this one of the few techniques to give luminol a run for its money. Luminol is not used as extensively in crime labs as its portrayal in on TV might imply. Luminol and a reagent must be sprayed on a surface of interest, which effectively contaminates a crime scene. As a consequence, using luminol is often a last resort, when other methods fail to highlight where blood is present — when someone tried to clean it up, for example,
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and not much is left. With demonstrated success at 1/1000 dilution, steam thermography is a promising alternative. What’s more, you need a darkened room to see the faint, distinctive blue glow that is generated for a short time when the luminol solution has come in contact with blood. That precludes its use outside. Steam thermography doesn’t have that limitation. Myrick and Morgan’s method does introduce a brief steam exposure to a crime scene, but they show that adding an already ubiquitous chemical (water) that quickly evaporates doesn’t warm the surface much (less than 20 degrees Fahrenheit), and they have verified that DNA testing of blood spots wasn’t affected. Moreover, they’ve also established that their new technique isn’t fooled by common materials that can cause false positives with luminol, which include bleach, rust and coffee stains. That makes steam thermography a good candidate for filling some niches where luminol doesn’t fit — and perhaps even some where it does.
3-D PRINTING A CRIME SCENE An engineering student’s CAD skills might help save a death row inmate’s life. Success in the engineering laboratory opened an unexpected door to the world of forensic science for one undergraduate at Carolina. Shana Mussel, who will earn her bachelor’s degree later this year, excelled in computer assisted design (CAD) in her mechanical engineering curriculum. It was a skill that her professor Joshua Tarbutton knew would carry her to success in a forensic reconstruction project he agreed to oversee last summer. Through connections in the community, Tarbutton had learned about a death row inmate, near the end of his appeals, who needed help in the courtroom. Convicted of murdering a police officer more than 20 years ago, the inmate has been trying to establish his contention that he did not know he was being confronted by a police officer and had been startled at the time of the shooting. He tried to reconstruct the shooting scene with a model to make the point, but the cardboard contraption he had assembled didn’t do much to strengthen his argument. At the behest of Justice 360, a non-profit that provides quality legal representation to death row inmates, Tarbutton enlisted Mussel to re-create the scene of the crime. Using forensic photographs and other evidence, she modeled the house and porch from which the police officer was shot using Sketchup, a three-dimensional modeling platform to which her CAD skills were readily transferred. They then brought the scene to life through 3-D printing, generating a scale model of the house, its porch and the two men involved. Tarbutton and Mussel then prepared a report based on the geometry of the shooting established by the evidence. It showed that the inmate’s view of the officer was obscured when he fired, and that his gun was fired from the hip, not the shoulder. Those conclusions could make a difference for a man whose life literally hangs in the balance, and a hearing on the case is expected later this year. If a new trial takes place, both engineers likely will testify. Mussel won’t appear as a surprise witness in court by any means, except perhaps to herself. “Possibly saving a man’s life, through being an engineer — that’s pretty cool,” Mussel says. “Definitely not something you think you’ll be doing with this kind of degree.” 12 / Breakthrough
YOU CAN’T HIDE YOUR LYIN’ MIND A psychologist uses fMRI imaging to detect the moment of deception. The lie detector test, or polygraph, is viewed skeptically in the courtroom, suspect enough to be subject to a patchwork of federal, state and local laws about whether the test results can even be admitted as evidence. Psychology professor Jennifer Vendemia and graduate student Jimmy Nye hope that the new scientific tools they’re bringing to bear in the study of deception will make lie detection a more reliable courtroom witness in the next decade or so. They and their colleagues are using the tools of neuroscience to get an inside look into the mind as it seeks to deceive — something that takes a lot of brainpower not just in the thinking, but also in the doing, and with possible consequences for telling the truth. To get a clear view of the lying mind, the researchers rely on two tools that give somewhat complementary information, the electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An EEG measures how electrical impulses travel along the scalp, reflecting electrical flow between parts of the brain near the skull, and it can resolve brain activity on a microsecond time scale. The fMRI technique provides much more spatial information, pinpointing in three-dimensional detail the blood flow within the brain, but the time scale cannot be resolved nearly as precisely as with the EEG. An fMRI image is only available every several seconds and reflects a time-averaged picture of blood flow over those several seconds. Together, these tools open a new window onto the act of deception. Today’s polygraph measures only the after-effects of telling a lie — physiological responses such as changes in heart rate, breathing and sweating. With EEG and fMRI, Vendemia and Nye are able to watch the formulation of the intent to lie, which they have shown can often take a lot more work than telling the truth. A truth-teller largely accesses parts of the brain associated with memory, presumably to recall the facts requested.
Someone intent on deception, however, has a more complex response, accessing other parts of the brain that might be involved in processing the lie to ensure consistency or in calming the emotional responses that most people have to intentionally being untrustworthy. Even the act of speaking an untruth is difficult. “We’ve found that the motor part of the lie, the actual telling of it, can take more time than truth-telling,” says graduate student Jimmy Nye. “We’ve seen that from measuring reaction times after a question was asked.” What’s more, a person telling a series of lies appears to have increasing difficulty in unexpected ways. “This is still preliminary, but what we’re starting to see is that the more lies you tell doesn’t really change how hard a lie was,” Nye says. “What really changes, though, the more lies you tell, is that it makes it harder to tell the truth.” Having to maintain a lie throughout an interrogation might thus be reflected in difficulty in honestly answering even innocuous questions, which could be quantitatively detectable by a forensic examiner. “That’s something we really want to test, these long-term lies,” Nye says. “That’s where I see this going.”
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Environment & Sustainability
What got you interested in hazards research — was there some defining moment? I’ve always been interested in the relationships between human activity and the environment and human activity and high hazard
Q&A With Susan Cutter Department of Geography
zones. I was in my second year as an assistant professor at Rutgers University when Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred. It does change you. You become more aware, more attuned to natural and technological threats that you might not have paid as much attention to before. I don’t have a complete disaster supply kit at my home or in my car, but my family does have a plan on how to contact each other should something happen when we’re apart. And I do pay attention to weather reports; that becomes second nature when you study the effects of natural hazards. When you’re in the field after a disaster, you become aware of the trauma and stress that people affected by it are dealing with — and that makes a big impression. How did the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute get
Floods, earthquakes, fires — it’s all in a day’s work at the Hazards and Vulnerabilities Research Institute.
started? The institute grew out of a hazards research lab I started in 1995, two years after I joined the geography faculty. I had been working to build ties with the state’s emergency management infrastructure before we got the lab going, and we’ve been working with them ever since. We were among the first to use remote sensing and geographic information systems to study hazards, and very quickly
Susan Cutter joined the geography department in 1993 with an interest in hazards research. Two years later, she launched a hazards research laboratory, which became the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute in 2006.
USC became the place to get an education in hazards research. We’ve become more integrated across campus since the hazards lab became the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute in 2006. In addition to the institute staff, we have faculty associates from civil engineering, history, public health and law. How many graduate students have received some of their training through the institute? Since 1998, 22 Ph.D. candidates and 34 master’s candidates have completed their degrees during their association with the institute. And recently, the university added a concentration in emergency management to the Master of Public Administration degree. Over time I think that’s going to help increase the number of professionals who can plan for and respond to disasters. Most of these students have had some experience in the field after a disaster.
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What services does the institute provide for South Carolina and emergency management agencies across the country?
What are the risks in South Carolina? Many citizens focus on hurricanes to the exclusion of other
We’re focused on research and outreach that provides best
threats. The potential for tornadoes is often ignored here in
practices and guidance and expertise concerning emergency
the state. Also, keep in mind that the two recent presidential
preparedness and response, hazard mitigation and disaster
disaster declarations we’ve experienced in S.C. have come
recovery. We were involved during the recent flood response
from ice and flooding. But, historically, the most significant
in South Carolina, running models for the state to determine
threats here are severe weather and hurricanes. There is seis-
the 100-year flood plain for every county as a quick way to
mic potential in the Palmetto State, as well. One of the big-
estimate the extent of flood damage. We provide basic infor-
gest earthquakes to hit east of the Mississippi was in 1886 near
mation for each state to determine its vulnerability to hazards.
Charleston. That’s a low-probability but high-consequence risk.
For example, each state and each county produces a hazards mitigation plan, and we provide information on vulnerability, a background picture on the potential hazards in that county and a snapshot of the different social groups who live there and their potential losses. We’ve created a database called the Social Vulnerability Index for counties to gather information about their own vulnerabilities. We want them to use the best
(insets, from left) A barber shop located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, La., showing extensive damage after Hurricane Katrina; broken miniature golf decor in the ruins of Biloxi, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina, courtesy of Library of Congress; a house set askew in Charleston, S.C., after the 1886 earthquake
science available.
What kind of research does the institute do after a disaster? A natural disaster is like a crash site; investigators want to gather evidence before it degrades. We are interested in documenting the impact of disasters immediately after the event so we can then trace progress toward recovery. After Hurricane Katrina along the Mississippi coast, a lot of areas were cordoned off, so we had to get credentialed by FEMA to get past the military check points. We took tents, food and water and found the only campground in southern Mississippi that still had electricity. We’ve gone back to those same places along the Gulf, using GPS coordinates to take more photos and gather more data. As a researcher it’s depressing to see these places that once were vibrant and are still not back 10 years later. Hancock County, Miss., is like a patchwork quilt; you’ll see one house rebuilt and several more missing on a street — just a concrete foundation where the house used to be.
Spring 2016 / 15
Book Corner
“ENDING ZERO TOLERANCE” Law professor takes on school discipline policy By Craig Brandhorst
M
aintaining classroom discipline is important, but so is maintaining student civil rights. According to Carolina law professor Derek Black, public education’s current hardline approach to the one is a threat to the other — and then some. In fact, as Black argues in his new book “The End of Zero Tolerance in Schools,” the rush to suspend or expel students without considering offenses on a case-by-case basis derives from, and feeds into, “an irrational discipline system” affecting everything from student success to eventual incarceration. Combining legal analysis with narratives of zero tolerance run amok — think students being expelled for bringing nail clippers to school, or even just drawing pictures of weapons — “The End of Zero Tolerance in Schools” is intended to add to the scholarly conversation as well as provide a resource for lay audiences, particularly parents, teachers and administrators. “The more deeply I looked into the issue, the more I realized that the courts haven’t really taken the issue seriously,” Black explains. “Courts take school funding seriously, they take segregation seriously, they take other civil rights issues seriously, but courts have not typically taken discipline seriously.” Right now, Black says, school districts and school administrators operate more or less free from oversight by the courts. And while the courts don’t dictate school policy, a wholesale abdication of legal authority on issues of classroom discipline leads, at best, to disciplinary inconsistency and, at worst, to abuse of power. “Courts will be very clear — it’s first and foremost the job of educators to come up with these policies. It’s not the court’s
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job to figure out if students should or shouldn’t be disciplined, there’s always going to be deference there,” says Black. “The problem is that in recognizing that educators have a better sense of these things, the courts have simply not bothered to look at what’s happening. Once no one’s looking over your shoulder, you’re free to do all sorts of stuff.” For Black, whose prior research has focused largely on issues relating to desegregation, school funding and equality of education opportunity, the new book represents for him a foray into a new area of scholarship. What ties it all together, though, is a larger interest in issues of civil rights. “There’s been a groundswell of community disgruntlement with discipline for a good decade or more, particularly calling on the civil rights community, but the civil rights community has traditionally looked at bigger issues,” Black explains. “I’m sort of giving something to that community.” He also wants to give something to the students themselves, whose educational opportunities are affected by the culture of zero tolerance. Indeed, part of Black’s thesis hinges on the idea, supported by research, that removing students from the classroom for what are often minor infractions not only impedes that student’s education but also adversely affects the educational opportunities of other students in that class or that school. “The social science has come a long way since the last time these issues were addressed by the Supreme Court,” he says. “We shouldn’t be so cynical about the courts placing some limits on what the school can do. It’s worth revisiting.”
Spring 2016 / 17
TALKING TO THE PUBLIC Academic bloggers share their research with a broader audience By Page Ivey
For researchers, little else is more gratifying than studying something that helps someone else — whether it’s finding a sustainable healthy diet, a better way to motivate workers or a way to make coursework more engaging. For some professors and researchers at the University of South Carolina that means taking their scholarly work out of the journals and into the blogosphere, where they can reach not just others in their profession, but those who might learn from their work. “Scholars are turning more to accessible media to get their scholarship to a broader audience,” says public history professor Allison Marsh, who writes a blog for her former employer, the Smithsonian Institution. “All the scholarship is rewarded when a reader wants to follow up.” For Marsh, that moment came on her most recent blog about the Columbia Canal following October’s catastrophic flooding across the state. A civil engineering professor at the university called her to talk about possible changes in the introductory civil engineering course he teaches to include local public works projects. “As historians, we want to be relevant to current events,” Marsh says, adding that her canal blog used architectural renderings that she knew the Smithsonian had in its collection. “The archival staff helped with quick turnaround time,” she says. “I wrote a draft and revised it on an airplane. It was the first time I ever paid for Internet access on an airplane.” Staying current is also important for law school professor Colin Miller. For the past year, Miller has participated in the “Undisclosed” podcast re-examining evidence in the murder trials of Adnan Syed, whose fate has been chronicled by the national podcast “Serial.” The podcast looks at evidence that
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has been explored by the national podcast produced in the
“The practice community is becoming more evidence-based
style of “This American Life” and looking at new evidence
now, there is more of a thirst for that information,” he says.
the “Undisclosed” team has uncovered. He also writes for
And that can lead to new research projects.
Evidence Prof Blog.
Finding those moments of value to the university and the
“Part of my goal is to educate the public,” he says. “Another
world of research are important if blogging is to be taken
part is to keep a toe dipped into what’s going on in the actual
seriously inside academia, public historian Marsh says.
trenches and another part is to discover ideas for my scholarship or for use in the classroom.” To that end, the blog helps Miller stay up to date on the latest cases and rules of evidence.
“Not everyone thinks it’s scholarship,” she says. “They wonder ‘How can you put anything intellectual into something so breezy?’ “There is a misconception that blogs are just your thoughts,
“I am always trying to find what’s going on so I can keep cur-
that they’re not scholarly. But my most recent blog had to
rent in my scholarship and teaching,” he says. “The worst thing
go through a review committee just like any other scholarly
you can have is a classroom where you’re citing cases from
publication.”
1903, and the students’ eyes are rolling back in their heads. “It’s better if I can come into the classroom and say ‘Here’s a case involving Uber or here’s one involving Twitter.’ ”
And, unlike scholarly publications, blog feedback is immediate and can sting. “If you are going to be a public intellectual, you’re going to
Another feature of the blog for Miller is the idea of educating
have to engage with the public,” Marsh says. “But, the public
the masses, of translating his scholarship into understandable
talks back. That is why, number one, your scholarship has to
bits for potential jury members.
be in place.”
“The entire foundation of the American justice system is an educated jury,” Miller says. “But a lot of people don’t get that justice education. I love the fact that somebody who might not know about the rules of evidence can hop on my blog and learn something.” That translation from academia to the real world is essential for business professor and human resources expert Patrick Wright at the Darla Moore School of Business. His twice-amonth blog for the HR Policy Association is nothing like his scholarly output. “Blogging is for practitioners who don’t speak academic jargon,” Wright says. “I am writing much more for general understanding. How can I provide data and knowledge to the practitioner? How can practitioners see the value in academic research? “When you are in a business school, it is absolutely critical, being able to translate from academia to the real world.” The bonus is that readers — mostly human resource officers at major corporations — get to see quality research coming out of the university and the Moore School.
Allison Marsh
Spring 2016 / 19
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TH E ART O F SCI ENCE
SLICE OF LIFE This magnified cross-sectional image of a marsh grass (Spartina) stem looks like a thing of beauty. To John Herr, it’s a work of art. That’s because, after years of disappointment with commercially prepared botanical specimens, Herr decided to build his own device and technique for capturing more accurate cross sections of plant parts. His patent-pending device, called a hydro-microtome, can slice off thin cross sections of plant stems, leaves and roots without distorting their anatomical structure. Herr continues to conduct research and publish on botanical topics nearly 25 years after retiring as a distinguished professor emeritus at USC.
Spring 2016 / 21
THROUGH LENSES OF DARK MATTER
By Steven Powell
After a long trek to our neck of the universe, photons from a beyond-ancient supernova recently lit up the sky—and more than once. Supernova Refsdal, the result of a star exploding billions of years ago in a galaxy billions of light-years away, emitted light rays that traveled through a cluster of galaxies with copious amounts of dark matter. Gravitational lensing focused the light, making the supernova visible to the Hubble Space Telescope. It also produced multiple images, with each appearing and fading on differing schedules that reflected differing transit routes. Astronomer Steve Rodney leads an international team that discovered and studied the faraway stellar explosion and is using Hubble to look for more.
1.
2.
3.
1. A single star exploded in a distant galaxy, but its light took ages to arrive here. 2. Billions of years after the supernova, four images of the explosion appeared in November 2014. 3. Each image faded in a matter of weeks, each on a different schedule. 4. As predicted by Rodney and his team, a fifth image appeared in December 2015. 5. It, too, soon waned.
4.
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5.
THE FERGUSON EFFECT — REAL OR IMAGINED?
S
ince the summer day in 2014 when unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot by police in a St. Louis suburb, the word “Ferguson” — the name of the suburb where the incident occurred — has become synonymous with social unrest. Criminal justice scholars refer to the Ferguson Effect in describing the reaction of police officers who, fearful of excessive public and media scrutiny, have reduced their efforts on the job. “There has been a view that some police are engaged in ‘de-policing,’ doing the bare minimum because they’re scared of getting caught doing something wrong in a tense situation by someone with a camera phone,” says Scott Wolfe, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice who has co-authored a study on the Ferguson Effect. “We looked at it with the idea that if the Ferguson Effect really exists, crime rates wouldn’t have changed yet — it’s too soon. But we realized the effect might be real in the eyes of police officers.” So Wolfe and his co-investigator surveyed a large sheriff’s department
in the Southeast whose jurisdiction includes rural, metropolitan and urban environments. They asked officers whether negative media focus on policing incidents in the past six months was affecting their motivation to be in law enforcement. “We asked them specifically how the media attention has affected them, whether it’s made their jobs more difficult and less enjoyable,” Wolfe says. “We also asked them questions about how willing they were to engage with community members on the job. That’s a vital indicator of whether ‘de-policing’ is occurring.” What Wolfe and his co-investigator found was that some officers reported feeling less motivated in their jobs as a result of media attention from the high-profile shooting incidents. But most of those individuals said they were not reducing their interactions with community members. “Among cops who are secure in their sense of authority and in their sense of the fairness of their own law enforcement agency, the Ferguson Effect goes away,”
Wolfe says. “From an agency standpoint, if supervisors can ensure that they are engaged in organizational justice, they’re more likely to insulate their officers from the stress of media attention. “If individual officers have a sense that there is organizational fairness — that the agency I work for is trying to do the right things — those police officers tend to not feel the Ferguson Effect. In other words, some officers might feel less motivated due to negative publicity but this does not translate into de-policing in the form of withdrawal from community partnership.” There are ominous signs of trouble in certain parts of a few major cities where robbery and homicide rates have increased, Wolfe says. “There is evidence of the Ferguson Effect in a handful of areas know for violent crime with higher percentages of African Americans — Detroit and St. Louis — and with poor structural conditions,” he says. “It could be a result of delegitimacy — citizens questioning the legitimacy of the law — or it could be de-policing.” Spring 2016 / 23
In the Pipeline
GOING DIGITAL Interdisciplinary team looks to bring “The S.C. Encyclopedia” to the web and beyond
Ten years after its launch as the most comprehensive reference book on the Palmetto State, “The South Carolina Encyclopedia” is getting ready for a second act, this time on the digital stage. The 1,120-page encyclopedia, a joint project of the S.C. Humanities Council, USC Press and the Institute for Southern Studies, was published in 2006 and contains nearly 2,000 entries comprising more than a million words. The encyclopedia covers topics ranging from war and politics to the arts, recreation, agriculture, industry, popular culture and ethnicity. The digital version of the encyclopedia will include all of the original material from the print edition integrated with new multimedia resources. “There was always the idea to move the encyclopedia to a digital version, but funding was an issue,” said Matt Simmons, project coordinator of the university’s Digital U.S. South project. “Phase one of the project will create a website with all of the material from the print edition, plus multimedia assets,” Simmons said. “We hope to have that completed by the end of the year. We don’t yet have funding for the second phase, but that will involve developing
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procedures for continually updating information in the encyclopedia.” The digital version of “The South Carolina Encyclopedia” is being supported by USC’s Center for Digital Humanities; University Libraries and its partnership with the S.C. Digital Library, a consortium of more than 50 libraries and historical societies from across the state; the S.C. Humanities Council; USC Press and the College of Arts and Sciences. “We are thrilled to support the Digital S.C. Encyclopedia project, and the broader Digital U.S. South initiative,” said Colin Wilder at the university’s Center for Digital Humanities. “These efforts have great cultural significance for South Carolinians, as well as helping spread the work of scholars at USC and beyond to the broader public. “This is a great example of what people call ‘public digital humanities,’ and is exactly what the center exists to support.” In the years since the print encyclopedia was published, several encyclopedia-worthy events have occurred, including Nikki Haley’s election as the state’s 116th governor, construction of
Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner plant in Charleston and removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds. Those and many other developments must be incorporated into the new digital version of the encyclopedia with the same scholarly rigor that characterized entries written by nearly 600 contributors to the print version, said Bob Brinkmeyer, director of the Institute for Southern Studies. The second phase of the digital encyclopedia project will also involve developing a mobile app that can be used when visiting places of historical interest around the state such as historic sites or state parks. The app could be especially useful on K-12 field trips. The encyclopedia’s original editor, history professor emeritus Walter Edgar, worked on the print edition for seven years and is pleased that a digital incarnation is finally happening. “I am delighted that there will be a digital version of the ‘South Carolina Encyclopedia’ so that information about our state can reach a wider audience,” he said.
Fund Your Dream Project Crowdfunding with Experiment.com — Magellan Undergraduate Research Programs — SPARC Graduate Research Grants — ASPIRE Faculty Grants — Minority Research Opportunities — RISE Grants for USC System Faculty The Offi ce of the Vice President for Research off ers a wide variety funding programs for original research, scholarly and creative projects in every discipline, with something for everyone. Undergrads, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, under-represented minority students, faculty — we’re here to help ensure that every investigator has an opportunity to receive fi nancial support for his or her meritorious scholarly activity. Visit sc.edu/vpresearch and select Internal Funding & Awards to learn more about our wide variety of funding programs. sc.edu/vpresearch Internal Funding & Awards
Spring 2016 / 25
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Columbia, SC 29208
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We make South Carolina stronger.
Runoff from heavy rains like those experienced last year in S.C. can create deadly flooding. Engineering major Fedora Nwachukwu is researching concrete pavers that allow water to pass straight through. Perfecting this technology for roads and sidewalks could save lives and protect property.
CAROLINA CHANGES EVERYTHING SOUTHCAROLINA.EDU/IMPACT
FEDORA NWACHUKWU CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, SENIOR USC COLUMBIA