Photos by Bruce Gilbert
At Rose Hill a couple of pigeons are looking into ways to help learning disabled children and stroke victims learn (or relearn) vocabulary. Of course the pigeons don’t know that’s what they’re doing: they’re just pecking at keys to get food rewards, but Jim MacDonall, Ph.D., and his undergraduate researchers are watching them, and they’re taking notes.
Photographs
Top: (L to R) Peter Sanneman, Jim MacDonall and Anne Neuendorf with some experimental subjects.
Middle: The experimental apparatus.
Bottom: A White Carneaux takes a spin in the apparatus.
MacDonall’s pigeons, like young children, stroke victims and children with autism or learning disabilities, can’t readily connect the stimuli to the label. In experimenting with how pigeons can be trained to make certain associations, MacDonall believes researchers can develop strategies to better teach language skills to children and adults who otherwise have difficulty learning them.
MacDonall uses pigeons (White Carneaux, from the Palmetto Pigeon Plant in Sumter, S.C.), because they’re hardy, long lived, have excellent eyesight and see colors. The pigeons are set up in their own room, with a separate ventilation system, as required by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. The equipment and part of the renovation to animal room funded by a faculty grant through the office of Michael Latham, the interim dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.
The experiment is simple: three circles can either be lit red or green. MacDonall trains the pigeons to peck the right- or left-hand circle that matches the color of the center circle (the birds aren’t actually matching the colors, in this case, but the pattern of colors). Each correct peck gets a food reward of mixed grain from a slot beneath the lighted circles.
Normally pigeons will make several hundred errors learning to peck the correct match, and their steady performance will be 85 to 95 percent correct. But preliminary results from MacDonall’s training scheme seem to show that pigeons can learn correct matching with fewer than 20 errors, and with a steady performance rate of about 97 to 100 percent correct.
What’s the difference? When the pigeons begin their training, they are only given the correct choice to peck (and of course rewarded when they do so). Once the pigeons reliably peck the target circle, the researchers introduce the wrong choice, but only for a fraction of a second. The bird has time to see the incorrect choice, but not time enough to peck it. Over time, the duration of time the incorrect circle stays lit is increased until it matches that of the correct choice.
MacDonall’s work has implications for how stroke patients who lost language ability should be retaught, and for teaching language skills to autistic children who have never had the ability to begin with. For adult stroke victims, relearning language can be very frustrating, and instruction is frequently delayed by outbursts of temper at getting the wrong word for an object the patient feels he or she should know.
The inherent frustration aside, MacDonall says the research on stroke recovery shows that the more quickly language skill is reacquired, the more complete it will be. Diminishing the time lost to aggressive outbursts increases the number of language lessons a patient can complete in a day. And that’s where MacDonall’s work comes into play: by giving stroke victims a more painless learning curve, they can potentially reacquire language more quickly and completely.
In teaching language skills to autistic and otherwise learning disabled children, MacDonall says if we can offer them an easier path to acquiring the skills, why shouldn’t we? “Kids don’t like to be frustrated, either,” he says.
The obvious question is, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? MacDonall pauses for a long minute before answering.
“I think a lot of investigators don’t pay close enough attention to the details in the stimulus,” he says. “You need to pay very close attention to exactly what’s happening in the environment, and to the consequences of responding—to the reinforcement you’re offering.”
As for why techniques developed on pigeons should work as well in humans, MacDonall says “Most of the time it does. Conditioning applies across species, though you may find parameter differences: pigeons may require thirty seconds between trials, and humans only two.”
The next step, according to MacDonall, is to try and replicate his early findings with four more pigeons, then publish the results.
“Individuals who do not have language ability (developmentally disabled children and autistic children) and those who have lost language (some stroke victims) are in a very difficult situation,” MacDonall says. “We need to do everything we can to speed their learning or relearning of language.”
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The current undergraduate assistants in MacDonall’s lab are:
Over the summer, Sanneman and Neuendorf helped with the research discussed above, and were supported by an Undergraduate Summer Science Fellowship from FCRH. Nosal, Moran and LaRusso joined the lab this semester. Funds for equipment used in this research were provided by the Office of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.
Keondra Bills, CBA ’06, has been named a 2010 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow, one of 40 new fellows named this summer who “have demonstrated promise across a range of areas crucial to United States Foreign Service Officers.”
The event, sponsored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), featured undergraduate and graduate researchers from universities across the nation, including Fordham, Brown and Yale Universities, and New York Medical College. The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with more than 12,000 members worldwide.
Jane McGonigal, FCLC '99, has made the 2010 O Power List, published in the September 14 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
Beth Knobel, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham, and broadcast legend Mike Wallace have written a book for beginning journalists, Heat & Light. The book also has its own website: www.heatandlight.org.
Photo with First Lady Michelle Obama at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Conference. Judith Perez (front row, third from right) is one of the Graduate Housing Fellows at the Institute for the 2010-2011 academic year.
Photos by Gina Vergel
A willingness to take risks. A keen understanding of a company’s culture. A true sense of ones’ own strengths and weaknesses.
These, said John P. Lionato (FCRH, ’85), are some of the traits that Fordham College of Business Administration (CBA) students need to learn to be successful in business.
Lionato, Global Leader of Operational Excellence at San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc., spoke to undergraduate students at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus on Wednesday, Sept. 15. His hour-long lecture and Q&A session, “Being A Leader,” was one of six in Access Your Future, a week of programming for CBA students featuring industry leaders talking about life outside of academia.
To give a fuller sense of what it means to be an effective leader, Lionato went back to his own career, citing eight leaders who he’s been fortunate enough to work with. Just as they mentored him, students should seek out mentors too, and when the time comes, they should take others under their wing. One of the lessons he learned was to not fear occasional setbacks.
“More than anything else, it isn’t really whether the situation fails. It’s whether you did the best you could in the situation,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you work so hard, and it didn’t do any good; it means that you worked smart and good, and made the best decisions you could, but the thing was just against you.”
He also told students to not be afraid to try different jobs if those jobs give them a better understanding of the company as a whole, but not to settle on one that doesn’t speak to their strengths. When they learn to recognize this in others, they will earn the loyalty of their fellow workers.
“We call people at Rackspace, ‘Rackers.’ They will kill for the company. Time has no meaning,” he said. “Why? It is all wrapped in who you are. We look at people who want to come to work at Rackspace, and the first thing question is, do they fit culturally? We’ll figure out what job they can do next.”
—Patrick Verel
Fordham GSAS sudent Kathleen Adams, left, in Berlin with students from CUNY PrepYouths from the Bronx will experience hip-hop culture in Berlin as part of a trip organized by a Fordham professor.
Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African-American studies, and about 10 students from Bronx-based CUNY Prep are in Germany’s largest city this week for the final leg of Bronx-Berlin Connection—a transatlantic hip-hop project.
Hosted by GangwayBeatzBerlin, a music association in which young people experience hip-hop culture on the streets of Berlin, the Bronx-Berlin Connection engages young people from Bronx and Berlin in a year-round cross-cultural exchange program. They use music—particularly, rap and hip-hop—to explore and express the experiences of urban youths globally, the critical challenges they face and the solutions necessary to enact change in their communities.
The project will culminate in a full-length, multi-lingual, cross-cultural rap album to be released later this year.
An online diary by GangwayBeatzBerlin mentioned, “The crew from the hip-hop capitol of the world arrived today,” referring to Naison, Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) student Kathleen Adams, three CUNY Prep teachers and, of course, the students.
Likewise, Naison is reporting on the experience through the social media. In a Facebook message posted on Saturday, he wrote, “We are having an amazing time in Berlin! We met up with people from GangwayBeatzBerlin, who took us to dinner at a great Turkish restaurant and then took us to a community hip-hop jam in Wedding, an immigrant neighborhood in Berlin, where our kids produced a freestyle cipher. Great chemistry between GangwayBeatz and the CUNY Prep kids.”
A “cipher” occurs when two or more rappers freestyle together in an informal context. But hip-hop is not all Bronx youths have in common with their Berlin counterparts, Naison explained.
“Kids from the Bronx think that their situation is unique. When they get to Berlin, they’ll see lots of kids from immigrant families experiencing similar things—employment struggles, family problems, race issues—and who look at hip-hop as a way to express their feelings about the world they are in,” he said.
Immigrants in Berlin hail from Turkey, the Middle East and various parts of Eastern Europe, said Naison, who previously traveled to Berlin to lecture on the “Multicultural Roots of Bronx Hip-Hop.”
Thanks to GangwayBeatzBerlin, youths from Berlin visited Fordham and the New York City area in November 2008 and again a year later. Many of the young poets and rappers performed at Rose Hill.
“The students for CUNY Prep are going to think they are in the Bronx when they arrive in Berlin. They’ll see ethnic enclaves, graffiti, street food vendors and, of course, hip-hop music,” Naison said before he left.
The trip was subsidized by donations, many which came from Fordham alumni.
“We had an amazing outpouring of support from alumni. Without it, this trip wouldn’t be taking place,” he said.
The CUNY Prep students will perform on Sept. 13 at the United States Embassy in Berlin. They’ll visit and be interviewed at radio stations and a television news crew will be following them as they visit clubs and community centers, Naison said.
GSAS student Kathleen Adams is accompanying the group as a chaperone. A student in the urban studies master’s program, Adams said she hopes to teach youths in Berlin about women in hip-hop, which she researched for her thesis as an urban studies undergraduate at Fordham College at Rose Hill.
—Gina Vergel
"Testimony" by Kara Walker
Fordham University’s Center Gallery kicks off the academic year with a two-part group exhibition on the theme of captivity.
“The Art of Captivity: Part One,” curated by Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English, is on display from Sept. 22 to Oct. 28, in the Center Gallery, on the first floor of Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus. Gallery hours are Monday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
An opening reception will take place on Oct. 5, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion with the artists.
The exhibition features work by seven contemporary artists chosen by Cassuto for their approaches to the theme of captivity: Paul Karasik, Fernando Molero, Alyssa Pheobus, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Peter Scott, Kara Walker and Karen Yama.
Using range of media, the works depict a variety of struggles set on different stages: physical, psychological, cognitive, sexual, racial and political.
This exhibition dovetails with Cassuto’s classes, “The Art of Captivity” and “Captivity and Conflict,” offered through the English Department at Fordham. His students respond to different depictions of captivity in poetry, fiction, and memoir by writers such as Art Spiegelman, Sylvia Plath and Oliver Sacks.
Selected writings from students inspired by the exhibition will be available to those visiting the exhibition. A catalogue of the exhibition featuring essays by Leonard Cassuto, Susan Eley and Anne Sherwood Pundyk and Casey Ruble will be available online and in print.
"The Art of Captivity: Part Two,” curated by Susan Eley, will be on display from Oct. 26 to Dec. 3, at Susan Eley Fine Art, 46 West 90th St., on the second floor. For more information on this part of the exhibition, call (917) 952-7641.
For information about the exhibition at Fordham, call (212) 636-7461.
—Gina Vergel
saving images to a laptop. ASTRO was limited in what it could capture in a spectral photo of because it has a fixed mounting in the airplane and the Itokawa was traveling too fast to be in the field of view for long. But ASTRO was able to capture one image of the re-entry when it was at its “hottest,” that is, a spectral image of the capsule as it caused a shock wave and as material coming off the surface of the capsule penetrated that shock wave. It also got five separate spectral readings on the disintegrating bus as it plunged toward the earth.
