Spring 2019

‘Catching up’ on sleep on the weekend doesn’t work

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 23:24:01 +0000

‘Catching up’ on sleep on the weekend doesn’t work Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/28/2019 - 16:24

Think sleeping in on the weekend can repair the damage from a week of sleepless nights? Not so, according to new CU Boulder research.

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Integrative physiology to get new HQ, labs, student space

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 22:50:30 +0000

Integrative physiology to get new HQ, labs, student space Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/28/2019 - 15:50

James McCurdy

The University of Colorado Boulder has broken ground on a new home for the Department of Integrative Physiology. The building will be erected just north of Norlin Library and will function as a long-awaited hub for department activity.

Construction is projected to wrap up in the spring of 2020, with the building fully occupied soon thereafter.

This is an architect's rendering of the lobby area in the new integrative physiology building. At the top of the page is a rendering of the new structure as viewed from the north.

The Department of Integrative Physiology was formed in 2003 by unifying the former department of Kinesiology and Applied Physiology (KAPH) with parts of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology. It quickly became one of the largest undergraduate degrees on campus—though the department was never joined physically.

For more than 15 years the department has had no administrative hub and has been running its research, teaching and administration primarily out of Carlson Gymnasium, Ramaley Biology, Clare Small and sites on the CU Boulder East Campus.

“Integrative physiology has been operating an outstanding research program from an old gymnasium for over a decade,” explains James W.C. White, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“Providing them with a proper research facility is sure to elicit some truly exciting breakthroughs. This building will create a formal and recognizable administrative home for one of the largest undergraduate degrees on campus that our students can take pride in.”

The longtime dispersion of personnel and activity has detracted from the day-to-day interaction of faculty and students, faculty members say. The new building, which abuts the existing Ramaley building, will alleviate some of the strain caused by this departmental spread, creating a physical “home” for IPHY.

“This new addition will increase visibility and will go a long way towards establishing an identity for integrative physiology on campus”, said Mark Opp, professor and chair of the department.

“Developing a sense of identity is critically important for the department given the distributed nature of the rest of our physical plant.”

In addition to having a unifying function, the new building is intended to bolster the department’s already strong research program. The third floor provides a suite of modern research labs housing five principal investigators, offering advanced facilities that are unavailable in the Main Campus labs housed in Carlson. The second floor will be primarily devoted to clinical research space, and the ground floor will house the administrative core, conference room and faculty offices.

“This $21.8 million building represents a strong investment in the A&S research mission and a wonderful addition to our portfolio of facilities,” said Zack Tupper, the college's assistant dean of infrastructure.

Russell Moore, CU Boulder provost, concurred: “Integrative physiology is a standout department. Its research program is pushing the envelope in translational science, and its teaching program boasts one of the largest undergraduate programs at CU. I’m thrilled to see this addition to the (department's) portfolio come to fruition and eager to see what new breakthroughs in the field of physiology will be developed in this new space.”

The university has broken ground on a new home for the Department of Integrative Physiology. The building will be erected just north of Norlin Library and will function as a long-awaited hub for department activity.

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Runner, scholar took time to find the ‘life you ought to live’

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 23:30:12 +0000

Runner, scholar took time to find the ‘life you ought to live’ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/27/2019 - 16:30

Clint Talbott

Mike Sandrock earned degrees in biology and business at CU Boulder, but he’d chosen those fields for the wrong reasons, he says; taking another path helped him find meaning in art and life

For Mike Sandrock, getting to Africa in 1986 had come at a price. He’d quit his job, sold all his belongings, walked away from his training in biology and business—just to make it to Cameroon, where he represented the United States in a marathon.

Twenty miles in, however, he hit “the wall,” when a runner’s glycogen—or stored energy—is depleted, when legs become lead. It was bad luck and good fortune.

In this photo from 1991, Mike Sandrock, center, loads running shoes into his car for his Shoes for Africa nonprofit, now called One World Running. Denver Post Photo by Dave Buresh/Getty Images. At the top of the page, Sandrock, right, presents shoes to a finisher at the 2018 One World Running Cuba La Farola Run, one of several international races OWR volunteers put on yearly, along with distributing thousands of pairs of running shoes as a way to promote health, wellness and community.

That episode symbolized his choice to take the road less traveled. Over time, that choice has made a difference to him and thousands of people in developing countries who have benefitted from his philanthropy, which began that day.

On the rocky dirt road, Sandrock, then a 26-year-old runner and recent University of Colorado Boulder graduate, struggled in vain to keep pace. As barefoot African runners bounded past him, he marveled at their grit.

Sandrock’s running partner for the 10 miles before he hit the wall wore only light sandals that cut his ankle. Despite the man’s deficient footwear, the African beat Sandrock by 45 minutes, then stood at the finish line in the withering heat, neither showering nor eating, only waiting.

“He stood and waited because he didn’t want to miss me,” Sandrock recalls. “I was floored, because I was driven by the ego and had to achieve and achieve.”

For the African, “It was about me, not him.”

The African gave a hug to Sandrock, who was so moved that he gave the man his running shoes. When he returned to Boulder, Sandrock—sleeping on a friend’s couch at the time—founded Shoes for Africa, a nonprofit that collected used running shoes, washed them, and shipped them to Africa. In the three decades since, the nonprofit—now called One World Running—has given tens of thousands of shoes to people in developing countries.

Sandrock has made a career as a newspaper journalist, book author and freelance writer. He has also been inducted into the Colorado Running Hall of Fame, alongside such household names as Olympians Frank Shorter and Lorraine Moller.

That background raises obvious questions: Why did he get degrees in biology and business? Answer: He studied what was valuable to others, not himself. How did that training help Sandrock chart his life’s journey? Answer: Mostly, it showed him what he did not want to do.

His real passions were writing, traveling and running. That day in Cameroon cemented his desire to follow his heart. As he notes, the Earth took 4.5 billion years to reach today, and the universe is roughly 14 billion years old.

“So, you’d better take advantage of your time, not spend it doing non-significant things,” he says. “It took me a while to find my path.”

The road to Boulder

Mike Sandrock grew up in Chicago with four siblings and his mother, a single mom who worked as a teacher in Catholic schools. Once a year, she drove the family to Snowmass, Colorado, for vacation.

Sandrock loved Colorado, “and I knew Chicago wasn’t for me.” So, he enrolled in CU Boulder, where he picked a major by asking an advisor to name the hardest course of study on campus. The answer was engineering or molecular, cellular and developmental biology (also known as MCDB).

Sandrock had planned to be a pre-med student, and thought the challenge of the difficult major would please his mom, make her proud. This desire was unconscious, he said, and he’s sure her wish for him to do this was unconscious as well.

Sandrock’s ruminations often return to Joseph Campbell, a literature professor who famously counseled people to “follow your bliss,” which would put them on a path that is "waiting for you and the life you ought to be living.”

Reflecting on this time in his life, Sandrock quotes Carl Jung, who said that until one makes the unconscious conscious, it directs our actions, and we call it fate. Sandrock was about to become conscious.

He graduated from CU Boulder in 1980, earning a bachelor’s in MCDB along with a degree in general studies (humanities) cum laude.

After graduation, he took a job in a laboratory of Marvin Caruthers, the biochemistry professor who co-founded Amgen, the biotech giant.

“It was the most money I ever made, but I didn’t have a passion for it,” Sandrock says.

So he changed course. At the advice of his brother, Sandrock left the lab and began studying for his master’s in business administration, which he earned from CU Boulder in 1984.

Toward the end of his coursework, Sandrock found himself in a class discussion in which fellow business students were each asked what they wanted to do after graduation. His well-dressed cohorts talked about working as financial advisors or in the stock market. Sandrock’s answer: “I want to write and travel.”

Loving learning over the long run

Running became his first ticket to travel, and a CU Boulder humanities professor opened the door to a life in letters.

Mike Sandrock runs to the finish of a 5k celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Olympic Trials Marathon in Alamosa, Colorado.

As a student, Sandrock had competed on the CU track team. Later, he clocked 2 hours and 24 minutes for the marathon, averaging a pace of 5:30 per mile. He hit a personal best of 30:29 (4:55 per mile) for the 10K.

Those times landed him an invitation to run for the United States in Yaounde, Cameroon.

His passion for the humanities flourished under the tutelage of the late Walter Weir, professor of philosophy and director of the CU Honors Program. Sandrock took Weir’s classes for a decade, even after graduation, until Weir’s death in 1991.

“That’s one reason I feel like I need to give back,” Sandrock muses. Besides his nonprofit, he tutors student-athletes at CU Boulder. “I was fortunate enough to be with Wally, a world-class scholar, world-class person with what Boris Pasternak called a ‘talent for life.’”

Sandrock started in journalism as a free-lance sports writer at the Colorado Daily and has spent three decades writing for that paper, the Daily Camera, Runners’ World and other running publications. He has written a book, Running With the Legends, that Booklist described as “among the most fascinating books on runners and running.”

Good writers are avid readers, and that’s long been true of Sandrock. Whether sipping Buddhist mint tea at the Trident Cafe or jogging the Boulder Creek Path, he drops frequent but casual references to a poem from T.S. Eliot, a quote from Joseph Campbell, or line from Shakespeare. He grows especially animated when talk turns to literature.

Sandrock’s ruminations often return to Joseph Campbell, a literature professor who famously counseled people to “follow your bliss,” which would put them on a path that is “waiting for you and the life you ought to be living.”

Sandrock’s bliss led him to a dusty road in Africa, and he says that has made all the difference.

To learn more about One World Running, see its website, or watch the following video, which was created by CU Boulder students and track runners Brianna Schwartz and Ana Holland.

[video:https://youtu.be/ssqRiH9ZZdo]

Mike Sandrock earned degrees in biology and business at CU Boulder, but he’d chosen those fields for the wrong reasons, he says; taking another path helped him find meaning in art and life.

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Donors, scholarship recipients say awards benefit both parties

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 18:00:19 +0000

Donors, scholarship recipients say awards benefit both parties Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/27/2019 - 11:00

Jeff Thomas

‘Because of you, I’ve gotten the opportunity to really experiment and create freely,’ student tells benefactors

There are a lot of ways to give back to the University of Colorado Boulder; but be warned, most of them will leave you wanting to give even more.

Sue and Barry Baer made that argument to scores of scholarship donors and recipients at the cozy cabin-themed celebration of scholarship donors and recipients in the College of Arts and Sciences on Feb. 10.

Barry and Sue Baer

“As newlyweds, we had not a spare penny to spend,” said Sue Baer, who with her husband, Barry, donates to multiple scholarship funds. “Still we treasured the value of giving back and gave the one thing we had, time. So, I did volunteer work while he trained with the Army.”

“If giving is indeed addictive, I hope you will all be hooked.”

Celebrating this year’s event at the Riverside event venue near Arapahoe Road on Broadway, Interim Dean Jim White noted that giving to the college really goes back to the very beginning.

“CU was literally built upon private donations,” said White, noting the university then consisted almost entirely of disciplines now in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The land was donated by three families: the Arnetts, the Andrews and the Smiths. The University of Colorado Boulder was first funded by donations from 104 individuals.”

With milk costing five cents a quart “imagine donating between $50 and $1,000 during that time period,” White said. “When these families were donating money, there wasn’t even an official school to donate the money to.”

But while those donors were giving sight-unseen to the concept of an educated Colorado citizenry, donors today often know the recipients of their generosity. That’s the case with donor Noel Hefty and the recipient of the Noel and Terrence Hefty Scholarship Fund, senior Hanna Ghadessi, a dance major who is minoring in anthropology and business.

“She comes to every one of my performances, and we have lunch at least several times every semester,” said Ghadessi, who is in the fourth year of receiving the $5,000 annual scholarship.

Donor Noel Hefty and student Hanna Ghadessi, above and at the top of the page, share a moment during a recent scholarship-donor celebration. CU Boulder Photos by Casey Cass.

The two now share a rich background in dance that goes well past the occasional meetup. Noel Hefty, who has been named a “Living Legend of Dance,” by the University of Denver University Libraries, was on the board of the Colorado Dance Festival when it gave a venue to a then unknown hip-hop dance artist, Lorenzo "Rennie" Harris back in the ’90s. Now Ghadessi is set to work in a troop headed by Harris, an artist in residence at CU Boulder, who is affiliated with the esteemed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

“I love Hip-Hop,” said Hefty, who also funds a scholarship in her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, and founded the Seamboat Dance Theater in 1972.

Javier, Padilla, a junior studying studio art, created a video, shared during the scholarship celebration and displayed below, shows him talking about the effect of donors’ support. The donations that allow him to offset the cost of his education are important, but smaller donations that offset the cost of his materials are important as well, said Padilla.

“Scholarships allow a lot more freedom in my practice,” especially when identifying new techniques that might allow him to be productive enough to make a living at his art, Padilla said. “I can put work out there at the volume that I need.”

“Because of you, I’ve gotten the opportunity to really experiment and create freely, and had the opportunity to fail, which is really important in my art practice.”

How to help

For more information about giving and scholarships, see the college's giving page or contact David Carpenter, assistant dean for advancement.

For all donors, these events allow them to be connected not only with the university, but the community of Boulder, said Russell Teets (BS, Engr, 1977), who graduated from Boulder High School in the ’70s, along with his wife, Jany. Their family has funded an undergraduate chemistry scholarship, the David W. Teets Memorial Scholarship, as well as the Otis and Elsie Purchase Teets Family Endowment, which has awards for both instate undergraduates and all graduate students.

“We’re the only ones who are still around, so we get to come,” joked Russell Teets.

But no matter how much alumni have to give, none of it is taken lightly.

“My first gift to CU was in June 1978 for $35,” said Barry Baer (BS, Acct, 1965, MBA, 1972). He added:

“Our bottom line to you today is this: We can all do something to improve the lives of others, no matter what our current stage of life. Don’t wait; the time to give back is now.”

[video:https://youtu.be/2-WGTqi3lgU]

‘Because of you, I’ve gotten the opportunity to really experiment and create freely,’ student tells benefactors.

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Battling anxiety through emotional flexibility

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 21:59:31 +0000

Battling anxiety through emotional flexibility Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/25/2019 - 14:59

Meagan Taylor

CU psychology grad student aims to prevent and reduce anxiety in youth using mindfulness and value-based behavior

At just 16 years old, the girl had missed nearly a year of school after a series of concussions left her with lingering physical and emotional struggles.

The girl’s psychologist, Rebecca Schneider, knew just how to help. Using a treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Schneider taught her teenage patient techniques that would help her get back her life.

Rebecca Schneider

“ACT's focus on acceptance of uncomfortable emotions and sensations allowed us to focus on how to reconnect with her life even in the face of continued discomfort,” says Schneider, who is a PhD candidate, expecting to graduate this year, in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Although the girl still has a long way to go, she is now missing significantly less school than she used to. The next step is to get her back to seeing her friends more regularly.

Schneider is completing her capstone internship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where she provides both inpatient and outpatient therapy, focusing on youth. Getting to this point, she says, is a credit to the connections she made at CU Boulder.

“CU really set me up well, and people are really impressed by my training,” she says.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Atlanta native came to CU Boulder specifically to study interventions for anxiety using ACT under Associate Professor Joanna Arch.

ACT is a variation of traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is a psychological treatment that is widely used in treating mood and anxiety disorders. It identifies problematic thinking and behavioral patterns, then works to change these patterns through development of coping skills and changing feelings through modifying thoughts and behaviors.

One key difference between the two treatments is that while CBT treatment involves efforts to manage feelings by changing maladaptive thoughts, ACT focuses more on addressing the context and function of these thoughts and feelings.

“In ACT, there is less of an emphasis on having to challenge your thoughts or question them, but how to relate to them differently, not judging them as right or wrong,” Schneider explains.

ACT focuses on accepting the presence of difficult emotions and then moving toward valued behaviors. For example, Schneider’s dissertation research examines the effect of incorporating college students’ personal values in deliberately and systematically facing feared situations, termed "exposure therapy."

My patients have learned that it’s okay to feel anxious, and anxiety isn’t dangerous. They’ve also learned how to pay less attention to their pain so that they can keep doing the things they love.”

Dissertation research participants were asked to give a public speech in exchange for either an extrinsic, monetary reward or for an intrinsic motivation based on their values.

“We helped them identify core values, such as connection, creativity, or family, and linked those to the exposure,” Schneider says. “The question we asked is: What values is your anxiety impacting, and if you didn’t have to avoid the feared situation, what would you be able to do?”

While she’s still evaluating the results, she reveals that the subjects who identified their core values reported feeling less anxious immediately before and after the speech, although those who spoke for monetary reward spoke for a longer period of time.

Schneider is drawn to treating anxiety disorders because their presentation is unique in different people, which allows for greater creativity in treatment, she says.

ACT in particular has produced significant positive results in treating anxiety disorders. And Schneider believes the therapy model can address difficulties that young people may have with regulating their emotions and behaviors. Emotion dysregulation includes things such as not being aware of or attending to emotions, having a negative emotional response to negative emotions, and difficulty pursuing meaningful goals due to negative emotions.

Schneider also led a 2016 research study in collaboration with Ben Hankin, currently at the University of Illinois, and Joanna Arch on the relationship between emotional dysregulation and anxiety, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology. Titled “The Longitudinal Effect of Emotion Regulation Strategies on Anxiety Levels in Children and Adolescents,” the study examines whether difficulties with emotional regulation predicted higher levels of anxiety in a population of 312 youth monitored for a period of three years.

“By showing that emotional dysregulation can affect anxiety over time, we can reduce or prevent the development of anxiety by targeting reductions in maladaptive strategies, and trying to add in more emotional regulation skills,” Schneider says.

Learning to accept troublesome emotions, practice self-compassion, and tolerate distress while accomplishing their goals are some of the skills she practices with her clients.

“Through ACT, my patients have learned that it’s okay to feel anxious, and anxiety isn’t dangerous,” she says. “They’ve also learned how to pay less attention to their pain so that they can keep doing the things they love.”

Schneider has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with McLean Hospital, the prominent psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School. She will work with children in residential treatment for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder using ACT-based exposure therapy.

CU psychology grad student aims to prevent and reduce anxiety in youth using mindfulness and value-based behavior.

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Novel 5-minute workout improves blood pressure, may boost your brain

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 16:54:52 +0000

Novel 5-minute workout improves blood pressure, may boost your brain Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/25/2019 - 09:54

Could working out five minutes a day, without lifting a single weight or jogging a single step, reduce your heart attack risk, help you think more clearly and boost your sports performance?

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The Bard in your backyard: Shakespeare covers Colorado

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:40:54 +0000

The Bard in your backyard: Shakespeare covers Colorado Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 10:40

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival plans to bring live Shakespeare to every county in the state by 2028, reaching an estimated 180,000 audience members.

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The tragedy of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 20:28:13 +0000

The tragedy of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/19/2019 - 13:28

Lisa Marshall

On the 50^thanniversary of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay about the 'freedom to breed,' the director of the CU Population Center contends he missed the mark

“Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”

The ominous statement reads more like a line from a dystopian novel than a peer-reviewed journal article. But it is, in fact, the punch-line of one of the most influential scientific essays to date.

Published in Science in December 1968 by the late University of California ecologist Garrett Hardin, the 6,000-word Tragedy of the Commons has been cited more than 38,000 times and informed policies on everything from climate change to intellectual property to digital content.

Lori Mae Hunter

Its bold assertion that, left unchecked, population growth will inevitably outpace the earth’s resources helped ignite a zero-population fervor in the 1970s, was often used to justify China’s now-defunct one-child policy, and is still conjured today in op-eds about immigration, Front Range overpopulation and fertility planning in the developing world.

But on the 50^thanniversary of its publication, a new CU Boulder-led paper published this month in the journal Nature Sustainability argues that Hardin’s theories about overpopulation were “simplistic” and “underdeveloped” and run the risk of leading to ill-informed policy.

“Pointing fingers at people who live in Tanzania and have large families or people who migrate here from elsewhere is not going to solve our environmental problems,” contends lead author Lori Mae Hunter, director of the CU Population Center at the Institute of Behavioral Science.

“It distracts us from looking at the way we live our own lives, our own consumption patterns and the way we build our own transportation and energy systems.”

Selfish herdsmen, a growing flock, and climate change

Hardin’s parable centers around a flock of hypothetical herdsman who, if given access to a communal pasture, will increase their herd size until they collectively degrade the pasture. “Ultimately, the commons collapses, hence the tragedy,” summarizes Hunter, who also chairs the sociology department.

The metaphor is most often conjured in the context of environmental protection: The global atmosphere is the “commons.” Owned by no one, used by everyone, and left unregulated it, like the pasture, is doomed to be overexploited and ruined.

Hardin’s parable centers around a flock of hypothetical herdsman who, if given access to a communal pasture, will increase their herd size until they collectively degrade the pasture. “Ultimately, the commons collapses, hence the tragedy,” summarizes Hunter.

That prediction has been debated for years, with one challenger, the late Elinor Ostrom, winning a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her elucidation of a more optimistic real-life scenario—one in which small communities around the globe have managed to devise ways to successfully manage common resources like grazing land, forests and irrigation waters.

But Hardin’s second argument—the overpopulation argument—has not received the same critical attention.

That’s the task that Hunter and co-author Aseem Prakash, a political scientist at University of Washington, set out to do.

“It’s time to move past Hardinesque population alarmism … in order to develop better-informed policy,” they write.

Relinquishing the freedom to breed

In his essay, Hardin bluntly applies the “tragedy of the commons” idea to parenting, suggesting that the availability of food and other resources as part of the “welfare state” drives people to procreate and overpopulate:

“If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own punishment to the germ line—then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state,” he wrote. His solution: Mandated population control:

“The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

That argument had ripple effects, notes Prakash, indirectly fueling heated arguments within the Sierra Club over whether population control, including stronger checks against U.S. immigration, should be a central pillar of their environmental agenda. (It is not).

We would not argue that population doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the environment. Of course it matters. But simply pointing a finger at others and saying you shouldn’t be here obscures all the other things we should be thinking about.”

“Even today, with all the discussions of the border wall, in the back of the mind is Hardin’s overpopulation thesis again. That if you have too many resources, people will in-migrate and procreate,” said Prakash. “What we are pointing out is that is much more complex than that.”

They note that while the birth rate in the United States is at its lowest in 30 years, 51 percent of people here still believe the population is growing too fast.

Meanwhile, they add, in the places where the population is truly growing rapidly, carbon emissions per capita are minuscule compared to those in the West. For instance, U.S. residents emit 16.49 tons per capita in carbon emissions, while in Tanzania, per capita emissions run around 0.22 tons.

The complex reasons women get pregnant, or don’t

While Hardin drew a simple conclusion—that availability of resources drives procreation—Prakash and Hunter also point to a complex web of factors, including social values, cultural norms and local reproductive health policies, that contribute to family planning.

For instance, in Nepal, where resources are scarce, women tend to want to have more children to help them to gather those resources—such as firewood and food for their animals.

In Rwanda, which had notoriously high fertility levels prior to 2005, fertility rates have declined a stunning 25 percent—from 6.1 to 4.6 children per woman—not due to a shrinking of the “welfare state” but due to a national prioritization of family planning and a greater exposure to mass media, which shifted male attitudes about birth control. Together, that led to a huge boost in contraceptive use.

“People don’t just procreate because they know they can feed their family,” says Prakash. “We shouldn’t take these simplistic notions—a la Hardin—and use them to support misinformed policies.”

Instead, he and Hunter suggest, policymakers and others concerned about overpopulation should consider the key role sociocultural factors can play in fertility decisions and take steps to empower women to control their own family planning.

And when it comes to the environment, they argue, they should stop pointing fingers at large families, and take a close look at their own house.

“We would not argue that population doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the environment. Of course it matters,” said Hunter. “But simply pointing a finger at others and saying you shouldn’t be here obscures all the other things we should be thinking about.”

On the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay, the director of the CU Population Center contends he missed the mark.

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Traversing the frontiers of concussion treatment

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 22:31:08 +0000

Traversing the frontiers of concussion treatment Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/18/2019 - 15:31

Cay Leytham-Powell

Concussion treatments still lag despite increased attention and concerns. Complementary or alternative medicine may be able to help, says CU Boulder neuroscientist

In a quiet, tucked away meeting room on the University of Colorado Boulder campus sit a group of people—calm and comfortable despite the snow falling in thick flakes outside—with their arms draped across their bodies. Two fingers from each hand press lightly on a spot right beneath their collarbones and on the upper corner of their shoulder muscle.

The participants’ eyes are closed, their breathing deep. Some lean back in their chairs, others lean forward on the table, as they search for their own pulse of life. The goal for each spot—called the Heart Meridian points by the ITEAplus program—is to sync them together.

Before the training session is finished, the participants press their fingers against their tailbone, the sides of their arms near the elbow, their forehead or tip of their nose, the crown of their head, the hollow of their throat and the center of the breastbone. All to improve energy, respiration and digestion levels, and, ultimately, their own stress resiliency.

“The ITEAplus program is about making a person more resilient and plastic in their everyday life,” comments Theresa D. Hernández, creator of the acupressure-based program and the associate dean of research for the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

Similar in some ways to acupuncture, acupressure utilizes specific spots on the body to invigorate the body’s wellness. It differs, however, in that it is self-administrable, the vehicle for relief are finger tips instead of needles, and has been shown to help provide relief for Hernández’s main research focus: traumatic brain injury, or concussions.

[video:https://youtu.be/iVLnWOr0DUc]

Over the past three decades, traumatic brain injuries have gone from a “silent epidemic” to one of increasing recognition, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that rates of traumatic brain injury-related emergency department visits increased by 47 percent between 2007 and 2013. That increased awareness has led to more funding for research and education, but treatment options of the complex injury still lag.

The non-traditional treatments often sought out by the injured, though, all seem to have one thing in common: stress reduction, which mindfulness-practices like acupressure and ITEAplus have been shown to accomplish.

“After a brain injury or concussion, we know in both humans and in animal models that a stressor can exacerbate an ongoing deficit or reinstate a deficit that was previously recovered from, which can be quite challenging for an individual. For example, a student who’s had a concussion does fine during the semester because they’ve had good recovery, but as soon as midterms or finals come along, that stress then reinstates something that they were struggling with months and months ago,” explains Hernández, who is also a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and a senior investigator and research psychologist for the Veteran Affairs’ Eastern Colorado Healthcare System.

“And so, our hope is that ITEAplus, as a web-based platform, will be accessible enough and sufficiently intriguing enough for the students to want to utilize it to help minimize the adverse impacts of stress in their lives.”

The Individualized Training and Education in Acupressure (or ITEAplus) program’s roots stem from over a decade ago when the CAIRR (Clinical Assessment of Injury, Recovery and Resilience) Neuroscience Laboratory—run by Hernández at CU Boulder—began to research the efficacy of acupressure as a possible treatment for stroke and concussion.

The thought at that time was that, because those with brain injuries are especially vulnerable to the negative impacts of stress, what if a treatment was something as simple as just reducing said stress through a complementary health approach? After all, an injured brain is an incredibly complicated system, but so is the body’s reaction to holistic treatment.

Theresa D. Hernández (left) works with a student. Photograph courtesy of Theresa D. Hernández.

However, at that time, acupressure in particular was drawing criticism from the medical community for its perceived lack of legitimacy. The practice draws its roots from Chinese and Japanese traditional healing arts that work to clear blockages and bring the body’s energy system back to balance. And, while some scientific studies showed benefits for pain and symptom management, other studies emerged that suggested that acupressure had a significant likelihood of bias that people felt and found what they want to feel (or from a placebo effect).

Hernández and her colleagues, though, researched further and instead found that when using a methodologically rigorous design—including placebo-controlled, randomized, blinded trials—acupressure not only reduces the adverse effects of stress, but also can have a positive impact on the individual after an acquired brain injury.

Using this as an evidence-based foundation, Hernández and her lab decided to create a free stress management and acupressure training resource—what would become ITEAplus—that is available to not only those with a concussion, but anyone who is dealing with ongoing stressors, such as faculty, students and staff, and are interested in developing coping skills.

They proposed the idea of developing a website that contained educational materials, acupressure examples and videos that could be accessed anywhere and by anyone, to the Bacon Family Foundation. The foundation, which is interested in improving mental health, was interested and the website got its start.

Since the website’s launch last fall, it has been lauded as easy to use and incorporated by a variety of organizations as a training tool, including the Marcus Institute for Brain Health at CU Denver (which works with athletes and veterans), the concussion team at Wardenburg Health Center at CU Boulder and the Be Heard campaign for staff of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“People love the feel of it,” comments Hernández. “We’ve had very positive comments.”

While the ITEAplus website is still in its infancy, there are plans for its future. Hernández and her team are working on not only expanding its reach for those experiencing stress or the effects of a concussion, but also fine-tuning the website’s analytics to help improve user experiences.

“My goal has always been that research would lead to discovery that then made a difference in people’s lives,” says Hernández. “One of the best outcomes of research is to then have dissemination and implementation of the findings, and that’s why we’re so grateful to the Bacon Family Foundation for making this possible.”

Top photograph courtesy of Penn State/Flickr

Concussion treatments still lag despite increased attention and concerns. Complementary or alternative medicine may be able to help, says CU Boulder neuroscientist.

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Cracking the nest egg: when governments mess with pensions

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 23:49:24 +0000

Cracking the nest egg: when governments mess with pensions Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/16/2019 - 16:49

Meagan Taylor

Award-winning book by CU Boulder political scientist explores global trend in pension policy reversals

Sarah Wilson Sokhey, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was recently honored for her book The Political Economy of Pension Policy Reversal in Post-Communist Countries, which explores countries that privatized public retirement benefits, only to reverse course.

In studying countries that privatized their social-security programs, Wilson Sokhey discovered that many post-communist countries ended up reversing their policy changes for short-term political or financial reasons.

Sarah Wilson Sokhey

“Pension policy isn’t always about pensioners, it’s also about a pot of money politicians get to play with,” she says.

Wilson Sokhey shared the 2018 Ed A. Hewitt Book Award for outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe. The award is bestowed by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a prominent international group.

Pension privatization takes mandatory social security contributions and redirects them to individual accounts that are privately managed. While researching a reversal of privatization reform in Argentina that began in 2008, she uncovered a remarkable pattern of reversals that spread across several former Communist countries including Hungary, Romania, and Poland in subsequent years.

“At first I thought it was a blip,” she says of her initial research on Argentina. “But then a lot of countries started getting rid of their pension reforms, and they were mostly post-communist.”

The book posits that the countries adopting moderate versions of pension privatization—rather than the most limited or most extensive reforms—are most likely to scrap them. This is because moderate reforms are not as economically and culturally entrenched as large reforms, and small reforms aren’t worth the effort of overturning.

In small reforms, only a small portion of future benefits come from individual accounts and the majority is still provided by the traditional social security system. Extensive reforms involve a large portion, or even all, of future retirement benefits managed in individual retirement accounts.

At first I thought it was a blip. But then a lot of countries started getting rid of their pension reforms, and they were mostly post-communist.”

“At moderate level of reform, politicians could get still get significant money in the short-term, which is what they wanted after the 2008 economic downturn,” Wilson Sokhey says of reversing privatization.

For example, Russia saved $50 billion from its 2012 reversal of moderate reforms, which nearly erased the state’s pension fund deficit for the following year. It was what Wilson Sokhey refers to as a “sweet-spot” where the government saved a lot of money in the short-term with minimum public backlash.

“When Russia reversed its pension privatization, the government froze contributions to the individual accounts,” she explains. “That money, taken out as a payroll tax, instead went to the government's general coffers instead of being invested in individual retirement accounts.”

Furthermore, the financial burden of implementing reforms was more than some countries’ economies were willing to continue to bear.

“With pension privatization, in the short term you have to pay for current retirees, while you save money for future generations,” she says. “That can add up to 3 to 6 percent of GDP annually until you fully transition.”

An aging population makes Wilson Sokhey’s research particularly relevant for policymakers and citizens, not just in post-communist countries but also in most developed countries.

With fewer working people paying into the system, and more retirees drawing on the funds, she says, “You have to think about how you make social security both sustainable and adequate so you don’t have people going into poverty after they stop working.”

Climate change can be used as a similar example of the dilemma politicians face when considering policies that have effects far beyond their terms of office.

“You want to do things that make sense long term,” she says. “But you have to have a short-term incentive to do what’s best in the long term.”

She concludes in her book that some reforms do generate such positives, which both help them survive and address the country’s social and economic challenges. These, also, vary based on the type of reform and circumstances.

For instance, in most of the Latin American countries that adopted pension privatization (with the notable exception of Argentina), governments engaged in a reform of the reforms introducing measures to do things like reduce administrative costs and provide additional retirement support for those at the lowest income levels.

“Figuring out sustainable ways to bolster social security is important,” Wilson Sokhey says. “There’s no one magic bullet. It’s different in every country.”

Award-winning book by CU Boulder political scientist explores global trend in pension policy reversals

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Cracking the nest egg: when governments mess with pensions

Award-winning book by CU Boulder political scientist explores global trend in pension policy reversals

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On the 50^thanniversary of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay about the 'freedom to breed,' the director of the CU Population Center contends he missed the mark