Research roundup at MSU-Bozeman (#227)- Level playing field? – Sick and scared – Austral spring – Military docs had good ideas

Level playing field?

Many people think sports are free of racism, but that’s not necessarily true, says J.R. Woodward, a sociologist at MSU-Bozeman. Positions such as quarterback and kicker on a football team are normally filled by white players. African-Americans more often fill positions like defensive back and running back. To learn more about race stacking (the over-representation of certain races in a sport or particular position), Woodward analyzed the way professional scouts described four positions on a pro-football team: quarterback, center, inside linebacker and tight end. He found that scouts tended to describe African-American players by their physical attributes and Caucasians by their mental characteristics. Woodward hopes his findings will help society reexamine the issue of race and sports.

Sick and scared

Professors and other academics who have serious illnesses are often afraid to talk about it, says Kimberly Myers, an associate professor of English at MSU-Bozeman. They don’t want to be seen as weak, incapable or inferior. They’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs or opportunities for promotion. Despite that, Myers was inundated with responses after she announced that she’d be working on a project called "Illness in the Academy." Academics from the U.S. and other countries sent her essays about their experiences with serious illnesses. Myers is especially interested in how people view an illness if they work in a field that relates to that illness. Myers is editing the essays and plans to compile many of them into a book.

Austral spring

Winter has arrived in Montana, but in the Southern Hemisphere it’s springtime. Montana State University scientists working in Antarctica have opened their field camps for the season, including MSU graduate student and Bozeman native Darren Ireland. Ireland is working with ecology professors Bob Garrott and Jay Rotella on a long-term study of Weddell seals. This field season Ireland said the team is testing methods of estimating the weights of the rotund mammals using digital cameras. MSU mechanical engineering students helped build the system that will spare the team the trouble of enticing a 1,500-pound mother seal onto a livestock scale. Begun in the 1960s, the Weddell seal project is one of the longest in Antarctic history.

Military docs had good ideas

Military physicians have made a number of key contributions to human health over the years, said speakers at a recent medical history conference at MSU. It was a British naval surgeon, for example, who figured out that fresh citrus kept sailors from getting scurvy, said Dr. Herbert Swick of the Institute of Medicine and Humanities in Missoula. Napoleon’s surgeon, taking a cue from how the Russians thawed their fish, pioneered better treatments for frostbite. During the Civil War it was a military contract surgeon who first recognized post-traumatic stress syndrome and the phantom limb phenomenon. Early on it was infectious diseases and not battlefield trauma that kept most military doctors busy. World War I was the first war that had more casualties from wounds than from disease, Swick said.

by Evelyn Boswell and Annette Trinity-Stevens
MSU News

http://www.montana.edu/commserv/csnews/nwview.php?article=1357