Babies, snakes… campaign finance
Academics at Island colleges
are involved in studies on a wide range of topics
Staten Island Advance - Sunday, April 02, 2006
What’s up, doc? Pose that question to academic
researchers, and you’ll get wildly ranging answers.
The Advance asked a sampling of Staten Island’s
college and university professors what they have been researching,
from the quotidian to the exotic.
In the psychology department at the College of
Staten Island, assistant professor Dr. Sarah Berger set up a child
development research lad at the Willowbrook campus last year. She
uses it to study cognitive development in infants and toddlers.
Dr. Berger looks at babies’ behavior in the context
of locomotion to understand how they acquire skills and make
decisions.
Her current studies – which confront toddlers making
their way toward their mothers with various obstacles – study young
children’s ability to inhibit, or stop, a given behavior when it’s
no longer appropriate.
She found that expert crawlers, for example, have an
easier time adjusting to a tunnel in their path than do novice
walkers.
Dr. Berger’s theory is that babies have a fixed
amount of attention, or mental resources. A baby concentrating on a
new task, like walking, may not have the leftover mental power for
inhibition.
Along with undergraduates under her direction, Dr.
Berger conducts her lab studies with parents and children who
volunteer to participate.
Her work contributes to the understanding of typical
development, which, in turn, helps researchers understand problems
like autism or attention deficit disorder.
As a mother, Dr. Berger says her research helps her
understand that there may be tradeoffs when it comes to when babies
reach milestones, like crawling and talking.
Tots – and who can blame them? – seem to master one
thing at a time.
Miguel Roig, an associate professor of psychology at
St. John’s University, Grymes Hill, has been performing research on
the motives behind plagiarism for the past 10 years.
Roig couldn’t pinpoint exactly when or why he began
looking into the topic, but jokingly said his interest has sparked
fear in his students and has raised an eyebrow or two among his
colleagues.
“Some students will browse my Web page and realize
what they are dealing with,” said Roig. “But, before the first exam,
I stop and say, ‘By the way, do you know what area of research I
do?’”
Much of his research looks at professional plagiarism, such as a
scientist publishing a large portion of previously published text.
He’s found that in some cases, a language barrier can cause a
scientist in one country to use a majority of another scientist’s
work.
“It’s hard to paraphrase something you don’t
understand,” he said.
Roig said one of the ways he researches his topic is
to give groups of people the same jardon-filled paragraph and ask
them to put it in their own words.
This is where it becomes interesting, he said,
because everyone has a different thought on what it means to put
things into their own words.
Sometimes they change a word or two and think that
is acceptable and other people change the whole paragraph around, he
said.
“When we encounter material difficult to translate
or understand, this is what happens,” said Roig.
Down the road at Wagner College, Jeff Kraus studies
New York City’s political landscape.
A professor of government and politics at the Grymes
Hill college since 1988, Kraus studies the city’s campaign finance
laws and programs.
His research includes sifting through pages and
pages of campaign finance reports and election returns, as well as
keeping track of the number of candidates in various races and
analyzing the findings.
According to Kraus, publicly funded campaigns in New
York City were meant to even out the playing field when it came to
money available for potential candidates, which in theory, increase
the candidate pool and voter turnout.
“But, frankly, none of those things happened,” said
Kraus, citing the research he’s done on the topic.
Trekking through the mucked up banks of the Arthur
Kill or climbing to the tallest mountain peaks to find some of the
most venomous snakes in the world is part of every-day work for
William Wallace, an associate professor of biology at CSI, who is
affiliated with the college’s Center for Environmental Studies, and
Frank Burbrink, an assistant professor of biology at the college.
Wallace recently received a $90,000 New York Sea Grant to
investigate mercury transfer along aquatic food chains in the Arthur
Kill and surrounding areas.
The goal of his research is to understand the impact
of pollutants such as mercury in aquatic ecosystems.
He will examine the factors controlling the
accumulation and detoxification of mercury in invertebrate prey,
such as worms and shrimp, and how these factors influence mercury
transfer along the aquatic food chains.
After receiving an undergraduate degree in marine
biology, his doctorate research led him into this field.
His work mixes a small portion of many scientific
disciplines, including marine biology, chemistry, physiology and
invertebrate zoology.
His colleague, Burbrink, travels to some of the most
remote places in North and South America to study various snakes and
salamanders.
While on a research hike in Arkansas, Burbrink
discovered what he believes is a new species of salamanders. After
studying them, he noticed the salamanders on top of the mountain
were genetically different then the ones in the valley.
As a result of his preliminary research, Burbrink
received a $100,000 grant from the state of Arkansas to study the
emerging species.
By MICHELLE MASKALY AND TEVAH PLATT
Reprinted here with permission
from the
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