Presentation Day!

On August 20, 2012 students did there final presentations to a group of about 25 faculty, staff and students (plus one dog…but we’ll get to that later).

Hydraulic Conductivity Group

The first group to present was the hydraulic conductivity group. They did an excellent job, and it is clear they really got into their research. For a complete set of results go to http://hydraulicconductivity.blogspot.com/

David was the first presenter of the day!

Next, the group studying the physical and cognitive benefits of exercise in elderly people presented their results.

Katie, Ashley, and Alicia’s turn to present

Another great job!

Next, was the Shakespeare presentation. The other research groups were so grateful that they had seen Measure for Measure, and so understood Kevin’s presentation perfectly!

Of course it helped that he was clear and articulate.

Finally, the dog group presented. There was a very special guest present for that one–Oliver, and his owner, Leslie.

Oliver and his owner/handler, Leslie.

Oliver was one of the therapy dogs in the study!

The dog therapy group, with their posters and their “placebo” dogs.

The dog therapy group gave another interesting and articulate presentation, and then they were off to the poster session. The poster session was designed to allow people who didn’t have time to attend the oral presentations a chance to see and hear about the students’ work.Congratulations to all the student participants. I’ve heard nothing but compliments! Hope some of them return for next year’s institute!

Research is fun, but sometimes you need a break!

So we worked hard, but we did some fun stuff too. Even though it was one of the hottest summers on record, we did some outside things. One of the very first things we did was to attend a play–Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”

Waiting for Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” to start.

It was not a random decision to attend this particular play. This year for the first time, we had a humanities project being conducted. Dr. Joe Hebert and his student, Kevin, spent their time analyzing and writing about the political context and motivations that might underlie this play.

When looking for things to do we discovered that the ONE Shakespearean play being performed by a local group this summer was…yep….Measure for Measure! How coincidental is that???

The very first week, we were supposed to have a cookout and swim at West Lake Park.

Tough or stupid? I don’t know, but we had fun…

Except there was a heat advisory that day and we had to cancel. So what did we do? We took our frisbees and volleyball and played outside!

It turned out the volleyball court was way to hot to play on, so the grass had to do. Of course, some of us were smart enough to stay in the shade and play frisbee.

Either way, it was hot and we didn’t stay outside for longer than an hour or two.

At some point Alicia and Aubrey decided to do squats.

Why? Um…no idea.

Of course the hot weather never let up, and our trip to the baseball game was even hotter. It was supposed to be a “Bark in the Park” day when people could bring their dogs.

Except it was too hot for dogs…I think we saw two dogs panting on the grass…

Service: It’s a Good Thing

This gallery contains 5 photos.

On Friday, July 13 we volunteered our time to help set up an annual garage sale.  The students helped sort and organize items that were donated while getting to know the community at the Center for Active Seniors. Some of … Continue reading →

Duck Creek Adventure part 2

Note..to FULLY catch up on what’s going on with the hydraulic conductivity group, go to http://hydraulicconductivity.blogspot.com/2012_07_01_archive.html

Today (7-11-2012) was an early start to survey a new location at the creek.

Matt and David, and Jessica on the bridge behind them

As before we used the falling head test at multiple locations in the creek. This section of the creek turned out to contain sediment that was more rocky in nature than the more sandy conditions at the first location. There was a top layer of sand that was rather shallow with a layer of rocks underneath. There seemed to be this layer of rocks at approximately the same depth across the whole area tested, so we expect differences in the values

Layered Sand

calculated for this location compared to the first. We collected sand from the location we had tested to bring back to the lab so we could try to confirm the K values by testing the sand in the lab. We set the column up to be tested tomorrow as the water was very murky and we wanted to allow the sand time to settle.

Once we were back in the lab we proceeded to test a new setup of two layers of different sand after having let it settle overnight. We tested different depths into the two layers of sand by starting with the column deep through both sands and slowly moving the column up half an inch between trials. Our goal from setting the test up and while carrying it out was to disturb the layers as little as possible to be more sure that the interface between the layers was where we thought it was and that the layers didn’t get mixed greatly with each other. A depiction of the comparison of our measured experimental values with our model values generated with MODFLOW is here http://hydraulicconductivity.blogspot.com/2012/07/duck-creek-adventure-part-2.html
by David Cooper

What is AAA?

by Marie Adams. I have never been what I would consider to be a “dog person”—I like dogs well enough but I’ve always had a “take it or leave it” kind of attitude about interacting with animals. However, after a few weeks of participating in this summer research institute and studying the physiological and psychological effects a dog can have on a person, I must admit I am starting to sing a different tune. I never would have thought that interacting with a dog could produce such noticeable changes. Let me tell you what I mean.

The focus of our group’s research this summer is on Animal Assisted Activities (AAA for short). While AAA is not specifically goal oriented, it is unique in that it can be incorporated into the framework of other structured therapeutic interventions, whether those are in hospitals, clinics, or schools. AAA consists of a handler/owner and dog team who have passed a number of behavioral and health tests. They are then granted membership to a therapy dog organization and are free to do visits at various facilities that use therapy dogs. While visits are not goal-oriented, the visits can provide motivational and recreational opportunities for the patients, or just relieve some stress through petting and interacting with the dog.

Therapy Dogs can have an immediate and positive impact on people.

In our field trips to Genesis West and Trinity West, we have seen how AAA is utilized and how it could help ease patient reported stress or pain in a variety of clinical settings. At Trinity West we were privileged enough to watch a therapy dog interact with patients on a rehabilitation floor. The difference that the presence of the dog made was remarkable. Before the dog entered the patients seemed distant from one another and did not exhibit much enthusiasm towards the upcoming group physical or occupational therapy sessions. However, the whole scene changed in a matter of minutes after the therapy dog entered; not only did they smile and pet the dog, but the games they played with the dog helped to work on their own issues of balance, coordination, arm or leg strength, as well as to increase their interaction with each other, all of which will help them recover faster.

Although we do not have access to hospital patients for our group’s study, we have noticed certain trends in our pilot study with college students, trends that hopefully prove to be statistically significant. We’ll have to wait and see on that, as we are just starting to analysis our data. But the meantime, if you were to ask me if I thought AAA was worthwhile, I would respond with a resounding yes.

How to Test the Impact of a Therapy Dog Experimentally

Knowing the process of experimentation and actually doing an experiment are two different things. Let us take you through what we’ve done so far:

We started our research on June 26^th, which consisted of background research in the library and various databases to gather some base knowledge in order to determine how we wanted to conduct our experiment.  We then began the lengthy process of perfecting a proposal to send to the IRB in order to get approval for our experiment.  This process took several days due to multiple drafts and revisions.

Jen is explaining (or trying to explain) our research process.

The experiment itself took around two weeks to perfect before we felt confident in using its design.  Even after our proposal was accepted, we performed several trial runs within advance in order to determine possible errors or problems that could arise within testing.

Our experiment is conducted in a series of pieces or sections.  In the “pre-test” section, each participant is asked exclusion questions to determine whether or not they have the ability to participate in our study.

The controller, pulse monitor and blood pressure monitor.

Once a participant has passed the exclusion questions, they are directed to take a seat in a classroom desk and hooked up to a blood pressure cuff along with a continuous pulse monitor attached to a new form of software called iWorx.

Here is what the computer screen looks like when we are collecting data using iWorx.

The iWorx program allows us to better examine what happens to pulse throughout the entire experiment whereas the blood pressure cuff can only give readings at a certain instant.  The participant is asked to relax for three minutes in order to obtain normal baseline readings.  After baseline readings have been recorded, participants are asked to rate their present stress verbally on a scale of 1 to 10.  This concludes the “pre-test” section.

In the “testing” section, participants are given a list of twenty anagrams (scrambled words) and told that the list is a test of their cognitive ability.  Participants are allowed three minutes to complete the test with warnings at the two minute and one minute marks.  The test actually has nothing to do with cognitive ability.  The test is a form of stressor that we use in hopes of increasing the stress levels in participants to heighten their physiological measurements of heart rate and blood pressure.  The test is impossible to complete within three minutes.  It actually took our entire research team about twenty minutes to complete it.  After three minutes of testing has passed, blood pressure and heart rate are again recorded, along with a verbal self-report of stress.  This concludes the “testing” section of the experiment.

In the “post-testing” section, participants are exposed to one of three randomly assigned conditions:

This is one of the therapy dogs, “Wrigley.” Isn’t he cute?

1)     Our first condition is contact with a trained therapy dog.  Participants in this condition are allowed a three-minute interaction time with a trained therapy dog with owner present.  Once the participant has been allowed three minutes with the therapy dog, blood pressure, heart rate, and verbal stress are again measured. Check out the dogs

And this is “Oliver.”

2)     The second condition is interaction with a stuffed dog.  The purpose of this condition is to determine whether or not contact with something soft is equivalent to interacting with a real dog.  Due to the sufficient evidence from past research, such as Harlow’s experiments on monkeys, we felt it necessary to include this condition in our design.

Our stuffed dogs, “Riley” and “Biscuit,” were very well-behaved, thanks to expert handling by Aubrey.

Participants in this condition are asked to interact by petting a stuffed dog for a three-minute interval.  As with the real dog condition, blood pressure, heart rate, and verbal stress are measured after the dog is taken away.

3)     The final condition is a no dog condition.  True to its name, participants do not interact with any form of a dog.  Participants are instructed to sit and relax for three minutes before final measurements are recorded.  This is to determine the difference in physiological measurements with a dog versus no dog at all.

Because most of our participants willingly participated in our study due to their love of dogs, participants assigned to the stuffed-dog or no-dog condition are allowed time with a real therapy dog after testing has been completed.

Aubrey and Zoe are waiting with Dr. Trujillo’s dog, Whitney. She came to give some loving to people in the control conditions at the end of the experiment.

Participants then fill out a demographic questionnaire, are debriefed that the cognitive test was not to test their intellectual ability and was impossible to complete, and thanked for their time.

Our testing began on July 13^th, and we just finished our data collection today, July 23^rd.  Overall, we had 25 participants help us in our research, along with 6 therapy dog teams.  Our goal now is to analyze all of our collected data in order to determine what type of impact dogs have on physiological measurements of stress.

By the way, not all our dogs were fluffy and white, we just happened to take pictures on days when there were white, fluffy dogs! More soon…

Zoe Harris, Jen Rushton, and Aubrey Graham contributed to this post.

An Encounter with Radiation

We recently had an opportunity to tour the cancer wing at Genesis West. The goal was to learn how science contributes to the treatment of cancer using radiation. We arrived early in the afternoon eager to get out of the July heat and were greeted by a medical physicist. A medical physicist is, we learned, someone who ensures that the radiation equipment is adjusted properly so that the patient receives safe and effective treatment. We were a given a tour of the cancer institute, and learned how the equipment could help determine proper levels and locations for treatment, and also deliver the radiation treatment. The machines give 3D images of tumors, and determine precisely where to aim the energy.

Image from http://www.genesishealth.com/services/cancer/advanced-treatment/tomotherapy/

Walking into any doctor’s office can be unnerving for some people, so it was easy to see how a cancer patient could find the enormous radiation equipment downright overwhelming. In talking with some of the staff at Genesis we learned that a cancer patient can expect to have upwards of 10 people involved in various aspects of their case. In addition to the number of people one would encounter while sick, some of the necessary scans can last up to 30 minutes at a time. It was fascinating to learn how these bulky giants use laser like precision to safely treat the cancer patients, but it was also sobering to know how it might be experienced from a patient’s perspective. Each of us enjoyed the tour; and both faculty and students found it to be a valuable learning experience!

Marie Adams and Andrew Friederich both contributed to this post.

For more information about radiation treatment at the Genesis Cancer Treatment Center, go to http://www.genesishealth.com/services/cancer/advanced-treatment/tomotherapy/