Several recent articles and interviews have covered research by Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci on the choices women in science make and how it is these choices, rather than discrimination, that affects their careers.
Quoted in Social scientist sees bias within, New York Times, February 7, 2011.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the employment of the first county agent in New York state, which launched what would become Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), the New York Farm Bureau and CCE joined forces March 21 in a ceremony in Binghamton, where both institutions were born.
Now, 100 years later, CCE operates in 35 counties across the state and is known for its agriculture programming and its work on energy and the environment, nutrition and health, and family and community development. Read more.
Last fall, when an 18-year-old Rutgers student killed himself after a live video showing him having intimate relations with another young man was transmitted on the Internet, public attention once again focused on the risk of suicide among gay teenagers.
But Ritch Savin-Williams, professor of developmental psychology, argues in this January 2011 New York Times article that the evidence for normal gay youth is less well-known because studies that don't find group differences between gay and straight youth are more difficulty to get published. Read more
Savin-Williams is also quoted in a March 2011 New York Times article on controversey over gay-friendly curricula in schools. Read more
Cornell, New York state's land-grant university, has received the nation's top recognition for community-related activities from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Cornell University has scores of programs that do everything from helping children avoid burns to educating men in prisons and supporting the sustainability of small farms.
For its community engagement, the university has earned the nation's top recognition. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching -- whose classifications of colleges and universities are considered the country's gold standard -- has designated Cornell an "institution of community engagement," Carnegie announced today (Jan. 5). Cornell is now one of only 311 U.S. colleges and universities to receive this classification. Read the full story
Positive emotions improve decision making, memory, and well-being of older adults.
For years, researchers have known that cognitive functions such as reasoning, memory, and problem solving decline with age. But a relatively new discovery is transforming conventional thinking about aging and cognition: as people age, their emotional wellbeing improves.
“The processes that show decline are ones people need to navigate our everyday world— working memory, short-term memory, attention, the ability to represent visual images in our mind,” explained Joseph Mikels, assistant professor of human development. “All of the things we need to get around in life show significant decline starting in our 20s.” That is, except in one area: emotion. “Loss is ubiquitous across a number of cognitive domains, but older adults actually show an advantage over younger adults in the domain of emotion,” explained psychologist Anthony Ong, assistant professor of human development. Read the full story
Human Ecology researchers aim to lessen aggression among residents, reduce staff turnover, and improve communication with families.
Last December, a 98-year-old Massachusetts woman became the oldest person charged with murder in state history for allegedly killing her centenarian roommate. The deadly assault followed a dispute over a piece of furniture the two nursing home residents shared.
Though an extreme case, the shocking incident brought to light a type of elder abuse that vexes nursing home residents, their families, and frontline caregivers: resident-to-resident elder mistreatment, a largely unstudied occurrence that takes the form of verbal attacks, physical violence, and, less commonly, sexual assault.
To better understand this issue, Human Ecology researchers, in collaboration with physicians at Weill Cornell Medical College, are midway through the first large-scale study of verbal and physical aggression among nursing home residents. Read the full story
Older adults are likely at greater risk from climate change. Recognizing the urgency of this unstudied problem, researchers in the College of Human Ecology brought together experts in the both the social and natural sciences to begin to make recommendations.
When Hurricane Katrina engulfed New Orleans in 2005, catastrophic flood waters and fierce winds crippled the city’s infrastructure, caused billions in property damage, and killed an estimated 1,500 Louisiana residents. The death toll cut across all races, but one characteristic stood out among the storm’s victims: nearly three-quarters of the dead were aged 60 and older, with 50 percent of the victims aged 75 and older.
The stark difference in survival rates between young and old illustrates what scientists believe to be a greater vulnerability among seniors to environmental calamities like Katrina, where the elderly—many physically frail and with limited mobility—could not evacuate coastal areas ahead of the hurricane’s onslaught. Older adults also figure to have the most trouble coping with the predicted negative consequences of climate change, such as the accelerated spread of human diseases, declines in air and water quality, energy shortages, rising temperatures, food supply volatility, and loss of suitable habitats. Read the full story
By Ted Boscia, reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, November 19, 2010
Karl Pillemer, the Hazel E. Reed Professor in the Department of Human Development, will receive the M. Powell Lawton Award from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) at its annual meeting Nov. 19-23 for his work on improving the lives of older adults in nursing homes and community settings.
The award recognizes Pillemer's work in three areas: preventing elder mistreatment by staff and other residents in nursing homes; improving the work life of qualified certified nursing assistants (CNAs); and strengthening relationships between the families of residents in long-term care and CNAs.
He has designed such interventions as workshops to ease communication between CNAs and families, a program to train and retain CNAs and epidemiological studies to determine the prevalence and causes of elder abuse.
"For people in nursing homes, the quality of relationships with staff and the care delivered defines the entire experience," said Pillemer, associate dean for extension and outreach in the College of Human Ecology. "If we can better support CNAs -- who deliver about 90 percent of the direct care -- and give families more tools to care for their loved ones, residents will have a better quality of life."
Pillemer is a GSA fellow, the society's highest class of membership, and serves as a member-at-large for its Behavioral and Social Sciences Section. At Cornell, he co-directs the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging, a National Institutes of Health-funded center to work with community and academic partners to improve elder care.
Why aren't there more women math professors? Or engineering professors, or physics professors, or professors of computer science or economics? Why aren't there more women tech entrepreneurs? If a field involves lots of numbers, why does it seem to involve so few women? Some people say it's discrimination, others say socialization and few, including a former Harvard university president, have said ability has something to do with it. (That's largely why he's "former.")
Now a husband and wife team, both academics (with three daughters), have analyzed the cognitive data and decided it's not really any of these. It's mostly about female preference and motherhood. Read the full article
For most older adults in long-term care, nursing homes are the last places they will ever live, and many give up hope on ever returning to home.
However, a Cornell evaluation project finds that a person-centered approach shows great promise in helping nursing home residents move back to the community, allowing nearly 60 percent of study participants to successfully return home.
Researchers in the College of Human Ecology evaluated Project Home, a pilot program in Syracuse, N.Y., funded by the New York State Department of Health. They report on their findings in an upcoming article in the Journal of Case Management.
"It's very common for older adults to express their desire to return home," said co-principal investigator Rhoda Meador, associate director of outreach and extension in the College of Human Ecology. "The idea with Project Home is that, with extra support and focus on an individual's unique needs, those wishes can become possible." Read the full story
