Student drug testing not effective in reducing drug use
Drug testing of students in schools does not deter drug use, U-M researchers have concluded, based on a large, multi-year national sample of the nation’s high schools and middle schools.
The findings were reported recently in the Journal of School Health. The research challenges the premise that has been central to the rationale for schools adopting a drug testing policy. The contention that testing is a deterrent to drug use also was an important consideration in a recent split decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of drug testing of students as a condition of participating in extracurricular activities.
The survey represents the only large or nationally representative samples of schools that have ever been used to assess the effectiveness of drug testing policy. At each grade level studied8, 10 and 12the investigators found virtually identical rates of drug use in the schools that have drug testing and the schools that do not.
Additional analyses focusing on specific groups of students also were conducted. In those high schools that tested athletes, use by male athletes of marijuana (or of any other illicit drugs) was not significantly different from use among male athletes in the great majority of high schools that do not test their athletes. (There were not sufficient numbers of female athletes available to conduct parallel analyses for them.)
The authors—Ryoko Yokohama, Lloyd Johnston and Patrick O’Malley—all are social scientists at the Institute for Social Research.
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Kids’ backpacks may not cause back pain after all
Backpacks have gotten a bad rap. For years, specialists have urged school children to lighten their loads, wear their backpacks on both shoulders and avoid lugging around those heavy school bags whenever possible.But new research from a U-M Health System physiatrist indicates backpacks don’t cause this—stress and strain on young backs.
“There is no good scientific evidence to support the claim that school bag load is a contributing factor to the development of low back pain in growing children,” says Dr. Andrew Haig, medical director of the U-M Spine Program and associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and of surgery at the Medical School. Rather, he points to signs that children’s activity level and weight may have more to do with back pain. Despite a flurry of attention to this issue, Haig’s study is the first to actually measure pain related to backpack use.
The study, which was presented May 21 at the World Congress of the International Society for Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine in Prague, Czech Republic, looked at 184 elementary and middle school children in the Ann Arbor public school district. The study focused on third grade pupils and middle school students; ages ranged from 7 to 15.
—Nicole Fawcett, UMHS Public Relations
Why fewer women choose math-based careers
Girls and boys who are confident in their math abilities tend to pick a science career based on their values more than on their skills, a study by two U-M researchers suggests.
The study found that both boys and girls who were people-oriented tended to choose college majors in the biological sciences—medicine, environmental sciences or social sciences—rather than the mathematically based sciences such as engineering, physics or astronomy. It also found that math self-confidence, while stronger in boys than girls, played a much smaller role in the choice of college majors and careers than previously thought.
The study, by Jacquelynne Eccles, a professor of psychology and women’s studies and a research scientist in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), and Mina Vida, a research associate in IRWG, is based on a data set collected during 17 years as part of the Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions.
Boys in the survey tended to rank the utility of mathematics more highly, while girls placed a higher value on English. In addition, girls were more likely to be people-oriented. “Given this data, it’s not surprising that there are many more men than women in math-based majors and careers,” Eccles said. “Boys’ beliefs and values are pulling them toward those areas while girls’ are pushing them in other directions.”
Eccles points out that women are going into science, but they tend to concentrate in the life and social sciences. Eccles’s and Vida’s research suggests that those who want to attract and retain more women in math-based academic programs and careers in industry need to develop different intervention programs for girls and young women. Eccles says U-M’s GO-GIRL program for seventh-grade girls is a good example. Students in GO-GIRL design questionnaires on topics of their own choosing and conduct surveys via the school’s Smartgirl.org Web site. They learn how to analyze and present the data they collect.
—Judy Steeh, News Service
The big undo: A time machine for corporate computing
When hackers break into corporate networks, millions of dollars of damage can be done in a brief amount of time. Records can be deleted or altered, business plans can be exposed, and companies sometimes are unclear about what parts of their systems have been compromised. Faced with a crime scene with few clues, system administrators often find themselves wishing for a way to travel back in time and watch the crime unfold.
New research performed at U-M might help them do it.
“What we have created is a way to turn back time—at least from a computing perspective—and watch history unfold exactly as it did before,” says Peter Chen, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “Not only can we turn back the clock on an attack to undo the damage, we can also go back to any point during the attack to observe exactly how the intruder breached the system.”
Chen says several commercial products can record all changes made to a hard drive, allowing users to restore their systems to a previous backup point. But none of these products allows system administrators to replay an intruder’s actions step by step.
Dubbed ReVirt, the Michigan project hides the system’s actual hardware and operating system behind a virtual machine. Actually a software program that emulates a systems hardware, the virtual machine then runs a guest operating system that runs applications and interacts with users. By creating this additional abstraction layer and forcing users to interact with a guest operating system, ReVirt is able to log all events completely that happen on the virtual machine at both the operating system and virtual machine level. The owner also can restore the system to any point in time recorded by the logs.
“It’s like having a security camera behind bullet proof glass that can see everything going on during a bank robbery,” Chen says.
—Neal Lao, College of Engineering
Many pregnant women show signs of depression, but few treated
One in five pregnant women may be experiencing symptoms of depression, but few are getting help for it, a new U-M study finds.
And those with a history of depression any time before their pregnancy—about one in every four women—are about twice as likely as other women to show signs of depression while pregnant, the study results show.
The study of 3,472 pregnant women, conducted by researchers from the U-M Depression Center in the waiting rooms of 10 Michigan obstetrics clinics, was published May 20 in the Journal of Women’s Health. The results reveal troubling under-diagnosis and under-treatment of depression in pregnancy. Twenty percent of the women scored high on a standard survey of depression symptoms, but of those, only 13.8 percent were receiving any mental health counseling, drugs or other treatment. Only about 24 percent of those who had had depression in the last six months were receiving treatment during pregnancy.
The U-M Depression Center, the nation’s only comprehensive center for depression treatment, research and education, has launched a Web site about depression designed specifically for women, http://www.med.umich.edu/womensguide.
Dr. Sheila Marcus, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Medical School and the clinical director of the psychiatry division of the Depression Center, was the lead author. The study’s other authors were Heather Flynn, a psychologist and member of the Depression Center Women’s Mood Disorders Program; and Frederic Blow and Kristen Barry of the Department of Psychiatry and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare Center. The research was funded by the U-M Health System.
—Kara Gavin, UMHS Public Relations
