Hospital and ambulatory care facility prices rose by 5.1 and 10.1 percent, respectively, in 2010. Increases in facility prices were offset by decreases in the number of inpatient admissions (-3.3 %) and use of outpatient facilities (-3.1%). HCCI confirmed 2010 prices for the privately insured grew more than utilization after accounting for changes in the mix of medical services provided in hospitals (0.7%) and outpatient facilities (4.6%).

The Health Care Cost and Utilization Report: 2010 is based on de-identified, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant data sets from three billion health insurance claims provided by Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare, three of the nation’s largest health plans. Future reports from HCCI will include data from Kaiser Permanente. The payers have agreed to share their data with HCCI to help researchers study what influences the use and cost of health care services in the United States. Findings from the 2010 report reflect the national health care spending of more than 33 million privately insured people with employer-sponsored group health insurance. View the coverage map.¹

“For the first time we have comprehensive data on the privately insured. This lets us develop a clearer picture of what is truly driving health care spending in the United States,” says HCCI Governing Board Chairman Martin Gaynor, PhD, E.J. Barone Professor of Economics and Health Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “Health care spending is a critical problem – it’s not an exaggeration to say that if we solve the health care spending problem we solve our fiscal problems.”

A More Complete Picture of Spending

The report examines trends in inpatient and outpatient care, professional services, and prescription drugs by the privately insured. HCCI looked at per capita spending, prices paid per service, out-of-pocket spending, utilization, and the mix or intensity of services used.

HCCI determined per capita spending on health care services averaged $4,255 in 2010, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009. Per capita expenditures varied, with $8,327 paid for people aged 55-64, and $2,123 for people under 18 in 2010. Per capita spending among the youngest cohort – people 18 and under – grew faster than any other age group under age 65. Overall health spending among the estimated 156.5 million people with employer-sponsored group insurance increased, rising 2.5 percent to $666.1 billion, consistent with recent reports on health spending.

“HCCI’s unprecedented effort to drill down into the underlying drivers of costs will help set the country on a more sustainable economic path,” says Bradley Smith, President of the Society of Actuaries. “This report will be a great help to the work we do to analyze and estimate the true drivers of health care spending.”

HCCI was launched in September 2011 as a nonprofit entity with a public mission of making these data available for research. HCCI has produced the first comprehensive picture of health care spending for the privately insured. The 2011 update of the current report will be available in fall 2012, making it one of the earliest available assessments of health care spending in 2011.

“We hope this report will help people get a much clearer picture about what triggers health care growth and spending,” says HCCI Executive Director David Newman. “Having this amount of data allows us to drill down and examine the underlying causes of health care spending among a population that hasn’t been studied extensively in a way that can provide answers to important questions.”

Highlights of the report:

Cost Sharing. Out-of-pocket per capita spending increased 7.1 percent in 2010 to $689. Cost sharing rates between payers and beneficiaries remained relatively stable, with beneficiaries contributing 16.2 percent of average per capita spending.

Inpatient-Outpatient Facility Trends. The average facility price paid for a hospital stay was $14,662 in 2010, a 5.1 percent increase over 2009. The price for an emergency room visit climbed to $1,327 in 2010, an 11 percent hike. The average out-of-pocket price of a hospital stay rose 10.7 percent from $632 in 2009 to $700 in 2010.

Prescription Drugs. Prescription drug prices grew on 3 percent overall from an average of $80 per prescription in 2009 to $82 in 2010. However, brand name drug prices increased 13 percent from 2009 to 2010, while generic drug prices decreased by 6.3 percent.

Professional Services. The overall price of professional procedures that include doctor visits, lab tests, and diagnostic imaging, increased 2.6 percent. Payments for office visits – to both primary care and specialist providers – grew by more than 5 percent.

Utilization Trends. Overall use of health care services declined in 2010. Usage dropped by more than 5 percent for medical inpatient admissions, emergency room visits, primary care provider office visits, and radiology procedures. On average, each insured person filled more than nine prescriptions in 2010. The number of brand name prescriptions dropped by nearly 4 percent, while the number of generic prescriptions increased by 2.5 percent.

What’s Ahead?

This is the first of a number of reports the HCCI will be releasing examining health care spending trends. In future reports, HCCI will examine cost and utilization trends in specific areas such as mental health and substance abuse, cancer, and diabetes. HCCI will also make available, by application, de-identified, HIPAA-compliant data sets for research purposes. Several research reports using HCCI data will be released in the coming months by independent researchers, including reports on the effects of aging and on hospital markets.

The report will be available on The Health Care Cost Institute website on May 21, 2012 at: http://www.healthcostinstitute.org/report

About the Health Care Cost Institute

The Health Care Cost Institute was created in September 2011 to provide comprehensive data on health care costs and promote independent, nonpartisan research and analysis on the causes of the rise in U.S. health spending. For more information, visit: www.healthcostinstitute.com

Contact: Janet Firshein
jfirshein@burnesscommunications.com
301-652-1558
Burness Communications

^{1. The report focuses on health care expenditures and their components of price, utilization, and intensity at the regional and national levels. It does not report on premiums or their determinants. See page 1 of the report for references to sources that address health insurance premiums.}

“The more they read, listen and see political information, the less negative and more balanced the citizen’s views of politics and politicians” Jordi Rodríguez Virgili, political communication lecturer at the University of Navarra (UNAV) explained to SINC. This is the conclusion of the study published in the journal Comunicación y Sociedad by the researchers Esteban López-Escobar and Antonio Tolsá.

The authors crossed media intake data with perceptions of politics and politicians. They carried out 950 personal interviews in Navarra in the homes of registered citizens that have the right to vote.

Before the interview, the researchers held several discussion groups to collect usual statements regarding politics and politicians. In the questionnaire they asked the level of agreement or disagreement with these statements. People who consumed less political information at the time of the interview were those who agreed more with the judgements along the lines of “all politicians are corrupt” or “all politicians are liars”.

The authors also analysed data from the Barometers of the Sociological Research Centre (CIS) from May 1985 to January 2011 to conclude that Spaniards perceive politicians to be part of the problem and not part of the solution. “This phenomenon is not new, nor is it exclusive to Spain. It is global, but in recent years it has heightened” Rodríguez Virgili states.

70% of the interviewees would not like their children to work in politics.

Negative perception of politicians is shown in that 66.7% state that politicians are not concerned by what the public think. Furthermore, 87.2% believe that politicians are more interested in what the party says rather than what the public say, and 70% of the interviewees would not like their children to work in politics. The results show that the majority link politicians with lies and their equivalent, and secondly with putting their own interests first, and thirdly, with corruption.

In the study, 62% of the participants said they referred to national politicians, 17% referred to those of their autonomous region and 15.4% their local council. Around 6% stated that they were referring to international politicians.

The least valued as a professional group

What also caught the experts’ attention is the “vicious circle” regarding the assessment of different professions. Researchers asked the interviewees to rate on a scale from one to ten, the level of trust they had for twelve different professional groups, including teachers, doctors, judges, soldiers, civil servants, members of religious orders, politicians and journalists.

Of those, the least valued were politicians, and the most trusted were scientists. Journalists were around mid-table, with a score of 5.5.

“If the public have a negative perception of the two basic pillars of democracy, politicians and the media, this can reduce the quality of democracy in the country”, the expert points out.

This article is part of a wider study on the perception of politicians and politics away from the current general crisis situation. Participants were chosen according to the ‘sex’, ‘age’ and ‘location’ variables. Eighteen interviewers carried out the surveys, with an average duration of 16 minutes, over 16 days, between 28 May and 12 June 2009. The level of trust is 95%.

References:

Jordi Rodríguez-Virgili, Esteban López-Escobar, Antonio Tolsá, “Media use and public perception of politicians, politic and political parties”. Comunicación y Sociedad XXIV (2): 7-39, 2011.

Contact: SINC
info@agenciasinc.es
34-914-251-820
FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Resistive RAM (or ‘ReRAM’) memory chips are based on materials, most often oxides of metals, whose electrical resistance changes when a voltage is applied – and they “remember” this change even when the power is turned off.

ReRAM chips promise significantly greater memory storage than current technology, such as the Flash memory used on USB sticks, and require much less energy and space.

The UCL team have developed a novel structure composed of silicon oxide, described in a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Physics, which performs the switch in resistance much more efficiently than has been previously achieved. In their material, the arrangement of the silicon atoms changes to form filaments of silicon within the solid silicon oxide, which are less resistive. The presence or absence of these filaments represents a ‘switch’ from one state to another.

Unlike other silicon oxide chips currently in development, the UCL chip does not require a vacuum to work, and is therefore potentially cheaper and more durable. The design also raises the possibility of transparent memory chips for use in touch screens and mobile devices.

The team have been backed by UCLB, UCL’s technology transfer company, and have recently filed a patent on their device. Discussions are ongoing with a number of leading semiconductor companies.

Dr Tony Kenyon, UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: “Our ReRAM memory chips need just a thousandth of the energy and are around a hundred times faster than standard Flash memory chips. The fact that the device can operate in ambient conditions and has a continuously variable resistance opens up a huge range of potential applications.

“We are also working on making a quartz device with a view to developing transparent electronics.”

For added flexibility, the UCL devices can also be designed to have a continuously variable resistance that depends on the last voltage that was applied. This is an important property that allows the device to mimic how neurons in the brain function. Devices that operate in this way are sometimes known as ‘memristors’.

This technology is currently of enormous interest, with the first practical memristor, based on titanium dioxide, demonstrated in just 2008. The development of a silicon oxide memristor is a huge step forward because of the potential for its incorporation into silicon chips.

The team’s new ReRAM technology was discovered by accident whilst engineers at UCL were working on using the silicon oxide material to produce silicon-based LEDs. During the course of the project, researchers noticed that their devices appeared to be unstable.

UCL PhD student, Adnan Mehonic, was asked to look specifically at the material’s electrical properties. He discovered that the material wasn’t unstable at all, but flipped between various conducting and non-conducting states very predictably.

Adnan Mehonic, also from the UCL Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: “My work revealed that a material we had been looking at for some time could in fact be made into a memristor.

“The potential for this material is huge. During proof of concept development we have shown we can programme the chips using the cycle between two or more states of conductivity. We’re very excited that our devices may be an important step towards new silicon memory chips”

The technology has promising applications beyond memory storage. The team are also exploring using the resistance properties of their material not just for use in memory but also as a computer processor.

The work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Notes for Editors

1. For more information or to interview Dr Tony Kenyon, please contact Clare Ryan in the UCL Media Relations Office on tel: +44 (0)20 3108 3846, mobile: +44 07747 565 056, out of hours +44 (0)7917 271 364, e-mail: clare.ryan@ucl.ac.uk.

2. ‘Resistive switching in silicon suboxide films” is published online in the Journal of Applied Physics. The paper is available for download here: http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/japiau/v111/i7/p074507_s1

3. Journalists can also obtain copies of the paper by contacting UCL Media Relations.

4. Images of the silicon chip described here are available to journalists on request from UCL Media Relations.

About UCL (University College London)

Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world’s top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has 24,000 students from almost 140 countries, and more than 9,500 employees. Our annual income is over £800 million.

www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow us on Twitter @uclnews

About UCLB

UCLB is a leading technology transfer company that supports and commercialises research and innovations arising from UCL, one of the UK’s top research-led universities. UCLB has a successful track record and a strong reputation for identifying and protecting promising new technologies and innovations from UCL academics. It invests directly in development projects to maximise the potential of the research and manages the commercialisation process of technologies from the laboratory to market. UCLB supports UCL’s Grand Challenges of increasing UCL’s positive impact on and contribution to Global Health, Sustainable Cities, Intercultural Interaction and Human Wellbeing. For further information, please visit www.uclb.com

Contact: Clare Ryan
clare.ryan@ucl.ac.uk
44-203-108-3846
University College London

The research, which earned best-paper honors at the conference, was conducted by experts from Rice University in Houston, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley.

“It is exciting to see this technology in a working chip that we can measure and validate for the first time,” said project leader Krishna Palem, who also serves as director of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID). “Our work since 2003 showed that significant gains were possible, and I am delighted that these working chips have met and even exceeded our expectations.”

ISAID is working in partnership with CSEM to create new technology that will allow next-generation inexact microchips to use a fraction of the electricity of today’s microprocessors.

“The paper received the highest peer-review evaluation of all the Computing Frontiers submissions this year,” said Paolo Faraboschi, the program co-chair of the ACM Computing Frontiers conference and a distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. “Research on approximate computation matches the forward-looking charter of Computing Frontiers well, and this work opens the door to interesting energy-efficiency opportunities of using inexact hardware together with traditional processing elements.”

The concept is deceptively simple: Slash power use by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes. By cleverly managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance.

One example of the inexact design approach is “pruning,” or trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits on a microchip. Another innovation, “confined voltage scaling,” trades some performance gains by taking advantage of improvements in processing speed to further cut power demands.

In their initial simulated tests in 2011, the researchers showed that pruning some sections of traditionally designed microchips could boost performance in three ways: The pruned chips were twice as fast, used half as much energy and were half the size. In the new study, the team delved deeper and implemented their ideas in the processing elements on a prototype silicon chip.

“In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25 percent,” said study co-author Avinash Lingamneni, a Rice graduate student. “When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8 percent were up to 15 times more efficient.”

Project co-investigator Christian Enz, who leads the CSEM arm of the collaboration, said, “Particular types of applications can tolerate quite a bit of error. For example, the human eye has a built-in mechanism for error correction. We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible, and relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images.”

Palem, the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice, who holds a joint appointment at NTU, said likely initial applications for the pruning technology will be in application-specific processors, such as special-purpose “embedded” microchips like those used in hearing aids, cameras and other electronic devices.

The inexact hardware is also a key component of ISAID’s I-slate educational tablet. The low-cost I-slate is designed for Indian classrooms with no electricity and too few teachers. Officials in India’s Mahabubnagar District announced plans in March to adopt 50,000 I-slates into middle and high school classrooms over the next three years.

The hardware and graphic content for the I-slate are being developed in tandem. Pruned chips are expected to cut power requirements in half and allow the I-slate to run on solar power from small panels similar to those used on handheld calculators. Palem said the first I-slates and prototype hearing aids to contain pruned chips are expected by 2013.

Contact: Jade Boyd
jadeboyd@rice.edu
713-348-6778
Rice University

“Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war,” says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research.

“Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation. But they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.”

As evidence for their claim that religion increases trust within groups but may increase conflict with other groups, Atran and Ginges cite a number of studies among different populations. These include cross-cultural surveys and experiments in dozens of societies showing that people who participate most in collective religious rituals are more likely to cooperate with others, and that groups most intensely involved in conflict have the costliest and most physically demanding rituals to galvanize group solidarity in common defense and blind group members to exit strategies. Secular social contracts are more prone to defection, they argue. Their research also indicates that participation in collective religious ritual increases parochial altruism and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks.

They also identify what they call the “backfire effect,” which dooms many efforts to broker peace. In many studies that Atran and Ginges carried out with colleagues in Palestine, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan, they found that offers of money or other material incentives to compromise sacred values increased anger and opposition to a deal.

“In a 2010 study, Iranians who regarded Iran’s right to a nuclear program as a sacred value more violently opposed sacrificing Iran’s nuclear program for conflict-resolution deals involving substantial economic aid, or relaxation of sanctions, than the same deals without aid or sanctions,” they write. “In a 2005 study in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian refugees who held their ‘right of return’ to former homes in Israel as a sacred value more violently opposed abandoning this right for a Palestinian state plus substantial economic aid than the same peace deal without aid.”

This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: “Modern multiculturalism and global exposure to multifarious values is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements to revive primary group loyalties through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity.”

But Atran and Ginges also offer some insights that could help to solve conflicts fueled by religious conviction. Casting these conflicts as sacred initially blocks standard business-like negotiation tactics. But making strong symbolic gestures such as sincere apologies and demonstrations of respect for the other’s values generates surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations, they point out.

“In an age where religious and sacred causes are resurgent, there is urgent need for joint scientific effort to understand them,” they conclude. “In-depth ethnography, combined with cognitive and behavioral experiments among diverse societies (including those lacking a world religion), can help identify and isolate the moral imperatives for decisions on war or peace.”

Atran is also affiliated with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique−Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest digital social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at http://www.isr.umich.edu for more information.

Contact: Diane Swanbrow
swanbrow@umich.edu
734-647-9069
University of Michigan

The paper ‘Reasons to Ban? The Anti-Burqa Movement in Western Europe’ examines the move to legislate against, and to criminalise face-veiling which has swept across the EU recently.

The European movement against face-veiling is now widespread, with calls to implement a ban, or a ban being in place, in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany.

This move from country to country makes it seem like a form of “political Swine Flu”, suggests the paper’s authors, Prakash Shah, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, QM and Ralph Grillo, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Sussex.

Face-veiling is capable of multiple interpretations, by those who wear it and those who do not, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Dr Shah explains: “While some claim that face-veiling is a customary rather than religious practice, others condemn it as an instance of ‘quintessential radical Islam’ – a Western extreme interpretation of Islam and Muslim practice.”

The current rush to legislate, the academics note, is set in the context of a ‘backlash’ against multiculturalism that has been developing across Europe. In France and other countries, security, identification and order have been central to legislative debates since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Despite less than one per cent of Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab in the West, critics also argue that the veil impedes societal integration and breeds ‘dangers inherent in self-enclosed communities’. It is seen as a symbol of the failure of the Muslim women who wear the veil to visibly declare their loyalty to the nation-state where they reside.

In Britain, and other countries too, multicultural ‘diversity’ is officially welcomed, but not when interpreted as ‘difference’. “Difference”, explains Dr Shah, “is identified as beliefs and practices which contravene principles of liberal democracy that underpin governance in much of Europe.”

Dr Shah says: “What was previously thought tolerable has now become unacceptable, and moreover, subject to the law. The legislation which has criminalised face-veiling has clearly originated with the belief, that face-veiling does not fit with European society, culture and values, and has all manner of disagreeable if not downright dangerous implications, especially for women.”

Face-veiling signifies an unwelcome racial or cultural presence, making it impossible for Muslims to be treated as ‘European’ unless they adopt ‘European’ sartorial practice.

“Face-veiling is one of those issues, like public prayers or arranged marriages, affected by a ‘repressive’ liberalism of the kind advocated by numerous European leaders, including Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron, often with racist undertones.

“The educative role of law is brought to bear upon ethnic and religious minorities in an effort to instruct, by force if necessary, the values of liberalism,” warns Professor Grillo.

It is also clear that many opponents sincerely believe that whether a religious or cultural symbol, face veiling is a non-liberal practice that penalises and subordinates women.

If women claim that they are not coerced into face-veiling but do so because it accords with their faith, then it is countered by saying, they have been ‘brainwashed’, notes the research.

“Freeing women from what is believed to be their submission to a patriarchal society, overrides their freedom to choose and express their religious beliefs. Anti-face-veiling discourse operates like a closed system, impervious to argument,” says Professor Grillo.

Criminalisation, the researchers argue, should always be a last resort, not least when it may harm those it is supposed to assist, for example, forcing women who voluntarily adopt the face-veil to disappear from public life.

“Legislators have sought to impose a particular narrative of the face-veil, and it is unfortunate that they have taken it upon themselves to declare a position strongly against face-veiling based on a number of narrow grounds. Leaning on the law stifles what might otherwise be a ‘natural’ dialogue among Muslims and non-Muslims, about the veil’s significance and future in Europe,” Dr Shah concludes.

The full paper, ‘Reasons to Ban? The Anti-Burqa Movement in Western Europe’, is accessible, via: http://www.mmg.mpg.de/publications/working-papers/2012/wp-12-05/

Contact: Emma Lowry
e.lowry@qmul.ac.uk
44-207-882-5378
Queen Mary, University of London

“Both Buddhists and Hindus, though still relatively small compared to the large Christian groups, have grown to the point that they are beginning to exert significant influence on the key issues that most affect their lives,” said J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, who was in charge of assembling the data on both groups.

The census, the most comprehensive statistical assessment of data from the 2,000-plus religious groups active in the United States, is made every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The complete summary may be viewed at this link: http://www.rcms2010.org/press_release/ACP%2020120501.pdf

Both Hindus and Buddhists have temples in most states, and “the groups now regularly voice their opinions on U.S. relations with predominantly Hindu and Buddhist countries,” Melton said. “Like the Muslim congregations, Hindus and Buddhists are found in every part of the country, but they are concentrated in the big cities and still have not begun to appear in the smaller cities and rural areas.”

Another significant finding was that all areas of American religion have grown, although specific groups – especially some of the larger Christian churches – have declined or stagnated.

Southern Baptists, whose ranks grew spectacularly for a generation as it became a national organization, decreased dramatically since the year 2000. United Methodist and Evangelical Lutheran membership also decreased.

Both Muslims and Mormons (Latter-day Saints) showed dramatic increases in percentages, the former from both immigration and penetration of the African-American community, the latter from movement out of its base in the Mountain states to all parts of the country. Muslims are distinct as the majority are of Indo-Pakistani background, the second largest group being African-American, with Arab Americans a distinct minority. There are now some 6 million Mormons and 2.6 million Muslims in the country.

Other findings showed that traditional patterns continue. The Baptist Bible Belt remains across the South, the older Reformation Protestant churches are strongest across the Midwest, Latter-day Saints dominate in the Mountain West, and Roman Catholics dominate in the northeast and southwest, including the southern third of Texas.

Rodney Stark, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, said the census is unique in its attempt to: (1) gather data from participating churches on a congregation-by-congregation basis; (2) compute membership in churches (as opposed to religious preferences as measured in national polls); and (3) assess data at the state and county level. The 2010 census includes:

• Detailed reports from more than 200 of the largest American denominations, including many that did not participate in the 2000 study.
• Most exhaustive count ever of independent, nondenominational Christian churches, including many of the new mega-churches, some on their way to becoming new denominations.
• First-ever counts of Buddhist and Hindu congregations/temples and adherents by tradition.
• Detailed coverage of Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches.
• Improved coverage of predominantly African-American religious bodies.
• Counts of Jewish congregations and adherents by tradition.
• Expanded coverage of Muslim congregations.
• More comprehensive coverage of Amish, Friends and other traditions.

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian university and a nationally ranked research institution, characterized as having “high research activity” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The university provides a vibrant campus community for approximately 15,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating university in Texas. Located in Waco, it welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 11 nationally recognized academic divisions.

ABOUT THE BAYLOR INSTITUTE FOR STUDIES OF RELIGION

Launched in August 2004, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) exists to initiate, support and conduct research on religion, involving scholars and projects spanning the intellectual spectrum: history, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, theology and religious studies. The institute’s mandate extends to all religions, everywhere, and throughout history, and embraces the study of religious effects on prosocial behavior, family life, population health, economic development and social conflict. While always striving for appropriate scientific objectivity, ISR scholars treat religion with the respect that sacred matters require and deserve. For more information, visit www.baylorisr.org

Contact: Terry Goodrich
terry_goodrich@baylor.edu
254-710-3321
Baylor University

Many women in contemporary Western cultures are dissatisfied with their bodies, a risk factor for eating problems. Snapp and team examined factors that make women more resilient when it comes to their body image, in a bid to help those women at risk of eating disorders. They focussed on young college women who are likely to experience self-consciousness as they compare themselves with peers and become involved in social groups and organizations that place a high value on appearance.

A total of 301 first-year college women, from two universities in the US, completed questionnaires based on the Choate theoretical model. This model hypothesizes that family support and low levels of pressure to attain the thin ideal are related to the rejection of the superwoman ideal, positive views of physical competence, and effective stress-busting strategies. These factors are associated with well-being, which in turn is linked to positive body image in women. The researchers put this model to the test in a ‘real life’ situation.

They found that young women with high family support and low levels of perceived socio-cultural pressure from family, friends and the media regarding the importance of achieving a ‘thin and beautiful’ ideal had a more positive body image. These same women also rejected the superwoman ideal, had a positive physical self-concept, and were armed with skills to deal with stress.

Practical recommendations for prevention programs aimed at young women at risk of eating disorders include helping women to evaluate and become comfortable with the multiple and often contradictory expectations placed upon them in today’s society; teaching them to use effective coping skills; fostering a positive view of their physical competence through exercise and health; and promoting holistic well-being and balance in their lives.

The authors conclude: “It is particularly important for women to develop a sense of self-worth that is not solely based on appearance, and to build resilience to pressures they may receive from family, friends and the media.”

Reference

Snapp S et al (2012). A body image resilience model for first-year college women. Sex Roles; 10.1007/s11199-012-0163-1

Contact: Joan Robinson
joan.robinson@springer.com
49-622-148-78130
Springer

The new protocol, called WS-Biometric Devices (WS-BD), allows desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to access sensors that capture biometric data such as fingerprints, iris images and face images using web services. Web services themselves are not new; for example, video-on-demand services use web services to stream videos to mobile devices and televisions.

The WS-Biometric Devices protocol will greatly simplify setting up and maintaining secure biometric systems for verifying identity because such biometric systems will be easier to assemble with interoperable components compared to current biometrics systems that generally have proprietary device-specific drivers and cables. WS-BD enables interoperability by adding a device-independent web-services layer in the communication protocol between biometric devices and systems.

Remember the last time you bought a new computer only to learn that you then had to upgrade your printer and find the appropriate drivers? For system owners, the difficulty of upgrading devices on a biometric system can mean significant costs. Using the WS-BD protocol eliminates that problem.

“This would be useful to many organizations that house biometric systems, including border control and customs agencies,” explained computer scientist Kevin Mangold. Using current biometric systems, when one biometric sensor breaks, it can be expensive and time-consuming to find a replacement because manufacturers often change product lines and phase out previous generation devices. A few broken devices could entail having to rebuild the entire system, upgrade devices and drivers that may be incompatible with host operating systems, and retrain personnel, he said.

Biometrics are playing an increasing role in security, access control and identity management. And their use is expanding – for example, some theme parks use biometrics for access control. Fingerprints are used in conjunction with passwords for computer security. Many jobs require employees to provide biometrics; using WS-BD equipment could potentially reduce costs by facilitating interoperability in biometrics devices.

A 2010 National Academies study, Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities, recognized that “Biometric systems should be designed to anticipate the development and adoption of new advances and standards, modularizing components that are likely to become obsolete, such as biometric sensors, and matcher systems, so that they can be easily replaced.”

NIST researchers recognized this need several years ago and developed a solution with the support of the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Biometric Center of Excellence and NIST’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. NIST also is working with industry through the Small Business Innovation Research Program to help bring these plug-and-play biometric devices to market.

Two NIST researchers recently demonstrated the NIST-developed WS-BD system in their lab using a tablet and two biometric sensors (see video). A tap on the tablet signals the web-enabled fingerprint sensor to capture four fingerprints from the individual whose hand is on the scanner and send it back to the tablet. A tap on another button controls a camera to take a photo for facial recognition.

The new protocol, Specification for WS-Biometric Devices (NIST Special Publication 500-288) can be found at www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=910334. Additional information on this and related projects can be found at http://bws.nist.gov.

While this is a final document, NIST welcomes your feedback, comments and questions for considerations for future updates. Send your comments to the WS-BD teams by emailing 500-288comments@nist.gov.

Watch presentation on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTxIA-wkmo0&feature=player_embedded

Contact: Evelyn Brown
evelyn.brown@nist.gov
301-975-5661
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the prestigious journal Consciousness and Cognition. This is the first time that a scientific explanation is provided on the esoteric phenomenon of the aura, a supposed energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo, which is imperceptible to most human beings.

In neurological terms, synesthesia is due to cross-wiring in the brain of some people (synesthetes); in other words, synesthetes present more synaptic connections than “normal” people. “These extra connections cause them to automatically establish associations between brain areas that are not normally interconnected”, professor Gómez Milán explains. Many healers claiming to see the aura of people might have this condition.

The case of the “Santón de Baza”

The University of Granada researchers remark that “not all healers are synesthetes, but there is a higher prevalence of this phenomenon among them. The same occurs among painters and artists, for example”. To carry out this study, the researchers interviewed some synesthetes as the healer from Granada “Esteban Sánchez Casas”, known as “El Santón de Baza”.

Many people attribute “paranormal powers” to El Santón, such as his ability to see the aura of people “but, in fact, it is a clear case of synesthesia”, the researchers explain. El Santón presents face-color synesthesia (the brain region responsible for face recognition is associated with the color-processing region); touch-mirror synesthesia (when the synesthete observes a person who is being touched or is experiencing pain, s/he experiences the same); high empathy (the ability to feel what other person is feeling), and schizotypy (certain personality traits in healthy people involving slight paranoia and delusions). “These capacities make synesthetes have the ability to make people feel understood, and provide them with special emotion and pain reading skills”, the researchers explain.

In the light of the results obtained, the researchers remark the significant “placebo effect” that healers have on people, “though some healers really have the ability to see people’s auras and feel the pain in others due to synesthesia”. Some healers “have abilities and attitudes that make them believe in their ability to heal other people, but it is actually a case of self-deception, as synesthesia is not an extrasensory power, but a subjective and ‘adorned’ perception of reality”, the researchers state.

Reference:

Auras in mysticism and synaesthesia: a comparison. Consciousness and Cognition, 2012, 21(1), 258-268 de Milán, Iborra, Pastor y otros. Avalaible at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810011002868

Contact: Emilio Gómez Milán. Department of Experimental Psychology. Phone Number: +34958 240665. e-mail address: egomez@ugr.es

Contact: Emilio Gomez Milan
egomez@ugr.es
34-958-240-665
University of Granada