Therese McCarty, associate professor of economics, and Stephen Schmidt, assistant professor of economics, recently presented a paper, “A Vector Autoregression of State Government Expenditure,” at the annual conference of the American Economic Association. The paper is to be published in the May 1997 issue of the American Economic Review.
Donna Burton, government documents librarian, has published reviews of two
documents reference tools in recent issues of Journal of Government Information.
Her evaluation of 1995 Updates/2000 Forecasts Edition Demographic Sourcebooks on
CD-ROM, what she calls “an expensive and relatively uninspired attempt to mimic
the print version of the product,” appears in the July/August issue. A Guide to
Information at the United Nations from the U.N. Department of Public Information,
which Burton determined would serve as a handy resource for those seeking information from
U.N. sources, was reviewed in the May/June issue of JGI.
Todd Burgman, assistant professor of finance, has published “An Empirical
Examination of Multinational Corporate Capital Structure” in The Journal of
International Business Studies. The paper examines the impact of political risk and
exchange rate risk on the financing behavior of multinational corporations.
Jay Newman, R. Gordon Gould Chair of Physics; Jeremy Goverman '96; and Louis
Schick, a physics teacher at Burnt Hills High School; have published an article, “The
Bundling of Actin With Polyethylene Glycol 8000 in the Presence and Absence of
Gelosin” in the September 1996 issue of Biophysics Journal. Supported by an
NSF research grant, the work describes the effects of an inert small crowder molecule, PEG
8000, on the polymerization and aggregation properties of actin protein filaments. The
study attempts to mimic the crowded conditions present inside living cells using a much
simpler system in order to better understand the control of force generation by actin
within cells. The state of the actin molecules was measured using intensity and dynamic
laser light scattering and phase contrast and fluorescence microscopy. Also, Newman had a
second paper published by Biophysical Journal in January 1997 with colleagues in
Italy. The paper, titled “Mesoscopic Gels at Low Agarose Concentration: Perturbation
Effects of Ethanol,” presents the results of joint studies to better understand the
structure of agarose gels. Although agarose is very commonly used in gel electrophoresis
to, for example, study high molecular weight DNA, its structure and interactions in the
gel-state are not well understood. In the presence of ethanol, Newman and colleagues found
that the initial steps in the gelatin are quite different, agarose forming globular shapes
instead of extended rod-like structures that form in pure water. These solvent effects may
also be important in the more general phenomenon of protein folding.
Martha Huggins, Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology, was interviewed
recently by Estado de Sao Paulo, a national newspaper in Brazil, and by TV
Bandeirantes, a Brazialian television network, on Brazilian torturers, the topic of
her 1993 research and the subject of a talk she gave recently at Columbia University. She
is author of the forthcoming book, Political Policing: Internationalizing U.S. Security
Through Assistance to Latin American Police (Duke University Press).