NC State In the News

The Hospital Gown, Fashion Malady, Worries Would-Be Redesigners Sick

The Wall Street Journal, Digitaljournal.com

May 10 – The traditional American hospital gown – flimsy in front, open to the breeze in the back – has been around about as long as the Band-Aid. If anything, it has changed less...."Nobody is happy with it," says Blanton Godfrey, dean of the College of Textiles of North Carolina State University. "It is amazing – we have created a product nobody likes."...For the past 2½ years, with about a quarter of a million dollars in funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., a small team of students and faculty at the College of Textiles has been working to update the traditional hospital gown. "It is a symbol of what needs to change in health care," says Rosemary Gibson, the RWJ foundation senior program officer who devised the "Down With the Gown" initiative. The college has sponsored six focus groups, five at hospitals in North Carolina and one in Massachusetts. The team has also met with or sought comments from so-called "stakeholders" who would have a role in making or selling the new gowns. "We thought that it would be a much easier problem to tackle," says Prof. Traci Lamar, who has been leading the effort for the College of Textiles...

Beetle, fungus threaten Florida’s avocado industry

Times Democrat, San Francisco Chronicle, US News, Ashland Times-Gazette.com, Associated Press, Breitbart.com, CNBC, Newser, Herald Tribune, The Ledger, Reptile and Amphibian News

May 10 – A little beetle could cause big problems for Florida’s multimillion-dollar avocado industry. Scientists are tracking the redbay ambrosia beetle as it crisscrosses the southeastern United States, spreading a fungus that is killing avocado trees. The beetle and the fungus it transmits could be devastating in Florida, the country's second-largest avocado producer...."When you're moving wood around and you have some redbay growing out there and you have some backyard avocados growing as well, you may be providing an easy pathway for that pest to move south," said Frank Koch, a researcher with the North Carolina State University who has projected the beetle and the disease it carries will hit South Florida around 2020 or sooner....

How Stereotypes Defeat the Stereotyped

Time, Time Magazine Blogs, Time Magazine (Asia)

May 9 – As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?...Research psychologists at North Carolina State University in Raleigh recruited 103 volunteers, ages 60 to 82, to perform simple arithmetic and recall tests. To conduct the experiment, the psychologists manipulated about half of the participants into feeling stereotype threat by telling them that the entire purpose of the tests was "to examine aging effects on memory." That statement was designed to prime the participants' worry that their advanced age would affect their performance. To emphasize the issue of elderliness, the researchers also asked this group of participants to write down their age before beginning the tests....

Microsoft's cuts reach Triangle

The News & Observer

May 9 – Layoffs at the world's largest software company are hitting the Triangle's economy. Microsoft announced earlier this year that the recession would force its first mass layoffs, about 5,000 jobs. This week, the Redmond, Wash., company notified the N.C. Commerce Department that those cuts will include 55 positions at an outpost in North Raleigh....And tech layoffs tend to have a larger ripple effect because those employees typically are highly paid. "All jobs are important, but the total impact from tech jobs may be greater," said Michael Walden, an N.C. State University economist. "Those salaries get respent and recycled in the local economy. You go to the mall and buy shoes and clothes, that becomes income for mall employees."...

N.C. State teacher and author John Kessel discusses his second Nebula award

Indy Week

May 8 – John Kessel, director of the creative writing program at N.C. State University, now holds an unusual record. "I am now the person who has gone the longest between his first and second Nebula--26 years," he says. "Pretty good, huh?" The Nebula is the Oscar of science fiction and fantasy literature, awarded annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. At a ceremony in Los Angeles on April 25, Kessel received the Best Novelette award for his story "Pride and Prometheus," a tale of Jane Austen's Mary Bennet meeting one Victor Frankenstein and his creation...