WISE Up about HIV/AIDS

Of all the secondary school students in Africa, only 16% are girls.

To raise this number, Dr. Sherryl Broverman of Duke University and Dr. Rose Odhiambo of Egerton University in Kenya collaborated to found the Women’s Institute for Secondary Education and Research (WISER) in Muhuru Bay, Kenya, an area with some of the highest HIV infection rates in the country. The school is an effort to empower women and help them avoid the cycle of early marriage, early childbirth, HIV, and poverty.

Women, their health and their education, are the heart of all of these issues, says Stephen Lewis, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2001 to 2006. He spoke at Duke last week as a guest of Duke’s Global Health Institute as a part of WISER week.

“I believe with every fiber of my being that the single most important battle we face on this planet is the struggle for gender equality,” Lewis said.

In Africa, 61% of people infected with the HIV virus are women. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, almost 80% of those infected are women and girls.


Lewis believes that gender inequality is what puts women at risk for HIV. Because African women lack sexual autonomy, they are not in a position to demand safe sex or use of a condom. As a result, they are very vulnerable to the virus, and also to various kinds of abuse. Hundreds of thousands of women are subject to sexual violence. “The turbulence in the society unleashes male behavior of the worst kind ... There is a tremendous sense of entitlement,” Lewis said. And where there is rape and violence, inevitably, there is HIV.

Even more devastating for many HIV positive women is the inaccessibility of drugs to prevent transmission of the disease to their children. Although certain drugs can reduce the chance of transmission by 50-70%, fewer than a third of pregnant women have access to them. “It’s soul-destroying for these women,” Lewis said.

Of the half-million HIV positive babies born in Africa each year, 50% die before age 2, and 80% die before age 5. “It doesn’t happen in the U.S. or Canada or Europe because we provide a full course of retrovirals [to pregnant women],” Lewis said.

Lewis expressed frustration with the lack of international attention to the issues of AIDS and women’s health in Africa. He cited the United States’ government’s ability to spend $3 billion a week for the war in Iraq, yet barely even $10 billion a year for the war against AIDS.

“I don’t understand the way the world works ... I live my life ricocheting between rage on the one hand and despair on the other.”

However, Lewis is hopeful for the future. He repeatedly praised the efforts of WISER and international NGOs and the progress they’ve been able to achieve around the world. His own NGO, Aids-Free World, promotes urgent and effective international responses to the AIDS crisis by focusing on the achievement of gender equality.

How Do They Do That?

Metamorphosis -- from ugly duckling to swan, toddler to teen, or globby, slightly disgusting caterpillar to breathtaking butterfly -- is just about the coolest thing in Biology.

Duke Biologist Fred Nijhout, who studies it in detail on the butterfly end of the spectrum, stars in the latest installment of "Science in the Triangle" from our dear friends and close neighbors the Museum of Life and Science. Don't miss the split-screen microscope action!

Check it out:

Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?

Last week, as part of the Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series, William Swartout of Institute of Creative Technologies(ICT), USC was invited to Duke to deliver a talk on 'Toward the Holodeck: Integrating Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Entertainment and Learning'. Inspired by the virtual worlds presented in Star Trek, William Swartout and the ICT are conducting research and developing virtual scenarios that contain a close knit connection between graphics, sounds and circumstances, so that man can react to them as if they are in the real world.

In simple words, the ultimate goal is to achieve the Holodeck.

The whole project is an extension of the concept of virtual reality, that has already achieved advanced stages. An example where such a technology can be tremendously useful is in the training of army personnel. A virtual world mimicing a real world scenario can be recreated, and the personnel can play out the whole situation in this simulated environment. This is refered to as the Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRE), and helps in facilitation of new techniques of survival, defense or attack in the virtual environment, so that one is fully prepared incase of a similar circumstance in reality. The method to make MRE a success is called as a hybrid approach, which involves already scripted and simulated characters, an artifical intelligence with emotional model, as well as a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system. The simulated characters are programmed to be triggered by certain commands and behaviors. The AI helps the simulation to respond in real-time to the actions of the user, and the emotion part adds a tinge of humane touch to it. And the TTS system is used to act as the direct medium of communication.

Apart from the sophisticated visual, audio and character model, this simulated model also takes a content based story approach. Hence the user feels like he is living in the present, and has been allocated certain specified tasks that will enable him to proceed further in the story. This is an excellent advanced platform that will help elevate the methods of physical training, and expanded to include all sorts of social and emotional environments. For example, here is a small video of Duke University graduate student Gil Bohrer interacting with a virtual forest he created:







Another breakthrough in the field of vitual reality was the development of the omni-directional treadmill (ODT), which allows a person to move in all directions. Their creation and further development was essential as they are utilized to ensure an uninterrupted and close to real locomotive motion in virtual reality environments.

What these experiments prove is this is the age of not just innovation in a particular field or subject. It is the age of strategically integrating research conducted in varied fields and model them to meet the needs and aspiration of today's society. This kind of interdisciplinary approach will provide the answer to life,universe and everything, and the answer is definitely not as easy as 42.

Looking for the Green Piece

Trends in global climate change are painstakingly emerging from a complex puzzle being assembled by diligent scientists all over the world. There are literally countless pieces, and there's no picture on the cover of the box to help them along.

One of the puzzle-makers is Nicholas School forest ecologist Jennifer Swenson who's looking very hard at several square pieces, each 250 meters on a side, that each amount to one pixel on a satellite image of North Carolina. Specifically, Swenson wants to know precisely when and how each pixel switches from brown to green as spring arrives in April or May.

To MODIS, the NASA satellite program that provides these awesome pictures of spring as seen from space, it's just a single point of light, but Swenson knows there's actually a ton of data in that one pixel. The exact arrival of spring, as measured by a full canopy of leaves, is an important variable in the global change equation.

Swenson explained to the Visualization Friday Forum how she's taking ground-truth measurements of soil moisture, temperature, leaf development and other variables to calibrate what MODIS sees with what is really going on.

Eventually, this will add to MODIS's ability to determine whether in fact spring is arriving earlier and earlier, as already evidenced by anecdotal records such as cherry blossom dates in Washington DC and the first arrival of migrating birds, as recorded by amateur record-keepers.

Together, this is known as Phenology, the study of the timing of natural events, and that's our new word for the day.