*UW researchers spend summer following fantasy baseball*
It's not every day you find professors filling their days managing fantasy sports leagues. Over the summer, two UW-Madison researchers did just that. For this pair, the study of fantasy baseball offers an exciting new arena of educational research.
While researchers have looked at how people learn through video games and other game play, few have explored fantasy league sports, a multi-billion-dollar industry drawing millions of players annually. In fantasy sports, a player, or owner,"" selects a team of the best available players in a sports league and competes against other fantasy teams.
Erica and Richard Halverson, UW-Madison assistant professors of education and veteran fantasy sports players, spent the summer tracking the behavior of fantasy baseball players in three separate leagues they created.
""With digitalization, the whole world suddenly opened up to us,"" said Erica Halverson. Now, education researchers are scrambling to keep up with the many ways people learn through new media.
By studying how and why people play fantasy baseball, a game that combines knowledge of real sports and competitive game play, the researchers hope to create more effective learning environments.
The Halversons designed a pilot study that monitors fantasy baseball players through interviews, surveys and game play throughout the 2007 Major League Baseball season. Although the study is ongoing, early research suggests thinking like a player of fantasy baseball greatly differs from the average baseball fan.
""A lifelong Cubs fan will say, 'What I love is the Cubs. I want the Cubs to win,'"" said Erica Halverson. ""In fantasy baseball, it's less important to be a part of a team. Instead, you must have a working knowledge of over 300 baseball players.""
While fantasy baseball challenges the notion of the traditional fan, Erica Halverson said fantasy players tend to develop a greater appreciation of the sport through the study of player statistics.
""We all want our pitcher to strike out ten guys. But, if you follow player stats, you start to see just how rare ten strikeouts are,"" said Erica Halverson. ""When a pitcher does it, you can't help but be amazed.""
Player statistics aren't all fantasy owners must consider when creating a good team. Owners must also think about how a player's personal life may influence their performance on the field.
By drawing upon and integrating large amounts of information, Erica Halverson said fantasy baseball players are learning important concepts that may translate into other subjects.
""Ultimately, the goal of our research isn't to create an overload of fantasy baseball leagues,"" said Erica Halverson, ""but rather to use the ways expert fantasy baseball players acquire skills and habits to teach people important skills.""
*Forcing happy thoughts can be bad for the depressed*
Periodically, we all need a reminder to look on the bright side when feeling down. For the millions of Americans struggling with depression, the regulation of negative feelings represents a daily battle. A recent study at UW-Madison found that training patients with depression to think positively about negative thoughts, also known as cognitive therapy, causes some depressed patients more harm than good.
""While we know that failure to regulate negative emotions is a major factor in depression, our study is the first to show abnormal brain activity in depressed patients when they try to control negative emotions,"" said Richard Davidson, UW-Madison professor of psychology and psychiatry and senior author of the study.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that allows scientists to view brain activity, to analyze the brains of depressed and non-depressed men and women exposed to a series of negative images. During the fMRI, researchers challenged the participants to concentrate on possible positive outcomes as negative images, such as the scene from a car wreck and an injured person, flashed before them. For instance, rather than dwelling on the suffering portrayed in the image of an injured person, participants were asked to imagine the person's recovery.
The fMRI revealed abnormal activity in the brains of depressed participants compared to healthy controls. Under normal conditions, the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain responsible for regulating emotions sends signals to the amygdala, the brain's center for emotion, to suppress negative emotions.
While both groups of participants displayed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex when attempting to control negative thoughts, patients with depression also had increased activity in the amygdala, signifying a malfunction in the emotional control system.
In fact, the harder depressed patients tried to suppress negative thoughts, the more their emotions seemed to spiral out of control.
""In some depressed patients, cognitive therapy appears to jack up the emotional system rather than offering the patient control,"" said Davidson. For these patients, Davidson recommends alternative treatments such as medication and therapies that teach patients to diffuse negative emotions.
""By using brain imaging to predict how well patients will respond to specific treatments for depression, we may one day create a short circuit to relief for the depressed,"" said Davidson.
*3-D microscope unlocks mystery of viral replication*
Thanks to the powerful resolution of three-dimensional electron microscopy, UW-Madison researchers recently discovered how a virus in the same class as West Nile and SARS viruses replicates its genetic information while secretly hidden from host cells.
""Genomic replication is a crucial feature of all viruses,"" said Ben Kopek, a UW-Madison graduate student in the Cellular and Molecular Biology program in an e-mail.
By identifying common strategies shared by replicating viruses, researchers hope to create new drugs capable of disrupting viral replication and destroying viruses.
Researchers used three-dimensional electron microscopy to view how a small virus known as the flock house virus (FHV) replicates its genome inside a host cell.
While standard light microscopes offer images of large objects such as tissues and cells, Kopek said electron microscopes allow researchers to view objects thousands of times smaller than the smallest visible objects in a light microscope.
Three-dimensional electron microscopy helped Kopek and others to see that FHV was creating special compartments or ""safe havens"" for virus replication along mitochondria, a site where energy for the cell is produced.
""Like all other viruses, the flock house virus co-opts normal cellular processes for its own purposes,"" said Kopek. According to Kopek, within less than 24 hours of entering a cell, a single flock house virus can create thousands of copies of itself.
""The replication compartments the virus creates are too small to see with a light microscope,"" explained Kopek.
""Being able to view replication structures in 3-D allowed us to advance our understanding of [virus] replication mechanisms more than we could have with just a two-dimensional image.""
Because FHV shares common replication features with viruses such as hepatitis C, SARS, West Nile, poliovirus and more, researchers hope new findings will bring them closer to the development of broad-spectrum anti-viral medications in the future.
