As a sociologist, Angela Garcia routinely fits together how and why people do things. What unfolds when someone calls 911? Takes part in a divorce mediation session? Visits an Internet chat room? Lately she has fixed on a real conundrum: process and motivation in the construction of jigsaw puzzles.
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Dipayan Biswas wants to know what you like. More to the point, he wants to know why you like it. The associate professor of marketing has studied people’s responses in sampling “experiential” products -- beverages, music, fragrances, and the like – which appeal directly to the senses.
His research into the factors that influence consumer preferences has turned up a surprise: A product’s impression on the taste buds or ear drums matters less than you would expect. More influential, perhaps, is the order in which products are sampled.
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If you’re having problems with a piece of high-tech gear, the cliché is to enlist a child to help fix that troublesome computer or DVR. Funny thing, it’s true – to an extent. But it’s not experience with gadgetry that makes youngsters such worthy assistants. It’s their lack of preconceived ideas about how technology should operate.
Cynthia Kamishlian, a research associate at Bentley’s Design and Usability Center, is out to understand how the younger set behave around technology. And the knowledge may benefit more than children’s learning.
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Hauling 60-plus pounds of geological gear up mountains. Purifying ancient marine shells for cutting-edge analysis. Rendering educational concepts into mathematical expressions. These professional-level adventures were the stuff of summer for three Bentley juniors.
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History, it is said, is written by the winners. At the dawn of the modern era, those authors were the great colonial powers. The nations of Europe, and later the United States, fired up the machines and know-how of the Industrial Revolution and carved out economic empires across the world.
A new book by Associate Professor of History Cyrus Veeser tells another side of the story.
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Books and more books are stacked on shelves and in piles around the office of Accountancy Department assistant Christine Nolder. But there is one she keeps close at hand: a tattered paperback copy of The Philosophy of Auditing, published in 1961 by the American Accounting Association.
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Democracies thrive on the belief that voice of the people matters. But Kristina Minnick wasn’t always convinced. In fact, when the assistant professor of finance started researching corporate “say on pay” proposals — which aim to give shareholders a voice in determining executives’ compensation — she believed quite the opposite.
“In all honesty,” she says, “I thought the proposals were just shareholders making noise.”
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Have you ever taken ginger to sooth an upset stomach or been needled by an acupuncturist? These and other forms of traditional Chinese medicine have found favor with a surprising number of U.S. adults. Surprising, too, is the intertwined history of medical traditions in the East and West.
Assistant Professor of History Bridie Andrews-Minehan is well acquainted with the opposing and inseparable nature -- the yin and yang – of the two traditions. As she puts it: “There is no way to draw a boundary between Western medicine and Chinese medicine, in either direction.”
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Sometimes, a hearty collaboration starts with something as simple as a good lunch.
Three years ago, Bentley Assistant Professor of Finance Irving Morgan (left) had a research paper starting to simmer. He ran into Fred Ledley in the faculty cafeteria and asked the professor of natural and applied sciences to review some initial findings. Ledley liked what he saw, and suggested working together at some point.
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