Psychiatry Online published an article entitled “Cervical Cancer Screening and Acute Care Visits Among Medicaid Enrollees With Mental and Substance Use Disorders” on June 1, which counted among its co-authors Michael T. Abrams and Cynthia Boddie-Willis, a Senior Research Analyst and Director of Health Services Policy and Research for The Hilltop Institute, respectively.

The piece, which involved creating logistic models using data from women enrolled in Medicaid for 2005, used cancer screening and acute care visits as dependent variables and mental illness flags and independent variables in order to “compare rates of cervical cancer screening and acute care (primary or gynecological) visits among women with and without a diagnosis of psychosis, substance use disorder, bipolar disorder or
mania, or depression,” according to the study.

Ultimately, the authors concluded that women with serious mental disorders who utilize Medicaid in Maryland were more likely to receive cervical cancer screening along with other related acute care visits than the control group, in contast to women with only substance use disorders, who were more at risk to not receive cancer screenings as opposed to acute care visits. As such, the authors of the piece recommended that “acute care visits [were] a high-potential path toward better prevention” of cervical cancer among these patients at risk.

The a PDF of the original article can be found here.

The zombie trend continues to spread across the pop cultural landscape and shows little sign of slowing down. Speaking with The Baltimore Sun‘s John-John Williams IV for a June 9 story entitled “Pop culture’s undying affection for zombies“, Arnold Blumberg, adjunt faculty member in English and co-author of Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For, illustrated the history of this now-ubiquitous staple of modern popular culture, as well as theorizing as to why the walking undead seem to have captured our culture’s imagination in recent times.

“There has never been a figure that has reflected all the fears we have as the zombie,” he told Williams. “It is the closest type of monster to us. They are us and we are them. The zombie comes down to some form of being a human being.”

NPR host and blogger Robert Krulwich devoted the May 26 edition of his blog Krulwich Wonders to a post entitled “A Puzzle: Why Aren’t They Laughing?”.

The post discusses a popular internet video ostensibly involving a Belgian television interviewer laughing at the “strange” voices of an interviewee and an audience member. Krulwich wrote of how the stone-faced reaction of the general audience in the video contradicts the findings of Robert Provine, professor of psychology. “It seems unnatural and seems to contradict what neuroscientist Robert Provine says about laughing — that it’s contagious, that ‘we laugh when we hear other people laugh. This is an automatic kind of thing.’ I thought, could this be evidence that Provine’s theories need amending?” Krulwich writes.

The answer to the puzzle – which leaves Provine’s theories intact – can be found in the original post.

Visual Arts associate professor and chair Vin Grabill’s latest experimental video Wet has been making the rounds for the past few months, including being show at the 2012 Athens International Film & Video Festival at Ohio University this past April and at the Tenement Street Workshop’s Second Annual Snowballs Film Festival in New York City June 3rd. Describing the piece, Grabill says on the video’s site that, ” I collaborated with computer animator Francisco Olivares to create a waterspout sequence designed to overwhelm a series of abstracted TV scenes. A second animated water sequence depicts the flooding of the physical detritus of our media infrastructure. Additional interludes depicting wetness round out the video’s visual episodes.”

Grabill’s work was also featured in last month’s edition of the online quarterly journal The Light Ekphrastic. Gabrill’s two pieces are another collaboration, this time with Baltimore writer Danielle Ariano, and entitled “Black Friday” and “Dishes.” The concept was to pair writers and poets with visual arts and have them switch off, with Grabill’s “Black Friday” inspiring Ariano’s “Holding,” and the writer’s “Anger” inspiring Grabill’s “Dishes.”

In aJune 5 article entitled “What’s the Buzz? Beehives Burgeon in Baltimore Backyards,” Rachel Wilkinson, adjunct professor of English, recently reported on the local beekeeping community for the website BmoreMedia.

Over the course of the piece, Wilkinson explores a number of facets to the practice and its prevalence within Maryland, noting that there are 1,751 registered beekeepers with about 12,000 colonies in 1800 locations according to the state’s Department of Agriculture, and that “[a]ccording to to state apiarist Jerry Fischer, Baltimore alone was home to about 29 registered beekeepers keeping more than 100 colonies in 45 locations as of February.”

Wilkinson also looks into the personalities and motivations of those who have chosen to pursue the beekeeping in the area. “Beekeepers are part thrill-seekers, part environmentalists. Concerned with ecology and sustainability, gardeners often find beekeeping the obvious next step. Keeping the pollinators results in more fruit, vegetables and flowers in your garden,” she writes.