INSIDE

An MU
professor
started
discussing sex in
columbia’s morning newspaper his class early on.
50 cents
ESTABLISHED IN 1908 n www.ColumbiaMissourian.com
Thursday, August 7, 2008

City weighs part

4
The final installment of a four-part series on the lives of female wrestlers. Read
the entire series online at ColumbiaMissourian.com.
gaining strength
Physically
Popularity
of paper
benefits of The scale is the first opponent wrestlers meet. In order to get
ballots up
new system
Electronic ballots
to what really matters — the matches, the women must meet have been ditched
for fear of glitches.
The Community Issues weight, which can be a struggle in itself. By ALLISON HOFFMAN
The Associated Press
Management system could SAN DIEGO — Come
November, more Americans
improve resource allocation. might cast their ballots on
By KOURTNEY GEERS paper than in any other elec-
news@ColumbiaMissourian.com tion in U.S. history.
Community leaders met Wednesday night That wasn’t supposed to hap-
to gain a better grasp of “the major goal for pen. If everything had gone
2009” for the Columbia/Boone County Health according to the government’s
Department in the proposed fiscal 2009 bud- $3 billion plan to upgrade vot-
get. ing technology after the hang-
The goal is not a simple one and required a ing-chad fiasco in Florida in
lecture-style crash course to understand the 2000, that sentence would read
Community Issues Management system, also “electronic machines” instead
known as CIM, the city is considering adopting of paper.
in order to improve its ability to use resources Instead, thousands of touch-
where they can make the best impact. screen devices are collect-
The system was developed at MU’s campus ing dust in
by a group led by Christopher Fulcher, co- warehouses
director of the Center for Applied Research from Cali- BY THE
fornia to
and Environmental Systems.
Four cities in the U.S. have found their own Florida,
NUMBERS
uses for the complex, Web-based system that where offi- 57: Percent of
allows various data to be aligned with maps cials wor- voters that live in
and sent representatives to Columbia to pres- ried about an area relying on
ent some of CIM’s uses. Some of the uses they h a c k e r s paper ballots.
have found for the program include communi- and fed up
ty development, improving community health with techni- 3 Billion:
Dollars budgeted
by understanding and assessing the social cal glitch-
and environmental factors that may affect the es have for a government
health of residents, and increasing the number r e p l a c e d plan to upgrade
of tax returns for a targeted area. the equip- voting technology.
“CIM provides public and nonprofit organi- ment with
zations and communities with facilitation tech- scanners that will read paper
nologies that improve choice-making,” Fulcher ballots.
said in his presentation. An Associated Press election
The program is in use in Tucson, Ariz.; research survey has found that
Detroit; Lehigh Valley, Pa., and Charleston, 57 percent of the nation’s reg-
S.C. The cities worked with organizations, such istered voters live in counties
An official at the Women’s College Freestyle Nationals writes “59” in black marker on Missouri Valley that will be relying on paper
Please see CIM, page 3A College wrestler Samantha Fee’s arm. Fifty-nine was Fee’s weight in kilograms at weigh-in. ballots this fall.
The number of registered

MU professor
voters in jurisdictions that will

Athletes A
rely mainly on electronic vot-
ing machines has fallen from
mberlee Ebert is calm the day before the final a high of 44 percent during the

to be honored
2006 midterm elections to 36
collegiate wrestling meet of the season. percent. Much of the rest of
Her blue eyes are not glaring on this Friday the electorate consists of vot-
afternoon in mid-March. The Missouri Valley ers in New York state, who will
He will receive the Priestley College sophomore is not thinking about her rival, Okla- be using old-fashioned pull-
lever machines.

wrestle
Medal for his work with boron. homa City University’s Ashley Sword. The 24-year-old Because of growth in
By JUSTIN MYERS veteran, known as “Mama Sword,” dominated her one the electorate over the past
news@ColumbiaMissourian.com month earlier, but Ebert has shrugged off that match for decade, expansion of absentee
An MU radiology professor has been selected now. Her current opponent looms ahead of her. voting rules, and expectations
to receive the American Chemical Society’s of high turnout for the contest
The scale. between Barack Obama and
highest honor for his contributions to under-

with
Ebert is not worried about making weight, but her John McCain, some experts
standing the chemistry of boron, the fifth ele-
ment on the periodic table. teammate Samantha Fee is anxious. The light auburn- are predicting a record num-
M. Frederick Hawthorne, who is also the haired sophomore is minutes away from breaking ber of Americans will cast bal-
director of MU’s International Institute of Nano lots on paper this year.
her fast. She will soon face the five seconds that have “More people will be using
and Molecular Medicine, will receive the 2009 plagued her for the past week.
Priestley Medal at the society’s semiannual computer-read paper ballots
Fee and her teammates are weighing in for the than at any other time in the

weight
national meeting in March. The award is named
for Joseph Priestley, who is credited with dis- Women’s College Wrestling Association Women’s Col- nation’s history,” said Kimball
covering oxygen. Brace, head of Election Data
lege Freestyle Nationals, the culmination of the women’s
Hawthorne is in good company; past Priest- Services, a consulting firm.
collegiate wrestling season, which started in January “As you get more registered
ley recipients include Linus Pauling, who won
a Nobel Prize for his work on chemical bonds, for Valley. Winners will be crowned in 10 weight classes voters and more people in the
and Glenn Seaborg, another Nobel laureate who Please see WRESTLING, page 7A pool, it exacerbates this bigger
led the team that discovered plutonium. Pauling issues of paper.”
also won a Nobel Peace Prize. In 2000, about 97 million reg-
“It (the Priestley Medal)’s the most important istered voters lived in counties
award one can get in the field of chemistry that relied on some form of
short of a Nobel Prize,” Robert Churchill, MU paper ballot, Brace said. That
radiology department chair, said. figure is expected to top 100
Recipients are invited to deliver an address at
DREW SCHMENNER Writer JENNIFER WHITNEY Photographer million this fall, according to
the meeting when they receive the award, and the AP data.
Please see CHEMIST, page 3A Please see VOTING, page 3A

MU vet invents Lameness Locator to help treat injured horses

By RACHEL DUFF
news@ColumbiaMissourian.com
In the equine veterinary
industry, lameness in horses
has been assessed subjectively
for centuries, said Paul Schiltz,
a veterinarian for Equine Medi-
cal Services in Columbia. Each
vet has his or her own opinion
about what’s wrong with a horse
— and they often disagree.
But Kevin Keegan, professor
of veterinary medicine and sur-
gery at MU, has a solution to
this problem with the technol-
ogy he has created that is going
commercial in the next couple
of weeks to months.
In the late 1990s, Keegan
BROOKE FLETCHER/Missourian began working on the Lame-
Loni Taylor runs with American Thunder. The Lameness Locator ness Locator with a simple goal:
measures acceleration and velocity at different points on a to develop an objective way of
horse’s body to help vets pinpoint problems. detecting lameness.
“Each practitioner says some-
thing different when observing,
so we need a way to teach our
students exactly what to look
at,” said Keegan, also director
of the E. Paige Laurie Endowed
Program in Equine Lameness
at MU.
Through a lameness evalu-
ation performed by multiple
vets, he found, for example, that
in looking at a horse’s front
legs, these vets agreed only 25
percent of the time.
Keegan then began observing
horses on treadmills and put-
ting markers on their bodies to
record movements and transmit
them to a computer. He attend-
ed MU engineering meetings
and developed rules and equa-
tions to analyze the movements,
pairing up with MU engineer
“It’s a new approach
to a very old problem.
Depending on the
price, I don’t know any
lameness clinic that
wouldn’t want one.”
PAUL SCHILTZe
Veterinarian for Equine Medical Services
professor P. Frank Pai, who has
worked with airplane vibration
evaluations.
The Lameness Locator is a
spinoff of Pai’s work with air-
planes. The locator analyzes
vibration damage to see where
the horse’s movement is off,
Keegan said.
But the invention wasn’t prac-
tical for other industry profes-
sionals. It was then that Keegan
began collaborating with Yoshi-
haru Yonezawa, an electronics
engineering professor from
Japan, Keegan said.
Keegan and Yonezawa worked
intensely on decreasing the size
of the sensors and the number
of other instruments and wires
they put on the horses to record
the movements, he said.
One of the first steps was to
use fewer sensors. Their previ-
ous work showed they needed
only four markers to determine
the lameness: on the top of the
head, the right front leg, the top
of the pelvis and the right hind
Please see HORSES, page 3A

Outside today Getting it right Index

HEADLINES

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2 sections
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Columbia Missourian THURSDAY, August 7, 2008 — Page 3A

Voting: Officials worry ballot

switch will cause extra stress
CONTINUED from page 1A
The return to paper creates
extra stress on an already-
strapped election system.
Cash-poor counties will have
to spend tens of millions of
dollars printing ballots. Vot-
ers, many of them first-timers,
may wind up confused by the
ballot formats and frustrated
by long lines of people waiting
to use the scanners. And count-
ing all the paper could hold up
the results of the election.
“After 2000, there was a wide-
spread revulsion about paper
— everyone had the mental
image of the guy cross-eyed
looking at the punch-card bal-
lot,” said Doug Chapin, direc-
tor of the watchdog organiza-
tion Electionline. “But there’s
no silver bullet. You’re trad-
ing one set of problems for
another.”
All states but Idaho have
junked the punch-card ballots
that caused so much trouble in
Florida. But many plan to use
paper ballots that require vot-
ers to fill in ovals with a pen.
in the punch-card maelstrom
in 2000, has produced guides
showing voters how to feed
their paper ballots into the
scanners.
Other counties making the
switch, including some of Cali-
fornia’s largest, are planning to
collect ballots at polling places
and pay workers overtime to
feed them into industrial-size
scanners at central offices.
None of that is likely to pre-
vent voters from making other
sorts of mistakes, such as fill-
ing in the wrong oval or using
the wrong color pen.
“A lot of officials are in dam-
age-control mode because
they’re going to try to limit
the problems of switching to
paper,” said Mike Alvarez, an
expert in voting technology
at Caltech in Pasadena. “You
will have ballots not showing
up, being printed wrong, the
litany of mistakes voters make
with these ballots, and then
there’s incredible pressure in
a crowded polling place for
people who are trying to make
their decision.”
As Brace put it: “Paper is
traditionally the device that
the public is really good at
screwing up.”
In 2000, about 61 percent
of registered voters lived in
counties that relied on some
form of paper ballot, whether
punch-cards or fill-in-the-oval
forms, according to Election
Data Systems. Only 13 percent
of voters lived in counties that
used touchscreens or other e-
voting devices; the rest used
pull-lever machines.
With fewer than 100 days
until Nov. 4, the first concern
for many election officials is
making sure they will be able
to get all their ballots printed
between the time the national,
state and local slates have been
selected and Election Day.
California, the nation’s big-
gest electoral prize with more
than 16 million people regis-
tered to vote, abruptly outlawed BROOKE FLETCHER/Missourian
most electronic machines last Loni Taylor places one of three sensors on Goldie. The sensors transmit information used to
summer, creating a potential determine lameness in a horse before symptoms are present.
crunch in the highly special-

Horses: Tool saves vets’ time

The ballots are then read by
digital scanners.
Unlike touchscreens, paper
can’t malfunction or be hacked
into. But it has to be printed,
shipped and securely stored
before and after Election Day.
Counties already paying to
warehouse electronic machines
will have to buy reams of card
stock, print extras in multiple
languages, pay for delivery
and eventually destroy the
unused ballots.
In counties that are on their
third system in three presi-
dential contests, officials are
retraining workers in how to
use the equipment and dem-
onstrate it to voters. Broward
County, Fla., which was caught
“You will have ballots
not showing up, being
printed wrong, the litany
of mistakes voters make
with these ballots, and
then there’s incredible
pressure in a crowded
polling place for people
who are trying to make
their decision.”
Mike Alvarez
expert in voting technology at Caltech
ized ballot-printing industry.
San Diego contracted with a
Washington state company
after local businesses said
they couldn’t produce the 3.5
million extra ballots in the
two-month window.
Many paper ballots may
wind up in the shredder.
Last week, Ohio’s secretary
of state ordered all 53 counties
using electronic machines to
print paper ballots to accom-
modate voters in November
who opt out of e-voting. A simi-
lar order during the primary
resulted in the pulping of more
than a million unused ballots
after only 14,484 voters asked
for them.
CONTINUED from page 1A
leg. A year ago, they stopped
using the locator on the right
hind leg because it was trans-
mitting the same information
received from the right front
leg, Keegan said.
The equipment, now wire-
less, measures the accelera-
tion of the head and pelvis and
the angular velocity of the
front leg. If they’re sound, the
data looks like a symmetrical
sine wave, and if they’re not,
Keegan and Yonezawa mea-
sure the shape of the signal.
A lame horse has a disruption
company raised money from
Angel Investors in Columbia,
and production will begin in
the coming months with 100
units this year for vets across
the country, Keegan said. A
price has not yet been set.
“I’ve been impressed,” said
Schiltz. “It’s a new approach to
a very old problem. Depending
on the price, I don’t know any
lameness clinic that wouldn’t
want one.”
Schiltz said it will benefit vets
when they’re observing subtle
lameness that isn’t visible by
simply looking at the horses.
Tom DiSalvo, co-owner of
the thoroughbred racehorse
American Thunder, didn’t know
about the Lameness Locator
before bringing his horse to
the MU Equine Clinic from
Illinois, and he is impressed.
“I think the system is great,”
said DiSalvo. “It helps Dr.
Keegan focus on the problem
and save time in diagnosing.”
It will also help vets locate
multiple problems that might
have been overshadowed by an
obvious lameness in another
area, Schiltz said. All of the
lameness will be shown at the

CIM: System would cost $75,000;

in the shape, Keegan said. A He said that because lameness same time, he said.
frequency analysis, which pin- is a specialty in equine vets, “It would be useful for any
points the location of the lame- another big advantage is that vet practice that deals with
ness, is performed. vets who don’t look at lameness lameness, but the limiting fac-

cost would be covered by grant

CONTINUED from page 1A
as the United Way and other
human service groups, to apply
CIM data to improve commu-
nity services. This is similar to
the prospective plan for Colum-
bia.
Stephanie Browning, director
of the Columbia/Boone County
Health Department, said the
about $75,000 system has yet
to be purchased by the city but
would be covered by an infra-
structure grant from the Mis-
souri Foundation for Health.
Some in attendance asked
about the practicality of such a
system for the average person
and about how much time using
the program would require of
staff.
“Our challenge is to make
it really understanding for the
folks in our community so they
can use this tool in a unique
way and make a difference in
their community,” said Dan
Duncan, senior vice president
of external relations with Unit-
ed Way of Tucson and Southern
With the Lameness Locator every day could have a way tor will be the cost of the equip-
ready to go for a wider mar- to evaluate the horses without ment,” Schiltz said. “I think it’s
ket, Keegan needed funding. relying solely on their experi- such an applicable program that
He started a business called ence. It would also be a great I would be able to justify buying
Arizona. Equinosis and got a license. His teaching tool, Schiltz said. it even if it’s not cheap.”
For now, however, the rep-
resentatives from the cities
are focusing on sharing their
knowledge over the course of
three days of discussion.
“For us, it’s not just where we
put money, it’s how we engage
residents and the community
to get results,” Duncan said.
“We really absolutely need to
learn from each other how to
do that — it’s a key component
of CIM.”

Chemist: Professor wants to expand

cancer treatment to different tumors
CONTINUED from page 1A
Hawthorne said he’s already
thinking of what to say.
“I want to use this as a means
to explain to the people out
there the unique properties at
MU,” he said.
He cited MU’s emphasis on
collaboration, which he calls
an “unusual and very favorable
situation in which to accom-
plish new and difficult research
goals.”
“You just don’t find it better
than this,” he said.
Hawthorne’s colleagues
describe his personality as
warmly as they do his accom-
plishments.
“He’s one of the most enthu-
siastic, upbeat, curious people
you’ll ever talk to,” Churchill
said.
Calvin Lewis, an under-
graduate student who works in
Hawthorne’s research group,
described him in an e-mail as
“an outstanding role model.”
“Because of Dr. Hawthorne’s
kind heart, he gave me the
chance of a lifetime,” Lewis
said.
Most of Hawthorne’s work
has focused on the basic chem-
istry and applications of boron,
which he said was “a relatively
unknown element” when he
started his career.
Hawthorne said the element
can be used to make all kinds of
small structures and devices,
including molecular motors,
which he called “really kind
of cute and possibly useful in
many ways.”
Another use of boron that
interests Hawthorne is a type
of cancer treatment known as
boron neutron capture ther-
apy.
In this treatment, boron atoms
are brought into cancer cells
but not into healthy cells. The
boron atoms split apart and kill
the cancer cells when exposed
to neutrons — subatomic par-
ticles found in the nucleus of
an atom.
Hawthorne didn’t have
access to a suitable source of
neutrons, though, until after
he came to MU and such a
source was built at its research
reactor.
Hawthorne said he has high
hopes for the treatment, which
so far has mainly been studied
for use with brain tumors, to be
used in other parts of the body.
“One of my main purposes in
being here is to open up boron
neutron capture therapy to
apply it to all sorts of tumors,”
he said.
Eventually, Hawthorne said,
he hopes to commercialize the
technology.
“I would like to see this hap-
pen in Columbia and the state of
Missouri,” he said.
Hawthorne arrived at MU in
2006 after spending 44 years
in the University of California
System, where he taught at
the Riverside and Los Angeles
campuses.
Before he lived in Califor-
nia, he went to school in Kan-
sas and Missouri. He went to
high school in Rolla and studied
chemical engineering for three
years at Missouri University of
Science and Technology, which
was then known as the Mis-
souri School of Mines and Met-
allurgy.
“This is also like coming
home, in a way,” Hawthorne
said.
Hawthorne said he has
received more than 100 e-mails
congratulating him since the
award was announced.
“It was and still is very excit-
ing,” he said.