Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009 - (Page 11)

RESEARCH RESEARCHER: WORKERS MORE PRONE TO LIE IN E-MAIL Workers are more likely to lie in e-mail than on pen and paper, according to two studies coauthored by Liuba Belkin. “There is a growing concern in the workplace over e-mail communications, and it comes down to trust,” says Belkin, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business and Economics. The studies’ results are reported in the paper, “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining.” Belkin and her co-authors—Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University and Charles Naquin of DePaul University—presented Liuba Belkin their findings at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in August. The researchers handed 48 MBA students $89 to divide between themselves and another ﬁctional party, who knew the amount fell between $5 and $100. There was one precondition: The other party had to accept whatever offer was made. Using e-mail or pen and paper, the MBA students reported the size of the pot—truthful or not—and the amount the other party would get. Students using e-mail lied more than 92 percent of the time, while those using pen and paper lied nearly 64 percent. The rate of lying was almost 50 percent greater among e-mailers. “It’s not just that e-mailers were more deceptive,” Belkin says. “The magnitude by which they lied was signiﬁcantly greater.” E-mailers awarded the other party $29 out of what they claimed was about $56. Pen-and-paper students were more generous, on average passing along almost $34 of $67. To explain whether a shared sense of identity reduces an e-mailer’s impulse to lie, Belkin and her colleagues conducted a second study. E-mailers who were more familiar with each other were less deceptive. But they still lied.—Tom Yencho civil & environmental engineering A GREEN FUTURE FOR Take a close look at that piece of scrap iron before you toss it in the trash. Wei-xian Zhang has a good use for it. Someday soon, much of the world might also. Zhang, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, recently concluded a ﬁveyear research project in which he and his colleagues at Tongji University in Shanghai used two million pounds of iron to detoxify industrial wastewater. The project was the largest in history to use iron in an environmental application. The iron, called zero-valent iron (ZVI) because it is not oxidized, was obtained as shavings from local metal-processing shops for less than 15 cents a pound. An article written by Zhang and Luming Ma, professor of environmental engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, was published as the cover article in July’s Environmental Science and Technology. The article was titled “Enhanced Biological Treatment of Industrial Wastewater with Bimetallic Zero-Valent Iron.” Since the article’s publication, Zhang has received a national award for technology commercialization from the University Economic Development Association and was featured in the November 14th issue of The Economist. The ZVI project began with small laboratory experiments that used 90 pounds of iron to treat toxins. It graduated in 2005-06 to a pilot test using 2,000 pounds of iron to pretreat wastewater at a treatment plant in the Taopu Industrial District in Shanghai. ZVI augmented and improved the previous remediation method, which relied on microorganisms alone. Following the pilot test, the Shanghai city government approved a grant to construct a full-scale treatment reactor in the Taopu district capable of processing almost 16 million gallons a day of wastewater. This ZVI reactor was connected to the biological treatment plant two years ago and has been in continuous use since. The addition of ZVI resulted in a significant improvement in pollutant levels, according to Ma, who directs the National Engineering Research Center for Urban Pollution Control in Tongji’s College of Environmental Science and Engineering. “Before this project,” says Ma, “few people believed scrap iron could work in a wastewater treatment plant. We have developed a copperactivated iron and used a systematic approach to show that ZVI-enhanced treatment can achieve dramatic improvements over biological processes used by themselves.” The ZVI scrap iron is chemically similar to iron-based nanoparticles invented by Zhang that are now widely used in North America to clean contaminated soil and groundwater. Zhang says the scrap iron’s low cost may appeal to developing countries that cannot afford nanoparticles. —Kurt Pﬁtzer winter 2009 11 PHOTO BY RYAN HULVAT SCRAP IRON PHOTO BY DOUGLAS BENEDICT

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Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009

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