Police say Portland, Ore., gang violence is exploding. A landmark report shows just the opposite.
Clay Mosher
Turn on the TV news and you’d have reason to believe gang violence in Portland, Ore., is out of control. Terse warnings from police and fallout from three recent high-profile shootings have prompted alarming reports in the media of a recent surge in gang activity.
But amid the rhetoric and media heat, a far more complicated picture emerges when the numbers are examined.
Clay Mosher, a professor of sociology at WSU-Vancouver and author of a gang assessment for Clark County law enforcement in 2012, says various agencies label gang-related crime differently—and often liberally. “Most crimes committed by gang members are not committed for the gang. But they can get coded as a gang-related crime,” Mosher said.
Many of the roughly 10,000 inmates who exit U.S. prisons each week following incarceration face an immediate critical question: Where will I live? While precise numbers are hard to come by, research suggests that, on average, about 10 percent of parolees are homeless immediately following their release. In large urban areas, and among those addicted to drugs, the number is even higher—exceeding 30 percent.
“Without a safe and stable place to live where they can focus on improving themselves and securing their future, all of their energy is focused on the immediate need to survive the streets,” says Faith Lutze, criminal justice professor at WSU. “Being homeless makes it hard to move forward or to find the social support from others necessary to be successful.”
WSU biologist Michael Skinner and his research team found that if a rat fetus is exposed to a specific pesticide during the first trimester of pregnancy, the likelihood of kidney disease, ovary disease and obesity in their decendents was elevated for three generations. Multiple diseases were even more prevalent in the third generation than in the second. The widely used chemical, Methoxychlor, once considered a safer alternative to DDT, was banned in the U.S. in 2003 for a host of human health reasons. The research points to a negative effect decades after exposure. In other words, the great-great-grandchildren of a woman exposed to Methoxychlor may still suffer the consequences.
Self-published books are on the rise, to the dismay of onlookers who wonder what to expect from a sector where E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey—originally published as online fan fiction by a tiny Australian e-book company—appears to be the best of the lot. More than 391,000 self-published titles appeared in 2012, according to Bowker, the official ISBN-issuing agency for the United States.
Academics, meanwhile, inhabit a parallel publishing ecosystem: a constellation of university presses and journals that publish slowly, offer few economic returns, and subject all work to painstaking peer review. Scholars and publishing experts in the United States and Britain say self-publishing by academics remains a rarity.
Roger Whitson, an assistant professor of English at WSU, said he thought self-publishing books was an undertaking only tenured professors could afford. “Part of the reason why academics publish pre-tenure is that they want to receive credit for becoming a specialist in the field, and one of the main ways they see that happening is through peer review,” Whitson said. “For pre-tenure people who haven’t established a name in the field, academic publishing is really important.”
After receiving tenure, more academics are in a position “to experiment and demand more from different publishing models,” he said.
Whitson has self-published a book of his own: a collection of writing from his postdoctoral program at Georgia Tech. “I would never consider it a major publication of mine,” he said. “It was just something that was fun.” Whitson does not list the book on his CV.
Joyce EhrlingerThe fact that women are vastly under-represented in high-level leadership positions is well known, but the exact reason for it is still the subject of much debate.
Research has long shown that men are more self-assured in general, and often overestimate their abilities and potential, while women are far more prone to underestimate and second-guess themselves.
Research by WSU psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger and Cornell psychologist David Dunning also shows that women tend to rate themselves more negatively.
In the study, male and female college students were given a quiz on scientific reasoning, after which they were asked to assess how many questions they thought they had gotten right. On average, the male students thought they had gotten 7.1 answers right, while the female students thought they had answered only 5.8 correctly.
In reality, though, the average for male and female students was almost exactly the same – 7.5 correct answers for the female students and 7.9 for the male students.
This negative self-perception can prevent women from taking on new challenges or opportunities.
