December | 2016 | CAS in the Media | Washington State University

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Examining toddler temperament around the globe

December 20, 2016 will.ferguson

How do parents’ cultural values affect their babies’ temperament?

Maria (Masha) Gartstein, professor of psychology, is on a multi-year quest to find out.

For the past five years, Gartstein has compared the behavior of babies from around the globe to learn how parents’ values and expectations influence the development of their toddlers’ behavior and overall temperament.

A greater understanding of these values and their impact on temperament development will help psychologists devise fine-tuned approaches to prevent infant temperament issues from becoming behavioral problems later in life.

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Computer models find ancient solutions to modern problems

December 20, 2016 will.ferguson

Washington State University archaeologists are at the helm of new research using sophisticated computer technology to learn how past societies responded to climate change.

Their work, which links ancient climate and archaeological data, could help modern communities identify new crops and other adaptive strategies when threatened by drought, extreme weather and other environmental challenges.

In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, assistant professor of anthropology, and WSU colleagues Stefani Crabtree, Kyle Bocinsky and Tim Kohler examine how recent advances in computational modeling are reshaping the field of archaeology.

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Health Medicine Network

NewHistorian

Association for Computing Machinery

Paste Magazine

Treehugger

North Africa women researcher share among world highest

December 19, 2016 adriana

University World News asked Julie Kmec, a professor of sociology at Washington State University in the United States, what factors were behind high female participation in science and research in predominantly Muslim countries.

“Studies indicate that this pattern emerges from a complex relationship between a country’s macro-cultural value systems regarding individualism and gender, the gender labelling of curricular and work fields, the organisational configuration of a country’s education system, and a country’s economic opportunity structures,” she explained.

“Overall, these countries may promote collectivism over individualism, gender label STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields as ‘masculine’ less-so than other countries, and their developing economies may shape choice.”

Kmec is also one of the principal investigators for the project on Women in Engineering in Predominantly Muslim Countries, which aims to identify mechanisms that motivate women to pursue engineering in Arab countries, to be used in America’s higher education and research system.

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University World News

New sheriff’s office training course is first of its kind nationally

December 16, 2016 adriana

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office has achieved the National Certification Program Seal of Excellence from the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement for a new training course, Interaction and Perception.

The first course of its kind nationally, Interaction and Perception was developed by Bryan Vila, professor of criminology and criminal, and his team at Washington State University with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. The goal was to make personnel into “good strangers” who can appropriately assess a situation and adapt in order to socially engage in any given circumstance.

Spokane Sherriff’s training will combine two programs into one: Strategic Interaction and Implicit Bias Training.

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Fox 28

Ask Dr. Universe: How do bugs walk on water?

December 14, 2016 will.ferguson

The other day I was out ice skating when I started thinking about your question. Water strider bugs skitter across ponds almost as if they were skating on ice.

I decided to visit my friend Dan Pope to find out how this works. He’s a graduate student at Washington State University who studies chemistry.

“Before talking about water, let’s talk about atoms,” he said.

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Dr. Universe