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In Oregon Governor’s Race, The 30-Second TV Ad Still Rules

Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and Republican challenger Knute Buehler, locked in the most expensive gubernatorial race in Oregon history, are pouring most of their money into a form of campaigning that hasn’t changed much in decades: 30-second TV ads.

Buehler, a state representative from Bend, has spent more than $8.3 million on broadcast and cable advertising while Brown has spent more than $7.1 million, according to campaign disclosure reports.

Travis Ridout.
Travis Ridout

“If you want to send a message quickly to a lot of people, then TV is still the best way to do it,” said Travis Ridout, a political science professor at Washington State University who is a co-director of the Wesleyan group.

Although an increasing amount of political advertising is being directed toward the internet, traditional TV still gets the lion’s share of political spending.

Kantar Media, a firm that works with Wesleyan to track advertising, projects that campaigns across the country will spend more than $3.2 billion on broadcast and cable by the time people are done voting on Nov. 6. In contrast, digital spending will total about $600 million in this campaign.

Ridout and other experts say politicians are attracted to broadcast and cable for a number of reasons. For one, older voters are still more apt to stick to traditional TV viewing—and they are also the people most likely to vote.

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In US, blackface far from a thing of the past

U.S. journalist Megyn Kelly got fired after she made comments on air that appeared to condone the use of blackface in Halloween costumes, a major backlash ensued, and she lost her NBC talk show.

The problematic custom dates back to about 1830, and so-called “minstrel shows”—white performers caked their faces in greasepaint or shoe polish and drew on exaggerated lips in a caricature of blacks.

David Leonard.
David Leonard

“Blackface was used to depict African Americans as not human, to justify and normalize and sanction violence,” David Leonard, a professor at Washington State University who has written extensively on the subject, told Agence France Presse.

“The history of blackface is one of violence, one of demonization, one of racism,” Leonard said.

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The Baltimore Sun

Ask Dr. Universe: What is venom?

A lot of different animals, like wasps, spiders, snakes, jellyfish, and scorpions, make venom. Animals like the cone snail, the blue-ringed octopus, and centipedes do, too.

Venom is a mixture of different proteins that can be very toxic to animals. While humans don’t make venom, they do carry around proteins. Proteins called keratin are the building blocks of your hair and nails. The red protein hemoglobin in your blood helps deliver oxygen around your body.

Mark Margres.
Mark Margres

Venom tries to disrupt the systems in our body that help keep us alive, said my friend Mark Margres. He was a post-doctoral researcher in biological sciences at Washington State University and now works at Clemson University.

In his work as a scientist, he’s also studied the venomous eastern diamondback rattlesnake. It is the largest of the 32 species in the rattlesnake family. It’s about four or five feet long. Snake venom is one of the kinds of venom scientists know the most about. Margres has collected thousands of samples of rattlesnake venom and he said proteins in the venom can do different things.

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Dr. Universe

Archaeology offers insights into climate change strategies

Once again, humanity might be well served to take heed from a history lesson. When the climate changed, when crops failed and famine threatened, the peoples of ancient Asia responded. They moved. They started growing different crops. They created new trade networks and innovated their way to solutions in other ways too.

Kyle Bocinsky.
Kyle Bocinsky

So suggests new research by former WSU anthropologist Jade d’Alpoim Guedes and Kyle Bocinsky, an alumnus (PhD ’14) and adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, a senior researcher with the Village Ecodynamics Project, and the William D. Lipe Chair in Research with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado.

Their paper, published in the journal Science Advances, describes a computer model they developed that shows for the first time when and where in Asia staple crops would have thrived or fared poorly between 5,000 and 1,000 years ago.

When the climate cooled, people moved away or turned to pastoralism—herds can thrive in grassland where food grains can’t. And they turned to trade. These strategies eventually coalesced into the development of the Silk Road, d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky argue. In some areas they also diversified the types of crops they planted.

With their new computer model, the researchers were able to examine in detail how changing climate transformed people’s ability to produce food in particular places, and that enabled them to get at the causes of cultural shift.

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Ecologists ask: Should we be more transparent with data?

Computational reproducibility—the ability to accurately reproduce outcomes from data sets using the same code and software—will be an increasingly important factor in future scientific studies according to a new paper released in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecological Applications.

Stephanie Hampton.
Stephanie Hampton
Stephen Steve Powers.
Stephen Powers

Authors Stephen M. Powers and Stephanie E. Hampton, researchers in environmental science at Washington State University, highlight the importance of adapting to, providing, and using data sets that are open to and usable by the public and investigators in ecology and other field research.

“Increasingly, peers and the public want more transparency,” Powers explains.

Ecologists, finding themselves in an inherently field-oriented science, have long faced the challenge that it is impossible to perfectly repeat observational studies of the natural world—weather conditions vary, populations change over time, and many other conditions in field work are not reproducible. The paper argues that ecologists should focus more on data sharing and transparency in the future in order to increase scientific reproducibility.

An investigator may spend considerable time, effort, and cost attempting to generate results of someone else’s study from scratch. When both data and code used to obtain statistics and results are published, the investigator saves on these efforts, and can even improve or modify the original author’s computer code. Essentially, sharing this information means less time is wasted for reviewers, editors, and authors alike.

It’s not only scientists that benefit from reproducibility and transparency; “In natural resource management and similar policy issues, high transparency is essential to maintain public trust,” says Hampton, who is also director for the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Being open about data and code from the beginning of a project can help scientists minimize post-publication work to share or clarify the products or to answer questions about contentious results from outside audiences.

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