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WSU political scientist investigates effects of social media on UK politics for BBC

Travis Ridout.
Ridout

Several hotly contested government seats and the likely fate of Brexit are all up for grabs in Thursday’s general election in the UK. To find out how social media and other digital campaign tactics are being used to influence—or manipulate—British voters, BBC World Service invited Travis Ridout, Washington State University political science professor and political media expert, to the UK to investigate.

In his 30‑minute BBC radio documentary, “The Digital Election: How social media is reshaping UK democracy,” Ridout shares highlights and insights of his interviews with a variety of sources, including British voters and online advertising professionals. He talks with a candidate in a tight race for parliament and a food deliveryman who runs a politically focused Facebook group with more than 30,000 members.

He also interviews a professor in London who examines how the Internet is used to harass politicians, and reports from a key marginal constituency to learn how digital campaigning is being used to target undecided voters.

The program can be heard on BBC World and on BBC Sounds.

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Video on cryogenics research earns WSU graduate national award

A video exploring how Washington State University cryogenics research is helping advance a wide array of cutting-edge technologies earned a WSU undergraduate a prestigious award from the Science Coalition.

Lillie Xi Max Williams.
Williams

Lillie Xi Max Williams, who graduated last week with a double degree in digital technologies and culture and strategic communication, took first place in the undergraduate category of the Science Coalition’s Fund It Forward Student Video Challenge. The award came with a $1,000 prize.

The challenge is a contest for undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled in one of the more than 50 research universities that make up the non-profit Science Coalition.

Participants were asked to create a video to tell the story of why science matters and remind members of U.S. Congress that now is the time to invest in research for the future of our nation. The winning videos can be viewed on the coalition’s website.

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WSU Insider

Honors College names first Elma Ryan Bornander Chair

Will Hamlin.
Will Hamlin

Washington State University English Professor William M. Hamlin has been selected as the first faculty member to serve the Honors College as the Elma Ryan Bornander Honors Chair.

“Will is a scholar, author, researcher, and award-winning teacher and mentor who has served the university, his department, and the Honors College and its students for years in innovative and impactful ways,” said M. Grant Norton, Honors dean. “We are very pleased that our relationship with him will progress even further and more deeply over the next two years through this endowed chair position.”

Hamlin has already prepared his spring 2020 course aimed at junior-level students titled, “Global Shakespeare.” Hamlin said he plans to help students explore how the Bard’s works are understood and performed in different parts of world.

“It’s fascinating,” he said, “to investigate the ways in which different cultures make sense of Shakespeare. There are strong traditions of Shakespearean production in India, Japan, and Russia, for example. I’d like Honors students to consider how ‘Othello’ is played in South Africa or how Israelis tend to view the character Shylock.”

This new Honors chair will provide funding for Hamlin to employ Honors College student Emma Taylor to help with his research. One project will involve using computational linguistics to study ideological shifts in English-language use over large periods of time. This sort of study is now being made possible by the extensive digitization of early printed books.

Hamlin said he is interested in examining the balances between religious and secular language in the early modern era. A question to pursue could be, for example, “in what contexts does a word like ‘soul’—which has strong religious connotations—appear between the years 1500-1700 in English texts? How does it change over time? When and why does its meaning evolve? What are its collocates—the words used in close proximity? What do they tell us?” Hamlin said that corpus linguistics enables the detailed scrutiny of huge collections of texts—tens of thousands of books—as they shift over time in their ideological assumptions and implications.

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WSU Insider

Chemist among four WSU faculty named AAAS Fellows

Aurora Clark.
Clark

Four WSU faculty members, including professor of chemistry Aurora Clark, were recently elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a high honor recognizing their contributions to science and technology.

This year a total of 443 scholars from a range of disciplines were chosen by their peers on the Council of AAAS to become new Fellows. They will receive official certificates and rosette pins in a ceremony on Feb. 15, 2020, during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

Clark is director of the Center for Institutional Research Computing and deputy director of the IDREAM Energy Frontier Research Center. Her research includes modeling of complex, multicomponent solutions, providing the basic science needed to help solve many industrial problems. Her work has helped in development of remediation strategies for the nuclear waste site in Hanford, Washington. To understand such complex problems, Clark has developed methods that integrate applied mathematics and chemistry to extract new information from modeling data – this includes the study of networks of interactions between molecules using similar approaches to internet search engines.

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WSU Insider

Living at the edges

Resembling an overgrown house cat with black-tipped ears and a stubby tail, the Canada lynx, a native of North America, teeters on the brink of extinction in the U.S. The few lynx that now roam parts of Washington and the mountainous Northwest survive largely because of a network of protected landscapes that crosses the U.S.-Canada border.

Washington State University environmental researchers believe this transboundary landscape provides not only essential habitat for the wild cats but likely also vital connections with larger lynx populations in Canada.

Wildlife cameras set by WSU researchers recently photographed lynx in the Kettle Mountains of far northeast Washington, close to the Canadian border, and more big cats have been spotted in Glacier National Park near the Montana-Canada line.

Daniel Thornton.
Daniel Thornton

Lynx, like their forest-dwelling neighbor the grizzly bear, require many miles of connected, undeveloped terrain to survive. According to new research led by Daniel Thornton, assistant professor in WSU’s School of the Environment, such terrain occurs most frequently throughout the Americas near international borders.

This clustering of protected habitats, including national parks and conservation areas, makes many iconic, wide-ranging animals—lynx, grizzlies, jaguars, tapirs and scarlet macaws among them—physically dependent on good relations between neighboring countries and wildlife-friendly borders.

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Phys.org
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