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Most violent era in America was before Europeans arrived

Timothy Kohler
Timothy Kohler

There’s a mythology about the native Americans—that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature. It’s easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions killed in wars and genocides,  was not the most violent. On a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, WSU archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

Learn more about this myth-busting research at Science 2.0 and WSU News

Gang Mentality

Police say Portland, Ore., gang violence is exploding. A landmark report shows just the opposite.

Clay Mosher
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.

Learn more about efforts to measure gang activity

‘Housing First’ Helps Keep Ex-Inmates Off the Streets (and Out of Prison)

Faith Lutze
Faith Lutze

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.”

Learn more about Lutze’s research into inmate recidivism

WSU biologist finds link between specific chemical exposure and obesity, kidney disease

Michael Skinner portrait
Michael Skinner

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.

Read more about the epigenetic connection in

Newsweek

Time

WSU News

Research results published in PLOSone

Additional information about Skinner’s research is in the
August 2014 issue of Scientific American
(subscription required)

A publisher of one’s own

Roger Whitson
Roger Whitson

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.

Read more about self-publishing in Inside Higher Ed