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CAS faculty receive Office of Research awards

October 17, 2018 adriana

The WSU Office of Research presented awards to eight faculty members, including three in the College of Arts and Sciences, for their outstanding achievements in research, as part of opening ceremonies for WSU Research Week.

The Creative Activity, Research and Scholarship Award went to Kim Christen, professor in the Department of English, director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and director of Digital Initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Christen has generated more than $4 million in external funding, including WSU’s first institutional grant from the Mellon Foundation. She has leveraged this support to create and sustain interdisciplinary projects and workspaces, most prominently establishing with WSU Libraries the new Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.

She directs several digital humanities projects, including the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a collaboratively curated site of Plateau cultural materials; Mukurtu CMS, a free and open source content management system and community digital archive aimed at the unique needs of indigenous communities; and the Sustainable Heritage Network, an online community of people dedicated to making the preservation and digitization of cultural heritage materials sustainable, simple, and secure.

An Exceptional Service to the Office of Research Award went to Tammy Barry, professor in the Department of Psychology. Barry co-chairs the Research and Arts Committee & the Centers, Institutes, or Laboratories task force, and provides outstanding support for the many Office of Research initiatives.

The awards included a prize for submitting the best idea to the National Science Foundation’s 2026 Idea Machine, a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and STEM education. The winner of this award is Peter Reilly, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, for his idea “Ultra-High Mass Spectrometry: The Next Frontier.”

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WSU Insider

Renewable energy offers common ground for Democrats, Republicans

October 16, 2018 adriana

As the battle lines are drawn for next month’s hotly contested midterm elections, some Americans may be comforted to know there is at least one area of common ground for Democrats and Republicans.

Regardless of political standing, age or gender, U.S. voters are in favor of renewable energy, according to research by Christine Horne, professor of sociology at Washington State University.

Horne and Emily Kennedy, a former WSU sociology professor now at the University of British Columbia, are the authors of a new study in the journalEnvironmental Politics that shows while conservatives and liberals tend to disagree on many environmental issues, they both view the development of solar power and other forms of renewable energy as financially savvy and a step towards self-sufficiency.

The research identifies an area where policymakers on both sides of the aisle could work together. It also could have important implications for utility companies and other businesses involved in the manufacture and sale of renewable energy technologies.

“I think anyone who is paying attention to our current political climate might be interested to see there is an area of common ground,” Horne said. “Marketing renewable energy as a way to be more self-sufficient is a message that would appeal to both liberals and conservatives.”

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WSU Insider
Citizen Truth
NWPR
OPB
The Fifth Estate – click to view

The Maya Kept Jaguar Zoos for Centuries

October 11, 2018 adriana

A chemical analysis of excavated bones shows that Mesoamericans had a long history of keeping jaguars and pumas—some of the fiercest predators around—in captivity.

Erin Thornton. “It’s absolutely solid work,” says Erin Thornton, an anthropologist at Washington State University who specializes in isotope analysis.

“With animal remains from Mesoamerica, it’s very hard to tell if you’re dealing with a captive animal from bones alone,” she said. “Stable isotopes are really the only way to tell if an animal was removed from the wild and put under human management.”

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The Atlantic

America’s “off-the-rails” politics

October 11, 2018 adriana

WSU political science professor discusses paranoia, populism, state of fake news

During a lecture in Kane Hall on Tuesday, Washington State University political science professor, Cornell Clayton, attributed the current landscape of fake news and conspiracy theories to a combination of both populism and paranoia in Americans.

Clayton, the director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at WSU, visited the UW as part of the UW Graduate School’s set of lectures entitled “BUNK: The Information Series,” which Ronan Farrow kicked off Oct. 2.

Clayton explored how American politics have become a space for suspicion in the form of conspiracy theories, such as the birther conspiracy that holds that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. However, Clayton noted that both Republicans and Democrats have recently been led by paranoid leaders.

“Which conspiracy theories we believe and how we think about populism is deeply structured by our preexisting partisan and ideological identities,” Clayton said. “That’s the nature of today’s off-the-rails politics.”

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The Daily

Blue but deeply divided

October 11, 2018 adriana

Dozens of races across Washington will determine if Democrats maintain — or possibly even increase — their control of the state Legislature.

All 98 seats in the House are up for election Nov. 6, and voters will decide 25 of the Senate’s 49 seats.
While Democrats hold most statewide offices in Washington, the political split in the Legislature is much narrower: Democrats currently hold a one-seat advantage in the Senate and a two-seat advantage in the House.

“People think of us as a blue state even though we are a deeply divided state,” said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy at Washington State University.

Seventeen of the races on the ballot are for open seats with no incumbent: 14 in the House and three in the Senate.

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Lewiston Tribune
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KOMO – click to view
SF Gate – click to view
Centre Daily Times – click to view
Olympian – click to view
The Hanford Sentinel – click to view
Yakima Herald – click to viewv
Seattle PI – click to view
Sun Herald – click to view
The Southern Illinoisan – click to view
Santa Maria Times – click to view
St Louis Post-Dispatch – click to view