Talking Jazz features conversations, stories, insights, and guided listening with today’s jazz creators hosted by pianist, composer, author, and educator Monika Herzig. Our guest today is composer/ saxophonist/ educator Greg Yasinitsky, sharing about his music created before and during isolation and his award-winning work.
Yasinitsky’s interview, during which he discussed producing, composing, arranging and performing on his recent CD, YAZZ Band: New Normal, was broadcast on radio on WICR and WETF.
Washington State University Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Jenny Zambrano and College of Education doctoral student James Asare are the first Cougs to receive the new Elson and Carmento Floyd & William and Felicia Gaskins Social Justice Advocate of the Year Award.
The recognition is part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Awards, given annually by the MLK Program to those who embody the spirit and vision of King’s work. Recipients of the Social Justice Advocate of the Year Award must have demonstrated a sustained commitment to the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and social justice through advocacy, collaborative partnerships, programming, research, service, or teaching.
Zambrano’s work to promote DEI is not a side project, but at the core of her mission as an educator and a scientist, said her nominator, Erica Crespi, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences (SBS).
A one-time political foe of the late Tom Foley is helping enhance efforts to promote their shared commitment to public service and productive discourse.
Former U.S. Congressman George R. Nethercutt Jr., a Spokane Republican who in 1994 famously defeated Foley, a Democrat and speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has joined the advisory board of Washington State University’s non-partisan Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service.
“Since 2008, my foundation has promoted civic education among students, so they are prepared to engage with our democratic system—a system that depends on the participation of informed citizens, open dialogue, and compromise to function properly.” said Nethercutt, a Spokane native who graduated with a degree in English from WSU in 1967.
More than 125 people filled the Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center on the Pullman campus Wednesday to hear about how advances in science and technology are influencing the nation’s response to threats ranging from emerging disease to climate change.
Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, delved into these topics and more as part of her lecture – National Security in the 21stCentury: Deterrence, Bio-Resilience, Energy, and Climate. Budil visited the Pullman campus to deliver the Institute for Shock Physics’ John and Janet Creighton Distinguished Lecture.
“Our old ways of thinking about conflict have to change and evolve and be much more multi-dimensional than it once was,” Budil said.
The number of snowshoe hares in a forest is a good indicator of how healthy the ecosystem is, and scientists have now applied a new method to find out.
Thornton
“Snowshoe hares are considered a keystone, boreal forest species and there’s been some evidence that hare populations are changing as the climate warms,” said study co-author Dan Thornton. “This study comes out as rapidly changing climatic conditions are altering our natural plant and animal communities worldwide.”
In 2019, researchers from Washington State University designed a large-scale field test to analyze the camera method while investigating the density of snowshoe hares at various forested sites on the eastern edge of the North Cascades in Washington. The experiment successfully trapped 770 snowshoe hares and collected 13,608 camera trap photos.
To determine effectiveness, the research team compared live-trapping and camera-trapping data. The study found that, overall, density estimates from the cameras had an 86 percent correlation with live trapping data. “Until now, cameras could only really tell us if the hares are there or not there,” said Thornton.
