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Science on Tap: WSUV professor to share Ebola experiences

The first social scientist to be invited by the World Health Organization to help Ebola control efforts works right here in Clark County.

Barry Hewlett.
Barry Hewlett

Barry Hewlett, an anthropology professor at Washington State University Vancouver, visited Central Africa to help the WHO in 2000, and he has visited the continent about five times as part of response efforts.

Hewlett will share stories on his experience, and how he worked to develop trust between local communities and the international and national response teams, at 7 p.m. Wednesday for Science on Tap at Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver.

When Hewlett first arrived, there was some apprehension from locals when it came to dealing with those response teams.

“The number of cases was going up, even though they were doing everything they thought they needed to do,” Hewlett said. “People were essentially running away from the World Health Organization treatment centers, isolation units and the rest. So the thought is, ‘What’s going on here?’ ”

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How Money Affects Elections

To quote the great political philosopher Cyndi Lauper, “Money changes everything.” And nowhere is that proverb more taken to heart than in a federal election, where billions of dollars are raised and spent on the understanding that money is a crucial determinant of whether or not a candidate will win.

This year, the money has been coming in and out of political campaigns at a particularly furious pace. Collectively, U.S. House candidates raised more money by Aug. 27 than House candidates raised during the entire 2014 midterm election cycle, and Senate candidates weren’t far behind. Ad volumes are up 86 percent compared to that previous midterm. Dark money — flowing to political action committees from undisclosed donors — is up 26 percent.

Travis Ridout.
Travis Ridout

Presumably, all that money is going to buy somebody an election. In reality, though, Lauper isn’t quite right. Political scientists, such as Travis Ridout, professor of government and public policy at Washington State University, say there’s not a simple one-to-one causality between fundraising and electoral success. Turns out, this market is woefully inefficient. If money is buying elections a lot of candidates are still wildly overpaying for races they were going to win anyway. And all of this has implications for what you (and those big dark money donors) should be doing with your political contributions.

Overall, advertising ends up being the major expense for campaigns, said Ridout. In 2012 and 2014, the average Senate campaign spent 43 percent of its budget on ads, he told me, and the average House campaign spent 33 percent. Presidential races spend an even bigger chunk of their budgets on advertising. In 2012, for instance, ads made up more than 70 percent of President Obama’s campaign expenses and 55 percent of Mitt Romney’s.

This is a really tough thing to study, Ridout said, and it’s only getting harder as media becomes more fragmented and it’s less clear who saw what ad how many times and in what context. But it’s also something people have been studying for a long time. Driven by fears that attack ads might undermine democracy by reducing voter turnout, researchers have been looking at the impacts of negative advertising since the 1990s. And, beginning around the mid-2000s, they began making serious progress on understanding how ads actually affect whether people vote and who they vote for. The picture that’s emerged is … well … let’s just say it’s probably rather disappointing to the campaigns that spend a great deal of time and effort raising all that money to begin with.

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FiveThirtyEight

Turtle shells served as symbolic musical instruments for indigenous cultures

Turtles served as more than tasty treats for many Native American tribes throughout North America. In fact, turtle shells were used as rattles and other musical instruments, said FSU Associate Professor of Anthropology Tanya Peres.

“Music is an important part of many cultures in ways we may not realize,” Peres said. “Musical instruments have a deep ancient history in human society and are encoded with meanings beyond their sound making capabilities.”

Andrew Gillreath-Brown.
Gillreath-Brown

Peres and lead author Andrew Gillreath-Brown, a doctoral candidate from Washington State University, published their research in the academic journal PLOS One.

The researchers examined the use of turtle shells as percussion instruments in the southeastern United States. They identified and analyzed several partial Eastern box turtle shells from middle Tennessee archaeological sites that they believe were used as rattles.

In the past, turtle shells found at archaeological sites were often dismissed as food remains.

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Heritage Daily

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New Historian

Science News

Science Pub talk features feminism in research

The role feminism plays in addressing the gaps in established science will be discussed at the next Science Pub talk, hosted by Washington State University’s Entrepreneurial Faculty Ambassadors and the Palouse Discovery Science Center.

The talk titled, “Doing Better Science through the Other ‘F’ Word” will take place 6-7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 11, at Paradise Creek Brewery in downtown Pullman.

Samantha Noll.
Noll
Amy Mazur.
Mazur

Amy Mazur, a Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor in political science at WSU and an associate researcher at the Centre d’Etudes Européennes at Sciences Po, Paris, and Samantha Noll, assistant professor in The School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, will map out the different feminist approaches that are used in current research. In addition to discussing the gaps in established scientific practices, they will present one specific area of feminist political science that has an integrative, comparative feminist agenda.

“Feminism in today’s ‘me too’ world often conjures up images of war of the sexes and man hating. For us, two feminist scientists whose work is situated in the social sciences and the humanities, the notion of feminism provides a fundamental starting point to make science more scientific,” said Mazur. “Taking a feminist approach to research also has the promise of making science more meaningful and better suited to solve today’s wicked problems.”

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WSU Insider

10 Scientific Facts About Spite

Though its benefits may not be immediately obvious, spite isn’t just an aberrant emotion that makes us act with malice: It can be a tool we use to our advantage.

In psychology, the dark triad of personality traits are psychopathy (the inability to experience emotions like remorse, empathy, and be social with others), narcissism (the obsession with one’s self), and Machiavellianism (willingness to be duplicitous and disregard morality to achieve one’s own goals).

David Marcus.
David Marcus

In 2014, researchers at Washington State University, led by psychologist David Marcus, had more than 1200 participants take a personality test, in which they were presented with 17 statements like “I would be willing to take a punch if it meant that someone I did not like would receive two punches” and “If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her,” then had to indicate how much they agreed with those statements.

The results, published in Psychological Assessment, showed that high scores in spitefulness correlated highly with psychopathy as well, along with the other two dark triad traits.

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Mental Floss