WSM Spring 2003

Spring 2003

Patient Doba pays his dues, realizes his dream

Washington State didn’t need to conduct a national search for a new head football coach when Mike Price resigned December 17. His successor was already on campus. He was familiar with WSU, Pullman, and the Pac-10.

Bill Doba, defensive coordinator at WSU since 1994, was introduced less than 24 hours after Price announced he had taken the top football coaching job at University of Alabama. Doba waited 41 years for his day to come.

“I could have gone to my grave and not missed a thing about my coaching experience, but this really is a coach’s dream,” Doba, 62, said at a campus media conference.

… » More …

Spring 2003

Harris takes volleyball to heart

“I’ve always believed that size doesn’t matter…”—LaToya Harris

It’s late November. LaToya Harris’s red-knit stocking cap is pulled down tight over the tops of her ears. She’s wearing a gray 2002 Apple Cup t-shirt, blue jeans, running shoes, large gold-colored hoop earrings, and a smile.

Her classes are finished for the day. Volleyball practice begins a 2 p.m., an hour away. There’s time for an interview.

The smile? It widens when she’s asked about efforts to recruit her out of high school. Stanford, the Arizona schools, and Oregon sent inquiries. Nebraska and Wisconsin did the same. Then came a second round of letters. Politely as … » More …

Spring 2003

Is the sky still blue in Emerald City?

Now that the economy has stalled, are the Seattle unemployed here to stay, or are they packing the U-Haul?

When I moved to Washington’s west side, I pursued a different career and landscape. When I was laid off last year, I decided to stay put rather than move where the job market held more promise. I thought I was following my heart, but according to Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002), I was following a trend.

Florida, a Carnegie-Mellon economics professor, theorizes that those in “creative” occupations “drive” the economy, i.e., corporate profits and economic growth … » More …

Spring 2003

The More You Learn: Distance Degree Program celebrates its tenth

What it came down to was that Michele Candela needed a college education-but it was going to have to come to her rather than her going to campus. When she made the trip from Bainbridge Island to Pullman for commencement last May, it was the first time she’d ever set foot on campus. Or met, face to face, the staff of the Distance Degree Program who helped her achieve a bachelor’s degree in social science (with a 4.0, it should be mentioned), working from the private classroom she shares with a husband and four children a few miles outside of Kingston.

“If you look at … » More …

Spring 2003

Mounting a defense against biological invaders

Whatever its impact on trade, the World Trade Organization has opened the doors to biological invasion, says Dick Mack. A professor of botany at Washington State University, Mack is a leading authority on invasive species and lead author of Predicting Invasions of Nonindigenous Plants and Plant Pests, a report recently published by the National Research Council.

Invasive species are those that are introduced, whether deliberately or not, only to find their new home much too accommodating. Whereas a plant might be an inconspicuous face in its home crowd, it could become the ubiquitous bully in a new ecological crowd with no defense against its aggressiveness. … » More …

Spring 2003

Foundation honors Creighton

John W. “Jack” Creighton, Jr., Bellevue, received the Weldon B. Gibson Distinguished Volunteer Award at the Washington State University Foundation Dinner Gala in the Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum last fall.

The annual award, established in 1981, recognizes an individual who has demonstrated sustained, exemplary service and achievement on behalf of Washington State University and the WSU Foundation.

Cited for his leadership and unselfish devotion to WSU, Creighton earned praise from nominators for his work as co-chair of the national steering committee for Campaign WSU. The multi-year effort raised a record $275 million in private gifts to the University. The successful campaign led to Creighton’s further … » More …

Spring 2003

Smoke & asthma

For as long as Jami Hinshaw can remember, she has coughed, sneezed, sniffled, and felt miserable every September. When she was nine, the Spokane native and WSU alum was diagnosed with asthma.

Last fall, Hinshaw was fighting her usual symptoms, but she was also carrying a portable air quality monitor in a backpack as part of a study to better understand the health effects of agricultural field burning. Researchers from Washington State University are working with their counterparts from the School of Public Health at the University of Washington to examine volunteers’ exposure levels to atmospheric pollutants coming from field burning in the region.

Controversy … » More …

Spring 2003

How do we perceive sound?

Christine Portfors, a neurologist, tends a lair of 23 tropical moustache bats at WSU Vancouver in order to tease apart the question of how they distinguish between sounds-for example, between those they use for echolocation and those they use to communicate.

Bat communication sounds, like speech sounds, are very complex in terms of frequency and timing, says Portfors. Beyond that, “We don’t know anything about how the brain actually processes those types of sounds.”

Earlier work by Portfors revealed that bats have neurons that are very sensitive to the timing of the echolocation sound, between when they emit it and when the echo comes back. … » More …

Spring 2003

Letters from Vladivostok

“This is the best research project I’ve ever had. It’s invaded my life in a very good way.” So says Birgitta Ingemanson, associate professor of Russian at Washington State University, about her current project transcribing and editing more than 2,100 letters written by an American woman, Eleanor Pray, in Vladivostok between 1894 and 1930.

The collection consists primarily of letters written by Pray and her sister-in-law, but also includes hundreds of photos taken by Pray of Vladivostok before the Russian Revolution and World War I. The array of letters and photographs provides glimpses of the city’s culture, politics, and merchant life from an American woman’s … » More …

Spring 2003

One hot link: WSU’s Ownbey Herbarium website

[ Unfortunately, the current WSU Ownbey Herbarium website has depreciated the reference links discussed in this article. You can, however, still access these valuable pages via Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” by clicking on the backeted links below. ]

[ http://www.wsu.edu/~wsherb/ ]

“From Rainforest to Grassland,” on WSU’s Ownbey Herbarium website, takes you on a virtual tour of Washington plant communities, from Cape Flattery on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula to the confluence of the Snake and Grand Ronde Rivers at the southeastern corner of the state. Along the way you … » More …