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Summer 2024

WSM Winter 2002

Winter 2002

Same dance, different tune

Buy low, sell high. Investors understand this basic goal of investing. This idea appeals to the intellectual side of our brain. However, it is the emotional, not the intellectual, side of our brain that usually motivates action. That is why advertisements and sales pitches appeal to our feelings more than our intelligence.

 Unfortunately, our emotions and psychological biases make buying low and selling high difficult. Consider the actions of many investors. The great bull market of the late 1990s brought millions of new investors into the stock market. The continual rise of the stock market was a trend that investors projected into the future. Assuming … » More …

Winter 2002

Lone Star Dietz left a football legacy

“That was the game which was to change the face of New Year’s Day in the years to come.”—Rose Bowl historian Rube Samuelsen

In the first four decades of the 20th century, hardly a week went by during football season when the name of William H. “Lone Star” Dietz’s didn’t appear in the nation’s sports pages. Today it’s rarely heard in Pullman, or anywhere else. In spite of that near silence for 60 years now, the one-time Washington State College football coach (1915-1917, 17-2-1 record) left a legacy that could land him in the College Football Hall of Fame next year.

He began his coaching … » More …

Winter 2002

Volleyball—European tour builds lifetime memories

In August Coach Cindy Fredrick and the Washington State University volleyball team spent 12 days in Europe, sightseeing and playing eight matches. While winning all its matches was special, it wasn’t everything, Fredrick said of the tour. She agreed to keep a journal. Here’s her report.

Saturday, August 10

We arrive in Munich at 9:30 a.m. after departing Pullman Friday at 3 a.m. Our guide, Cory, meets us at the airport. Frank, our bus driver, takes us to the City Square. The first place we see is McDonald’s. We have a break, so we walk through the large shopping area. Being with 15 young women, … » More …

Winter 2002

A compass, not a roadmap

“Guided by a plan that hundreds of WSU people worked on for more than a year, we have maintained stability in one of the toughest years in our history.”—V. Lane Rawlins

Recently, I spent a day in Kongsberg, Norway, at a company that is the world leader in development and production of dynamic stabilizers. These technological wonders are installed on ships and oil platforms in the stormy North Sea to stabilize them so that the oil fields can be worked. I was amazed at a video showing ships sitting still in a rough sea, accomplished, I was told, by precisely measuring all of the turbulence … » More …

Winter 2002

A summer job that meant something

An entomology undergrad combats the worm in the apple

When they hatch, they’re so tiny you can barely see them. Then they eat. They bore their way inside an apple and consume it from within. After two weeks, they’re half an inch long, pinkish orange, and engorged, with tiny dark heads. They’re also translucent, so if you look closely, you can see their food moving along their digestive tracts.

They’re codling moth larvae, the number one adversary of Washington apple orchard growers and the subject of her fascinating summer of research at the Washington State University Tri-Cities’ Food and Environmental Quality Lab. With faculty members … » More …

Winter 2002

A common reader: Trouble in Dusty Gulch

I really should be more worried about this. It’s my living, after all. For 20 years I’ve been presenting a kind of music so wildly varied in time (seven centuries and more), in style (Morris dances, Joplin rags, Mahlerian stairways to heaven, Copland cowboy ballets), and in instrumentation (shawms and zithers along with the violins and cellos), that the term “classical” is as inadequate in describing it all as calling the United States of America, Dusty Gulch, Nevada, just to avoid the complexities. But we call the music Dusty Gulch anyway, and there’s trouble in Dusty Gulch. Always has been, to tell you the truth.

… » More …

Winter 2002

Mystery of the Martian mummies

One of the last places you would expect to find teenage girls in the middle of July is a science classroom. But for Rachel Milhem, Romany Redman, and nine others, the Washington State University Spokane CityLab Young Women’s Summer Science Camp laboratory was one of the hottest places to be last summer.

“I wanted to participate in this camp, because I really like science, and I thought it would be fun to analyze stuff, like maybe whether or not aliens exist,” says Rachel Milhem, a sixth-grader at All-Saints Catholic School.

Rachel, along with 10 other young girls, decided to spend some of her summer engaging … » More …

Winter 2002

What’s protein got to do with it?

it is now possible to measure the activities of thousands of genes and corresponding proteins-all at once. The methods are reasonably straightforward technically, and all the necessary bits and pieces are available to anyone-for a price. A lot of razzle-dazzle and hype have accompanied this technological breakthrough. Certainly mountains of data will be generated, and many interesting insights will be gained in the next few years.

But then what? Ironically, we are blessed with almost too much of a good thing. University labs worldwide and dozens of newly spawned biotech companies are working day and night to devise methods for sorting out all this information. … » More …

Winter 2002

Don’t panic yet

An asteroid may be heading for a collision with earth, reports a group of researchers including Washington State University’s Scott Hudson. Fortunately, the actual probability of a collision is only one-third of one percent, and we have 878 years to prepare.

In an article in the April 5 Science, scientists predict that Asteroid 1950 DA, about one kilometer in diameter, could hit earth in March 2880. Typically, it is very difficult to predict asteroid collisions this far into the future. However, by obtaining radar imagery of the asteroid, the researchers were able to model in detail the evolution of its orbit for the next several … » More …