Were there a Hall of Fame of Sleep Deprivation, a special place would be reserved for single-handed sailors who routinely rise from their bunks to check their rigs and scan the horizon for oncoming vessels. It’s a reasonable safety precaution. It also invites its own measure of risk by compromising reaction times, hand-eye coordination, and general judgment, the kind of things scientists study at WSU Spokane’s Sleep and Performance Research Center.
As it happens, Lois James MA ’09, PhD ’11, a research assistant professor in the center, is the daughter of Naomi James, the first woman to sail single-handed around the world via … » More …
WSU criminologist and fatigue research Bryan Vila explains his Deadly Force Judgment and Decision Making Simulator, which he hopes can give a clearer view of how tired police react in dangerous situations.
Washington State Magazine talks with Tom Reese, the economic development officer in the Spokane mayor’s office, about the knowledge economy, the role of higher education in economic development, and the planned university district surrounding Washington State University’s Spokane campus. Reese is an adjunct faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Design Institute at WSU Spokane.
Tom Reese: Spokane is redefining itself. I think it’s really interesting that the world’s fair focused on Spokane and the environment. Spokane at that time [1974] was in the throes of being a resource-based economy, timber, and manufacturing and processing of those resources, and how to do it [correctly] was really … » More …
It was only a few decades ago that Northern Pacific Railroad ran daily trains from Spokane through Pullman and down to Lewiston. And train cars loaded with students and steamer trunks came over the Cascades delivering their lively loads to packed stations filled with eager classmates awaiting their friends.
Bob Scarfo, an associate professor with Washington State University’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute, and his landscape architecture students have evoked some of that romance with a project urging the reintroduction of passenger trains to the Palouse. Only now, along with the romance of the rail, they’re citing contemporary reasons like oil scarcity, climate change, an aging population, … » More …
Torn between respect for its natural surroundings and a desire for
cosmopolitan sophistication, Spokane lends a unique perspective to the
notion that works of architecture reflect what a community thinks of
itself. » More ...
Spokane is undeniably a beautiful place to live and raise a family. Its
downtown is once again vibrant. But it takes more than attitude and
livability to drive an economy. That's where higher education comes in. » More ...
Basil was a dog in need of a home. And with just 30 hours to assess the whippet’s personality and create and execute a design, a group of Washington State University design students were determined to give him one.
It was an intense competition with “a tremendously difficult timeline,” says Keith Diaz Moore, assistant professor of architecture and landscape architecture, who coordinated the annual design-challenge charrette for the Interdisciplinary Design Institute. “To complete everything in 30 hours is pretty amazing—and to see the delicacy of some of these solutions is fascinating.”
More than 100 students from a variety of disciplines—architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and … » More …
Linda Massey swings open the doors of large kitchen cabinets that store portions of the $10,000 worth of groceries needed over eight weeks for people in a kidney-stone- and low-salt-diet study. Nearby are industrial-sized freezers to keep perishables. The Washington State University Spokane professor of human nutrition is studying the role salt plays in the formation of calcium kidney stones under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Next door in another lab is a white contraption that might have come straight out of NASA, a six-foot long container with a window. Large enough to hold one person, the “Bod Pod” has instruments to … » More …
