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Spring 2012

The Wire: Urban drama, gritty reality, and Soc 496 “textbook”

It’s not exactly a typical day in class, even an upper-level sociology class geared towards the grittiest of urban realities.

The room is filled with the sound of gunfire. A projection screen shows a quartet of inner-city drug thieves pinned down behind a parked car. Each reloads his and her weapon. Their leader, the scarred and unflappable Omar Little, gives them a look and says, “Y’all ready? Let’s bang out.”

The four stand up, fire back in unison, and execute a retreat, with one killed by friendly fire.

Professor Gregory Hooks stops the tape. The room goes quiet.

“And why’d we watch that?” he asks.

… » More …

Joe Keim Campbell
Spring 2012

The end of free will?

 

The wind said
You know I’m
the result of
forces beyond my control

—A.R. Ammons, “The Wide Land”

When the subject of free will resurfaced on the media horizon recently, all I could think of was that last dorm room bull session on said topic many, many years ago. But up it pops again, not just in philosophy journals, but in the esteemed science, and generally nonphilosophical, journals Nature and Science. A subject that has been fervently teased, manipulated, and debated (by scholars decidedly more rigorous than a clutch of college students with a couple of semesters of introductory philosophy under … » More …

Spring 2012

Video: The Amazing Leaproach

An insect’s small size gives it the gift of relatively greater strength. The newly discovered South African cockroach Saltoblattella montistabularis takes advantage of this fact plus several other features, as Washington State University entomologist Carol Anelli describes here:

This is very cool for several reasons.

It is a wingless cockroach, described for the first time only two years ago, and the first existing roach known to jump. It achieves this feat with modified hind legs that possess long femurs invested with enlarged muscles. These long femurs—akin to the longest bone in the human body—help give grasshoppers their great jumping ability.

» More …

ant artwork
Spring 2012

Living the right-sized life

I want to walk on water, climb walls, and dance on the ceiling. If insects can do it, it’s only fair that I should, too.

But this thing called physics has decreed otherwise. Carol Anelli, a WSU entomologist, can tell you why, having a lifelong fascination with ways insects can at times make us seem relatively slow, earthbound, and weak.

Carol Anelli
Carol Anelli (Photo Shelly Hanks)

Anelli first came upon the wonders of insects as a child among the woods and fields of a suburbanizing central Connecticut. She would pull caterpillars from her … » More …

Spring 2012

Good Science: The Pursuit of Truth and the Evolution of Reality

2012spring_goodscience_cover

Timothy McGettigan ’95 PhD
Lexington Books, 2011

Truth, writes Timothy McGettigan, is a challenging subject.

It’s hard to get at, consuming the bulk of scientific endeavor for starters. It’s also hard to nail down, with paradigm shifts both altering our sense of reality while rattling our faith that something like the truth can be attained.

McGettigan, a professor of sociology at Colorado State University-Pueblo, makes an enjoyable and wideranging case for forging ahead. Drawing on … » More …

Winter 2011

Bread books and videos

More than four decades ago, The Tassajara Bread Book opened up with the following epigram:

“We need more cooks, not more cookbooks.”

Now we have a lot more of both, plus video. Here are few of the latest gems of the genre:

 

My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method,Jim Lahey (W.W. Norton & Company)

A bread one doesn’t knead calls to mind a cake mix with a slew of mystery ingredients and food science. But Lahey’s bread has only four ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast, and the yeast is a fraction of … » More …

Alumni News
Winter 2011

Awards and Recognition

Each year, the WSU Alumni Association acknowledges alumni and volunteers who have made significant contributions to their professions, their communities, the world, and the University. The WSUAA Alumni Achievement Award was created in 1970 and of the nearly quarter of a million people who have attended WSC/WSU since 1890, only 495 have received it.

We salute the following Cougars who received the Alumni Achievement Award over the past year and thank them for the prestige they bring to their alma mater:

Robert Berry, ’50, Political Sciences

Drew Bledsoe, Former Student

Gordon W. Davis, ’68 & ’69, Agriculture

Holly Whitcomb Henry, ’78, BPH-Pharmacy

Tom Pounds, ’81, … » More …

Chance (Chad) McKinney ’94, ’96
Winter 2011

Chance McKinney ’94, ’96—Country music working man

It’s vacation season, mid-August. A light breeze off Lake Chelan wafts over Manson, where Chance McKinney and his band Crosswire prepare to open for country music star Dierks Bentley at the Mill Bay Casino.

For McKinney ’94, ’96—an all-American javelin thrower at Washington State University, former high school math teacher, songwriter, and country music artist—it’s a working day. “We don’t have a full team like these artists that are coming out of Nashville. It’s running a small business,” he says.

McKinney wears a baseball cap, t-shirt and jeans, and his rich voice and country-boy good looks have an edge of exhaustion from days, weeks, … » More …

Winter 2011

LaToya Harris ’03—Standing out

When coach LaToya Harris stands with her team on the volleyball court at Lewis-Clark State College, here’s the remarkable thing: She doesn’t stand out.

Sure, she is the only one wearing black crop pants instead of blue shorts and a white tee, but, suddenly it hits you—this is the woman who tallied 1,459 kills during her WSU career and still holds the record for service aces.

Her Cougar teammates voted her the team’s most valuable player in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and she remains the only WSU player to ever earn that award three times. In 1999, as a freshman, she was an honorable … » More …