Humanities & Society

WUSTL students living in on-campus housing on the South 40, the north side of the Danforth Campus and in fraternities are shutting off lights, sharing refrigerators and setting their laptops on power save mode to try to win the annual Green Cup. The Green Cup recognizes the team in each area of campus that garners the most points during the four-week competition, Feb 1-28.

Timothy McBride, PhD, professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on healthcare policy and health economics, has been named chairman of the MO HealthNET Oversight Committee for the state of Missouri.

For a majority of the pollsters and established pundits, the outcome of the 2012 presidential election was a shock. For statistician/author/blogger Nate Silver, it was anything but. In his Assembly Series presentation on Feb. 11, he will describe one of his secrets: discerning the “signal” from the “noise.”​

Three teams, including the first all-undergraduate team to place, earned a total of $140,000 during the annual Olin Cup commercial business plan competition finals Jan. 30 in Simon Hall.

Missouri’s first Family Impact Seminar, a national program aimed at educating lawmakers on family policy issues, was held Jan. 17 in Jefferson City for legislators and aides, and the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis took a lead role in bringing the forum to the state.

The Obama administration has proposed letting religiously affiliated non-profit businesses and institutions opt-out of the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act. “The Obama administration has bent over backward to accommodate the concerns of some religiously affiliated businesses,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University In St. Louis.

Students from Brittany Woods Middle School in the University City School District and Hixson Middle School in the Webster Groves School District came to WUSTL Jan. 29 to participate in the “Investigating Nanotechnology” program.

The Refund to Savings Initiative, the largest savings experiment ever conducted in the United States, begins with this tax season and is expected to reach almost 1.2 million households within the next few months. The project is a novel collaboration of university researchers, led by Michal Grinstein-Weiss, PhD, associate director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, and corporate partner Intuit Inc., the maker of TurboTax software, Quicken Books and Mint. This groundbreaking project is ushering in a new way of doing research.

Attorney and women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke, who last February testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the need to provide access to contraception, will kick off the spring lecture series sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 12, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium.

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service at WUSTL has announced faculty scholars receiving Innovation Grants for Community-Based Teaching and Learning. The grants provide faculty members with financial support for curriculum development and implementation.