Humanities & Society

Anthropologist Eugenie Scott has been involved with some of the high-profile legal trials about the teaching of evolution in the classroom. She is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She speaks on intelligent design at the Assembly Series on March 22.

She’s executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

The series will consist of four feature films and four short films from seven different African nations; all screenings are free and begin at 7 p.m. in Brown Hall.

Courtesy photo*African Middleweights*Washington University will host the African Film Festival’s renowned Traveling Film Series March 23-26. The series consists of four feature films and four shorts from seven different African nations, addressing themes on colonialism, urbanization and youth subcultures erupting from the ironies of contemporary life.

On the heels of a highly acclaimed book on the NFL comes another football tome from Michael MacCambridge. In an era of stat freaks, over-analysis and just plain numbers-crunching, the literary world — and sports world — needed a book like the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Game (ESPN Books, 2005). MacCambridge, adjunct professor of journalism in University College in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, took three years worth of exhaustive research by several football experts and edited it into an easy-to-read format. More…

America’s conflicted cultural obsession with the gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” might seem old-fashioned in Japan where stories of love and romance between beautiful young men have been entertaining women for more than a decade, suggests Rebecca Copeland, Ph.D., a Japanese studies professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to movies, male-male romance is a popular theme in a variety of other Japanese pop culture media, including book-length graphic novels and comics, known as manga, and an array of animated cartoons and television action series, known as anime. All of which have developed cult followings on the Internet and among fans of late-night cable television programming, including large numbers of American teens. More…

In recent years, one in five U.S. Latina teens attempted suicide. Though this rate is startlingly higher than their non-Hispanic peers, “efforts to understand the phenomenon have been hampered by a dearth of solid statistics and research,” says Luis H. Zayas, Ph.D., professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on mental health issues in the Latino community. “We have developed a new research model that will help us to understand what is really behind those statistics.” More…

Repeated testing vs. repeated studyingRemember the dreaded pop quiz? Despite their reputation as a cruel tool of teachers intent on striking fear into the hearts of unprepared students, quizzes — given early and often — may be a student’s best friend when it comes to understanding and retaining information for the long haul, suggests new psychology research from Washington University in St. Louis. More…

Concerns over biopiracy have fueled urgent calls for a new system of legal protection for indigenous biological materials and knowledge. Detractors of the current patent systems say that the knowledge of traditional cultures and communities does not readily fit into the industrialized world’s definition of intellectual property (IT); critics argue that existing laws basically promote the interests of the industrialized world. However, intellectual property and technology law expert Charles McManis, J.D., disagrees. More…

The Bush administration’s plan to push through health savings accounts is limited in how much it can lower healthcare costs, according to a business professor in the Olin School of Business at Washington University. He says that health savings accounts could work for some things – if the relationship between most doctors and patients changes, and if there were greater acceptance of the variety of ways to keep people healthy. More…