Faculty receive promotions, tenure
At recent Board of Trustees meetings, faculty members were granted tenure, promoted with tenure, appointed with tenure or granted a track change with tenure.
THIS IS home.php
Creative outlet
Photo by Bill StoverA graduate student art exhibit titled Offcourse featured the work of some 65 graduate students from numerous disciplines across the University.
It’s a celebration!
Photo by Kevin LowderChinese New Year parties at the University included a Dragon Dance, student singing and dancing performances, and a bojutsu demonstration.
Investors don’t trust women, WUSTL study finds
Investors are reluctant to devote resources to female-run companies, according to research from two professors at the Olin School of Business. They found that potential backers are likely to invest 300 percent more in male-run firms than in firms run by a woman; and they would pay a female CEO 86 percent of the salary they’d pay a male CEO.
February 2006 Radio Service
Listed below are this month’s featured news stories.
• Warfarin increases risk of fractures (week of Feb. 1)
• Older adults can control health (week of Feb. 8)
• New cancer strategy (week of Feb. 15)
• Enzyme affects aging process (week of Feb. 22)
William Cronon to speak on landscape and environmental change Feb. 13
Courtesy photoWilliam CrononEnvironmental historian William Cronon will speak on “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Environmental Change” at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, studies the history of human interaction with the natural world.
Popular site sheds light on meteorites
Randy Korotev with a sample meteorite found in Siberia.The mysterious orb you find in your backyard that wasn’t there just the day before has to be a meteorite, right? Wrong. Overwhelmingly the chances are it’s a meteorwrong, says Randy Korotev, Ph.D., research associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that 998 out of 1,000 meteorites are from asteroids, one out of 1,000 is from the Moon, and one out of 1,000 is from Mars. Of the hundreds of meteorites that have been found in the United States, none has been a lunar meteorite, and only one has been a Mars meteorite.
New analysis shows three human migrations out of Africa
A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes — strongly — the ‘Out of Africa’ replacement theory. That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations — thus making love, not war.
Competition for sex is brutal in biodiversity hotspots
Good pollinators wantedMother Nature could use a few more good pollinators, especially in species-rich biodiversity hotspots, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS online, Jan. 16, 2006). Jana Vamosi, Ph.D, postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary and Tiffany Knight, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and their collaborators have performed an exhaustive global analysis of more than 1,000 pollination studies which included 166 different plant species and found that, in areas where there is a great deal of plant diversity, plants suffer lower pollination and reproductive success. For some plant species, this reduction in fruit and seed production could push them towards extinction.
Linguistic profiling: The sound of your voice may determine if you get that apartment or not
Many Americans can guess a caller’s ethnic background from their first hello on the telephone.
Can the sound of your voice be used against you?However, the inventor of the term “linguistic profiling” has found that when a voice sounds African-American or Mexican-American, racial discrimination may follow. In studying this phenomenon through hundreds of test phone calls, John Baugh, Ph.D., the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor and director of African and African American Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has found that many people made racist, snap judgments about callers with diverse dialects. Some potential employers, real estate agents, loan officers and service providers did it repeatedly, he says. Long before they could evaluate callers’ abilities, accomplishments, credit rating, work ethic or good works, they blocked callers based solely on linguistics.