April 9, 2009
Newsmakers
PENGUINS PROVE IT: Penguins are showing us that climate change has already occurred, UW Biology Professor Dee Boersma told The New York Times in a recent interview. “The birds are trying to adapt. But evolution is not fast enough to allow them to do that, over the long term,” she said. In the article, headlined “A Conversation with Dee Boersma: A Census Taker for Penguins in Argentina,” Boersma described her work studying the 200,000 breeding pairs of penguins at Punta Tombo, who are having to travel ever farther for food. “We’re seeing that conservation areas that we’ve set up to protect penguins are not going to work. If we’re going have penguins, I think we are going to have to do ocean zoning and try to manage people.” She added that researchers should try to anticipate where penguins might move next. “Right now they are on public land in Punta Tombo, but as the birds look for new food sources, they might end up colonizing beaches that are privately owned. What then?”
NAMED THAT SCHOOL: In his recent novel, The Associate, John Grisham used a real school — Duquesne Univerisity, a private Catholic college in Pittsburgh — as the site of a fraternity house rape that comes to haunt his protagonist. This caused concern among some writers and, not surprisingly, officials at Duquesne University itself, according to a recent article in Inside Higher Education. The article quoted Hazard Adams, UW professor emeritus of comparative literature, as among those who disagreed with Grisham’s choice. “I think it is inappropriate to use the name of an actual university in a piece of fiction when the issue is as explosive as (sexual assault),” Adams said. “In my three novels, comprising the Academic Trilogy, set on university campuses, I have invented fictional names and probably would do so no matter what the subject matter.”
POSTAL PROBLEMS: A recent article in USA Today about the U.S. Postal Service’s concerns amid the economic downturn quoted Richard Kielbowicz, a UW associate professor of communication. The article noted that the Postal Service, which earned $3.8 billion in the good times of 2003 but lost $7.9 billion in the last two years, is considering closing offices and moving from six to five deliveries a week to stay afloat. “The Postal Service was the nation’s first communication policy,” said Kielbowicz. “The Post Office was designed to circulate information so the nation could hang together. Everyone wants the post office to operate like a business. But they also want it to operate like a public service.” He said threats of ending six-day delivery date back a half-century. “This time, though, it doesn’t look like a bluff.”
POT DEBATE: The flap over Olympic medalist Michael Phelps being photograhed smoking marijuana has brought that still-illegal substance back into the headlines. But an article in The Los Angeles Times notes that pot never really went away. “It has been constant in terms of it being the most popular of the illicit drugs,” said Roger Roffman, UW professor of social work and director of the Innovative Programs Research Group. Roffman has studied the drug since the 1970s and, the article said, is writing a memoir of his 40 years observing the debate. “There aren’t many places where Joe and Mary Public can turn to for a balanced, up-to-date, accurate, rational debate about marijuana and all of its glitter and all of its warts,” Roffman said.
ON CLASS SIZE: Budget crises may cause public school classroom sizes to increase. A recent New York Times article discussed such increases and their perceived effect on the quality of education, along the way quoting New York Mayor Michael Bloomburg saying, “If you have to have smaller class size or better teachers, go with the better teachers every time.” Dan Goldhaber, a research professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at UW Bothell, said the focus on class size comes from a wish for “something that people can grasp easily — you walk into a class and you see exactly how many kids are there.” But he added, “Whether or not it translates into an additional advantage doesn’t necessarily matter. We know that teachers are the most important thing, but teacher quality is not stamped on someone’s forehead.”
CAFFEINE AND CANCER: “We have found what we believe to be the mechanism by which caffeine is associated with decreased skin cancer,” Paul Nghiem, UW associate professor of dermatology told U.S. News & World Report for a recent article. Nghiem studied caffeine’s effect on human cells that had been exposed to ultraviolet radiation and found that it could interrupt the work of a protein that caused the cells to self-destruct in some cases. “Caffeine more than doubles the number of damaged cells that will die normally after a given dose of UV,” Nghiem said. “This is a biological mechanism that explains what we have been seeing for many years from the oral intake of caffeine.” But he added that people should not increase the amount of caffeine they take in to battle skin cancer. “You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect. But if you like it, it’s another reason to drink it.”
TIPPING POINT? Is the world’s climate heading toward a tipping point from which it cannot return? Such was the question taken up by a recent Newsweek article, which quoted David Battisti, UW professor of atmospheric sciences, among others. The article noted that Arctic sea ice is shrinking faster than expected, but “how much is due to carbon dioxide and how much would the ice have retreated anyway?” There’s too little data to really know. “The most likely bet is that the acceleration is due to greenhouse warming,” Battisti said. “But I’d be nervous about making that bet. To know for certain we’d want a couple hundred years of data. We have 30 years of really good data.”
Newmakers is a periodic column reporting on the coverage of the University of Washington by the national press and broadcasting services.
