winter 2018

Once a frontier discipline, digital arts now well established at CU �鶹ӰԺ

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:26:59 +0000

Once a frontier discipline, digital arts now well established at CU �鶹ӰԺ Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/10/2018 - 10:26

Jeff Thomas

Back in the day, people spoke of “building the bike as we were trying to ride it.” Today, digital artists are defining the art as they create it, said Mark Amerika, founder of TECHNE Lab at the �鶹ӰԺ.

Amerika, a college professor of distinction of art and art history who has been described as a “pioneer” of digital art, founded the TECHNE lab in 2002 to develop “innovative approaches to the invention of new forms of knowledge generally considered to be both artistic and scholarly.”

Mark Amerika. At the top of the page is an image from CU MFA graduate Rick Silva's work, displayed in the TECHNE Lab exhibition at the city of New York's Made in NY Media Art Gallery.

He said the field offers no shortage of material on which to focus artistic and scholarly attention: “I’m covering a lot of ground: internet art, live multi-media performance, digital fiction and feature-length films shot exclusively on mobile phone.”

“When they hired me, there weren’t that many universities supporting this kind of work, so this meant we were able to attract some of the better students because we were out there early,” Amerika said. “Now almost every university has a digital arts component to their research program.”

There may be no art field expanding as quickly as the digital arts—which is art that made or presented using digital technology—Amerika said, adding that most of the undergraduate students have grown up immersed in the field through social media. Nonetheless, there is a great need to enable a more focused approach, which the TECHNE Lab provides.

“We attract students from art and art history but really from all over campus: units in (the College of Media, Communication and Information) like communication, advertising and critical media practices, the College of Music, English and creative writing, as well as students in the ATLAS Technology and Arts and Media program who want to stretch their arts and humanities muscles using creative technologies,” he said.

“The TECHNE Lab provides more of an arts-centric focus; we’re very conceptual, very experimental, very politically engaged.”

CU �鶹ӰԺ is instituting a PhD program in digital arts and humanities; the recently established doctoral program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP), where Amerika serves as the founding chair. By operating as an interdisciplinary digital arts and humanities research unit, IAWP allows graduate students to pursue practice-based PhDs where the students create elaborate creative projects for their final thesis.

“We are trying to make things more flexible for students who don’t want to put themselves in some sort of disciplinary box,” he said. Because of this, graduate students can produce a wide array of art, ranging from museum pieces and live performances to digitally expanded forms of creative writing produced for the internet.

CU MFA graduate Nicholas O'Brien's work on display in New York this summer. Images courtesy of Mark Amerika.

This past summer, the TECHNE Lab exhibited artwork from both current and former students at venues in both Brooklyn and Governors Island. Current PhD students Laura Kim, Ryan Ruehlen and Ryan Wurst had pieces in the show, as did former students Melanie Clemmons, Rick Silva, Nicholas O’Brien, Zak Lloyd and Paul Echeverria.

All of the former MFA students from the Department of Art and Art History featured in the exhibition had previously taught and conducted their practice-based research inside the TECHNE Lab before the inception of the PhD program and have since gone on to help establish digital art programs in universities across the country.

“In Brooklyn, the artwork was displayed on these big, beautiful screens customized for animation and 3D works,” Amerika said. “It was great fun, and visitors got to see a variety of artwork created by former and current students who passed through the lab.”

Some of that work is widely disseminated on the internet, as well. Amerika said all students who study the field seem to be automatically wired to get their work in front of the masses in some form.

“The word these days is ‘public-facing,’ and because they grew up exposed to this kind of insta-art, artists are sort of wired to go out and find an audience for their work. It’s embedded in their psyche. It’s just something that comes naturally.”

People once spoke of “building the bike as we were trying to ride it.” Today, digital artists are defining the art as they create it, said Mark Amerika, founder of TECHNE Lab at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

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Renewable energy goals can A) boost infrastructure or B) cut emissions

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 23:44:51 +0000

Renewable energy goals can A) boost infrastructure or B) cut emissions Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/06/2018 - 16:44

While states believed Renewable Portfolio Standards would yield both environmental benefits and resource booms, researchers find that it’s one or the other

States working within our nation’s patchwork of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) apparently can’t have their cake and eat it too, according to a recent study co-authored by a �鶹ӰԺ economics professor.

The study found that enacting such standards can generate either lots of renewable infrastructure or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, but not both. Many states have adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards to support alternative energy and mitigate climate change.

Daniel Kaffine

“We spent some time looking at what exactly people were saying in the (state) legislatures when they passed these (RPS),” said Professor Daniel Kaffine, co-author of the research, which was published earlier this year in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

“We saw them talking in terms of both environmental benefits and resource booms.”

RPS polices typically require that a certain percentage of a state’s power be produced by renewable energy such as wind and solar. Colorado’s RPS has a target of 30 percent renewables by 2020.

It turns out that if there is a patchwork of roughly 30 different states adopting different rules for each RPS, the different standards can result in either big resource booms—lots of renewable infrastructure—or big benefits in pollution reduction, but not both, the study states.

“And that’s a consequence of having this patchwork of RPS across different states with different resource bases and different RPS stringencies,” Kaffine said.

You can look at an RPS like a ratio, with a numerator and denominator. If the RPS increases, one way to approach that is to make the numerator bigger, increasing renewable production, but that means there will be less emissions reduction in the denominator.”

Some of that is by design, the study notes, as when Iowa developed its RPS in 1983, emphasizing the use of corn for ethanol, thus resulting in a resource boom that didn’t produce much in the way of emission reduction, but did provide economic relief during a farming crisis. New Jersey, which went for stringent renewable standards, though it doesn’t really have the sun or the wind to make it work, has seen great emission reduction, but not much in the way of a resource boom.

But the paper was not based on case studies; rather it created a general equilibrium model of an RPS policy that captures key features of the economic features that come into play. The idea, Kaffine said, was to create a model that state legislatures could use to predict the effects of their RPS.

“Essentially the question we wanted to answer is how a state’s economy would respond to an increase in RPS standards,” Kaffine said. “Given that, we set up a sort of toy model of the economy that’s all self-contained and consistent: accounting for demands of consumers and decisions made by producers.”

“You can look at an RPS like a ratio, with a numerator and denominator,” Kaffine continued. “If the RPS increases, one way to approach that is to make the numerator bigger, increasing renewable production, but that means there will be less emissions reduction in the denominator.”

That’s similar to what has transpired in Colorado. The state created new renewable resources in both solar and wind, but that resource boom hasn’t necessarily meant huge emissions reduction, as much of the power finds its way to other places on the grid or making new power available here.

That’s exactly the opposite of what has occurred in New Jersey, Kaffine said. The state ratcheted up its standards to require a certain percentage of (costly to generate) solar; a move that decreased the amount of total power produced in the state, suppliers finding other resources or consumers cutting back usage.

The paper was co-authored by economists Antonio M. Bento, a professor at the University of Southern California, and Teevrat Garg, an assistant professor at the University of California San Diego.

Kaffine said the paper went on hold for a time as the Obama Administration was working on a federal clean energy plan, but its timing today can still help states attempting to create a clean energy route of their own.

States working within our nation’s patchwork of Renewable Portfolio Standards apparently can’t have their cake and eat it too, according to a recent study.

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Creative writing alums cultivate conjoined creativity

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 20:04:55 +0000

Creative writing alums cultivate conjoined creativity Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/06/2018 - 13:04

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU �鶹ӰԺ alumni David Gessner and Nina de Gramont have succeeded both as authors and teachers

For a couple of writers who also happen to be a writing couple, David Gessner and Nina de Gramont admit they’ve got it pretty good.

Gessner (MA, Engl’98) is professor and chair of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and published nine books, including the New York Times bestseller All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West.

De Gramont—who began her master’s degree in the �鶹ӰԺ creative writing program and completed it at UNCW—is an associate professor in the same department and has published eight works of fiction for both young adults and adults, including the novel The Last September.

Nina de Gramont and David Gessner share a moment during "our �鶹ӰԺ days." Photo courtesy of Gramont and Gessner.

“We are lucky to be where we are,” says Gessner.

But the couple, who have also lived on Cape Cod—the subject of Gessner’s highly praised A Wild, Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod—confess a sneaking desire to return one day to their favorite place.

“�鶹ӰԺ is still our shining city on a hill, despite the real-estate prices,” Gessner says.

But for now, they are content to visit for a month each summer with their teenage daughter, Hadley (“Yes,” de Gramont answers, anticipating a question before it’s asked, she was named primarily in honor of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson), where they relish riding their bikes up actual hills.

Gessner and de Gramont met in CU’s creative writing master’s degree program in the 1990s. They acknowledge that the program’s somewhat experimental emphasis didn’t quite match their own, more traditional narrative approaches, but they found their places nonetheless.

“I tend to be a very obedient student, so I started writing things that were really out there. It was helpful for me to have that, actually. When I returned to what came more naturally to me, I had a better grasp of how to use language and how to use form,” says de Gramont, who cites Marilyn Krisl and Suzanne Juhasz as influential faculty members.

Considered something of a curmudgeon by his fellow students, Gessner says he never really plugged into the community. Instead, he focused on his writing, biking and his passion for ultimate Frisbee, the subject of his later book Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth (Riverhead Books, 2017).

“It was sort of a mismatch for me, very experimental. (Program faculty) tended to turn their noses up at any whiff of narrative,” he says.

Gessner cites Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and Philip Roth as early influences: “Abbey was one of my earliest models. I liked the way he could re-create his personality on the page. You can’t wave hands or use voice to create that. It’s an underrated ability.”

He gravitated toward three faculty members whose work focused more on place and nature, writers Reg Saner and Linda Hogan and English professor Marty Bickman. He also reveled in his life in �鶹ӰԺ—and publishing a cheeky comic strip, “The Ballad of �鶹ӰԺ,” in the �鶹ӰԺ Weekly—in the wake of recovery from testicular cancer. Gessner’s early memoir, Under the Devil’s Thumb, explores his new life in the West, what Stegner called, “the geography of hope.”

Abbey was one of my earliest models. I liked the way he could re-create his personality on the page. You can’t wave hands or use voice to create that. It’s an underrated ability.”

“It was about my awakening and coming back to health, having time to write in a stunningly beautiful place, Eldorado Springs,” Gessner says. He knocked the book out in a month and a half, setting a pattern for future writing projects. “I build, build, build, then blast them out.”

With the pending publication of A Wild, Rank Place in 1997, Gessner decided that “it wouldn’t do for a Cape Cod nature writer to be living in Colorado,” and the couple moved to his mother’s empty house on the Cape.

“That was both a romantic time and a crazy-making time. People think Cape Cod is all about Kennedys and rich folk, but in February, it’s more like the Arctic,” Gessner says. “For us, it was a great and fruitful writing period.”

De Gramont sold her first book while living on Cape Cod, the short-story collection Of Cats and Men, winner of the Discovery Award from the New England Booksellers Association. Gessner, meanwhile, was writing Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder, judged a “classic of American nature writing” by the Boston Globe.

Gessner also began commuting two hours to teach in the extension and summer writing programs at his alma mater, Harvard, where he would later create the school’s creative nonfiction writing program. When he was named to a Briggs-Copeland Lectureship at Harvard, the couple moved to Cambridge, taking up residence in the apartment of the late Irish playwright and poet Seamus Heaney and welcoming Hadley to the family.

In 2002, following the success of Return of the Osprey, UNCW invited Gessner to interview for a job in its Creative Writing Department. He got the job, and the couple has lived there ever since.

“We’re always angsting a little bit, ‘Why aren’t we out West? Why aren’t we up North?’” Gessner says. “But we have two really good jobs in the same program. This is where our daughter grew up. And my writing has grown being here—the fact that I’m not writing book after book on ‘I love this place’; I’m not trying to write ‘Walden’ three times in a row about �鶹ӰԺ and Cape Cod.”

De Gramont recently submitted a new novel to her agent, and Gessner is working on a book entwining the stories of Theodore Roosevelt and Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. In 1906, Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the authority to create national monuments on federal lands to protect significant natural, cultural or scientific features. Bears Ears has become a political battleground between factions that want to either preserve or exploit natural landscapes

“I spent basically two months out there in Bears Ears this summer to experience it,” says Gessner, who also blogs at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. “The book will be a history of the Antiquities Act woven together with the biography of a very charismatic—and potentially racist toward Native Americans—president. … I want to bring readers to the subjects through the prism of my own, more limited self, getting to the bigger issues through a human conduit.”

CU �鶹ӰԺ alumni David Gessner and Nina de Gramont have succeeded both as authors and teachers.

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‘Til death do us part

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 18:36:17 +0000

‘Til death do us part Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/06/2018 - 11:36

Sarah Kuta

CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers find link between marriage quality and mortality

If you’ve taken the plunge, you’ve likely heard some variation of the popular marriage expression: “Happy spouse, peaceful house.”

But new research from the �鶹ӰԺ suggests that the phrase doesn’t go far enough and that the quality of your marriage may be linked to how long you live.

A trio of CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers in the psychology and neuroscience department recently set out to explore the connection between marriage quality and mortality. The findings of their study were published in the journal Health Psychology in November.

Researchers Mark Whisman, Anna Gilmour and Julia Salinger.

“We found that the odds of dying for married people who described their marriage as ‘not too happy’ was 25 percent greater than the odds of dying for people who rated their marriage as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy,’” said Mark Whisman, a CU �鶹ӰԺ professor of psychology and neuroscience and the study’s lead author.

Past research has found a connection between the quality of our marriages and our physical health. In addition, other studies have measured the link between marital satisfaction and mortality in people with pre-existing conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and renal disease.

But Whisman, who also serves as the department’s associate chair for undergraduate education and director of undergraduate studies, wanted to understand whether a connection exists between relationship quality and death by any means, a “downstream” health outcome, in a sample of the general, healthy population.

To do that, Whisman and graduate students Anna Gilmour and Julia Salinger analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a long-running national survey of American households led by the University of Chicago with funding from the National Science Foundation. They focused their attention on data gathered from more than 19,000 married individuals between 1978 and 2010.

We found that the odds of dying for married people who described their marriage as ‘not too happy’ was 25 percent greater than the odds of dying for people who rated their marriage as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy."

As part of the survey, these married participants were asked, “Taking things all together, how would you describe your marriage? Would you say that your marriage is very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” The participants then selected one answer to rate their relationship.

Whisman, Gilmour and Salinger linked this survey data with information from the National Death Index, a database of national mortality statistics maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Even after factoring in participants’ household income and self-rated health, the results showed a connection between marriage quality and mortality rates — those who were in happier marriages had lower odds of dying than those in not-so-happy marriages. The findings seem to support past studies led by Whisman, including research that linked divorce to a biological indicator of early aging.

“Mortality is arguably the most detrimental health outcome and so even though there are a lot of studies showing that relationship quality can be impactful on less-severe health outcomes, it was really intriguing to see that we did find a significant difference even for mortality,” Gilmour said.

Because past research has found that women have more interdependent self-concepts — meaning they tend to define their identities in the context of their relationships to other people more so than men — the researchers suspected that marriage quality may be more closely linked with mortality for women. But they ultimately found no evidence of gender differences in their analysis of the data.

It’s important to note that the CU �鶹ӰԺ research showed a correlation between marriage quality and mortality, not a causal relationship, meaning that bad marriages don’t necessarily cause death, Whisman said.

The researchers pointed out that the magnitude of the association between marriage quality and mortality is similar to that of physical inactivity and mortality, which suggests that we should consider paying just as much attention to the health of our marriages as we do to hitting the gym regularly.

Everyone knows that being physically inactive is bad for your health and can lead to a reduced lifespan, but you don’t really hear doctors talking about your relationship with your partner as something you should boost to potentially live longer."

“Everyone knows that being physically inactive is bad for your health and can lead to a reduced lifespan, but you don’t really hear doctors talking about your relationship with your partner as something you should boost to potentially live longer,” said Gilmour.

Though this study didn’t examine why marriage quality is linked to mortality, Whisman said researchers have several possible explanations as to why our primary romantic relationships seem to have such a big impact on our health.

Our romantic partners can help reinforce healthy behaviors, such as eating a healthy diet and getting regular exercise, while also helping us shed bad habits. Relationships can also provide a sense of security and purpose in our lives, while at the same time buffering the effects of acute or chronic stressors, Whisman added.

In their paper, Whisman, Gilmour and Salinger called for additional research to build upon their findings and pointed out that their study has limitations. For starters, participants were only asked one question about the quality of their marriages at one point in time, meaning the researchers didn’t get a very detailed look inside their relationships, nor could they consider changes over time.

There was also no accounting of people who separated or divorced after participating in the survey, nor any measure of other relationship characteristics, such as the length of the marriage or whether the participants had been married before.

“It would be really interesting to do this study in a sample where more is asked about the relationship with the partner,” Gilmour said. “Just knowing whether someone is satisfied or not with their marriage does actually tell you a good amount, but I would be interested in knowing what particular things are actually happening in those relationships.”

Futures studies might also consider the specific biological pathways underlying the connection between marriage quality and mortality, Salinger said. In other words, what’s happening in the bodies and minds of people in both happy and unhappy marriages that could be connected to their life expectancy?

“More research on why and how this kind of psycho-social stress leads to mortality, particularly through cardiac, immune, and neuroendocrine pathways, would be informative,” Salinger said.

Future research that replicates and extends these findings could have important public health implications — doctors may be inclined to prescribe couples counseling to help lengthen their patients’ lives, for example. Until then, the researchers say their findings are an interesting addition to the growing body of research into how our romantic partnerships affect our health and wellbeing.

“It could really speak to the importance of screening couples to try to detect those who are discordant and connect them with resources in the community and therapists to try to improve their marital satisfaction with a goal of improving their health and, potentially, longevity,” Salinger said.

New research from CU �鶹ӰԺ suggests that the quality of your marriage may be linked to how long you live.

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As she blazes trails, Rhodes Scholar leads and inspires

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:33:16 +0000

As she blazes trails, Rhodes Scholar leads and inspires Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/04/2018 - 09:33

James W.C. White

Serene Singh aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there

Follow your heart.

That’s the advice I give the many students who ask me how to choose from the diverse array of degree possibilities at the �鶹ӰԺ. When you follow your personal passion, you wake up in the morning excited to get after every day. That’s when you do your best. Do what you are passionate about doing and life seems more like a daily gift and less like a daily grind.

James W.C. White

Serene Singh is a classic example. Serene aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there.

She is the first woman from CU �鶹ӰԺ to be named a Rhodes Scholar, and she’s in good company. Former Supreme Court Justices David Souter and John Marshall Harlan II were also Rhodes Scholars. So was CU �鶹ӰԺ student (and football star) Byron White, who was named a Rhodes Scholar 80 years ago and was later the first Coloradan to serve on the high court.

Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am? If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”
—Serene Singh

Following their path, she will study at Oxford University, where she will pursue graduate degrees in criminology and criminal justice. Singh, who is from Colorado Springs and is majoring in political science and journalism, has previously been named a Truman Scholar and Dalai Lama Scholar. She is president of her political science honors fraternity, chief justice of the CU Student Government’s judicial branch, and president and founder of the Sikh Student Association.

She is also president and founder of The Serenity Project, a nonprofit aimed at empowering women in at-risk communities. It aims to boost women’s self-esteem by imparting skills such as public speaking and interviewing.

These are talents Singh honed through pageantry. She was Miss Colorado Teen 2016 and America’s Junior Miss in 2017. “I joined pageantry because I had a bias against it,” she told Voice of America. Doing things she thinks she will hate, she said, is one way to challenge herself.

It’s also one way to expand one’s horizons, a principle at the core of a liberal arts education. Open inquiry is a critical value the university strives to impart, as is independent thought. Both permeate her philanthropic work and disciplinary focus.

“Going into college, there was a lot of pressure from my community and from the world around me to be either in engineering or in pre-med,” she said. “Even in high school, I really felt like in order to be successful, I needed to be in the hard sciences.”

But science was not where her passions lay: “It was in government. It was in communications like journalism, and it was in understanding our Constitution, democracy, freedom studies and learning how to reduce violence through a political lens in the United States.”

Each student choosing whether to study the humanities, STEM or anything in between, Singh said, should ask themselves this question: “Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am?” Singh added: “If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”

Serene Singh personifies hard work, intellectual curiosity and compassion. And she embodies the wisdom of some old but good advice: Follow your heart.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Serene Singh aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there.

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Declining warblers making the best of bad situation

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 17:15:12 +0000

Declining warblers making the best of bad situation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/03/2018 - 10:15

Cay Leytham-Powell

The discovery of a rare three-species warbler hybrid suggests bird species in sharp decline are struggling to find suitable mates

A strange warbler found in a Pennsylvania backyard is the first-of-its-kind three-species hybrid, indicating nearby endangered warblers might be making the best of a declining population—but at a cost, according to new research from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the �鶹ӰԺ.

With a mother that is a fertile hybrid of the Golden-winged Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler, and a father that is a Chestnut-sided Warbler, this newly found bird is one of only a few firmly documented cases of a three-species hybrid ever found, and the only known hybrid of two completely different genera (or, the biological classification above species).

The newly discovered three-species hybrid is believed to have stemmed from a mother, who was also a hybrid, and a Chestnut-Sided Warbler. Graphic by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

These findings were recently published by the journal Biology Letters.

“I don’t think we would’ve expected that across such a different part of the warbler evolutionary tree we’d still have offspring produced. They’re genetically very different birds,” said Scott Taylor, an assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at CU �鶹ӰԺ and one of the study’s co-authors.

The small, vocal bird was first spotted in May 2018 by Lowell Burket, a bird watcher, on his property in Pennsylvania. Burket, who is a co-author on the study, had gotten into birding only in the last few years, and immediately noticed when he reviewed a video he took that there was something not quite right about this bird. It looked and acted like both Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers, but it sang like, and had minor physical characteristics of, a Chestnut-sided Warbler.

After seeing the bird a few times, he sent a photograph and video of it to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where Taylor was previously a postdoctoral researcher. The bird immediately drew the interest of Taylor and David Toews, a fellow postdoc, as the bird was found in an area where Golden-winged Warblers have declined dramatically over the past decade.

“During fieldwork in West Virginia the previous summer, we were having these conversations about, what if Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers hybridize with Chestnut-sided Warblers? But we both thought that would be crazy,” said Taylor.

Scott Taylor, seen here holding a Chestnut-Sided Warbler, helped identify the three-species hybrid. Photograph courtesy of Scott Taylor.

Toews immediately went to the property and retrieved a blood sample from the bird. And, using that sample and genomic tools they had already created from Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers, Toews and Taylor established that this mysterious bird was indeed a three-species hybrid.

"I had literally zero knowledge about birds until seven years ago," Burket commented to the Lab of Ornithology. "And now I end up discovering what appears to be a first-of-its-kind bird. It can happen to anybody!"

While the three-species hybrid is interesting, Taylor cautions that it’s hard to say how evolutionary relevant this hybrid is to the grand scheme of warbler speciation and conservation. Rather, it might actually hurt the Golden-winged Warbler, which is up for consideration to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, and the Blue-winged Warbler’s future survival.

And this issue isn’t new. Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers have increasingly been hybridizing, thanks in part to a steep decline in their populations stemming from habitat loss in their wintering grounds—Venezuela and Central America.

“It’s maybe rarity of mates that caused this hybridization because the mother just couldn’t find another Blue-winged or Golden-winged to breed with, so she bred with a Chestnut-sided,” commented Taylor.

Toews agreed in a comment to Cornell: "That this hybridization occurred within a population of Golden-winged Warblers in significant decline suggests that females may be making the best of a bad situation.”

Toews and Taylor will continue monitoring this three-species hybrid going forward to see if it will try and find a mate next year, and then, if so, whether the hybrid is sterile or fertile.

The discovery of a rare three-species warbler hybrid suggests bird species in sharp decline are struggling to find suitable mates.

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There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:16:57 +0000

There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:16

Jeff Thomas

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art

Art has always taken our imaginations to unexplored places, and now two �鶹ӰԺ art professors are finding it can also encourage freshmen, through a first-year seminar, to actively explore the campus, community and, hopefully, the wide world of academia.

“You get them out of their shell, get them to feel a part of the fabric of the campus, and beyond the campus as part of the community,” said Brianne Cohen, assistant professor of art history. “How do they become citizens of the world? Art is a great way to think through that.”

Paul Ramirez Jonas, a visiting art professor from Hunter College and an internationally renowned public-space artist, speaks to a First Year Seminar on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus this fall. At the top of the page is an image from Jonas' "Key to the City" project in Manhattan. Image courtesy of Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Many departments on the �鶹ӰԺ campus are involved with the First-Year Seminar series, which are courses designed to help freshman acclimate to the university. Almost none of the freshmen registered in the course are actually art majors.

Neither Cohen nor Yumi Janairo Roth, an associate professor in art practices, had taught the seminar before. However, both are involved in post-studio, public-space art at CU �鶹ӰԺ, Cohen as an art historian and Roth as an artist.

“I just said, ‘Hey, we should teach one together,’” Roth said. Both think it is the first time any CU �鶹ӰԺ studio art and art history professors have taught an entire course together.

The seminar, “Art, Public, Site: Imagining Place and Making Worlds,” is very much geared toward getting freshman to go to different places, engage with people in those places and learn from those experiences. The initial phase, mapping, was sometimes as simple as throwing darts at a campus map and then figuring out routes to get there.

The students were also excited in October when visiting Hunter College Art Professor Paul Ramirez Jonas, an internationally renowned public-space artist, dropped in for a week.

Jonas gave the freshmen students an assignment to investigate how people interacted with art in public spaces, such as sculpture parks, campus buildings and hospitals. He has been a groundbreaking artist in socially engaged art, including the “Key to the City” program that engaged more than 25,000 participants in New York to explore new spaces.

Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

“The assignment was basically to imagine yourself as an anthropologist doing fieldwork. What do they take for granted as a space? How does art operate? It was a good exercise at looking at spaces and how people interacted with those spaces,” Roth said.

“Then (in a class that Jonas attended) we did more brainstorming on what they might change. Get them to think about what’s on hand, and what they could do to disrupt conventional systems by manipulating that space.”

That brainstorming was an important step, as that is exactly what the art professors are trying to get the freshmen to do with experiencing their own place on the campus and in the community: Mapping the space they frequent, interacting in that space and then intervening by changing their own behavior to question and explore those interactions.

“It fits with the freshman experience. How do you fit in? How do you relate? How do you branch out more and more and have an impact on that social space,” Cohen said. “Paul did a wonderful job, and the students were really excited that an international artist was coming to talk to them personally.”

Jonas said that an illuminating part of the course came when students realized that an exchange that would change interaction did not have to be money or something else usually considered valuable: it could be a wave or even a “secret.”

“I think introducing students to art through public art is a sound idea,” Jonas said. “Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

And at least one of the first-year students was reconsidering branching out from her strategic communications major and including some form of art as a minor, or perhaps a double major.

“It was amazing and a valuable experience for freshmen as you are trying to get involved with something,” said Jordan Altergott of Denver, who now professes to be a big fan of Jonas. “To have him in such an intimate setting was phenomenal.”

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art,

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Think the Bible is fully understood? CU scholar begs to differ

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:15:10 +0000

Think the Bible is fully understood? CU scholar begs to differ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:15

Sarah Kuta

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sam Boyd, a CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar of Biblical studies, dove into the study of religious texts ‘so I know what I’m talking about’

When he tells people about his research, Sam Boyd is often met with perplexed looks and questions. But why are you studying the Bible? Don’t we know everything there is to know already?

But the University of Colorado faculty member simply smiles and explains that while the Bible is extremely popular — it’s the world’s best-selling book of all time — it’s still ripe for exploration.

Sam Boyd

“The answer is always, ‘No, we know next to nothing about it still,’” said Boyd, an assistant professor of religious studies and Jewish studies.

Perhaps that’s why Boyd, who also serves as the director of undergraduate studies for the Program in Jewish Studies, is such a productive scholar — he’s driven by an intense curiosity and the desire to solve what he describes as a “really interesting, sophisticated puzzle” in understanding the Bible.

Case in point, he’s in the process of writing his second book, which is based on an article being published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies this spring about the Tower of Babel passage in the book of Genesis. This year, he was also a member of the inaugural cohort of fellows in the Research and Innovation Office, a prestigious new program that seeks to build and enhance scholarly leadership across campus.

Beyond that, fellow professors say Boyd is a congenial colleague who is dedicated to service within the department and building bridges to other disciplines. As a teacher, Boyd is “inspiring and challenging,” forcing students to think critically about widely accepted views of the Bible, said David Shneer, chair of the religious studies department.

This well-rounded faculty member, who became CU’s first Biblical scholar when he arrived in the fall of 2015, is already considered a rising star in his department and across the campus at large.

“He’s unbelievable, and we’re really, really lucky to have him,” said Nan Goodman, director of the Program in Jewish Studies. “He’s really ramped up the intellectual rigor of the department, both for the students and among his colleagues. His scholarship is meticulous and innovative and he has really shed a huge amount of light on what the Bible is as a text.”

Boyd didn’t always want to become a professor — in fact, when he was a kid, he dreamt of growing up to be Indiana Jones. He studied economics and American history as an undergraduate at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and was working at a bank when a series of conversations caused him to rethink his career path entirely.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Boyd remembers having happy hour debates with his coworkers about Christianity, Islam and other religions. But for Boyd, these after after-work conversations went much deeper.

“I thought, ‘I should go read these texts so I know what I’m talking about’ and I just got hooked — that’s what led me on this journey,” he said.

He earned a master of divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary before earning his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2014. Today, he uses more than 20 languages to study ancient texts and gain a better understanding of the conversations Biblical scribes were having with the world around them through their writing.

“The basic question I ask is, ‘Where did the Bible come from? Why did people start writing it?’” he said. “People think of the Bible as just a book you pull off the shelf at Barnes & Noble and it’s always kind of looked like this, and that’s not the case.”

Though religion can be a polarizing issue, Boyd has made a point of reaching out to pastors, rabbis and imams in Colorado to introduce himself since arriving at CU �鶹ӰԺ from Chicago three years ago. He said he hopes his work can help spark a constructive dialogue that transcends political and religious differences.

“I am not out to tell people whether God exists or whether there’s one or many gods or whether God is a man or a woman — that is not what I do,” he said. “I’m interested in the people walking around in the ancient Near East whose thought is reflected in what becomes the Bible, the very real issues of what it means to be human in the world.”

Because interpretations of Bible passages are referenced so frequently in popular culture, political discourse and everyday conversations, Boyd and his colleagues say they believe it’s more important than ever to understand what this book actually says.

“Whether it’s the attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh or whether it’s our presidential election, it’s important for us to get it right and be responsible with it, whether we’re religious or not,” Boyd said.

The topic of his forthcoming journal article and book provides a perfect example of why Boyd’s research into ancient Biblical texts is so relevant today.

Traditionally, the Tower of Babel story has been interpreted like this: People attempted to build a tower that reached heaven, but were stymied when God caused them to speak different languages and scattered them across the earth.

In the modern era, politicians and pundits have used this interpretation in debates about immigration reform, arguing that multilingualism is a sign of God’s curse and should be avoided at all costs; a similar interpretation also appears in literature and art. For example, Pat Buchanan, who unsuccessfully ran for president three times in the 1990s and early 2000s, has cited the Tower of Babel story to argue against multiculturalism in America. Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor who made an unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, used “Tower of Babel” to criticize Democrats’ love of diversity in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But based on his analysis of the syntax and the order of Biblical chapters, Boyd argues that the story is not about language at all.

“When we take the Tower of Babel story and put it in its ancient Near Eastern context … Syrian kings would talk about ‘one mouth’ as a political metaphor,” Boyd said. “It had nothing to do with everyone speaking the same language, but was about political unification and fragmentation against authority. And boy, if we’ve gotten that story wrong, that has a big impact on people’s political metaphors, a big impact on art history, on literature.”

In essence, much of Boyd’s research can fundamentally change the way we think about the Bible and call into question long-held notions about morality, human behavior, diversity and other topics.

These types of research revelations from Boyd consistently impressed the 12 other inaugural Research and Innovation Office faculty fellows, a cohort of early to mid-career tenured and tenure-track professors who were identified as leaders in research, collaboration and systems thinking.

The first group of participants in the new program spent 2018 forming cross-campus relationships, improving and developing leadership skills, setting professional goals and discussing the significance of their roles within the university community and in society at large. The second cohort will begin the fellowship in January 2019.

“Most of the faculty in the program were mesmerized whenever Sam spoke because he had such a breadth of understanding of humanity and history through his studies of the Bible,” said Kirsten Rowell, program director for the fellowship program. “We had a really broad group of intellects in the program, and we were all thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to understand more.’”

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sam Boyd, a CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar of Biblical studies, dove into the study of religious texts ‘so I know what I’m talking about.’

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CU �鶹ӰԺ pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:11:26 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:11

Sarah Schleifer

Carey Stapleton, PhD candidate at CU �鶹ӰԺ, was survey lead for the American Politics Research Lab’s Colorado Political Climate Survey

The nature of political polling is changing in the United States, and Carey Stapleton, a PhD student in American politics and methodology at the �鶹ӰԺ, is equipping his undergraduate Survey Design and Analysis class, to meet these changes head-on.

Carey Stapleton

The result of this class was the recently released Colorado Political Climate Survey. Through creating a class centered around surveys and polls from CU’s American Politics Research Lab (APRL), Stapleton is teaching his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

Stapleton, who has “a substantial background in survey design,” was approached two years ago by Professors Scott Adler, Anand Sokhey and David Brown to create a class in survey design and political polling.

“We all sat around and developed the syllabus for the course, and we finally started teaching it last fall.” He says the class has grown by a factor of three in two years, and is continuing to pick up speed.

Stapleton says the Colorado Political Climate Survey took a couple years to perfect. “We tried to get both information that's relevant to Colorado specifically, but also kind of how Coloradans feel about broader national issues.”

It’s why the poll features questions ranging from intent to vote in the gubernatorial election to opinions on sports gambling, recreational marijuana laws, and if “Dreamers” should be allowed to remain in the country.

In 33 pages packed with data and analysis, the survey “is designed to gauge the public’s political and partisan leanings,” and correctly predicted the outcomes of the gubernatorial and congressional races, but revealed inconsistencies in polling with issues on the ballot like Propositions 73, 74 and 112.

In this midterm election, pollsters stood poised to redefine the relevance and format of political polls and surveys after the stunning upset in the 2016 presidential election defied the predictions of many major polls.

I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

On the nature of polls and the argument that they might yield biased information, Stapleton argues, “We're not here to tell people what to think about the results. We do this to get this information out there.” His responsibility is to be an impartial arbiter of the reality that the poll is reporting, he says.

Stapleton argues that transparency is key among polls and pollsters, citing the intersection of science and politics as an area that should be free from biases. He observes: “I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

Undergrads “are just now learning to think things through and come to conclusions,” which is why making sure students analyze the reason certain conclusions are reached is critical.

In his own research, Stapleton focuses on the role anger plays in American politics: “Emotions are critically important to our daily lives, and one thing that politicians can do is use their own emotional projections to influence how the public feels.”

The prevalence of emotional manipulation in today’s politics only reinforces the importance of unbiased, science-based surveys, he says. According to Stapleton, the goal of a survey like APRL’s is to create a more nuanced view of politics among voters and his students.

“I think that's our goal ultimately,” he muses. “Do people leave your class with a better grasp of reality and the truth? My hope is they do. And then do they take that and apply it in the real world? My hope is they do.”

Through creating a class centered around surveys from CU’s American Politics Research Lab, grad student teaches his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

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CU’s first female Rhodes Scholar took the road less traveled

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 23:50:38 +0000

CU’s first female Rhodes Scholar took the road less traveled Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/27/2018 - 16:50

Sarah Schleifer

Following her passion rather than advice to major in a STEM field was key to finding a ‘sweet spot of success’ in political science and journalism for Serene Singh

It’s a mantra most millennials have heard: “We need more female doctors and engineers.”

But Serene Singh, �鶹ӰԺ’s first Rhodes scholar in 25 years—and first ever woman—chose a different path for her education after asking herself about her talents, her happiness and the world’s needs.

Serene Singh. At the top of the page, she is shown addressing her high-school graduating class in 2015.

“Going into college, there was a lot of pressure from my community and from the world around me to be either in engineering or in pre-med,” she says. “Even in high school, I really felt like in order to be successful, I needed to be in the hard sciences.”

But Singh, a Boettcher, Truman and now Rhodes scholar, chose to major in both political science and journalism and minor in leadership studies.

On where her passions lie, Singh says, “I realized it wasn’t in the hard sciences. It was in government. It was in communications like journalism, and it was in understanding our Constitution, democracy, freedom studies and learning how to reduce violence through a political lens in the United States.”

She hopes to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, exemplifying the ideals of the Truman and Rhodes scholarships, which prioritize public service and a plan for bettering the world.

She will continue her education at Oxford University, where she’ll pursue graduate degrees in criminology and criminal justice, thanks to the Rhodes Scholarship, which offers a full ride to exceptional students who display leadership promise, ambition for impact and an ability to work with others to achieve one’s goals.

Historically, most people honored by the Rhodes Scholarship have been in STEM fields, but Deborah Viles, director of Top Scholarships at CU �鶹ӰԺ, notes this year candidates in the humanities outnumbered those in STEM areas.

Viles says that exceptional skills in teamwork and written and oral communications set liberal-arts majors, including in the humanities, apart from those in other fields. Being able to “think aloud on paper and in an oral presentation can really make a difference,” she notes.

Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am? If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”

“Anytime I get someone who’s in the liberal arts, I am super excited. I’m always excited by people who come through because they’re good writers and good thinkers, who want to contribute in interesting ways that are usually less recognized than the sciences are,” says Viles, who earned her M.A. in English literature and creative writing at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

Viles, who has worked on campus for more than 25 years, had not seen a Rhodes Scholar at CU �鶹ӰԺ since 1993, and was “starting to feel uncertain” due to the long stretch of no recipients. “I’ve had some really fantastic finalists, but we couldn’t seem to crack the code of the Rhodes Scholarship,” she says.

Singh cracked the code with her extensive leadership and social-justice credentials on and off campus, a life of public service and making the world a better place, Viles observes.

Singh serves in CU Student Government as the chief justice of the judicial branch, and as an active member of the Sikh community, working to promote religious freedom and challenge stereotypes and violence against Sikh Americans and other minorities.

On campus, she is president of Pi Sigma Alpha (Political Science Honors Fraternity), founder and captain of the nationally competitive and statewide Colorado Bhangra Team, and president of the Sikh Student Association. She is also a Dalai Lama Fellow, a Global Changemaker, a Boettcher Scholar (fully funded undergraduate degree), and a former America’s Junior Miss and Miss Colorado Teen.

Two years ago, Singh founded her own nonprofit called The Serenity Project to empower and provide skills to at-risk women survivors and changemakers. Singh also interned with Michelle Obama and the Global Girls Alliance this past summer.

Her personal and educational backgrounds will be “instrumental” to her goal of becoming a judge, she says.

“Judges are the vehicle through which justice is administered,” she says. “Serving on the (student government’s) judicial branch for the past four years, I’ve realized that the more you deep dive into one small thing, the more you need to see the intricacies of everyone’s perspective, of every different possible impact and the varying degrees and channels through which change can impact actual lives.”

To students who struggle to choose between the arts and humanities, STEM or anything in between, Singh says it’s important to ask oneself: “Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am? If I didn’t have that conversation with myself,” she recalls, “I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”

The Rhodes Scholarship is a fully paid scholarship that includes transportation to the UK, tuition, fees, books and a living stipend. Find out more at /topscholarships/

Following her passion rather than advice to major in a STEM field was key to finding a ‘sweet spot of success’ in political science and journalism for Serene Singh.

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