Fellows

Listen to CASBS Fellow Tomás Jimenez and Gregory Rodriquez in the 2013 Oregon.org "Think & Drink" series, How to Love America, explores our relationship to the nation we call home. The conversation looks at immigration and national identity

Biologist and past fellow Deborah M. Gordon's decades-long study of the collective behavior of harvester ant colonies has provided a rare real-time look at natural selection at work.

In ancient Greece, the city-states that waited until their own harvest was in before attacking and destroying a rival community's crops often experienced better long-term success.

It turns out that ant colonies that show similar selectivity when gathering food yield a similar result. The latest findings from Stanford biology Professor Deborah M. Gordon's long-term study of harvester ants reveal that the colonies that restrain their foraging except in prime conditions also experience improved rates of reproductive success.

Read the rest of the story in the Stanford Report.

Jonathan Levy, 2013 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to receive the 2013 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the 2013 Avery O. Craven Award, and the 2013 Ellis W. Hawley Prize. On Saturday, April 13, OAH President Albert M. Camarillo and OAH President-Elect Alan M. Kraut will present the awards in San Francisco, California, during the 106th annual meeting of the organization.

Frederick Jackson Turner Award: given annually for an author’s first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history

CASBS Fellow Susan Herring was a guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show Wednesday March 19, 2013.

From the program description:

In the early days, the Internet and email were text-driven. But a decade after email began, the sideways smiley-face emoticon showed up, along with other symbols of emotion constructed largely from punctuation marks. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're still around and have been joined by emoji, an extensive keyboard of images available on Apple products, and GIFs, a short-loop animation. Tech Tuesday explores the history, function and future of these images as a means of communication and their place in the tech lexicon.

You can listen to an archived version on the program website.

2013 CASBS Fellow K.T. Albiston worked with Shelley Correll, professor of sociology and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University on an opinion piece published today on CNN.com.

Benefit of office face time a myth

The recent decision by Yahoo's chief executive to drop the company's work from home policy makes sense, doesn't it? Plenty or people believe that if you aren't in the office, you aren't working; if you aren't clocking face time with bosses and co-workers, you aren't fully committed, and long hours are the measure of productivity. Right?

Not exactly.

Organizational sociologists call these beliefs "rational myths," convictions about how things should be done that are widely shared but not necessarily accurate.

ASA Files Amicus Brief with U.S. Supreme Court in Same-Sex Marriage Cases

The American Sociological Association (ASA) weighed in on the gay marriage cases before the U.S. Supreme Court today, filing an amicus brief outlining social science research that shows “children fare just as well” when raised by same-sex or heterosexual parents.

The ancient Greeks and the Second Amendment

In a post on the Culture Desk Blog at the New Yorker, Melissa Lane (CASBS 2013) writes on how the ancient Greeks viewed weapons and citizen armies.

The pioneers of citizen armies were also pioneers of withdrawing weapons from the places of civilized life. The ancient Greek armies were manned exclusively by citizens who brought their own weapons into battle. Getting to serve in an élite combat unit required being wealthy enough to afford to buy one’s own armor. It was this vision of citizen militias, further developed by the Romans, that went on to inspire the English revolutionaries of the seventeenth century and the American revolutionaries of the eighteenth—so shaping the values expressed in the Second Amendment.

CNN's Josh Levis reports on the polarizing language surrounding gun laws and interviews experts including CASBS Fellow (1993, 2013) Deborah Tannen.

Can words help bridge the gap?

"If you get new words, there's a better chance of moving beyond the polarization," says Tannen, who is spending this year at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. But, she warns: "Words don't stay neutral for long -- because they quickly get associated with the people that use them."

Read full article: Loaded language poisons gun debate on CNN.com

In a feature article on the history and future Hewlett-Packard, Bloomberg Businessweek ask's Leslie Berlin to explain the importance of Silicon Valley's founding company.

“HP is the model for the idea that as a startup you can become one of the biggest and most important companies,” says Leslie Berlin, the project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. “It’s an idea that’s still vitally important for the Valley.”

Read: Can Meg Whitman Reverse Hewlett-Packard's Free Fall?

Russian President Vladamir Putin and his supporters believe that history shows Russia’s strength comes from autocracy not democracy, but new research reveals tsars frequently responded to community opinion.

During her 2011-12 CASBS fellowship year, historian Nancy Kollman combed through the criminal record archives of small towns and villages across Russia to investigate the country's criminal justice system. The resulting book "Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia" is the most sweeping account to date of Russian criminal justice in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It is also one of the first to explore how the system impacted the daily lives of ordinary Russians.