Social Sciences Newsblog

Reception for Pat Martin: May 15, 2015

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PatThe Department of Social Sciences invites the campus community to recognize Pat Martin for his 38 years of service to Michigan Tech as Professor of Archaeology. The department will hold a reception to recognize Pat from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday, May 15, on the 2nd floor of the Annex to the Academic Office Building.

Pat, who has served as the Chair of Social Sciences for the last six years, was instrumental in the creation of the department’s Industrial Archaeology graduate program. After his retirement, Pat will remain active as a research professor, initiating projects and advising students, as well as serving as the Executive Secretary of the Society for Industrial Archeology and as the President of The International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage — so “retirement” is slightly misleading.

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Wellstead Publishes on Policy Capacity and Climate Change Decision-Making

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National Climate Change Assessment’s adaptation process Source: Bierbaum et al. (2014)
National Climate Change Assessment’s adaptation process
Source: Bierbaum et al. (2014)

Professor Adam Wellstead co-authored a paper, Mainstreaming and Beyond:  Policy Capacity and Climate Change Decision-Making published in the Michigan Journal of Sustainability Volume 3, Spring 2015.

Abstract:

Mainstreaming involves integrating climate adaptation measures into existing policies and programs. This article reviews the policy process and policy capacity of government organizations and suggests that both need to be incorporated into climate change adaptation assessments. A critical part of mainstreaming is evidence-based decision-making, which emphasizes that decision makers should have the best available information in order to make knowledgeable decisions. This requires policy work that involves a wide variety of statistical methods, applied research, and advanced modeling techniques to gauge broad public opinion and attitudes as well as more routine research techniques. A review of previous past quantitative studies conducted mainly in Canada identifies factors driving policy capacity within government departments responsible for formulating, choosing, implementing, and evaluating climate change adaptation policies and programs. Policy capacity has traditionally been objectively measured and includes indicators such as the number of policy staff, their education levels, resources available, roles and tasks, and ongoing training. More attention needs to be paid to the subjective perceptions of individuals who undertake policy work, in particular the attitudes towards the policy-making process. This paper concludes by proposing a policy capacity framework that includes individual, organizational, and sectoral policy capacity considerations.

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Gorman Named Chair of Social Sciences

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Hugh Gorman
Hugh Gorman

From Tech Today by Mark Wilcox

Bruce Seely, dean of the College of Sciences and Arts at Michigan Tech, has announced that Hugh Gorman will be the next chair of the Department of Social Sciences.

Gorman, who has been on the Social Sciences faculty since 1996, will begin his new duties July 1.  He succeeds Patrick Martin, who completes his term as chair and will retire June 30.

Seely says Gorman has played an integral role in the department’s master’s and doctoral programs in environmental policy. “Hugh is a well-respected scholar in the intertwined communities of history of technology and environmental history,” Seely explains.

Gorman says one of his goals will be to nurture the department’s existing capacity to undertake world-class interdisciplinary research. “Most people are aware of the department’s important contributions to the University’s general education program,” he says. “But our faculty is also producing policy-related knowledge that guides technological development in a direction that encourages uses of the built and natural environment that are sustainable, economically viable and just.”

Read the full story.

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Michaelson Receives Provost’s Award for Scholarship

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Melissa Michaelson
Melissa Michaelson

From Tech Today:

Outstanding students, staff, and a special alumna were honored on April 17, 2015 at Michigan Tech’s 21st Annual Student Leadership Awards Ceremony.  This year’s recipient of the Provost’s Award for Scholarship was Melissa Michaelson, Departmental Scholar from Social Sciences majoring in Anthropology.

According to the Student Affairs and Advancement, “each academic department nominates one student to represent their department as its Departmental Scholar. From the collective departments, one student is selected to receive the Provost’s Award for Scholarship.

The Provost’s Award for Scholarship is given to a senior who best represents student scholarship at Michigan Tech. This outstanding student is considered excellent not only by academic standards, but also for participation in research scholarship activity, levels of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and communication skills.”

Congratulations Melissa!

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SS Student Poster Presentations

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9:00-10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 28 in AOB 201. Open to all.

Join in celebrating the work of students from Intro GIS for Social Sciences class on Tuesday, April 28th as they present their Final Project Posters.

Poster presentations and student teams include:

“Gauging Hope:  Mapping Material Changes in an Industrial Townscape” John Arnold, Adrian Blake, and Emily Oppliger

“Identifying Sustainable Forest Biomass Sources Using Spatial Criteria Analysis:  A Case Study of Rothschild, Wisconsin” Miranda Aho, Brad Barnett, Jeff Kelly, and Melissa Michaelson

“Predictive Modeling of Industrial Archaeology and Pollution Potential in Urban Brownfields” Eric Pomber and Dan Trepal

“Mapping the Potential Impacts of Unconventional Oil and Gas Exploitation in Michigan” Nicolette Slagle

 

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SS Talk: Fred Quivik on Deepwater Horizon Trial: U.S. vs. BP

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quivik April 244:00 P.M. on Friday, April 24th in AOB 201.

Professor Fred Quivik will present “The Deepwater Horizon Trial: United States v. BP,  under the Clean Water Act”.

Professor Quivik will present an overview of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the nature of the trial under the Clean Water Act, a summary of his testimony and the role that the United States hopes it will have played at trial, and a description of how he came to develop the expertise he used in the Deepwater Horizon case and some reflections on what that means for General Education at Michigan Technological University.

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Boyer Ontl on Tool-Assisted Hunting in Chimpanzees

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KellyKelly Boyer Ontl co-authored a paper, New evidence on the tool-assisted hunting exhibited by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in a savannah habitat at Fongoli, Senegal published in the Royal Society Open Science, 15 April 2015. 

The paper was summarized in numerous news articles highlighting the team’s chimpanzee research including Chimps that Hunt Offer a New View on Evolution from the New York Times, Women are better at DIY (in chimps at least):  Female primates can master and use tools more easily than males from Daily Mail, and Female Chimps More Likely Than Males to Hunt With Tools from Smithsonian.

ABSTRACT:

For anthropologists, meat eating by primates like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) warrants examination given the emphasis on hunting in human evolutionary history. As referential models, apes provide insight into the evolution of hominin hunting, given their phylogenetic relatedness and challenges reconstructing extinct hominin behaviour from palaeoanthropological evidence. Among chimpanzees, adult males are usually the main hunters, capturing vertebrate prey by hand. Savannah chimpanzees (P. t. verus) at Fongoli, Sénégal are the only known non-human population that systematically hunts vertebrate prey with tools, making them an important source for hypotheses of early hominin behaviour based on analogy. Here, we test the hypothesis that sex and age patterns in tool-assisted hunting (n=308 cases) at Fongoli occur and differ from chimpanzees elsewhere, and we compare tool-assisted hunting to the overall hunting pattern. Males accounted for 70% of all captures but hunted with tools less than expected based on their representation on hunting days. Females accounted for most tool-assisted hunting. We propose that social tolerance at Fongoli, along with the tool-assisted hunting method, permits individuals other than adult males to capture and retain control of prey, which is uncommon for chimpanzees. We assert that tool-assisted hunting could have similarly been important for early hominins.

 

 

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