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Voters make their voices heard
Associate Director of Community Relations Jared Giarrusso discussed SF State's efforts to encourage students to vote in a Jan. 16 Washington Monthly article. "It doesn't matter at all to me who any of our students decide to vote for. What matters is having the reputation of them voting," Giarrusso said. "Our legislators are going to be responsive to voting blocs they know are at the polling places."
Funding needed for new tools
Next-generation sequencing (NGS), the focus of research led by Professor of Biology Jonathon Stillman, makes possible the rapid analysis of a multitude of short pieces of DNA, TerraDaily reported Jan. 23. The expensive technique allows researchers to "characterize the populations that they are studying to a higher resolution than ever before possible," Stillman said. "Broad scale adoption of NGS approaches by environmental biologists will require new thinking about how to fund researchers or research consortia who are attempting to use the best available tools to tackle what may be one of the largest but most poorly funded problems facing society today -- understanding and mitigating the impacts of climate change."
Focus on the reward
Associate Professor of Psychology Ryan Howell's research on happiness and purchases was featured in a Jan. 22 U.S. News & World Report article about financial planning by couples. "Debt is stress. So invest in your relationship by eliminating a huge source of stress and conflict," Howell advised. "That's why investment companies show couples walking on a beach, not hunched over a spreadsheet. It's all about the reward, not the work."
Driving searches
Research done by Assistant Professor of Marketing Sina Damangir and colleagues at the University of Houston suggest that search trends for automobile features could prove to be more valuable than brand searches currently tracked by marketers, according to a Jan. 23 Product Design & Development report. "Consumers search online for much more than brand names," Damangir and research colleagues wrote. "Marketers should also tap into search trends for product features, which can reveal important changes in consumer preference. This opens the door to a whole new field in consumer interest tracking."
Need to know
Professor of Management John Sullivan helped answer a job hunter's question about privacy concerns in a job search for a "Workologist" column in the Jan. 24 New York Times. Most companies rely less on long questionnaires/forms than in the past and instead collect more information online. "They're asking for less, but there's more out there," Sullivan said. Job seekers who encounter lengthy forms should remember that "if a company is that worried about you now, they're going to be that worried about you when you work there."
For more media coverage of faculty, staff, students, alumni and programs,
see SF State in the News.
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