SEATTLE, WA – A new University of Washington report released Tuesday shows federal agencies are accessing local police department cameras, and at least two local departments say they were unaware it was happening.
The report was released by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. It states that U.S. Border Patrol had unauthorized direct or indirect access to traffic cameras that capture drivers’ information throughout cities.
What they’re saying:
“It should be a wakeup call for all us as Washingtonians about the vulnerability of the technology that is being used to scoop up our data,” said Angelina Godoy director of the UW Center for Human Rights.
Law enforcement says the cameras, which are through the company Flock Safety, have led to numerous arrests of violent suspects and the recovery of stolen cars.
They are installed throughout cities and read license plates as cars drive by. The report from UW shows federal agencies could also access many of the local department’s cameras.
Local perspective:
“It’s very clear both on the immigrants’ rights front and the access to reproductive healthcare front, that Washington stands firmly in favor of peoples’ rights and yet, for Washingtonians’ data to be leaked to entities that don’t share those values is worrisome,” said Godoy.
Godoy tells FOX 13 Seattle federal agents gained access to local data through three different ways:
Directly, by a department sharing access to federal agencies.
Through backdoor access to the networks of at least 10 Washington police departments who did not authorize the border patrol searches.
And indirectly, by a member of law enforcement doing searches for federal agencies. For example, the report says the Yakima County Sheriff’s office made two searches with the reason listed as “ice”.
The Response:
“We immediately paused all access to any outside agencies while we make sure we can determine where we can put guard rails in place with Flock and with all of our detectives and investigators to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said Deputy Chief Ryan Rutledge with the Renton Police Department.
Rutledge tells FOX 13 Seattle the Renton Police Department had no idea its cameras were vulnerable to unauthorized federal access.
Renton is now requiring any outside agency, including other local police departments, to submit a specific request to them to access their data.
The Auburn Police Department released a similar statement saying they are working to make changes.
Big picture view:
“It’s deeply revealing if their answer is, ‘we had no idea that our tools were being used in that way.’ Well, if you have the tool, you have the responsibility to ensure you are using it responsibly, ethically, and in compliance within state law,” said Godoy.
In regard to the report, Governor Bob Ferguson told FOX 13 Seattle, “My team is following up with the Office of the Attorney General on the assertions made in the report, and working to ensure local jurisdictions are complying with the bipartisan Keep Washington Working Act.”
Flock Safety releases a statement in response to UW’s report
The company behind the cameras, Flock Safety, provided this statement to FOX 13 Seattle:
We appreciate and value the attention that privacy advocates pay to Flock. Unfortunately, these activists published a report that is full of inaccuracies and misconceptions about our technologies and their use that we’d have been happy to clear up, had they reached out to us prior to publication.
Most importantly, there is no “back door” into Flock. Every Flock customer has complete control over their sharing relationships, and Flock never shares customer data without authorization. Much of this report consists of old claims and allegations that have been addressed and, in some cases, that have led to improvements in our products.
Local public safety agencies collaborate with federal agencies on a wide variety of serious crimes, including human and narcotics trafficking and multi-jurisdictional cases. If agencies choose to collaborate with federal agencies, that is wholly up to them. Flock never enrolls agencies in automatic data sharing, and sharing relationships can be revoked at any time.
We are extremely proud of the positive, community-enhancing impacts our products have had across Washington and the nation.From helping locate vehicles wanted in hit-and-runs, to identifying homicide suspects, and bringing justice to victims of kidnapping and abuse, Flock technology is making communities across Washington safer today. Activist detractors downplay and even ignore those positive impacts and outcomes; the communities that we help make safer do not.
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A University of Washington football player has been arrested for allegedly raping two college-aged students in separate incidents just days apart last year.
SEATTLE – A University of Washington football player has been arrested for allegedly raping two college-aged students in separate incidents just days apart last year.
The King County Prosecutor’s office rush filed two felony charges against 18-year-old Tybo Tylin Rogers for rape in the second- and third-degree.
According to charging documents, Rogers was a freshman running back at the time of the alleged incidents. None of the victims knew him from the UW football team, court documents said.
The first alleged incident occurred on Oct. 23 in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The 19-year-old woman told police on Oct. 28 that she had been raped by a man she matched with on the dating app, Tinder, two months earlier. The two briefly communicated on the app, talking about where they went to school. Rogers told the woman he was a football player at UW and she disclosed that she was a Seattle Central Community College student.
The victim said they connected on social media and began messaging there. She told officers she ignored him for about three months because he was “pushy” and she was not interested in having a conversation with him.
She acquiesced and they later began messaging back and forth, saying she wanted to give him a chance to “prove he was different than her preconceived ideas of football players.”
When they met up for the first time, she told him about her epileptic episodes and that she doesn’t hook up with someone the first time she meets them because she had some “scary” experiences in the past, court documents said.
When the victim’s roommate left for work, Rogers allegedly asked her if they were alone in the apartment. She replied that her roommate’s boyfriend was sleeping in the back room.
Rogers then said he wanted to show the victim something on his phone and asked her to sit closer to him on the couch. He then allegedly grabbed her head and forcefully held her face near his crotch and demanded she perform oral sex on him. She said he would not listen to her pleas and she complied out of fear, since Rogers is several inches taller than her and 75 pounds heavier, so she didn’t think she could fight him off, she told detectives.
He then raped her and left when he was finished. The victim said she cleaned herself up with towels and brought those to Harborview Medical Center for a sexual assault kit.
She told detectives it appeared Rogers blocked her on Instagram after the alleged assault.
The victim said about a month later, she got a call from a number that she didn’t recognize, which ended up being Rogers’. The pair never exchanged phone numbers, she said. She told detectives that he called her out for posting about the assault on Instagram.
The victim also had to drop out of school after the assault, due to the trauma and the worsening of her seizures, court documents said. She moved back home with her parents.
Prosecutors say Rogers and second alleged victim had a very brief conversation at a Halloween party at a house on Greek Row just days later. The pair did not exchange numbers or connect on social media that night, but they did match on Tinder about one and a half weeks later. The 22-year-old woman did not know him as a football player before that first meeting, prosecutors say.
The pair made plans to meet up two days after messaging on the dating app. The victim said Rogers “became very forceful as soon as they got into her unit.”
The 22-year-old victim said he threw her onto a bed and ripped off her clothing.
The victim said Rogers was on top of her, trying to penetrate her, documents said. She kept trying to roll away and screaming at him to stop, according to court documents. Rogers allegedly became angry and frustrated and yelled at her to, “stop! I’m trying to f— you!” court documents detailed.
The victim told police that he simply dressed and left when he finished. She stated that “during the assault, she just wanted it to end and wanted him to leave.”
She later told officers that the pair had never discussed sex or anything of the sort when they were messaging. She said that he “never presented as violent, so this assault came as a shock,” documents detailed.
Detectives said the two victims do not appear to know each other.
Rogers was arrested on April 5 near Husky Stadium. He was booked into King County Jail and charged with second-degree rape and third-degree rape.
Bail has been set at $300,000.
“The State is respectfully requesting bail remain the same due to the likelihood the defendant will commit another violent offense,” the prosecutor’s office wrote in charging documents.
Rogers has been suspended from the football team.
In a statement about the alleged incidents, UW told FOX 13:
“The University of Washington Intercollegiate Athletics Department is aware of the arrest of a football student-athlete by the Seattle Police Department. The student-athlete has been suspended from all team activities until further notice. The UW will continue to gather facts and cooperate with law enforcement, as requested.”
The new head coach also briefly answered questions Monday afternoon about the alleged incidents.
“I don’t know much about it other than the fact that the ICA has suspended him indefinitely and I don’t expect him to be out on the field,” said Jedd Fisch, the new football head coach at the University of Washington.
When asked why Rogers was allowed to play in the Sugar Bowl and National Championship following his suspension last year, Fisch didn’t provide any details.
“I wasn’t here for that. That has nothing to do with what we do here. As soon as I found out about the allegations, as soon as it was brought to our attention, he’s been suspended indefinitely. I have no comment about what happened in the past. That has nothing to do with me,” he said.
This is a developing story.
FOX 13 will have updates as they become available.
SEATTLE (AP) — A University of Washington football player has been arrested and charged with raping two women in Seattle and court documents say he played in two College Football Playoff games for the school after at least one of the allegations was known to the university.
Seattle police officers arrested 18-year-old Tylin “Tybo” Rogers on Friday and booked him into King County Jail, KING-TV reported. He was charged Tuesday with second-degree rape and third-degree rape and his bail was set at $150,000 in each case, according to court documents.
It wasn’t immediately known if Rogers, of Bakersfield, California, has an attorney to comment on his behalf. Jail records show he was released on bond. Efforts to contact him by The Associated Press weren’t immediately successful.
Rogers has been suspended from all team activities until further notice, the University of Washington athletic department said in a statement Tuesday. The university will continue to gather facts and cooperate with police, as requested, the statement said.
A Seattle Central Community College student told police she was raped in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood last year. According to court documents, Rogers and the 19-year-old woman met and started messaging each other after matching on the Tinder dating app in August 2023. Rogers went to her apartment to hang out on Oct. 23 and assaulted her, according to court documents.
Authorities said in court documents that the woman reported the alleged rape to police on Oct. 28, and completed a sexual assault kit at Harborview Medical Center.
A 22-year-old University of Washington student reported that she was raped in November 2023 in the University District, police said.
The woman met Rogers at a Halloween party at the university and then matched with him on Tinder, according to court documents. Police said the two made plans a couple weeks later to hang out and that upon entering her apartment Rogers was immediately forceful and assaulted her. The woman told police at one point Rogers “used one of his hands to strangle her.”
The second woman reported the alleged rape to the university on Nov. 28, police said. Rogers allegedly called her on that date to confront her about the allegations, police said in court documents.
He was also suspended from team activities around late November 2023, according to court documents. The freshman running back did not travel with the team for its victory over the Oregon Ducks in the Pac-12 Championship game on Dec. 1.
At the time, offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb said during a news conference that Rogers was “working through some things, some challenges he’s had off the field,” court documents said. Rogers returned to team practices by mid-December, documents said.
Multiple emails were also sent within the University of Washington athletic department confirming Rogers should be taken off the team’s travel roster for the Pac-12 championship game, but no documentation of reasons for such an action were given, the documents said. He was allowed to appear in the Huskies’ two College Football Playoff games a month later, however.
Rogers recorded five carries for 19 yards in the Huskies’ semifinal win over the Texas Longhorns on Jan. 1. The 18-year-old rushed for two yards in the National Championship Game against the Michigan Wolverines on Jan. 8.
Washington was coached last season by Kalen DeBoer, who left following the national championship game to take the head job at Alabama. Jedd Fisch is now Washington’s head coach.
After practice Tuesday, Fisch told local news media that nothing about Rogers being suspended last year, or the reasons for it, had been brought to his attention.
“I wasn’t here for that,” Fisch said. “As soon as I found out about the allegations, as soon as it was brought to our attention, he’s been suspended indefinitely. I have no comment about what happened in the past. That has nothing to do with me.”
Q: Is one day isolation sufficient to stop forward transmission of COVID-19?
A: People with COVID-19 could potentially transmit it to others well beyond a day after developing symptoms or testing positive. New guidance from the CDC advises people to isolate until they have been fever-free and with symptoms improving for at least 24 hours, and then take precautions for five days, which covers the period when “most people are still infectious.”
FULL ANSWER
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 1 updated its guidance on preventing the spread of respiratory viruses, consolidating advice on a range of common respiratory illnesses including COVID-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
Since December 2021, the agency had recommended individuals isolate for at least five days after developing symptoms of COVID-19, or after a positive test if asymptomatic. After five days, the agency recommended various symptom-based criteria for leaving isolation combined with additional continued precautions, such as masking.
The new guidance drops the standard minimum of five days of isolation in favor of a symptom-based approach. The agency advises people to stay home and away from others when they are sick with a respiratory virus. People can cease isolation if, over a period of 24 hours, their overall symptoms have been improving and they have been fever-free without using fever-reducing medications.
Many people have had questions about what the new guidance means for people who have COVID-19. Some, like our reader, have referred to the idea that the guidance means only one day of isolation is needed. “do you agree with Biden that one day isolation for covid is fine and dandy??” asked one person on X, formerly known as Twitter.
But that’s not what Biden or the CDC is recommending.
“It’s not saying isolate for 24 hours,” epidemiologist Ronit Dalmat, a research scientist at the University of Washington, told us, referring to the CDC guidance. “It’s saying if you have a fever, absolutely stay home” until it has been gone for 24 hours, and also stay home until other symptoms are improving.
Nor does the CDC say people are guaranteed not to spread COVID-19 or other respiratory illnesses after their symptoms have improved. “Keep in mind that you may still be able to spread the virus that made you sick, even if you are feeling better,” the guidance says. “You are likely to be less contagious at this time, depending on factors like how long you were sick or how sick you were.”
The guidance recommends continuing to take precautions for five days after resuming normal activities. These include physical distancing, testing, improving air quality, using good hygiene and wearing a well-fitting mask, such as an N95 or KN95.
“The total number of days of precautions when sick, that is, a period of staying home and away from others plus 5 days of additional actions, covers the period during which most people are still infectious,” the CDC wrote in an FAQ.
“That whole period could be quite a while,” Dalmat said. “That could be 10 days for some people.”
The CDC said in background materials accompanying the new guidance that it looked at data from countries and states that had adopted similar policies for COVID-19 isolation and had not seen “clear increases in community transmission or hospitalization rates.”
“The updated guidance on steps to prevent spread when you are sick particularly reflects the key reality that many people with respiratory virus symptoms do not know the specific virus they are infected with,” the CDC said. The agency noted that its survey data indicated less than half of people with cold or cough symptoms would take an at-home COVID-19 test.
Some on social media have misinterpreted the guidance as an admission that it was always reasonable to liken COVID-19 to the flu, as was done early in the pandemic despite the marked difference in the diseases’ severity.
But the new CDC guidance acknowledges the continued seriousness of COVID-19 while also detailing the ways in which treatments, vaccines and population immunity have improved outcomes for people with the disease.
“COVID-19 remains a greater cause of severe illness and death than other respiratory viruses, but the differences between these rates are much smaller than they were earlier in the pandemic,” the CDC said. The agency explained that the risks are reduced due to the availability of COVID-19 treatments and population immunity to the virus, both from vaccination and prior infection. The agency also said that long COVID remains a risk, although the prevalence appears to be falling.
The Science on COVID-19 Transmission
Whether someone transmits COVID-19 depends on multiple factors. These include a person’s infectious viral load, but also the susceptibility of the people the infected person encounters and the precautions taken.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how long a particular individual will shed infectious virus and how much they will shed. “Everybody has a slightly different ability to control the amount of virus in their system, which is a part of what makes the virus shed,” Dalmat said. Variation in how people’s bodies fight a virus affects “how much virus you are putting in the world that is infectious.”
There’s evidence that a relatively small number of people who shed particularly high levels of the virus over the course of their infections have been responsible for a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases, and many people with COVID-19 do not infect others.
However, according to the CDC, the data on the typical overall length of shedding has not significantly changed, even as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — have arisen. “Even as the SARS-CoV-2 virus has continued to evolve, the duration of shedding infectious virus has remained relatively consistent, with most individuals no longer infectious after 8-10 days,” the agency said.
The CDC accompanied this statement with a figure showing data collected by the Respiratory Virus Transmission Network from five U.S. sites between November 2022 and May 2023 (see below). One line on the graph (light blue) shows how often researchers were able to isolate and grow — or culture — virus from people with COVID-19.
Trying to culture the virus that causes COVID-19 from a respiratory sample — a laborious process used in research — indicates whether someone is carrying infectious virus. The figure shows that the proportion of people with culturable virus began to increase two days before symptoms begin, or before a positive test for those who were asymptomatic, peaking around one to two days after symptom onset. After that, the rate began falling, with around one-third of people having culturable virus at day five. By day 10, the percentage had dropped to around 10%.
A different study, published in 2023 in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, combined data from multiple studies done in people diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2021 and 2022. The average duration of shedding of culturable virus was just over five days from symptom onset or first positive PCR test, whichever came first.
Another metric for assessing infectiousness in people with COVID-19 is viral load, often measured as the amount of viral materials, such as RNA or proteins, found in a respiratory sample. A 2023 study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases found that median viral load for people diagnosed with COVID-19 peaked around three or four days after symptoms started. The study assessed people seeking testing for respiratory infections between April 2022 and April 2023.
Someone who is shedding infectious virus may or may not transmit it to others. One factor is that the average person is less susceptible to infection today than they were early in the pandemic, Dalmat said.
“Even if the person is producing the exact same amount of virus today as they could have three years ago, the people on the other end on average are less likely to get infected,” Dalmat said, explaining that today more than 98% of the population has had some exposure to COVID-19 itself, COVID-19 vaccines or both.
When people do get infected, the cases tend to be less severe.“Among the people who get infected with COVID these days, on average it is much rarer that it turns into a very serious illness,” Dalmat said, while also acknowledging that a lot of individuals “are still very vulnerable.” People at elevated risk for severe disease include those who are elderly or immune compromised.
While the CDC guidance harmonizes suggested precautions for COVID-19 and other common respiratory viruses, there are differences in the details of how COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses are spread.
The new guidance is meant to be a general rule of thumb but does not apply to health care settings or cases where there is an outbreak of a disease that requires special instructions, the CDC said. The CDC also said the agency is working on specific guidance for schools, which should be available prior to the 2024/2025 school year.
Masks, Tests and Other Precautions
Isolating from other people when sick is a key way to reduce one’s risk of spreading COVID-19. But the CDC guidance lists additional ways to reduce the chances of spreading a respiratory illness.
Masks can help prevent the wearer from spreading a respiratory virus. They can also protect others from inhaling a virus, particularly well-fitting masks such as N95 or KN95 respirators, the guidance says. Individuals can take measures to improve their hygiene and the air quality in their surroundings and maintain physical distance from others, such as by avoiding crowded spaces.
The CDC still recommends testing to help high-risk people who are sick determine whether to seek treatment for a specific virus. For instance, someone with COVID-19 may benefit from receiving Paxlovid within five days of when their symptoms start. The guidance also lists tests as a tool that can help people decide when they need to take precautions to avoid spreading disease.
At-home rapid antigen tests can be helpful for people who are recovering from COVID-19 and want to see if they still have infectious virus, Dalmat said. In their research, she and her colleagues found that among people who tested positive for COVID-19 on a rapid antigen test, subsequent negative antigen test results were “very, very highly correlated to whether you had infectious virus or not,” she said. That means people with COVID-19 who start to test negative on rapid antigen tests as they get better likely are no longer at risk of infecting others.
However, the CDC cautions that rapid antigen tests early in the course of a person’s infection often miss COVID-19. People who are sick should be taking precautions regardless of test results, Dalmat said. “They shouldn’t test and have a negative test be the end of it,” she said.
The authors of the Clinical Infectious Diseases study, which measured viral loads over the course of infection, wrote that “our data in combination with others’ suggest that symptomatic individuals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 by PCR currently may not reliably test positive on a rapid antigen test until the third, fourth, or even fifth day of symptoms.”
The CDC guidance says people can end isolation when they have been fever-free and their symptoms have been improving for at least 24 hours. Dalmat cautioned that the definition of improving symptoms is somewhat ambiguous.
“Symptoms improving can mean different things to different people,” Dalmat said, adding that people should make sure their symptoms are truly getting better. “If your symptoms are not really improving – not kind of plateauing but really improving — you should continue to stay home and continue to take whatever measures you are taking in your household.”
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.
A psychology professor warned that hiring based on race alone was illegal, even as the University of Washington (UW) psychology department was downgrading white and Asian candidates, an audio recording obtained by Newsweek has shown.
The university later banned the faculty from hiring tenure-track employees for two years after finding major discrimination in hiring practices.
In an audio recording of a meeting from March 16, 2023, psychology professor Ione Fine objected to the hiring process in which the first- and second-ranked candidates, who were white and Asian American, respectively, got overlooked in favor of the third-ranked hopeful, who was Black.
For that to be achieved, a new “threshold” system was introduced in which any candidate could be chosen once they reached a certain level, circumventing the previous practice of hiring the highest-ranking candidate.
In 1998, Washington state passed a referendum banning race-based hiring in universities, which appears to have been ignored by the psychology department.
At the meeting, Fine objected to staff having just a 15-minute meeting to approve the decision of the selection committee.
“I feel like this idea that we are just deciding on candidates above threshold is a huge change in what we are looking at as a department and I think it should be something that we discuss as a faculty, not something that is decided by the planning committee,” Fine told the meeting.
She added: “I personally am in favor of affirmative action but we are legally not allowed to do it. I actually think we do owe the taxpayers who pay our salaries—the fact that it is illegal and has been democratically decided to be illegal by the taxpayers.”
Students at the University of Washington are pictured on March 6, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. The university has banned its psychology department from hiring tenure-track employees for two years after finding discrimination against white and Asian candidates. Karen Ducey/Getty Images
“So can you explain how we are respecting taxpayers? How are we not doing a [work-] around on what we are legally supposed to do?” she asked.
In response, a member of the selection committee denied that they were hiring based on race alone.
“This is not kind of like we are giving someone a position because of their identity. We have three extremely qualified candidates and we are making a strategic offer based on what the department has deemed the most important … so that is not at all what is happening,” the committee member told Fine.
Fine’s objections came one month before the Black candidate was hired after some Black faculty members urged that she be hired over the white candidate, who was then downgraded from first to third in the rankings.
An internal report discovered the discrimination in hiring procedures.
Other violations included the absence of white staff from meetings with job candidates, deleting a passage from a hiring report to hide discrimination, and discussing ways to “think our way around” a Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in colleges.
A UW spokeswoman told Newsweek on January 3 that the case was exposed when “the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, responding to an internal whistleblower, requested an internal review of this process by what was then called UCIRO (University Complaints, Investigation and Resolution Office) and is now the Civil Rights Investigation Office.”
The UW report found that when five finalists for a tenure-track assistant professor position were selected in January 2023, they were due to be interviewed by the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups so they could assess the general atmosphere of the faculty.
The report said a member of the Faculty of Color did not want any white women at the meeting and complained that the interviews were “awkward” when there was a white candidate. The names of everyone involved are redacted from the UW report.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The use of psychedelics as a treatment for serious mental health conditions continues to gain traction as multiple studies focus on the psychological symptoms commonly experienced by cancer patients. In one study, researchers at the University of Washington are exploring the use of psilocybin, one of the psychoactive components of magic mushrooms, to treat anxiety experienced by patients with metastatic cancers. Other research focuses on using psychedelic therapy to help patients receiving hospice care cope with demoralization.
In a separate study at the Center for Psychedelic Medicine at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, researchers are conducting a clinical trial using psilocybin-assisted therapy to treat existential distress in patients with advanced-stage cancer in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Colorado. Dr. Xiaojue Hu, a psychiatrist and researcher at NYU’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, noted that the study “is building on the same work in this area originally done at NYU in the 2010s.”
“Now, there are many other studies using psilocybin in cancer patients, including a study using psilocybin in combination with multidisciplinary palliative care to treat demoralized cancer survivors with chronic pain going on at Emory University,” she told SurvivorNet.
Hu explained that psychedelic-assisted therapy could be a more sustainable and effective treatment for cancer patients than other commonly prescribed alternatives including antidepressants.
“From the psilocybin research on depression alone, we’ve seen clinically significant impact from just one or two doses of psilocybin in conjunction with therapeutic support that can last up to 14 months for some patients,” said Hu. “This is in contrast to antidepressants, which people have to take on a daily basis for potentially years, with a risk of relapse when the meds are tapered off.”
Psilocybin And MDMA For Mental Health
Clinical research and other studies into psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA have shown that the drugs have potential therapeutic benefits, particularly for serious mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, substance misuse disorders and anxiety. In January, a California biopharmaceutical company announced positive results from a clinical trial testing MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. Research published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Psychiatry in 2020 found that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy was an effective and quick-acting treatment for a group of 24 participants with major depressive disorder. A separate study published in 2016 determined that psilocybin treatment produced substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer.
Although the research is promising, Hu said that psychedelic-assisted therapy does not work for everyone and that further research is needed to confirm the efficacy and safety of the treatment.
“Psychedelics aren’t a panacea or miracle cure for anxiety and depression, as there’s still much that’s unknown about them and there’s always the potential for adverse effects, like with any treatment,” Dr. Hu said.
Hu added that research has focused on using psychedelic treatments in conjunction with multiple sessions that integrate more traditional forms of therapy.
“Most of the research is also done when psychedelics, such as psilocybin, are used in the context of therapeutic support with usually two therapists, which can include up to three sessions of preparation and three sessions of integration afterwards,” she said. “So the results are not completely due to the physiologic effects of psilocybin alone, in my opinion, but must be taken into context with the therapeutic and environmental support that’s also offered.”
Hu also noted that psychedelic-assisted therapy is conducted in a tightly controlled environment because the set and setting in which a patient receives the treatment can have an impact on its success.
“We typically don’t expect different results if someone took their Lexapro [an antidepressant] in different moods, with different people, or in different environments, but we definitely can when it involves psychedelics,” she said.
While the research continues, the use of psychedelics to treat serious mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression has yet to achieve approval from health regulators. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projects that the Food and Drug Administration will eventually approve MDMA and psilocybin mental health treatments, according to a letter from the department in May 2022. In 2017, the FDA granted MDMA-assisted therapy Breakthrough Therapy designation, indicating that the therapy is a significant improvement over existing treatments.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) predicts that an application to use MDMA to treat PTSD will be submitted to the FDA at some point in 2023, and approval could come as early as 2024. But so far, MDMA-assisted therapy has not been approved by any regulatory agency and the safety and efficacy of MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD have not been firmly established.
“MDMA and psilocybin have the most clinical research and legal momentum behind them right now, with psilocybin already being legalized in Oregon and Colorado and MDMA phase III trials recently being completed,” said Hu.
Newswise — In the frigid waters surrounding Antarctica, an unusual seasonal cycle occurs. During winter, from March to October, the sun barely rises. As seawater freezes it rejects salts, creating pockets of extra-salty brine where microbes live in winter. In summer, the sea ice melts under constant daylight, producing warmer, fresher water at the surface.
This remote ecosystem is home to much of the Southern Ocean’s photosynthetic life. A new University of Washington study provides the first measurements of how sea-ice algae and other single-celled life adjust to these seasonal rhythms, offering clues to what might happen as this environment shifts under climate change.
The study, published Sept. 15 in the International Society for Microbial Ecology’s ISME Journal, contains some of the first measurements of how sea-ice microbes respond to changing conditions.
“We know very little about how sea-ice microbes respond to changes in salinity and temperature,” said lead author Hannah Dawson, a UW postdoctoral researcher who did the work while pursuing her doctorate in oceanography at the UW. “And until now we knew almost nothing about the molecules they produce and use in chemical reactions to stay alive, which are important for supporting higher organisms in the ecosystem as well as for climate impacts, like carbon storage and cloud formation.”
The polar oceans play an important role in global ocean currents and in supporting marine ecosystems. Microbes form the base of the food web, supporting larger life forms.
“Polar oceans make up a significant portion of the world’s oceans, and these are very productive waters,” said senior author Jodi Young, a UW assistant professor of oceanography. “These waters support big swarms of krill, the whales that come to feed on those krill, and either polar bears or penguins. And the start of that whole ecosystem are these single-celled microscopic algae. We just know so little about them.”
The tiny organisms are also important for the climate, since they quietly perform photosynthesis and soak up carbon from the atmosphere. Polar algae are especially good at producing sulfur-containing molecules that give beaches their distinctive smell and, when lofted into the air in sea spray, promote formation of clouds that can reduce penetration of solar rays.
Antarctic sea ice, though long stable, is at an all-time record low this year.
In other oceans, satellite instruments can capture dramatic seasonal phytoplankton blooms from space — but that isn’t possible for microbes hidden under sea ice. And Antarctic waters are particularly challenging to visit, leaving researchers with almost no measurements in winter.
In late 2018, Dawson and co-author Susan Rundell traveled to Palmer Station, a U.S. research station on the West Antarctic Peninsula. They used a small boat to sample seawater and sea ice at the same nearby sites every three days.
Back on shore, the two graduate students performed 10-day experiments in tanks to see which microbes grew as temperature and salinity were adjusted to mimic sea-ice formation and melt. They also shipped samples back to Seattle for more complex measurements of the samples’ genetics and metabolites, the small organic molecules produced by the cell.
Results revealed how single-celled algae deal with their fluctuating environments. As temperatures drop, the cells produce cryoprotectants, similar to antifreeze, to prevent their cellular fluid from crystallizing. Many of the most common cryoprotectant molecules were the same across different microbial lifeforms.
As salinity changes, to avoid either bursting in freshening waters or becoming desiccated like raisins in salty conditions, the cells change the concentration of salt-like organic molecules. Many such molecules serve a dual role as cryoprotectants, to balance conditions inside and outside the cell to maintain water balance.
The results show that under short-term temperature and salinity changes, community structure in each sample remained stable while adjusting the production of protective molecules. Different microbe species showed consistent responses to changing conditions. This should simplify modeling future responses to climate change, Young said.
Results also hint that the production of omega-3 fatty acids may decline in lower-salinity environments. This would be bad news for consumers of krill oil supplements, and for the marine ecosystem that relies on those algae-derived nutrients. Future research now underway by the UW group aims to confirm that result — especially with the prospect of increasing freshwater input from melting sea ice and glaciers.
“We’re interested in how these sea-ice algae contend with changes in temperature, salinity and light under normal conditions,” Dawson said. “But then we also have climate change, which is completely remodeling the landscape in terms of when sea ice is forming, how much sea ice forms, how long it stays before it melts, as well as the quantity of freshwater input from glaciers. So we’re both trying to capture what’s happening now, and also asking how that can inform what might happen in the future.”
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Other co-authors are Anitra Ingalls, Jody Deming, Joshua Sacks and Laura Carlson at the UW; Natalia Erazo, Elizabeth Connors and Jeff Bowman at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Veronica Mierzejewski at Arizona State University.
Newswise — Menthol-flavored cigarettes account for more than one-third of cigarettes sold in the United States, and experts believe they are more dangerous than traditional cigarettes.
More than 150 cities and counties have prohibited the sale of menthols, and Massachusetts and California both have statewide bans. The Food and Drug Administration proposed a federal ban in 2022 but may never institute it. In the absence of a national ban, new research from the University of Washington finds that a menthol tax is a preferable policy to scattered statewide bans.
The study, forthcoming in Marketing Science, evaluates the ban on menthol cigarettes in the state of Massachusetts. While researchers found some demand shifted from menthol to non-menthol cigarettes, menthol sales in bordering states also increased significantly. This suggests consumers engage in cross-state shopping for menthols, which reduces tax revenue for Massachusetts and decreases positive health benefits. A statewide menthol tax would be preferable, study results suggest, because it would lead to a drop in smoking in the state while also generating additional tax revenue.
Menthol adds a cooling, minty sensation to cigarettes that mitigates the harshness and leads to increased initiation among new smokers, according to the FDA. Combined with nicotine, effects in the brain are also associated with signs of greater addiction.
“Many menthol smokers are still smoking them after the ban,” said Simha Mummalaneni, co-author and assistant professor of marketing in the UW Foster School of Business. “They’re just traveling across the border into New Hampshire or Connecticut and buying the cigarettes there.
“From the perspective of the people who wrote this policy in Massachusetts, this is bad because it means the public health benefits are not as big. We’ve not solved the problem. We’ve diminished it, but not solved it. This pattern is also bad for the policymakers because they have lost a tremendous amount of tax revenue.”
The study focused on stores in three areas: the state of Massachusetts, a 30-mile ring around the state border and a control area outside the New York and New England region. Menthols accounted for about 27% of all cigarette sales in these areas, and researchers calculated the total weekly cigarette sales in Massachusetts and the border area to determine the overall impact of the ban from June to December 2020.
While stores in Massachusetts lost sales, stores within 30 miles of the border received additional customers. Out-of-state cigarette sales increased by 88.72%, with most sales going to New Hampshire. As a result, New Hampshire’s cigarette tax revenue sharply increased during the observation window.
Non-menthol cigarette sales in Massachusetts increased after the ban — implying that some consumers switched from menthols — but not enough to cancel out the decline in menthol sales. Overall cigarette sales in Massachusetts also declined significantly, while non-menthol and menthol cigarette sales both increased in the border area.
Researchers found that state-specific bans decrease menthol consumption by 46% and overall cigarette consumption by 4.8%, but also decrease tax revenues by about 21%. Based on these calculations and a model of consumer shopping included in the new study, a $6 per-pack tax would increase tax revenue by 14% while also decreasing menthol and overall cigarette consumption by 28% and 2.7%, respectively. When the tax increases beyond $6, revenue begins to fall because consumers are strongly incentivized to purchase cigarettes across the border.
While researchers didn’t study the effects of California’s menthol ban, they said cross-border shopping likely wouldn’t be as severe due to the state’s larger size. That doesn’t eliminate the issues, however.
“Despite its larger size, there is still reason to be worried for California,” said Ali Goli, co-author and assistant professor of marketing in the UW Foster School of Business. “If menthols are being smuggled through organized crime, you haven’t solved the problem. You’re still sending tax revenue elsewhere. We haven’t seen these scattered statewide bans really working.
“When you consider a tax in California, there’s no reason to believe it would fail. You can still implement a tax to generate more revenue and then wait until maybe there’s a nationwide ban.”
In Massachusetts, a menthol ban would reduce cigarette tax revenue by $108 million, while a menthol tax would increase revenue by $72 million. The difference between the two options is $180 million — lost tax revenue that could be used to fund tobacco control programs, education efforts, outreach and more.
“States have tobacco control programs,” Mummalaneni said. “They are like a lot of public health initiatives; they are underfunded. They have people who are really working hard for them and care about the initiatives. They would love to do so much more, but they just don’t have the funds to do so.”
Newswise — Even for scuba and snorkeling enthusiasts, the plunge into open water can be dislocating. Divers frequently swim with limited visibility, which can become a safety hazard for teams trying to find each other in an emergency. Yet even though many dive with smartwatches designed to go to depths of over 100 feet, accurately locating mobile devices underwater has confounded researchers.
Now, a team at the University of Washington has developed the first underwater 3D-positioning app for smart devices. When at least three divers are within about 98 feet (30 meters) of each other, their devices’ existing speakers and microphones contact each other, and the app tracks each user’s location relative to the leader. This range can extend with more divers, if each is within 98 feet of another diver. The team will present its findings in September at the SIGCOMM 2023 conference in New York City.
“Mobile devices today can work nearly anywhere on Earth. You can be in a forest or on a plane and still get internet connectivity,” said lead author Tuochao Chen, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But the one place where we still hadn’t made mobile devices work was underwater. It’s kind of the final frontier.”
Above water, GPS relies on a vast satellite network to locate mobile devices with radio signals. Underwater, these signals quickly fade. Sound, though, travels faster and farther in water than it does in air. Previous underwater positioning systems have relied on strategically placed buoys, but these systems are expensive and cumbersome to deploy, leading many divers to do without.
The UW team found that such buoys aren’t necessary. With the app, if the dive leader has at least one other diver visible, the group’s devices can send acoustic signals to each other through their microphones and speakers and use the timestamps to estimate each diver’s distance. Based on these distances, the app can estimate the group’s formation and each diver’s location. If a device also tracks depth, as sport monitors like the Apple Watch Ultra or the Garmin Descent do, the system can locate divers in 3D.
The app needs at least three devices in its network to function, and its accuracy improves as more devices are added. When tested with four to five devices in local lakes and a pool, the app estimated locations with an average error of about 5 feet (1.6 meters) — close enough for divers to see each other in most environments. To get actual GPS coordinates, instead of tracking locations relative to the dive leader, the leader needs to be wirelessly connected to a surface device on a boat with GPS capabilities.
For more information and to see the app’s open-source code, visit the team’s website.
“This and AquaApp can be used together,” said author Justin Chan, a UW doctoral student in the Allen School. “For example, if the dive leader finds someone going the wrong way, the leader can send an alert: ‘Hey, you’re going out of range. You need to come back.’ Or if a diver is running out of oxygen, an SOS can let the team find the person quickly even in murky water.”
Shyam Gollakota, a professor in the Allen School, is a senior author on this paper. This research was funded by grants from the Moore foundation and National Science Foundation.
Newswise — Despite their invisibly small size, ultrafine particles have become a massive concern for air pollution experts. These tiny pollutants — typically spread through wildfire smoke, vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and airplane fumes — can bypass some of the body’s built-in defenses, carrying toxins to every organ or burrowing deep in the lungs.
New research from the University of Washington found that those effects aren’t felt equitably in Seattle. The most comprehensive study yet of long-term ultrafine particle exposure found that concentrations of this tiny pollutant reflect the city’s decades-old racial and economic divides.
The study, published July 5in Environmental Health Perspectives, also found that racial and socioeconomic disparities in ultrafine particle exposure are larger than those observed in more commonly studied pollutants, like fine particles (PM 2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
The study used mobile monitoring — a car loaded with air pollution sensors driving around the city for the better part of a year — to examine long-term average levels of four pollutants: soot (or black carbon), fine particles (PM 2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ultrafine particles. Researchers found the highest concentrations of all four pollutants on census blocks with median household incomes under $20,000 and those with proportionately larger Black populations.
Disparities in concentrations of ultrafine particles— which are less than 0.1 micron in diameter, or 700 times thinner than the width of a single human hair — were especially stark. Blocks with median incomes under $20,000 had long-term UFP concentrations 40% higher than average. Blocks where median incomes are over $110,000, meanwhile, saw UFP concentrations 16% lower than average.
“We found greater disparities with this pollutant of emerging interest, a pollutant that hasn’t been well-characterized. That’s very interesting,” said senior author Lianne Sheppard, a UW professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. “Our work has shown the highest ultrafine particle concentrations are north of the airport and below common aircraft landing paths, downtown, and south of downtown where there are port and other industrial activities.”
The study also found that modern-day air pollution disparities mirror Seattle’s history of redlining, the racist practice that denied racial minorities and low-income residents access to bank loans, homeownership and other wealth-building opportunities in more “desirable” areas. The practice shaped American cities throughout the early 20th century, building a foundation of segregation and environmental racism.
Today, neighborhoods once classified as “hazardous” are still exposed to higher concentrations of pollution than those once labeled “desirable,” the study found. This was true for all sizes of particles. The spatial disparities were largest, however, in Seattle neighborhoods that received no label because they were once considered industrial areas.
In those previously industrial areas, ultrafine particle concentrations were 49% above average.
“These results are important because air pollution exposure has been shown to lead to detrimental health effects, and these health effects disproportionately impact racialized and low-income communities,” said Kaya Bramble, the study’s lead author, who graduated from the UW in 2022 with a degree in industrial and systems engineering. “Notably, air pollution is just one factor, and there are plenty of other examples of how systemic racism is detrimental to people’s health and well-being.”
Bramble said the results didn’t surprise her. She was raised in Tacoma, in a neighborhood near Interstate 5, where the constant crush of cars and diesel trucks spewed pollution into the air. And as a student journalist at the UW, she researched the relationship between redlining, green spaces, heat and air pollution.
“In the case of air pollution exposures, these policies affect the health of real people. I think at a time where the teaching of systemic racism is a controversial topic in this country, being ignorant is not going to reduce the number of children who suffer from asthma due to air pollution,” Bramble said. “Instead, I hope we can have conversations about how past policies affect us today, to drive efforts toward a healthier, sustainable society.”
Bramble proposed and carried out this study for the Supporting Undergraduate Research Experiences in Environmental Health grant program, which provides National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funding and mentorship to undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue research. She joined the program in June 2020 under Sheppard’s mentorship.
Other UW authors are Magali Blanco, Annie Doubleday and Amanda Gassett of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, Anjum Hajat of the Department of Epidemiology and Julian Marshall of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
One of the hottest fields for recent college graduates has recently cooled off, as layoffs have hit the technology sector.
On Tuesday, Zoom announced it will be eliminating 15 percent of its staff. Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all made cuts in their work forces in the past month. In November, the Facebook parent company Meta announced it would be cutting 13 percent of its workers. Amazon and Google are also expected to hire fewer interns in 2023 than in past years.
It is being called the largest wave of tech layoffs since the dot-com crash in the early 2000s, and it’s creating headaches for colleges’ career-counseling offices and soon-to-be-graduates who flocked to majors that once promised plentiful jobs.
For the past two decades, colleges, think tanks, and policy makers have touted the wage-earning potential of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degree programs. Enrollments in many of those fields have grown accordingly, particularly in computer science.
The number of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences and support services has increased by 34 percent since 2017, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Interest in data science has risen as well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that demand for data scientists will rise by 36 percent, much faster than the average for all occupations, from 2021 to 2031.
If history is any guide, it will most likely take some time for students and undergraduate academic programs to adjust to the changing job market.
The number of undergraduate computer-science degrees conferred in the United States began rising in 1995-96 and continued to do so until just after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. That started affecting freshmen’s choices. By 2005-6, the number of computer-science degrees as a share of all degrees awarded dropped to 3.2 percent from 3.5 percent in 2000-1. The Great Recession dealt a further blow to the field, as computer-science degrees made up only 2.5 percent of all degrees earned in 2010-11.
Since then, the share of such degrees conferred has grown each year, reaching almost 5 percent in 2019-20.
It’s just a matter of researching the employers that are engaging with the campus, as opposed to pining away for the ones that maybe aren’t at the moment
The drop in enrollment after the dot-com bubble burst was felt on campuses in many ways, said Amruth Kumar, professor of computer science at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Classes that were held once a semester were only held once a year, and some courses were combined in an attempt to fill them up.
Kumar said that he isn’t yet sure what to make of recent tech layoffs. Graduates who are just entering the job market could be disadvantaged by the layoffs and rapid rehiring of tech employees, he said, but the long-term effects on computer science as an academic field remain uncertain.
Besides, computer-science departments may face more immediate threats to their enrollment, and they come from within the campus. Soaring interest in data-science programs could divert institutional resources and draw students. Kumar said that while the increased interest in data science could cause a slight decline in computer-science enrollment, the two areas focus on different ways of problem-solving with technology.
“It seems to me that data science caters to a different skill set than computer science,” said Kumar, who is co-chair of CS 2023, a multi-association effort to create curricular guidelines for computer-science programs across the world.
Kumar believes computer science has become so popular because of the myriad fields computers are now used in.
“It used to be the case that only people use them in STEM disciplines, but now you have computer science being used for communication, social interaction like Facebook and Twitter,” he said. “All these are nothing but computer-science products appealing to other areas, other walks of life.”
Undergrad Programs Forge Ahead
For now, undergraduate programs across the country remain optimistic about interest in their disciplines and students’ job prospects.
The College of William & Mary plans to expand its data-science program; data is one of the four tenets of its “Vision 2026” plan. That’s because data fluency is a skill that students can apply in a variety of industries, said Kathleen Powell, chief career officer at William & Mary.
“Our students are understanding that if they’re combining that data fluency with strong communication skills, strong critical-thinking skills, that is actually opening up pathways for different types of internships and full-time opportunities,” Powell said.
She’s confident most 2023 graduates will find jobs. Companies plan to hire 14.7 percent more graduates from the Class of 2023 than were hired from the Class of 2022, according to a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
For their part, students seem to be optimistic, too. Full career fairs and continued demand from companies that are not tech giants may be giving them a false sense of security amid a possible economic downturn.
“It takes about six months for students to realize that, you know, maybe the job market isn’t as great,” said Gail Cornelius, director of the career center at the University of Washington’s College of Engineering. “It’s also somewhat deceiving in the fact that when we have our career-fair employer activities on campus, we are still full.”
The fairs still attract between 70 and 100 employers, she said, and she hasn’t noticed companies rescinding offers made to students, though some employers have delayed students’ start dates.
Students at Washington have flocked to computer science in recent years. In 2017, the university created a school of computer science, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Since then, the number of undergraduate students enrolled in the university’s computer-science program at its Seattle campus has more than doubled. At the start of the winter quarter in January, the university’s Seattle campus had over 1,500 undergraduate computer-science majors. As of the autumn-2022 quarter, computer science was the most popular major at all three University of Washington campuses.
Many graduates have gone on to jobs at tech companies. About 55 percent of engineering graduates from the university got jobs with large technology companies, said Cornelius, citing data collected by the career center. And 44 percent of graduates found jobs with roughly 500 other companies, including those in nontechnology industries.
“Our students are savvy enough to know that even though I didn’t get the Amazon job, the first job I get out of school isn’t going to be the dream job, and isn’t going to be the place that I die in,” Cornelius said.
Closer to Silicon Valley, career counselors are advising students to be flexible in their career choices.
“There’s always companies and industries that are going to be thriving depending on what the market is,” said Kelly Masegian, a technology and engineering career counselor at San Jose State University. “It’s just a matter of finding those, and figuring out how you can pitch your skills in those environments.”
For example, Masegian and her colleagues are trying to introduce students to technology fields seeing major investments, like the semiconductor industry.
Like Cornelius in Washington, Masegian hasn’t seen job offers to new grads being rescinded, but she has seen some delays. Masegian said about 85 students who received job offers from Amazon had their start date postponed by six months. Many of them are international students, she said, whose ability to remain in the United States hinges on being employed within 90 days of graduating.
Despite the delayed starts for some students, Masegian said, she hasn’t seen companies reducing their hiring. Over 125 employers have signed up for the university’s upcoming STEM career fair, which can accommodate only 80 companies.
“It’s just a matter of researching the employers that are engaging with the campus, as opposed to pining away for the ones that maybe aren’t at the moment,” Masegian said.
She said that some students have been nervous about their ability to get internships, but she tries to remind them of the nature of the internship market. Students vying for internships are not competing with recently laid-off professionals, most of whom have years of experience.
Even recent graduates seeking entry-level positions might not be competing with recently laid-off workers, she said, because of differences in their experience levels.
A Market for M.B.A. Programs
If the changing nature of the tech job market poses a challenge for undergraduate programs, it’s looking like an opportunity for graduate business programs. Some M.B.A. programs are seeking to capitalize on the layoffs, redirecting their recruiting efforts toward unemployed technology workers.
In November, some business schools started waiving fees and testing requirements for applicants to M.B.A. programs who can provide proof of being recently laid off.
For example, the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University has waived GMAT or GRE requirements and application fees for laid-off tech workers. The University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business waived its application fee and extended the deadline to apply for its full-time M.B.A. program. Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business is waiving application fees and test requirements, as well as promising some prospective students a minimum $3,000 scholarship.
Workers with STEM backgrounds are attractive prospective M.B.A. students because of the skills they’ve picked up in the workplace, said Greg Hanifee, associate dean of degree operations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which announced it was waiving testing requirements in November.
Our students are savvy enough to know that even though I didn’t get the Amazon job, the first job I get out of school isn’t going to be the dream job, and isn’t going to be the place that I die in
Hanifee said Kellogg decided to waive GMAT scores and market to those experiencing tech layoffs out of a sense of empathy for tech workers whose sudden layoffs meant they may not have had much time to study for exams. Kellogg will continue evaluating the economy to determine whether it will waive the exam for next year’s class.
He also said that the high hiring standards of major tech companies, like Meta and Google, mean laid-off workers are strong candidates, even without graduate exam scores supporting their applications.
“I think we’re at the point now where, fingers crossed, the economy rebounds from some of this, and there aren’t additional sectors that go through a similar sort of mass layoff experience,” Hanifee said.
And, while some displaced tech workers may find refuge in an M.B.A. program, many may well be headed right back into the field after earning their graduate degrees. Twenty-four percent of Kellogg’s full-time graduates in 2022 found employment in the technology industry.
The ranks of the newly unemployed may fill a need for M.B.A. programs, said Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy at Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce, and a former Chronicle editor.
Many M.B.A. programs are facing enrollment declines similar to those plaguing institutions across the country. The U.S. is home to over 500 colleges with masters programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
Applications for admission to graduate business schools increased only by 0.4 percent from 2020 to 2021, a far cry from the average annual increase of 3.6 percent from 2016 to 2020, according to a report by the Council of Graduate Schools.
The report also says that overall enrollment in graduate business programs declined by 3.4 percent from 2020 to 2021. During that period, part-time enrollment for first-time graduate students fell by 15.6 percent, while full-time enrollment for first-time students rose by 4.1 percent.
“They’re looking to fill as many seats as they can,” said Van Der Werf.
Newswise — The number of U.S. adult handgun owners carrying a loaded handgun on their person doubled from 2015 to 2019, according to new research led by the University of Washington.
Data come from the 2019 National Firearms Survey (NFS), an online survey of U.S. adults living in households with firearms, including nearly 2,400 handgun owners. Compared to estimates from prior UW-led research, the new study suggests that in 2019 approximately 16 million adult handgun owners had carried a loaded handgun on their person in the past month (up from 9 million in 2015) and 6 million carried every day (twice as many as carried daily in 2015).
Published Nov. 16 in the American Journal of Public Health, the study also found that a larger proportion of handgun owners carried handguns in states with less restrictive carrying regulations: In these states, approximately one-third of handgun owners reported carrying in the past month, whereas in states with more restrictive regulations, only about one-fifth did.
“Between increases in the number of people who own handguns and the number of people who carry every day, there has been a striking increase in handgun carrying in the U.S.,” said lead author Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology and Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the UW.
Among the other findings reported in the new study:
About 7 in 10 handgun owners said they carried a loaded handgun as protection against another person, dwarfing the number who said they carried as protection against an animal, for example, or for work
4 in 5 handgun owners who reported carrying were male, 3 in 4 were white, and a majority were between the ages of 18 and 44
Researchers pointed to some limitations of the study: Respondents were asked if they carried, and how often, but not where. It is possible that a person residing in a state with one type of permitting restrictions (or none) could have carried their handgun in another state with different laws. The study also did not ask whether the respondent carried a handgun openly or concealed.
While the data are from 2019, researchers say the findings are timely, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down a New York state handgun-carrying law. States, in general, have become less restrictive over the years regarding handgun carrying — more than 20 do not require permits to carry today, compared to only one such state in 1990. The differences highlighted in this study suggest that this behavior may be responsive to the types of laws governing carrying that pertain in a state.
“The Supreme Court ruling has already resulted in some states’ loosening of laws related to handgun carrying,” Rowhani-Rahbar said. “In light of that ruling, our study reinforces the importance of studying the implications of handgun carrying for public health and public safety.”
The study was funded by the Joyce Foundation and the New Venture Fund. Co-authors were Amy Gallagher, now of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, previously of the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at the UW; Deborah Azrael of Harvard University; and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University.
Newswise — When groups of people need to reach a decision, they will often take a straw poll to test opinions before the official vote. New research from the University of Washington shows that one specific voting method proved more effective than others in identifying the best choice.
In a study published Sept. 28 in Academy of Management Discoveries, researchers found that groups that used “multivoting” in unofficial votes were 50% more likely to identify the correct option than those that used plurality or ranked-choice voting.
Multivoting gives people several votes to allocate across all options. The reality show “American Idol” uses multivoting, giving fans 10 votes each. They can use all 10 for their favorite contestant or split their votes among two or more. For this study, students were given 10 votes to distribute among three choices.
Plurality voting, where voters must select one option, is most often used in political elections. Ranked-choice voting, which is growing in popularity in some local and state political elections, allows people to list their preferences from first to last. It’s also used to determine Academy Award winners.
Michael Johnson, co-author and professor of management in the UW Foster School of Business, said multivoting most benefits groups that want to be sure they’re making the best decision. The researchers don’t believe it would work for political elections, mostly because of how taxing it would be to allocate votes across a variety of options.
“We see multivoting as primarily useful for decision-making groups in workplaces,” Johnson said. “Wherever groups feel like it’s going to be critical to get a decision right, use multivoting as an unofficial vote, look at the distribution and discuss after that. It works where people are motivated to vote consistent with what they really think rather than trying to strategically vote to counter another person.”
The UW study was based on the “pursuit teams” developed by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. The purpose was to connect the findings of multiple intelligence agencies to track potential terrorist threats.
In this study, researchers asked 93 groups of undergraduate students to simulate the counterterrorism support teams and identify which of three suspects represented the greatest threat. The student groups were given information about three terrorists, but no group member had all the information about any one suspect. Students had to share intelligence to correctly identify the biggest threat.
The teams were split into thirds, producing an even number of groups using ranked-choice voting, plurality and multivoting. All groups took a preliminary, unofficial vote to see members’ initial thoughts on the terrorist suspects. After the unofficial vote, they considered the results and discussed the suspects. If students combined the information well, they would be able to identify one terrorist who was clearly more of a threat. The teams then returned their final verdict.
Just 31% of plurality teams chose the most threatening suspect in the final vote, about the same as if it were left up to chance. In the unofficial vote, 6% of teams had a majority of members identify the correct suspect. That’s less than the 11% that would have been expected by chance.
Ranked-choice voting didn’t fare much better. In the final vote, 32% of teams identified the correct suspect. In the unofficial vote, 7% of groups had a majority of members rank the right suspect as the most threatening.
“We were surprised that the ranked-choice groups did not outperform the plurality groups,” Johnson said. “There is a lot of evidence, particularly in politics these days, that ranked-choice voting leads to outcomes that are more consistent with the preferences of the electorate than plurality voting does. That’s why we’ve seen so many political elections move toward ranked-choice voting.
“But ranked-choice voting is generally better at revealing the true preferences of people and not necessarily getting to the exact right answer. When people are making decisions at work, you’re more concerned about getting it right than about making sure it reveals what everybody thinks.”
The multivoting groups started stronger, with most members in 30% of the groups choosing the most threatening suspect. In the final vote, 45% of teams identified the most threatening suspect.
Researchers found no evidence that discussions in the multivoting groups varied in any meaningful way from the other two voting conditions. Instead, the benefit of multivoting occurred before any discussion as students processed the information more deeply and considered the intelligence more critically.
“The real discovery, and the thing we didn’t expect, was that multivoting groups would be more accurate before they discussed,” Johnson said. “We just assumed they would all be kinds of equal before the discussion and then they’d improve at the end. If people have the option to say, ‘I kind of like Option A, but I also kind of like Option B,’ that might make them think more before they discuss, which would help them make the proper decision.”
Other co-authors were Eli Awtrey of the University of Cincinnati and Wei Jee Ong of the National University of Singapore.
