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KVOS Special: Western's Fourth R.
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- One of the things that we found in working with the American
- Indians and the Mexican-Americans
- and the other youngsters, was that ethnic group
- seems not to be a determining factor-- that they
- emerged as individuals.
- And the success of the program, in reference
- to the progress that the youngsters have made,
- is much more in relationship to the strength
- of the individual child rather than the ethnic group.
- I think, further, that we are gaining a lot of insight
- into the feelings and reactions of these youngsters.
- The reports that they were able to give to us,
- in reference to how they feel about school
- and how they feel about some of the experiences
- that they have had, differ rather remarkably
- from the school's attitudes toward the way
- in which these youngsters behave in the usual classroom
- situation.
- It's our hope then, that as we work
- with the public schools in the two county area,
- we will have some real information-- information that
- will be useful to the average teacher in helping
- these youngsters.
- You mentioned an American Indian component.
- How many American Indians?
- What is the percentage of American Indians
- in the project?
- We had 50 participants, and of the 50,
- 26 were American Indians.
- Now, here again, when you have a charming little--
- or rather rotund boy, as a matter of fact,
- with bright red hair, and another short, stubby baseball
- player with blond hair, both of whom are Indians,
- we are using the term in a rather general fashion.
- What's the size of the Rockefeller grant?
- We have $100,000 for a two-year program.
- Our program differs again from [INAUDIBLE]
- in that the youngsters just have one opportunity.
- Those youngsters who were involved here at Western
- last summer are being followed with a control group
- but will not return to the campus.
- We're in the process now of soliciting nominations
- for 50 additional participants who
- will take part in the program this coming summer.
- The holder of a Title III grant under the Higher Education
- Act of 1965, Dr. Larry Douglas, is
- carrying on a rather different sort of investigation
- with the disadvantaged.
- Tell us about it, Larry.
- Well, the project is designed to find out
- what has been the effect in the Seattle public school system,
- especially in the central area of the program.
- The compensatory education program
- is designed for treating the disadvantaged pupils
- in the public schools themselves.
- For the last two years, we've had teachers here
- and instituted teachers for the disadvantaged
- with whom we work.
- And they've presumably learned certain techniques.
- And this is designed to find out what
- they have done, what has happened because of what
- they've done, if anything, more or less also,
- to find out certain basic statistical information-- how
- many pupils there are that can be so classed, how
- many teachers there are, what the programs involve,
- how much information is being fed out
- to the community, especially the parents, and so on.
- And to examine whether, effects such as reduction
- of dropout rate, and so on, can be ascertained from it.
- VICOED means visual communication education.
- And we're trying to prepare people
- for industry, or for the public schools as teachers--
- and the community colleges.
- So they will have a much broader background
- than the traditional graphic arts program.
- These new programs in VICOED will include such things
- as the design of communications, visual presentations,
- printed media, and the big information and storage
- retrieval systems.
- You also have considerable support
- from industry, as well as that $490,000 Ford Foundation grant,
- do you not?
- Yes, we have approximately $317,000
- as of January the first this year.
- From all industrial sources.
- From all industrial sources.
- Now, this includes a work study program
- from the Boeing company.
- Yes.
- All told then, you are now the boss of about 3/4 million
- dollar operation.
- That's right.
- Then including this-- in addition to this, really--
- the schools have been putting in about $350,000, also.
- Now, you say the schools?
- The college and the pilot schools,
- in the form of equipment, supplies, materials,
- release time for teachers traveling, and so on.
- How many schools are tied in a satellite to the program,
- right?
- There are four high schools in Vancouver, BC,
- which makes it really an international project.
- There's one high school in Bellingham.
- There are four in Tucson, Arizona.
- One in Kailua, Hawaii.
- There's a junior college in Seattle,
- and the Milwaukee Institute of Technology.
- This grew out of a philosophic position
- that I published in '62, and it's
- based on the following statement.
- The question one asks, and the frame of reference
- in which one asks it, determines the kind of data
- that one looks for and the answer one gets.
- The answers can be divided into several different kinds
- of problems.
- I have called these specific problems, for example.
- An example of that would be, how many swings
- will this pendulum bob make in 10 seconds?
- The answer to this question is a singular one
- and can be answered by the first, second, third, fourth,
- fifth, and sixth grade students with whom we are working.
- A second kind of question deals with a comparative.
- It compares two answers.
- For example, how many swings will the pendulum
- make in 10 seconds without the presence of a magnet,
- and with the presence of a magnet?
- This, too, is easily answered by the children.
- There is a single event that they would have
- to do to answer the question.
- These are the easiest ones.
- The third kind of question is one
- that one would call experimental.
- This involves doing more than one thing to find the answer.
- For example, one could say, how does the number of oscillations
- of the pendulum bob vary with the distance the magnet is
- from the pendulum?
- Now one would have to use several different distances
- to see that as the distance of the magnet
- decreases the effect upon the pendulum bob
- will also decrease.
- This would then be called a qualitative experimental
- question.
- The quantitative experimental question
- would be a quantification, or getting an equation,
- for the data that one would collect.
- We are in the business here of studying
- the structure and the properties of atomic nuclei.
- As you know, atomic nuclei consist
- of neutrons and protons.
- The problem is to decipher the motions that
- go on within the atomic nucleus based
- upon this knowledge of its structure.
- To do this, we need fairly high energy particles.
- We used in this laboratory neutrons
- to bombard atomic nuclei and investigate their structure.
- We produce these neutrons with this hardware
- that you will see in the lab.
- The neutrons are produced by the collision of hydrogen isotopes.
- We use heavy hydrogen isotopes, known as deuterium and tritium.
- We bombard deuterium into tritium
- with an approximate energy of 200,000 volts.
- And this, amazingly, produces--
- in a fusion reaction--
- about 15 million volt neutrons.
- These neutrons have enough energy
- to enable the investigator to blast apart atomic nuclei
- and to investigate their structure.
- I'm sitting at the console, which
- controls the device behind about 270 tons of concrete shielding
- designed to protect the investigators
- and surrounding people from the hazards of radiation.
- We have a number of instruments, which
- we use for counting particles that emerge from neutron
- bombardments of light nuclei.
- These instruments consists of scalers
- and amplifiers and computers.
- Our main instrument is a very simple accelerator,
- which is just to produce the neutrons alone.
- The neutrons are then used to investigate
- the various structures of light nuclei.
- One problem which we are interested in
- is the problem of the very lightest nuclei.
- It turns out that there are no pure atomic nuclei consisting
- of only protons or only neutrons.
- We have, hopefully, some preliminary data
- which indicates that there is a pure atomic nucleus.
- We call it the tri-neutron.
- Well, you're amending your previous statement, then.
- You may have found a new nucleus, right?
- We may have found a new nucleus.
- The preliminary data, of course, will
- be submitted to periodicals and a criticism of the rest
- of the scientific world.
- Clearly no one of the researchers extant at Western
- Washington State College can be regarded as typical,
- but in many ways, Dr. June Ross epitomizes the new breed.
- First of all, she is from Australia--
- Ph.D from the University of Sydney,
- postgraduate training and research at Yale,
- subsequently at other universities--
- and finally has settled down here at Western
- with her husband, Dr. Charles Ross.
- Dr. Charles Ross is engaged in geological research.
- Dr. June Ross in paleobiology.
- This makes her one of the new breed,
- as well, since we did not have such disciplines present--
- or such research present at Western
- until a couple of years ago.
- Then, too, Dr. June Ross epitomizes the new researchers
- at Western, in that most of her salary and most of her time
- is devoted to pure research--
- and from funds drawn from private agencies
- and from federal foundations.
- Finally, you will observe that Dr. June
- Ross is possessed propitiously of two X chromosomes.
- Again, a peculiarity a few years ago at Western.
- But many of our outstanding researchers now are female.
- June, what's that spongy material
- that you're dealing with there?
- Oh, this coral-like material.
- This is a colony--
- a calcareous colony of an ectoproct.
- Generally, they look very close to a coral,
- and therefore, we generally think of them more as corals.
- This one is quite familiar to the many people in the Puget
- Sound area.
- And these finger-like dendritic growths
- occur below the low tide level, going down
- in the subtidal region.
- The calcareous material secreted by these various organisms--
- primarily marine organisms-- takes many different forms.
- And I have been concerned primarily
- with the different calcification structures that are present
- in the variety of forms, covering
- over about 4,000 species.
- Where did you get these samples of the 4,000 species from,
- June?
- These come from many places.
- Some of them are fossil material from the United States,
- coming from New York State across the central states.
- And as I have mentioned, these come from the Puget Sound,
- San Juan Islands.
- Some of this material here is off the South
- Australian continental shelf.
- And other material I have seen from the Himalayas
- and various places in Europe.
- And in many of these areas have you, yourself,
- done the fieldwork?
- The fieldwork?
- All of it in the United States and some
- of the material from Australia I have done the fieldwork on.
- And the Himalayan material was reference material
- from the Dutch and the Austrian expeditions to the Himalayans
- about two, three years ago.
- This is Dr. Carol Diers of the psychology department,
- and Dr. Diers is responsible for publications
- in the field of personality research.
- Could you tell us something about it, Dr. Diers?
- Yes.
- One of our concerns was what it is
- that determines an individual's response to personality test
- items.
- We discovered that one of these determinants
- is the tendency to answer in a socially desirable manner.
- What that is-- when items portray
- socially desirable characteristics in the society,
- then by far the majority of people
- tend to attribute these characteristics to themselves.
- I see.
- You're also responsible for bringing
- some rather unusual animals to Western, are you not?
- Yes, a few years ago we purchased some armadillos
- from Comfort, Texas.
- Had them shipped up here by air.
- And we're interested in them for research purposes.
- Could you tell us what's special about armadillos?
- Why you needed them?
- Yes, and they're a very unusual animal in that they always give
- birth to four identical young.
- That is, usually four.
- And they are--
- Quadruplets.
- Right.
- And they are born from the same fertilized
- egg, so they are identical.
- And why is this important to you?
- We had hoped, in using these animals,
- to be able to control the heredity
- variable in our experiments.
- What we had intended to do, was to have the young separated
- from the mother at birth as soon as possible, then
- place the young in different environments and later,
- observe what the results of this would be.
- We would have heredity controlled ideally,
- because they are identical.
- We can therefore use a very small number of animals
- and perhaps come up with some rather radical differences.
- How did this turn out?
- Unfortunately, we never ran the experiment.
- The baby armadillos did not survive very well.
- First of all, the mother, when giving birth to the armadillos,
- had a tendency to kill them and eat them
- within a few hours following birth.
- This was very disastrous for our experimental intentions.
- Of course.
- We did manage to get one litter away from the mother,
- and we attempted to rear them--
- feeding them artificially.
- However, it seems that the humidity in this area
- is unfavorable.
- And they contracted pneumonia.
- They're used to a very dry climate.
- Is that right?
- Yes, fairly dry.
- Practically all departments at Western
- are involved in research in one way or another.
- We're now in the geography department with Dr. Mookherjee.
- Could you tell us about your workplace?
- Yes.
- I've been engaged in a couple of research projects in India.
- And in one such project, I'm now making some correlation
- analysis between the rate of food production and population
- growth in various parts of the country
- to identify the deficit areas.
- Then I intend to make some analyses
- of the patterns of planning that have been done,
- or that is being done, in these areas
- to overcome this shortage.
- With these analyses, I hope to be
- able to make up some interpretations at what
- can be done in these areas to overcome the deficit.
- In another project, I'm working on some cities around Calcutta,
- making some socioeconomic analyses.
- I'm taking such variables as economic-based educational
- facilities and employment opportunities in these cities--
- the size of 25,000 to 100,000--
- to see whether or not these cities
- will be able to absorb Calcutta's growing
- population in future.
- This is Dr. Joseph Hashisaki, chairman
- of Western's math department.
- The math department at Western has
- been preeminently successful in getting grants,
- both pure research grants and more particularly,
- National Science Foundation programs
- for experienced and inexperienced teachers
- and summer institutes.
- By all odds, the most successful of all of our departments,
- and several of them, as you've already learned,
- have been quite successful.
- Joe, why do you have a lock on getting summer institute
- grants from the National Science Foundation?
- Well, Herb, I don't think we have
- a lock on getting these summer grants and academic year
- institutes.
- But I think that we've been fortunate here at Western
- in attracting very able young staff of mathematicians,
- who are active in mathematical research
- and scholarly activity.
- And at the same time, they have a deep concern for teacher
- education and teachers.
- And I think that this comes through
- in writing our proposals.
- While it's very-- wishing to spare your blushes a go,
- but speaking of the success of the NSF institutes,
- is it not true that your own textbook-- that
- is Joseph Hashisaki's textbook-- is the one standardly used
- in the NSF math institutes for elementary teachers?
- Yes.
- The book, which John Peterson and I wrote,
- has been used most widely in the summer institutes
- for the elementary teachers.
- I think one of the reasons for that
- is when the book was written, it was
- written with the teachers in mind
- rather than our own ego or something like that.
- We were trying to write a book which
- would actually be useful and helpful to the teachers that
- are--
- You mean you did not write it for the critical math
- reviewers.
- But rather, for the classroom teacher?
- Yes.
- This is one mistake that many writers tend to make.
- And that is writing with what the reviewer is going
- to say about the book, and they very often
- get far too sophisticated.