External Posts

Professor of Statistics Liam O’Brien has coauthored a paper, "Assessing Older Adult Wellness: An Assessment of the Psychometric Properties of the Lifestyle Survey," recently published in the Journal of Nursing Measurement. "The purpose of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Lifestyle Survey instrument," according to the study's abstract. The researchers concluded that "with refinement, the Lifestyle Survey is a valid and reliable measure of wellness among community-dwelling older adults."

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, Emeritus, has coauthored a new article, Trends in stable-isotopes and climate proxies from late Changhsingian ghost landscapes of the Karoo Basin, South Africa, published in Frontiers in Science: Ecology and Evolution. "The manuscript continues reports of our studies on the paleoclimatology of the latest Permian in the Karoo Basin, about 253 million years ago," explained Gastaldo. "What we have been able to demonstrate is that over a period of several hundreds of thousands to a million or more years, climate varied in the Southern Hemisphere between intervals of wet and cool conditions and warm and seasonally dry conditions. The widely accepted model for this interval of time is one of a unidirectional increase in temperature and aridity. Our data demonstrate that this hypothesis is too simplistic, and increased cooling and wetting are characteristic of the climate on land prior to a reported ecological turnover at the end of the period."

Colby’s Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of American Government Sandy Maisel was part of a story in The Globe and Mail on the Electoral College and its past, present, and future role in choosing U.S. presidents. Referenced as a “political scientist who is perhaps the leading student of Maine politics,” Maisel discussed how most people, including experts like himself, don’t know who their electors are.

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was the subject of the first article in the "Power of Faith" series by Central Maine Newspapers. Isaacs, who is also Colby's Dorothy “Bibby” Levine Alfond Chair in Jewish Studies, said the pandemic increases reasons to be thankful to God. “I think that the more vulnerable we are, the more we need community and we need God," Isaacs said. "I’ve been really impressed ... how people want to connect so much more to faith and community now more than ever.”

Professor of English Debra Spark spoke with the Portland Press Herald's Joan Silverman about her new book, And Then Something Happened: Essays on Fiction Writing. In the book, Spark "combines memoir, problem solving and lessons on the writer’s craft," Silverman writes. "Vivid, warm and entertaining, the book includes references to a wide range of modern literature."

Colby's Biology Department has loaned an ultra-cold freezer to the State of Maine for storage of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Portland Press Herald reports. The freezers “could play an important part in ensuring that Maine has adequate capacity to store Pfizer vaccine doses upon their arrival in Maine,” said Robert Long, Maine CDC spokesman.

The Art Newspaper covered Colby's story about a discovery by Matthew Brown '24, whose research uncovered the identity of the man depicted in the 18th-century painting The Man in the Flowered Coat, currently in the Colby Museum of Art. “This discovery links the works in small collections like ours to a larger dialogue across art history," Assistant Professor of Art Marta Ameri told the paper. 

Trustee Dave Epstein '86, a popular Boston-based meteorologist and horticulturist, was featured in the Boston Magazine story "Winter, the Weatherman, and Me." Epstein brings context to his reports, context that's "about helping us to recognize the simple joys of being alive. ... He’s the meteorological Mr. Rogers, and no matter where we happen to live, he is our neighbor."

Raffael Scheck, the Gibson Professor of History, has published a new article on the treatment of Western prisoners of war during World War II in the journal, War in History. "Nazi courts martial could sentence prisoners of war for offences that did not exist in the western democracies, such as insults to the Führer, or severely punish them for acts leading only to mild disciplinary sanctions in Britain or America," according to the paper's abstract. "These asymmetries, which influenced the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war of 1949, challenge the paradigm of reciprocity and symmetry in prisoner of war regimes between Germany and the western countries in World War II."

In a correspondence published in Nature and available here, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and colleagues draw attention to the need for an internationally agreed-upon definition of climate finance. Without this, donors decide what counts as climate finance. This has serious implications for whether countries in the Global South can adequately mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.