External Posts

Provost and Dean of Faculty Margaret McFadden was quoted in the NPR story "How Colleges Are Grading Students During Coronavirus," which discusses strategies that colleges are using during the coronavirus pandemic. "Our goal was to give students as much flexibility and choice as possible," McFadden told NPR, "and allow our students to focus on learning and doing their best work knowing that they have control over how they are evaluated." Colby is allowing students to choose to receive regular letter grades for all courses or designate some or all of their courses satisfactory/unsatisfactory.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of African American Studies and Sociology, has contributed a chapter on W.E.B. Du Bois to the Sage Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. "In addition to many well-known publications, he produced a massive body of work—a hardcover annotated bibliography weighs 5 pounds—and his sociology of religion is embedded throughout work produced over 80 years of published writing, scientific scholarship, and activism," Gilkes writes in the opening paragraph of the chapter.

Spire, the Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability, published an article titled "Diversifying Maine’s coastal economy: A transition from lobster fishing to kelp aquaculture?" cowritten by Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, and Madeline Greene '20, Mae Sefransky '20, and Christopher Wang '20. The students were in McClenachan's Domestic Policy capstone course last fall, and they contributed to the study's main question: identifying kelp’s potential to diversify Maine’s coastal economy. "While our results demonstrate that kelp has the potential to be economically and socially beneficial to Maine’s economy, they also indicate that continued injections of social and economic resources are needed for kelp to mirror the success of the Maine lobster industry," the authors conclude in the paper's abstract.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland contributed an essay to the American Philosophical Association's blog series "Women in Philosophy" titled "The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child." Moland is currently working on a biography of Child, and in this essay, she notes that in 1833 Child "authored the country’s first book-length condemnation of slavery: a book so progressive in its commitment to immediate emancipation and racial equality that she was ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she spent the next thirty years arguing against slavery in every venue imaginable."

Duncan Coles '19, a biology and environmental science double major, was included as a team member on a recently published paper in the journal Nature Methods titled "Genetic tool development in marine protists: emerging model organisms for experimental cell biology." One of the paper's lead authors, José A. Fernández Robledo, is a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, which partners with Colby on providing opportunities for Colby students to collaborate with scientists at the lab. Coles worked with Fernández Robledo on an independent research project during a Colby Semester at Bigelow, and Coles tried several ways to deliver plasmids and labeled DNA into the microalgae Crypthecodinium cohnii. They used both regular electroporation and electroporation using microfluidics, and they went down to the MIT to run the microfluidics experiments. The success was limited, still, in the paper, they provided all the set of conditions they tried for another scientist interested in further pursuing the transfection in this microalgae.

Associate Professor of Sociology Christel Kesler contributed a post to the Work in Progress, a blog of the American Sociological Association. Kesler's post is titled "Public preschool helps some families more than others" and discusses her recent study, in which she sets out "to better understand the implications of the rise in children’s preschool attendance for the work lives of their parents, focusing on the very simple outcome of whether parents with children of this age participate in the labor market."

Associate Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor has published a paper in the Journal of Topology titled "Distortion and the bridge distance of knots." In the study, the coauthors relate the rigid geometric properties of a knot to its more flexible topological properties. A more rigorous explanation of their work is found in the paper's abstract:  "We extend techniques due to Pardon to show that there is a lower bound on the distortion of a knot in R3 proportional to the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number of the knot. We also exhibit an infinite family of knots for which the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number is unbounded and Pardon's lower bound is constant."

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was a guest on Maine Public's April 7 call-in show "Maine Calling." Isaacs joined five other faith leaders from around the state for the episode, titled "Faith Communities Adapt to COVID-19: How Different Religious Groups Are Reacting To the Crisis."

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was a guest on Maine Public's April 7 call-in show "Maine Calling." Isaacs joined five other faith leaders from around the state for the episode, titled "Faith Communities Adapt to COVID-19: How Different Religious Groups Are Reacting To the Crisis."

Associate Professor of Psychology Jen Coane coauthored a paper with students Grace Arnold '17, Kimberly Bourne '16, and Sarah Boland '17 recently published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. Titled "Reading the news on Twitter: Source and item memory for social media in younger and older adults," the study "examined how the presentation of news-like content in social media affected both item and source memory across two age groups," according to the paper's abstract. "Although both younger and older adults remembered the content of social media better than the content of news sources, older adults were more sensitive than younger adults to congruency effects in source memory. These findings suggest that older adults rely more on their prior knowledge of conventional language and style in traditional and social media."