{"id":27852,"date":"2023-09-29T16:47:15","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T20:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=27852"},"modified":"2024-03-26T16:00:11","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T20:00:11","slug":"furman-engaged-invites-us-to-be-curious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/furman-engaged-invites-us-to-be-curious\/","title":{"rendered":"Furman Engaged Invites Us to Be Curious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wanted to try Peruvian chupe de camarones<\/em>, find out where Danes get their joy and learn about the bacterial load in leafy greens \u2013 all in one day?<\/p>\n

If so, it\u2019s not too soon to think about attending next year\u2019s Furman Engaged, as these were just a few of the activities the 15th annual celebration offered attendees this past April.<\/p>\n

During this Furman tradition, students publicly share their research, internships, study away and other scholarly and performance activities. This year\u2019s Furman Engaged was part of the launch weekend for Clearly Furman, the Campaign for Our Third Century. Here are some of the topics students presented, showing their peers, faculty, staff and the community what\u2019s possible at Furman:<\/p>\n

HOW CLERGY MEMBERS TALK ABOUT RACISM<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sabrina Strickland-Harris \u201924 and Virginia Wayt \u201923 studied what members of the clergy told their congregations after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020.<\/p>\n

They transcribed, coded and analyzed dozens of recorded sermons from around the time of those events. Their preliminary findings: Many of those sermons tended to frame controversial issues as individual spiritual problems, not systemic social ills.<\/p>\n

\u201cClergy have regular opportunities to share messages about race and racism to an audience,\u201d said Wayt. \u201cThey are engaging with current issues, but they\u2019re doing so really vaguely.\u201d<\/p>\n

A CARD FOR THOSE OFF MOMENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Greeting cards to commemorate birthdays, anniversaries and other major life events are easy to find. But what can you send a friend who has lost their phone, or is struggling to adjust to a new haircut \u2013 or just plain having a bad day? Rebecca Cowles \u201923 might have you covered. The studio art major created \u201cThe Small Things,\u201d a line of watercolor greeting cards you won\u2019t find at Hallmark.<\/p>\n

6,000 TICKS<\/strong><\/p>\n

For some of us, ticks are a nuisance while hiking. For African farmers, tickborne diseases that strike livestock can be devastating to a family\u2019s livelihood. In Africa, 37% of the land mass is made up of farms, which produce 70% of the continent\u2019s food supply.<\/p>\n

Kaya Frawley \u201924 traveled to a game reserve in the Limpopo province of South Africa to learn how habitat and climate affect tick abundance and diversity. While on the reserve, Frawley dragged a pole draped with cloth across three different types of habitat to collect and identify ticks: 6,000 of them in all. \u201cTick-borne diseases can have a local, national, continental effect,\u201d she said, adding that they decrease livestock reproduction and milk production and raise mortality rates. Eco-tourism and game ranching are also affected. Meanwhile, ticks have grown resistant to the acaricides pesticide.<\/p>\n

Her recommendation is to go back and closely examine the multitude of ecological relationships involving ticks to develop better tick-control methods.<\/p>\n

THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF TRAUMA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Caitlyn Horton, a student in the Master of Science in Community Engaged Medicine program, examined the existing research about the greater likelihood that women experiencing trauma \u2013 such as physical assault, intimate partner violence and childhood abuse \u2013 later experience homelessness later in life. These women have a greater risk of isolation, psychiatric disorders and hormonal imbalances, among
\nother symptoms, she explained.<\/p>\n

She recommends trauma-informed care and communication among professionals who support women experiencing homelessness and examining sources of trauma to better design responsive resources, among other measures.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving child care resources, addiction treatment, domestic counseling \u2013 these are all things that will better serve this population,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

HOW\u2019S THE WEATHER?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Computer science majors Ian Cho \u201924 and Luke Kvamme \u201923 wanted to know how reliable weather professionals are and how their prognostications compare to those of amateurs.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving accurate weather forecasts is something that everyone can relate to,\u201d Kvamme said. Using Python, the two compiled and analyzed data and forecasts from 11 sources across 61 major cities in the U.S. and Canada, collected twice a day for five years. That\u2019s more than 400,000 HTML files equaling about 125 GB of text data.<\/p>\n

When comparing forecasts to actual recorded temperatures, Cho and Kvamme found that while TV meteorologists are pretty accurate, weather-savvy amateurs aren\u2019t bad. The amateurs were only off by about 2.5 degrees in their forecasts compared to the professionals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visit the field, the lab, another country or century \u2013 for just a few moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":27862,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2666,2299,1963],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-around-the-lake-fall-2023","category-fall-2023","category-furman-magazine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}