Volume85Issue27

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M THE MANEATER The student voice of MU since 1955

www.themaneater.com

Vol. 85, Issue 27

april 17, 2019

NURSING

SCIENCE

Curators approve $30 million project to replace Sinclair School of Nursing building

Board of Curators approves new human environmental sciences degree, hopes to boost retention

The project is part of a five-year capital plan for the UM System. EMILY WOLF

University News Editor The UM Board of Curators approved a $30 million project to replace the Sinclair School of Nursing building in a meeting Thursday. Curator Julia Brncic, chair of the finance committee, said the project will demolish the current building housing the nursing school on MU’s University Hospital campus and build a smaller, threestory building over the The design for the new MU Sinclair School of Nursing. | COURTESY OF TWITTER VIA @MIZZOU existing basement. The new building will allow “overall explained how the new square footage to be more efficient,” Brncic said. "[Sinclair School of Nursing] Dean [Sarah] Thompson building will help recruit new

The degree will add an emphasis area in family and consumer sciences. LAURA EVANS

University News Assistant Editor

Warner, associate professor in political communication and a member of Kearney’s dissertation committee, said. “I think it’s no surprise that he won the award. His dissertation was unconventional.” The research centered around how partisan and nonpartisan social media users communicated and connected leading up to the election. “The main goals were to see if political polarization and user networks increased in relation to proximity to the elections,” Kearney said. “As [the election] got closer, did we see more polarization, and also, was there a difference in users who followed political accounts versus users who tended to follow more entertainment-oriented accounts?” For this research, Kearney collected data from 3,000 Twitter users who either followed Democrat partisans, Republican partisans, or non-political, entertainment-based accounts, seeing how the amount of partisan users they followed changed over a seven-month period. Twitter makes its data openly available to the public,

A new Bachelor of Science in human environmental sciences with an emphasis in family and consumer sciences degree was approved for MU Thursday at the UM System Board of Curators meeting. Steve Graham, MU professor in the College of Education and senior associate vice president for academic affairs for the UM System, delivered the proposal. The new emphasis area is intended to keep human environmental sciences students from having to switch their majors or stop attending MU. “[There are] no new courses or faculty required in this. It’s just more of a way to catch that student so that she doesn’t have to transfer to some other program, let’s say psychology, history or some other arts and sciences program, and then extend her stay at the university for an extra year,” Graham said in the meeting. The MU College of Human Environmental Sciences is ranked nationally as the number four college

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RESEARCH

MU researcher looks into political polarization, lack of moderate voices on social media Michael Kearney developed his own software called rtweet to collect mass amounts of user data from Twitter. LAURA EVANS

University News Assistant Editor MU research has found that although partisan Twitter users became more polarized leading up to the 2016 election, polarization as a whole may be exaggerated since many moderates remained uninvolved in political conversations. In January, Michael Kearney, assistant professor in the MU School of Journalism with a joint employment in the Informatics Institute, published his research into political polarization and social media in the peer-reviewed journal “New Media & Society.” Kearney’s research won the 2017 Lynda Lee Kaid Outstanding Dissertation Award, an award from the National Communication Association. “It’s a very prestigious award, very competitive,” Ben


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