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CAMPUS NEWS
DEAD ON ARRIVAL
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randy Todd has a busy life. When she’s not putting her education/outreach “Robot Rat Racers” through their paces at the UO Oregon Center for Optical, Molecular, and Quantum Science, cavorting with her fellow Eugene Slug Queens, or inspiring middle school girls to get excited about science through her STEM SPICE camps, the triple Duck writes science fiction novels with her husband, Lorne, under the pen name BL Craig. The couple had been knocking around the idea of writing together, and the pandemic presented an opportunity for collaboration at home. “I’m the one who can bang out a lot of words really fast. He’s better at plot,” says Todd (BS ’01, sociology; MPA ’10, public administration; PhD ’15, educational leadership).
Brandy Todd
AfterLife: An Undead Space Opera, the first book in the Reanimate Saga series, follows a heroic male protagonist who immediately dies and winds up on a survey ship with a crew who have been dead for quite a while. Todd is emphatic that these are not zombie novels. “We don’t use the ‘z’ word,” she says. Rather, the “reanimated” corpses become the property of a megacorporation and are actually vital to the survival of humanity. Although the books touch on serious themes, Todd says, the characters entertain themselves in the afterlife through art and movies, close friendships, and lots of gallows humor. “It happens to be set in a space opera setting—you know, aliens and intrigue, and spaceships,” she says, “but it’s really more about trauma and loss and finding a new place.” The series continues with AfterDeath: An Undead Chronicle and AfterAll: An Undead Reckoning, with more books to follow. Visit blcraig.com for details.
ournalism student Lauren Yang Brown is among eight college students nationwide selected by media groups Poynter and MediaWise to be “campus correspondents.” They’ve been trained to help peers spot misinformation online and in social media. Oregon Quarterly tested Brown in sniffing out the truth of four “fowl” facts: 1. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. LYB: FALSE. Her tip: “There are three big questions to consider when reading information online: Who’s behind that information? What’s the evidence to support the fact? And who are the sources? “There were lots of credible websites like Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com, all citing a study from the University of Salford, England, that the duck quack does have an echo. You want multiple sources for confirmation, and academic papers are good, too.” 2. Only ducks native to the northern hemisphere can withstand extreme cold. LYB: FALSE. Her tip: “It’s definitely worth it to check the accuracy when you’re seeing broad statements on social media. Sometimes you need to ‘read upstream’—a term coined by the Stanford (University) History
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Education Group—which means clicking through a page’s hyperlinks to find the original sources of references. On Wikipedia, I found the Muscovy duck is native to Australia and New Zealand. But Wikipedia is not always the most reliable source, so I checked the citations after each fact in the article. I found that information for the Wikipedia article came from a conservation center and the owner of a waterfowl farm, which I felt to be accurate sources.” 3. There once was a mother duck with . . . 77 ducklings. LYB: FALSE. Her tip: “When it comes to news outlets, they do a decent job. They’re not always the best, but this story was heavily reported by lots of newspapers. It was a very cute, feel-good story—but every single news site said there were 76 ducklings, not 77. When all of them are saying the same thing, that’s pretty trustworthy.” 4. According to an urban legend, The Duck once jumped out of an airplane. LYB: TRUE. Her tip: “When you’re doing a keyword search, sometimes you have to be creative. I tried ‘Puddles the Duck jumps out of airplane,’ and was getting nothing. But then I looked up ‘Puddles the Duck skydiving,’ and that confirmed through various news sites—ESPN, Business Insider, USA Today—that not only did The Duck skydive during the ESPN College GameDay show in 2012, but it lost its costume head midair.”
COURTESY OF BRANDY TODD; CHRIS LARSEN, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
JUST THE QUACKS, MA’AM
