Recent Press Coverage
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Levine Comments on Stem Cell Treatment in USA TODAY
May 18, 2015
Aaron Levine, associate professor in the School of Public Policy, gave his opinion regarding the controversial use of stem cells in the treatment of two former athletes. Both Gordie Howe, former hockey player, and John Brodie, former NFL quarterback, suffered massive strokes that drastically impaired their abilities function.
After entirely losing hope and the will to live, they decided to try an experimental stem cell treatment in Tijuana, Mexico. This treatment used stem cell injections from an aborted fetus. This practice has gone largely unnoticed because many who use fetal tissue refer to it as "adult" stem cells, which can also include stem cells from adults, because fetal cells are much more advanced that embryonic cells.
"Talking about fetal tissue raises concerns for some people, and being able to say you're using adult stem cells probably makes sense from a company's perspective when writing a press release or when asking for funding — just to minimize the controversy," said Aaron Levine. "I don't know if there is some deliberate thought there, but it may have helped the 'adult' terminology take hold just because it describes the science well and it also minimizes some of that concern."
Levine's research focuses on understanding how the policy environment influences the development of ethically contentious new technologies, particularly in the life sciences, and his recent work has examined human embryonic stem cell research policy and oversight of the fertility industry.
Published in: USA TODAY
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Buzzwords Dominate Business Communication
May 11, 2015
Richard Utz, professor and chair of the School of Literature, Media and Communication, spoke with Georgia Tech Institute Communications on the use of metaphors in business communications.
“Ever since Robin Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s landmark 2003 study, Metaphors We Live By, there has been a broader recognition of metaphors — a figure of speech in which a word/phrase is linked to an object or action to which it is not literally connected: thinking does not ever happen in boxes,” said Richard Utz. “They try to help simplify and link more complex subject matter with commonly comprehensible objects, such as fruit and boxes, to enable easy communication.”
Utz, who has a background in the stuy of rhetoric and linguistics, noted that phrases like buzzwords and metaphors are often tied to a specific region, class, gender, or race, and are therefore subject to the danger of misinterpretation. In addition to the generational nature of buzzwords, wherein older people may lack familiarity with emergent phrases and likewise, Utz notes other challenges in communication.
“Another danger of misinterpretation has to do with the cultural specificity of many buzzwords and their inbuilt metaphors,” said Utz. “Thus, while a German will probably get the idea of ‘thinking outside the box,’ the German will prefer using a different buzz phrase to express the same issue — über den Tellerrand schauen — which is translated as: ‘to look beyond the edge of one’s plate.’”
Despite the potential for buzzwords to be misinterpreted, Utz does not see a decline in thir use in the near future.
“There really is no way for human beings to do without metaphor or buzz phrases. They render us human beings capable of connecting what we know about our physical and social experience with subjects or issues we could otherwise not comprehend.”
Published in: Georgia Tech News
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Social Media Helps Curb Nigerian Election Deathtoll
April 30, 2015
Nunn School professor Michael L. Best was cited in an article on PCWorld discussing the effect social media has had on limiting violence surrounding the recent Nigerian presidential and parliamentary elections, which were the most peaceful in Nigeria since the nation embraced democracy in 1999.
“I do believe that the capacity for social media to connect and inform helped Nigeria conduct a free and fair election and helped to keep violence to a minimum,” said Michael Best via email. "Of course, these technologies are not silver bullets nor do they always contribute to positive elements within a democracy. But during the recent Nigerian elections, our experience monitoring social media over our media aggregation platform, named ‘Aggie,’ demonstrated the power of these technologies can be used for good.”
Along with Thomas Smyth from Sassafras Tech Collective, a worker-owned tech co-op in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Best published a qualitative dual case study, “Tweet to Trust: Social Media and Elections in West Africa,” about social media use during the general elections in Nigeria and Liberia in 2011.
In addition to remarking on media's effect during Nigerian elections, Best noted that the use of social media and technology such as electronic voting systems should not be considered a panacea.
“Electronic voting systems can be beneficial if correctly designed and deployed but too often they are actually detrimental due to lack of smart engineering and weak deployments,” Best said. “Across many parts of the United States, for instance, badly designed e-voting machines have actually reduced the transparency and accountability of that nation’s elections.”
Dr. Michael L. Best is an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He is also a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the widely read journal, Information Technologies and International Development.
Published in: PCWorld
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The After-Work Email Quandary
April 26, 2015
Ian Bogost (LMC) was quoted in The Atlantic on the ritualistic qualities of reading, sorting, and pruning emails even while out of the office. Bogost suggests that email sorting is simply a default activity when there's nothing much else to do.
"Email pruning doesn’t enact work so much as it simulates work: It’s a ritual—like a secular, corporate rosary—which we perform in the hopes that it will somehow help us leave the domain of ineffectual work and re-enter the domain of gratifying productivity."
Ian Bogost is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication; holds a joint appointment in the Shool of Interactive Computing; and also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Published in: The Atlantic
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17th Century Precursors of Google Maps on View at Georgia Tech
April 8, 2015
Featuring a vast collection of illustrative world maps compiled in the 1660s, "A Gathering of Continents" has come to Georgia Tech's Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking for a limited time only. Global Atlanta featured a conversation with Ken Knoespal, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, who played a significant role in bringing the exhibition to campus.
“There’s a real sense of this being current,” said Dr. Knoespel, who compared Duth cartographer Joan Blaeu’s telescopic approach to Google Earth technology. Many pages offer detailed glimpses into the architectural and agricultural layout of major cities and regions that serve as a “zoom-in” function for a pre-digital society.
“Google Earth, Google Blaeu,” Dr. Knoespel joked. “You can enter the space.”
The exhibition features a 17th Century Grooten Atlas, one of only a few still left in existence, and will be on display at the Museum of Papermaking until May 15, 2015.
“Every time I come in here I can see something I haven’t seen before,” Dr. Knoespel said with a grin. “Where does that road go? It’s not just museum material. It opens history and opens the way we think about space today.”
Published in: Global Atlanta
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How to Rethink the Olympic Bid for Boston's Benefit
April 7, 2015
A longitudinal study on public housing conducted by Thomas "Danny" Boston, an economist in the Nunn School, was cited in The Boston Globe article on the Olympic's impact on host cities.
Longitudinal studies by Georgia Tech economist Thomas Boston show that (success following housing displacement) was hardly an aberration. In fact, residents who moved out of one of Atlanta’s many public housing projects and into Section 8 housing were one-and-a-half times more likely to be employed in the long term than those who remained in the projects. And for those who moved into mixed-income complexes like Centennial Place, that job rate was nearly five times higher.
Published in: The Boston Globe
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Hypersexualization of Women at Technology Trade Shows
March 31, 2015
Carlo Colatrella, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was quoted in an article on CNET discussing the presence of scantily clad "booth babes" at technology trade shows to tout products.
"The outcome of dressing women inappropriately, establishing them as eye-candy or as decorative objects or hypersexualized figures, results in people taking women in general less seriously and being less inclined to hire women and promote women into positions of authority," said Carol Colatrella, author of "Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology" and co-director of the Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology .
Instead of booth babes, "why not just have a neon bulb that goes off to attract people's interest?" Colatrella said.
Colatrella believes the RSA Conference and the other associations instituting dress codes for their tech conferences is a positive move.
"I think it's the right step to treat women as people and not as hyper-sexualized objects," she said. "Whenever you have a professional situation, it's better if all of the professionals are on as equal footing as possible."
Published in: CNET
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Thomas Lux's Poem Featured in The New Yorker
March 23, 2015
Thomas Lux's poem "Cow Chases Boys," as well as a recorded reading by Lux of the poem, was featured in March 23, 2015 issue of The New Yorker. Lux is a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as well as director of the McEver Visiting Writers program and Poetry@Tech.
Cow Chases Boys
What we were thinking
was bombing the cows with dirt balls
from the top of the sandbank,
at the bottom of which ran a cave-cold
brook, spring-born.
We knew the cows would pass below
to drink and we’d pried our clumps of dirt
from a crumbling ledge. Here
August lasted a million years.
There was no “we,”I can tell you that now.
I did this alone. At one cow
I knew as old and cloudy-eyed
I threw the dirt balls as if it were a sport
at which I was skilled.
Boom, a puff of dust off her hip, boom, boom: drilled
her ribs, and neck, and one more
too close to where she made her milk.
She swung round and chased me up an apple tree.
Her rage surprised me, and her alacrity.
She looked up. I looked down at her.
As with many things, I did this alone.
We both knew we’d soon be called home.Published in: The New Yorker
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New Works by Nam June Paik Are Discovered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
March 23, 2015
Professor Gregory Zinman was quoted in an article in Smithsonian Magazine on the confluence of art and engineering, particilarly in the context of "Watch This! Revelations in Media Art," an exhibition that opens on April 24.
The exhibition features artifacts from the Nam June Paik archive aquired in 2009. Paik is a Korean-born composer, performance artist, painter, pianist, writer, and the acknowledged grandfather of video art. In the 1960s, Bell Lab's senior management briefly opened the labs to a few artists, including Paik, inviting them to use the computer facilities.
"The engineers turned to artists to see if the artists would understand the technology in new ways that the engineers could learn from,” Zinman explained. “To me, that moment, that confluence of art and engineering, was the genesis of the contemporary media-scape.”
On Paik utilizing words and letters fromt eh English alphabet to compose visual works of art:
“I think it has to do with opposites, Paik’s play on words,” Zinman adds. “My guess is that he found that amusing. It also could be that short terms could be plotted more easily.”
On Paik's frustration with technology found in the labs:
"He was frustrated because it was just too slow and not intuitive enough,” Zinman says. “Paik moved very fast. He once said his fingers worked faster than any computer. He thought the computer would revolutionize media—and he was right—but he didn’t like it.”
Gregory Zinman is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His research interests include experimental film and media, artists’ film and video, digital aesthetics, the moving image online, and early computer films.
Published in: Smithsonian Magazine
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Killing Top Terrorists Is Not Enough
March 5, 2015
A skeptical caution about the efficacy of targeting top leaders comes from Jenna Jordan, an assistant professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She first distilled her critique in a 2009 article in Security Studies titled, “When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation.”
“Decapitation is not an effective counterterrorism strategy,” Jordan wrote bluntly. She said killing top leaders “does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse,” and that “decapitation is more likely to have counterproductive effects in larger, older, religious and separatist organizations.”
Analyzing 298 incidents from 1945 to 2004, Jordan found that killing the leader of a group resulted in its collapse only 30 percent of the time. With religious organizations, less than 5 percent collapsed after the leader was killed. Overall, organizations were actually more prone to decline if their leaders survived.
Jordan updated her contrarian assessment last year in in an article titled “Attacking the Leader, Missing the Mark” in the journal International Security. Here, she focused on the decade-long decapitation campaign against al-Qaeda following its Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. She found that the United States launched 109 strikes on al-Qaeda leadership between 2001 and 2011. But the number of attacks by the group and its affiliates “rose steadily” over that decade. As the lethality of attacks from al-Qaeda’s core declined, that of its affiliates increased.
“Essentially, al-Qaeda did not suffer a period of degradation,” she warned in the 2014 study. The lesson was that, “even if organizations are weakened after the killing or arrest of their leaders, they tend to survive, regroup and continue carrying out attacks.”
Published in: The Washington Post
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The End of the Big Mac
February 27, 2015
"The burger's demise won’t be marked by a declaration in a quarterly report, but by a collective appreciation for the comfort it offered America."
"All classics are bittersweet, whether they’re vintage films or triple-bun hamburgers. Tender, they tug at our emotions, partly earnestly, partly in nostalgia for a joy that probably was never as joyous as the distortions of time and memory afford."
-Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing. He also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Published in: The Atlantic
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Impact of UK research revealed in 7,000 case studies
February 16, 2015
“Every government wants to know the societal impact of its research,” says Diana Hicks, who studies science and technology policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “The difficulty is how to do that broadly when you only have isolated case studies. Britain has cracked that problem and produced a wonderful data source.”
Published in: Nature
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U.N. Taps Georgia Tech Professor to Launch Macau Program
February 16, 2015
The Georgia Institute of Technology has granted Michael L. Best, who teaches in the university’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and College of Computing, a four-year leave of absence so he can assume the position of director of a newly formed United Nations institute in Macau, China.
Published in: Global Atlanta
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To Win Funds, Scientists Pursue Sweeping Solutions to Social Ills
February 10, 2015
"Even the science community knows that basic research, the linear model of progress, is kind of getting tired," says Diana M. Hicks, a public-policy professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Scientists have realized they can’t go to Congress, talk about the endless frontier, and expect more money, she says. "Grand challenges are somehow of the cultural moment."
Published in: The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Bankoff Brings Leadership to Midtown Alliance
February 6, 2015
Joseph Bankoff brings his longtime Atlanta leadership, perspective and appreciation for the arts, education, and business worlds to his new role as chairman of Midtown Alliance.
Published in: Atlanta Business Chronicle
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Besedes Study Determines Best Decision-Making Strategy
February 4, 2015
Tibor Besedes led a study — published recently in The Review of Economics and Statistics — that pitted three decision-making strategies against each other, and the best strategy was the one that treated the process like a tournament
Continue to article...Besdes' study was also recently featured in the Daily Mail.
Read more...Published in: New York Magazine
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