Radio Continues to be Important to Us

Read this blurb from an article at Radio & Records Online

Talk Stations for Women Unite

Here's a great story found on the radio site All Access:

Utah Station Forges Link With Baghdad's "Station For Women"

KUTR

BAGHDAD's radio station for women is getting some badly-needed help from listeners of SALT LAKE CITY's radio station for women, according to the SALT LAKE TRIBUNE's HOLLY MULLEN, who reports that BONNEVILLE's Talk KUTR-A has forged an alliance with RADIO AL-MAHABA at the urging of morning co-host KURT BESTOR.

RADIO AL-MAHABA's original transmitter was destroyed by a bomb but the station returned to the air with an expensive leased transmitter; UTAH-based WOMENADE is raising money to help the IRAQ station buy a new transmitter. The UTAH station is publicizing three local appearances by RADIO AL-MAHABA's spokeswoman BUSHRA JAMIL this week; for more information, click here.

----------------------

Great story!
Find out more about the Utah talk station targeting women EXCLUSIVELY by visiting Utah's New AM 820

Even though I'm busy--it's a great profession

Again, more than a week pasts between posts.
Sorry, but things have been so darn hectic--even with my 8-week course now behind me.
In T503 , the Telecommunications Theory course the grad students are starting to turn in drafts of their term papers and...of course I promised them feedback.


And I've got two students with Master's thesis proposals on my desk.
The deadline for submitting revised papers to ICA (The International Communication Association) is April 30th...and I've got to revise three of them by that time--including one for which the data analysis is not even complete!

That same weekend is the deadline for abstract submission to the Society for Psychophysiological Research...and although the abstracts are not as daunting to write as full papers, I still have to do it.

And between now and the April 30th/May 1st double-deadline, several of us from the ICR will be attending the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication to present some research.

And, on top of it all, this week begins the official journey through the maze that academics call "the tenure process." More on that later, I'm sure.

Whew! Lots to do!

But, amidst the headaches and the presures, I found this article last week from Money Magazine, saying that College Professors have the 2nd best job in America.

Too true. Headaches, pressure, tenure clock, all true and all present. But, I get to interact with graduate students who are really interested in pursuing questions of interest to them...and undergrads who are eager to figure out what they'll be doing with their lives. Right now I'm working (okay, right now I'm writing in my blog, but I'm soon to be working) while sitting on my couch...and I can work at home for most of the day---and it's entirely on stuff that interest me.

Good morning--Now quit kidding yourself

For decades, the broadcast media industries have been able to convince advertisers that they should use ratings data for the programming content to determine the number of impressions made by advertisements that occur during the BREAKS in those programs.

But wait...you say...don't people get up and leave the room during commercial breaks? I mean, that's why they call them, BREAKS right?

Well, for longer than I can believe possible, everyone in the industry has been complicit in mimicking the scene from the Wizard of Oz (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!). That may be starting to change, as described in this recent posting by the Media Daily News.

Congratulations to Sam Bradley

Congratulations to Dr. Sam Bradley, of Ohio State University (no "the"). Sam was honored last night by the IU Cognitive Science Program for the 2006 Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Because I'm lazy this morning...I'm just going to copy from the nomination letter I wrote on his behalf. If you want "the long story" you should contact Sam himself:

The dissertation itself consists of two experiments and a neural network model. The two experiments utilize a motivational activation theory to explore the role of the orienting response in the cognitive processing of television. Orienting has long been conceptualized as a physiological mechanism offering a protection against interference for information encoding of novel or signal stimuli in the environment. Past work conducted in the Institute for Communication Research has established that structural features of a television message (i.e., cuts from one screen shot to another) provide sufficient novelty to elicit orienting. Sam’s overarching goal was to test the “zone of protection” conceptualization of the orienting response by selecting camera cuts occurring during real-time television processing in which the emotional context was positive, negative, or neutral. At varying time points following these cuts (133, 267, and 800 ms) subjects were given an auditory startle probe in order to determine whether orienting to the cut would provided protected processing of the information following it, or whether the startle probe would interrupt processing. Both startle magnitude and recognition memory data showed that, contrary to predictions derived from past work using simple stimuli, orienting to structural features in television messages only provided protected encoding of information when the emotional context was neutral, not when it was particularly positive or negative. In the discussion , Sam elegantly explains why these findings are understandable given the dynamic nature of the medium compared to the static emotional slide presentation in which pre-pulse inhibition has been found.

Sam has successfully set up a new lab at Ohio State and is navigating the sometimes difficult waters of being a new Assistant Professor. Not only that, but he updates his blog much more regularly than I do. It was nice to see him, plus it was just my luck to run into his wife Emily and their three kids in the lobby of the Indiana Memorial Union yesterday afternoon. It's always nice to see "the kids" return home.