 Even
marketers dislike telemarketing
Telemarketers are pushing the whole concept of marketing downhill, said
Sanjit Sengupta, professor of marketing, in an article that appeared in
the Oct. 2 edition of the Contra Costa Times. All that may change if the
federal do-not-call list goes into effect, but so far telemarketers are
fighting it. Sengupta deplores their methods. And he
also thinks that the field of marketing will have no problem adapting if
the law eventually is enforced. "Marketers
are very creative people," he said. "Communication is their lifeline,
so they will find new ways to do it. This is a strong message to the industry
and they will take this message seriously."
Fallout from Sept. 11 fears
International students have been especially singled out by the Patriot
Act reported KTVU-TV on Sept. 11. Most troubling for Ann
Ginger,
lecturer in global peace studies, are the provisions that allow for
greater surveillance, especially electronic surveillance by the government. "I
am upset," Ginger said. "This is
worse than McCarthyism. And I lived through McCarthyism … I
am a constitutional lawyer. I'm not just making this up. If you read
the First Amendment, the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and
14th, what the U.S. government is now doing violates these sections."
Great products
-- across the board
Instead of going for the big video game money, San Francisco-based University
Games creates board and card games and puzzles, according to the Sept.
10 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. The company focuses on games
that children will enjoy -- games that don't take too long to play
and don't lead to only one winner. Charlotte Ferretti, director of
SFSU's Marian Wright Edelman Institute, approves of their efforts. "The
most important thing is that they're creating a product that's enhancing
the time a parent spends with a child. It's not something you see very
often that a parent gets down on the floor and plays a game with a
child."
The breath of Buddha
The Sept. 4 edition of the Gainesville Sun featured an article on a Gainesville
exhibit that includes "Paranirvana (self-portrait)" by Lewis
DeSoto, professor of art. "Paranirvana" is a large
blow-up figure of Buddha that explores perceptions of death and life.
The sculpture,
which is Buddha-shaped but features DeSoto's own face,
is inflated each day by an industrial-size fan and then deflates when
the fan is
turned off at the end of the day. "The concept of dying is probably
one of the biggest ones you can wrestle with, but the reality is, what
can I say, 'immaterial' ... the immateriality of
the air keeping the sculpture formed is a way of saying that I don't
understand dying because I have not personally experienced it."
For
more SFSU people and programs in the news, see the SFSU
in the News page on SF State News.
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