Wooing
gay tourists
More cities across the country are wooing gay and lesbian
tourists, USA Today reported Dec. 8. From Ft. Lauderdale,
Fla., to Bloomington, Ind., to Philadelphia, Penn., tourism
bureaus are
marketing their cities' gay-friendly images with brochures,
advertisements and slogans targeted to gays specifically. More
conservative cities are targeting gay and lesbian tourists
more discreetly through the mainstream media with images of
same-sex couples and messages that everyone is welcome, said
Daniel Wardlow, professor of marketing. "Certainly some
tourism promotion boards would avoid promoting directly to
gays and lesbians if there is reason to fear a local political
backlash," he said. Read the full story: www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2003-12-07-gays-usat_x.htm
Journalists
judge writers
Two journalists from Porterville recently were honored at the fifth
annual New California Media Awards in San Francisco, the Porterville
Recorder reported Dec. 11. The New California Media Awards, known
as the "ethnic Pulitzers," were judged in part by the
Journalism Department's Center for Integration and Improvement
of Journalism (CIIJ). "The awards recognize j
ournalistic
excellence in ethnic media in California where they represent
the primary news
source -- the new mainstream media -- for over half of the state's
new majority of ethnic residents," CIIJ Director Cristina Azocar said.
Read the full story: www.portervillerecorder.com/articles/2003/12/11/news/local_state/news06.txt A
generation with no first language
Mark Roberge, assistant professor of English language
and literature, was the subject of a Facetime profile in
the Dec. 14 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. He discussed "Generation
1.5," a group of immigrant children who arrived in the United
States before kindergarten and speak their native language at home
but struggle with English skills in school. "Half of our students
come from families where at least one person doesn't speak English
as their first language," he said. "We work with them.
We get them tutors. We send them to the learning center. We have
extra courses. But we don't know exactly what to do with these
kids either. They have these grammar errors. They've been saying
it a certain way for 15 years, and there's nothing you can
do to get them to change." Read the full story: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/12/14/CM199288.DTL
Ethnic
media and common ground
Rufus Browning, political science professor and
senior faculty researcher with the Public Research Instutute,
was interviewed by KTSF-TV, channel 26 Chinese-language
TV and quoted in the October/November 2003 issue of American Journalism
Review about PRI's recently-released Bay Area ethnic news media
survey. Browning disputed the belief that ethnic media dilute
the "common
conversation" that binds society together. "We talk about
this notion of common ground" in the media, Browning said. "But
I don't see this common ground there. It's all split up anyhow. People
are [already] choosing which mass media to use. They're not watching
CBS; they're listening to Rush Limbaugh, or somebody worse, to hear
somebody whose views are more like their own. That whole thing about
common ground is really exaggerated." Read the full story: www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3415
Wild
about mushrooms
Bay Area folks love their wild mushrooms, the San Francisco Chronicle
reported on Dec. 5 and within this mycophilic (mushroom-loving)
region,
biology Professor Dennis Desjardin is "one of the West
Coast's
foremost mycologists." Desjardin shares tips for picking porcini
and bagging boletes and waxes about the fungi that he finds most tasty.
His most important advice: "There's only one surefire way to determine
an edible mushroom, and that's by identifying it properly by species:
keying it out." Read the full story: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/12/05/DDGIM3FQ8B1.DTL
Gay
marriage makes gains in '03
On the legal front, 2003 was a year of remarkable gains for gays and
lesbians, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on Dec. 30, most notably
with the Massachusetts Supreme Court's ruling that gay couples are
entitled to all the rights of marriage. Yet, controversy about gay
marriage continues, and Gil Herdt, director of the National
Sexuality
Resource
Center, believes religious dimensions are sparking the debate. "When
it comes to marriage, I think there's going to be continued resistance
when people think about it as a religious institution. If marriage
is seen as secular, it has much higher [public] support," he said.
Read the full story: www.post-gazette.com/localnews/20031230closeup1230p3.asp
Bland
tackles an uphill battle
There's a hill in Petaluma so unique that cars roll up its slope, according
to local lore. KPIX-TV's Evening Magazine put the myth to the test – with
the help of physics Professor Roger Bland. Employing good humor and
good science, Bland measured a "flat" piece of road that
takes drivers on a steady downhill ride. His team checked the magnetic
field for anomalies in the earth's gravity and surveyed the slope. "The
bottom line," he pronounced, "it's a hill."
Future
scientists at American Geophysical Union meeting
KCBS-AM aired stories on Dec. 12 about high school
students from SF ROCKS (Reaching Out to Communities and
Kids with Science) attending the fall
meeting of the American Geophysical Union -- the first time students
were invited to present their findings. Lisa White, geology
professor and SF ROCKS director, and two students shared their delight
about
presenting scientific posters at a conference attended by more than
9,800 scientists from around the world. "They have first-hand
experience working with professors and college students on really exciting
geoscience projects," said White. SF ROCKS recruits students to
study the earth sciences in college.
The
message of hip-hop literature
Dorothy Tsuruta, associate professor of Black Studies,
provided perspective on the emerging genre of hip-hop literature
for The Newshour with
Jim
Lehrer on PBS in December. Tsuruta commented on the work of novelist
Renay Jackson, author of "Oaktown Devil." Tsuruta said she
finds Jackson's work is not devoid of morality. "No, I don't think
he's condoning violence at all. He wouldn't have all the bad guys get
killed. He's not celebrating this. He's saying, ‘Folks, look
at this. This is what we have come to,'" she said. Read
the full story: www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/hiphoplit_12-08.html
A
backlash in San Francisco
The strong campaign by Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez against
San Francisco's new mayor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, shows there is now
another political force in town, Corey Cook, associate professor of
political science, told the San Francisco Chronicle in a Dec. 10 article. "The
progressive community in San Francisco has really woken up," he
said. "It really showed a backlash to the Democratic establishment." Cook
added that the close election shows that Newsom will have to reach
out to more liberal members of the Board of Supervisors and to his
opponents' supporters if he wants to move his agenda forward. "For
him, the work has really just begun," Cook said. Read the full
story: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/12/10/MNGQV3IVM61.DTL
Willie
Brown's 'Waterloo'
In a January story in the Washington Post on Willie Brown's
tenure
as mayor of San Francisco, political science Professor Rich DeLeon said
Brown's "Waterloo" was how he handled the dot-com boom. "He
just rolled out the red carpet and was not responsive in any way early
on to all the suffering that was occurring because of the building
explosion. And when there were dissenting voices on the Planning Commission,
he fired them. He basically did what he did so well when he was ayatollah
in the Assembly, but in the fishbowl of San Francisco that boomeranged." DeLeon
was also widely quoted in national newspapers, including the Boston
Globe and The New York Times, commenting on Brown and Gavin
Newsom,
San Francisco's new mayor.
Latinas
and soccer
Kinesiology Professor Susan Zieff was quoted in the Dec. 9 edition
of The Journal News (New York) about the more than 250 Latinas
playing in a new soccer league that has teams in the Bronx,
Yonkers and Manhattan. While there is support for the sport, not all
the men are happy. It's that kind of lingering attitude that
contributes to the continued lag in Hispanic girls and women participating
in sports in the United States, said Zieff, who's written extensively
on both immigrants' and young women's participation in sports. "There
may not be outright discouragement, but there is less overt encouragement
than for other groups," she said. Read the full story: www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/120903/b01p09soccer.html
Nurse
serial killers
School of Nursing Director Beatrice Yorker appeared on national
television news shows and was quoted in nearly a dozen
national newspapers in December and January, including Newsday, The
New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today,
regarding
alleged nurse serial killer Charles Cullen
charged with murdering about 40 seriously ill patients in nine hospitals
since 1997. "This
is an established, predictable phenomenon. It's time to do something
about it," said Yorker, a lawyer. She added that the problem has
been exacerbated by a nursing shortage. "Some hospitals just want
a warm body with a nursing license and a CPR card who can be on the
floor the next day." Hospitals must be more careful
to check for unusual numbers and types of patient deaths and to control
nurses' access to drugs and patient records. Read the full story: www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-12-16-angels-usat_x.htmstory.
Bush's
reasons for Iraqi invasion
Ramon Castellblanch, a heath education assistant
professor, wrote in
his bi-monthly column in The Hartford (Connecticut) Courant that
President George W. Bush slid the United States further down the slippery
slope
of pre-emptive war by expanding the rationales for the U.S. military
to invade and occupy foreign countries. Apparently, now it's reason
enough
to
invade if it is just possible that a country might acquire weapons
of mass destruction, Castellblanch wrote. "Nearly a year after
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the weapons are yet to be found. When confronted
with this contradiction in a rare interview last month, Bush clarified
what he meant by 'worst threats.' Bush also repeated
that the world is better off and America was safer because the United
States had conquered Iraq, Castellblanch wrote. Read the full column:
www.ctnow.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-castellblanch0109.artjan09,1,2863154.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped.
Help
for the nursing shortage
Responding to the critical need for more nurses, the University has
teamed up with Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City on a new program that
will train at least 30 additional students each year and increase the
University's undergraduate enrollment of nursing students by 40 percent.
The district will pay $25,000 annually per student to SFSU, where it
costs about $35,000 to educate a nurse in a four-year program, Beatrice
Yorker, director of the School of Nursing, told the Silicon Valley/San
Jose Business Journal on Dec. 22. The difference in funding will come
from tuition and "in-kind" donations from the hospital. "We
could not have done this without the district funding," Yorker
said. Classes will be held at Cañada College in Redwood City
near Sequoia. Read the full story: sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/12/22/story4.html?page=1
Reforming
California's civil service
"Could Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger enact changes to California's
civil service like other states?" Katherine Naff, assistant
professor of public administration, commented on the possibilities
of the Golden
State reforming civil service in an article published Dec. 23 in the
Contra Costa Times. "The unions won't go along with it.
Florida and Georgia had very weak unions," Naff said. Unions
such as the California State Employees Association and the California
Correctional Peace Officers Association are entrenched against any
change that their leaders perceive as weakening members' rights,
she said. Read the full story: www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/special_packages/uncivil_servants/7557197.htm
For
more SFSU people and programs in the news, see the SFSU
in the News page on SF State News.
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