Mobile Voices: Projecting the Voices of Immigrant Workers by Appropriating Mobile Phones for Popular Communication

Mobile Voices, also known as VozMob (www.vozmob.net), is a digital storytelling platform for first generation, low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to create and publish stories about their communities, directly from cell phones. The project is a partnership between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit that organizes low-income immigrants in Los Angeles. Founded in 1984, IDEPSCA's programs are focused on education, economic development, health access and reform, popular communication, and worker rights. Currently IDEPSCA runs six day laborer and household worker centers and two day laborer corners where workers look for jobs in a more humane and dignified way while learning about their rights and gaining valuable leadership skills. The Annenberg School for Communication (the research partner) and IDEPSCA (the community partner) came together around the shared goal of designing communication systems and processes that promote media justice and help those without computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere. This chapter is a reflection on popular communication, participatory design, andcommunity-based multimedia practice from the Mobile Voices project team. It was collaboratively written by 13 members of the project and includes a project overview and an exploration of themes including the pedagogy of popular communication, participatory technology design, and the dynamic

Candidate Gene Analysis of Femoral Neck Trabecular and Cortical Volumetric Bone Mineral Density in Older Men

In contrast to conventional dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, quantitative computed tomography separately measures trabecular and cortical volumetric bone mineral density (vBMD). Little is known about the genetic variants associated with trabecular and cortical vBMD in humans, although both may be important for determining bone strength and osteoporotic risk. In the current analysis, we tested the hypothesis that there are genetic variants associated with trabecular and cortical vBMD at the femoral neck by genotyping 4608 tagging and potentially functional single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 383 bone metabolism candidate genes in 822 Caucasian men aged 65 years or older from the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS). Promising SNP associations then were tested for replication in an additional 1155 men from the same study. We identified SNPs in five genes (IFNAR2, NFATC1, SMAD1, HOXA, and KLF10) that were robustly associated with cortical vBMD and SNPs in nine genes (APC, ATF2, BMP3, BMP7, FGF18, FLT1, TGFB3, THRB, and RUNX1) that were robustly associated with trabecular vBMD. There was no overlap between genes associated with cortical vBMD and trabecular vBMD. These findings identify novel genetic variants for cortical and trabecular vBMD and raise the possibility that some genetic loci may be unique for each bone compartment. © 2010 American Society for Bone and Mineral Researc

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Special Section: New Media in International Contexts Introduction

The study of the relationship between media and society has a long and varied history in the social sciences and the humanities.1 From the Frankfurt School’s theories of the culture industries and McLuhan’s focus on the relationship between the medium and the message to work on mediation, remediation, and the network society, media continue to be viewed as a driver and a lens for understanding social, economic, and political life. Indeed, the first wave of research on new media—particularly on the Internet—explored how access to networked forms of communication and information may lead to transformations in notions of community, identity, and the nature of being human (Castells, 2000; Van Dijk, 1991; Katz & Rice, 2002; Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2002; Miller & Slater, 2000; Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995; Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002). Research on mobile phones, portable music players, and gaming (desktop and console) began to explore the embeddedness of new media in everyday life (Boellstorff, 2008; Castells, Qiu, Sey, & Fernandez-Ardevol, 2006; Horst & Miller, 2006; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004; Ling & Donner, 2009). Exemplified by sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and others, the presence and participatory properties of new media in the contemporary moment represent an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between media and society in light of the changing media ecology. Are new media technologies appropriated in a similar fashion in what Thomas Friedman calls a “flat” world? Or do particular engagements with such technologies arise from specific local contexts? Even when new media technologies appear to be appropriated in a similar manner (on the surface, anyway), what local sociocultural, economic, or political factors contribute to such appropriations

Special Section: New Media in International Contexts Introduction

The study of the relationship between media and society has a long and varied history in the social sciences and the humanities.1 From the Frankfurt School’s theories of the culture industries and McLuhan’s focus on the relationship between the medium and the message to work on mediation, remediation, and the network society, media continue to be viewed as a driver and a lens for understanding social, economic, and political life. Indeed, the first wave of research on new media—particularly on the Internet—explored how access to networked forms of communication and information may lead to transformations in notions of community, identity, and the nature of being human (Castells, 2000; Van Dijk, 1991; Katz & Rice, 2002; Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2002; Miller & Slater, 2000; Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995; Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002). Research on mobile phones, portable music players, and gaming (desktop and console) began to explore the embeddedness of new media in everyday life (Boellstorff, 2008; Castells, Qiu, Sey, & Fernandez-Ardevol, 2006; Horst & Miller, 2006; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004; Ling & Donner, 2009). Exemplified by sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and others, the presence and participatory properties of new media in the contemporary moment represent an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between media and society in light of the changing media ecology. Are new media technologies appropriated in a similar fashion in what Thomas Friedman calls a “flat” world? Or do particular engagements with such technologies arise from specific local contexts? Even when new media technologies appear to be appropriated in a similar manner (on the surface, anyway), what local sociocultural, economic, or political factors contribute to such appropriations

Team Coaching through CDAI and the GLP

This chapter illustrates how Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI) theory, method, and practice can be used to simultaneously assess and transform leaders, teams, and organizations, through a non-formulaic coaching and consulting process that becomes increasingly self-transforming and collaborative as it evolves. The chapter provides two mini-cases illustrating how CDAI and Global Leadership Profile (GLP) can be used in team coaching contexts to shape coaching interventions on the ground and support the growth of individuals and teams toward more transforming/collaborative ways of operating. The first case was written by Peter Hill during his period of supervised debriefings en route to GLP certification. The second case was written by Nancy Wallis based on her experience coaching a technically brilliant but irascible senior executive toward becoming a more effective team leader and coach of his manufacturing quality team in a global biopharmaceutical firm

Studying the Sent-Down Internet: roundtable on research methods

Welcome to this dialogue on methodological issues in studying the Internet in rural China, an area where you all have direct experience. What do you find is most challenging in researching this topic