Technology, Media, and Political Change

My dissertation studies the political impacts of media and information technologies in American history. The first chapter employs novel data to examine the electric telegraph's impacts on political participation and news coverage in the mid-19th century America. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connection to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation in access to telegraphed news from Washington. I find that access to Washington news with less delay increased presidential election turnout. Text analysis on historical newspapers shows that the improved access to news from Washington led newspapers to cover more national political news, including coverage of Congress, the presidency, and sectional divisions involving slavery. The results suggest that the telegraph made newspapers less parochial, facilitated a national conversation and increased political participation. The second chapter investigates the political impacts of the first populist radio personality in American history. Father Charles Coughlin blended populist demagoguery, anti-Semitism, and fascist sympathies to create a hugely popular radio program that attracted tens of millions of listeners throughout the 1930s. I digitized unique data on Father Coughlin’s radio network. Exploiting topography to generate plausibly exogenous variation in radio signal strength as well as another difference-in-differences strategy, I find strong evidence that Coughlin’s anti-Roosevelt broadcast reduced the support for Franklin D. Roosevelt in presidential elections. Moreover, Coughlin’s broadcast appeared to influence public sentiment concerning WWII and anti-Semitism. The third chapter studies whether media and information technologies can empower minorities in the resistance to oppression. Specifically, I assemble a novel dataset to study the effects of black radio on black political activism and participation during the civil rights movement. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in signal reception resulting from topographic factors, I find strong evidence that black radio increased black voter registration and the presence of NAACP chapters in the South during the early 1960s. I explore potential mechanisms and also provide evidence that black radio led to greater political power and economic benefits for Southern blacks, as measured by state aid transfers and legislative support for civil rights bills in Congress

On Your Own

My thesis On Your Own is an 18-minute short fiction film focusing on the relationship between a daughter and her dying father. After his wife was killed in a car accident, Frank, as a single father, raises his daughter Giana who has Down syndrome on his own. Frank becomes informed that he is in the terminal stage of lung cancer. He teaches Giana how to live on her own and tries different ways to find a suitable facility to take care of Giana after his death. The film was shot in HD format using Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera with Zeiss Lenses, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Pro Tools and color graded in DaVinci Resolve 11. In this paper, I will discuss my experience during the whole production processes, and explore goals and the authentic works from its original conceptions to the first official screening of my at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)

Roadmapping for Intellectual Property Strategy Formulation: a Conceptual Framework and a Practical Process

In the worldwide knowledge-based economy, intellectual property (IP) is recognised as a key business asset. In the digital economy, whether for large corporates, SMEs or start-ups, it is not uncommon that innovative technologies, devices (products) and services are built from a complex set of IP. As organisations increasingly employ open innovation processes, IP is likely to not only result from internal R&D, but also from external sources, such as R&D partners, complementors and even competitors. Building and maintaining IP-based competitive advantage then rests on the effective acquisition (internal and external), exploitation and enforcement of IP. When having to manage complex IP portfolios and actor relations, an IP strategy is useful to provide guidance to decision makers. While business executives often express the need for better IP management tools and IP strategy formulation approaches, the corresponding literature is surprisingly scarce. In this thesis, a roadmapping-based approach is proposed for IP strategy formulation. While roadmapping is a widely adopted approach for strategy formulation at all firm levels, it has hardly been discussed in the IP management literature. Therefore, based on the strategic roadmapping approach, the IP roadmapping framework and the practical process model were developed for especially IP strategy formulation. The proposed IP strategy formulation approach integrates different strategy levels, provides clear visibility and facilitates communication and consensus among stakeholders in order to increase the prospects for better decision-making. The IP strategy formulation process is business centric, starting with an identification of business strategy objectives that can be supported by the means of IP, for instance, the creating of entry barriers and minimisation of the threats from substitutes. Throughout the process, these IP objectives are gradually translated into specific IP actions. The roadmapping approach then allows to align the timing and sequencing of these IP actions in support of the organisation’s business objectives. The sequence of the IP actions can then be synthesised into a coherent IP strategy. The roadmapping-based IP strategy formulation approach was developed using a procedural action research approach. The prototype has been developed based on literature review and 20 interviews in total with IP or roadmapping experts, and then the approach has been tested and refined through three action research cycles based on 12 interviews with 17 IP practitioners and roadmapping experts, and 14 roadmapping workshops involving IP managers, innovation experts and business executives of large international companies, SMEs and start-ups. Accordingly, this research contributes to both practice and theory. It not only provides a novel roadmapping approach which enables and facilitates structured conversations among executives, innovation, technology and IP experts, who often find it difficult to engage in conversations about IP decision making, but also contributes to the IP management literature in which there is a paucity of studies on IP strategy formulation in practice. It also contributes to the roadmapping literature proposing a novel use case for this widely adopted strategy formulation approach. Additionally, this research also contributes to the strategic management literature with elaborations on the concepts of IP strategy and strategic alignment. The next stage for this research will be disseminating the tool widely and evaluating its commercialisation value for different purposes. This is going to be completed through close collaboration with IfM ECS and one independent technical consulting firm specialising in matters relating to IP. In addition, to help equip entrepreneurs with the tools they need for IP strategy formulation, the materials developed through this research will be made available online for downloading. The hope is that the materials can enable companies to conduct IP strategy formulation exercises by themselves, but also that this openly accessible material will be picked up by entrepreneurship teaching programmes. By spreading good practice on IP strategy formulation, it is expected that the toolkit can help companies to overcome some of the obstacles and maximise value from their IP

Energy-Efficient Transmission Schedule for Delay-Limited Bursty Data Arrivals under Non-Ideal Circuit Power Consumption

This paper develops a novel approach to obtaining energy-efficient transmission schedules for delay-limited bursty data arrivals under non-ideal circuit power consumption. Assuming a-prior knowledge of packet arrivals, deadlines and channel realizations, we show that the problem can be formulated as a convex program. For both time-invariant and time-varying fading channels, it is revealed that the optimal transmission between any two consecutive channel or data state changing instants, termed epoch, can only take one of the three strategies: (i) no transmission, (ii) transmission with an energy-efficiency (EE) maximizing rate over part of the epoch, or (iii) transmission with a rate greater than the EE-maximizing rate over the whole epoch. Based on this specific structure, efficient algorithms are then developed to find the optimal policies that minimize the total energy consumption with a low computational complexity. The proposed approach can provide the optimal benchmarks for practical schemes designed for transmissions of delay-limited data arrivals, and can be employed to develop efficient online scheduling schemes which require only causal knowledge of data arrivals and deadline requirements.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure