Home Sweet Home 3-D

Ditch the movie glasses. A new USC lab explores the promise of 3-D innovations in your living room.

If you’ve been to the movies lately, chances are your popcorn came with a pair of 3-D glasses. U2 3-D, Bolt, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Under the Sea 3-D are among the slate of recent theatrical entries taking audiences into another dimension.

Now, with affordable 3-D-enabled consumer electronics products on the market and 3-D programming cropping up on television sets, will 3-D technology become a mainstay in the living room? That’s what the Entertainment Technology Center @ USC hopes to explore with the new Home 3-D Experience Lab it launched in March.

“We’re acting as ‘Switzerland’ for the many constituents who have a stake in making 3-D work in the consumer market,” says David Wertheimer, executive director of the center. “We believe 10 years from now, high-quality 3-D movies in the home will be commonplace. A significant proportion of televisions – maybe even the majority – will come ‘off the shelf’ as 3-D capable.”

The entertainment and consumer electronics industry-funded lab will encourage collaboration between professional and research communities to develop technical standards and industry best practices for the use of 3-D technology. With the Entertainment Technology Center’s help, Hollywood will take steps to unleash the power of 3-D as an immersive entertainment experience and transform the technology from theatrical gimmick to consumer gold mine.

Displaying an evolving showcase of state-of-the-art products and services targeted to the consumer 3-D entertainment market, the lab’s 3-D products currently range from a $6,500 46-inch 3-D-enabled Hyundai screen to a $90 Webcam by Minoru that comes with 3-D glasses.

“3-D brings something new to the home viewing experience,” says Chuck Dages, executive vice president of emerging technology for the Warner Home Entertainment Group, an Entertainment Technology Center sponsor. “There’s a consensus that there’s a lot of activity around 3-D technology innovation, and we are trying to find out how it fits in today.”

Dages says he expects USC’s role will be to help industry players understand how to standardize 3-D technology for the home by tapping the expertise of students, technologists and “storytellers” on campus.

According to the center’s Phil Lelyveld, its 3-D lab also will help USC faculty study issues related to 3-D entertainment and evangelize the possibilities of 3-D technology across campus.

“3-D is hot,” Lelyveld says. “And we are trying to create a bridge between industry and university to help drive the market forward.”

Wertheimer says USC students will be invaluable to the process. Students from fine arts, engineering, cinematic arts and business already are participating in forums with entertainment executives to discuss their experiences with 3-D technology.

In addition, the USC School of Cinematic Arts is investigating a curriculum built around 3-D technology at the undergrad­uate level, says USC professor Michael Peyser, a veteran film producer of 3-D content. “There’s a perfect opportunity here,” he says, “particularly around how to use 3-D for creative storytelling and narrative filmmaking.”

Wertheimer adds, “The technology of 3-D, especially in the theatre, has reached the point where just about anything is possible; it’s now critical for students and faculty to focus on teaching the ‘art’ of 3-D to the next generation of filmmakers.”

– Ariel Carpenter

Classroom in China

For California K-12 educators who teach about the country, a USC institute offers on-the-ground training.

It’s tough trying to immerse yourself in Chinese culture on a teacher’s salary. But now, USC’s U.S.-China Institute can help.

Since its inception in 2006, the institute has worked with over 350 California teach­ers and school districts as part of its mission to promote deeper understanding of East Asia’s rich cultural heritage and its multi­dimensional role in current affairs. That effort got a shot in the arm with a recent $500,000 grant from the Free­man Foundation to continue the institute’s extensive professional development programs for K-12 educators.

According to the institute’s Clayton Dube, approximately 50,000 California schoolchildren are being taught this year by teachers trained in institute programs.

The U.S.-China Institute offers a 40-hour seminar program tailored for classroom teachers as well as weekend workshops on topics such as East Asian visual cultures and human rights in Asia. These sessions are taught by distinguished China experts, such as political scientist Stanley Rosen and historian Jack Wills.

“Because our workshops and seminars are entirely voluntary and demand considerable time and effort, we tend to get the most committed teachers,” Dube says.

K-12 teachers who complete the seminar program receive stipends, continuing education credits at the USC Rossier School of Education and grants for the purchase of East Asia-focused teaching materials.

Previous Freeman Foundation support has allowed the U.S.-China Institute to offer subsidized summer study tours. Last year, 16 teachers from the United States who teach subjects such as world history and language arts traveled to China and Japan with Dube, gaining firsthand experience to share with students.

“Americans increasingly recognize the importance of East Asia,” Dube says. “Our appetite for news coverage, films and books about the region has grown tremendously. At the same time, most acknowledge we have a pressing need to better grasp the diversity and complexity of East Asia.”

The institute hosts the online discussion forum “Asia in My Classroom” – currently part of a study about best uses of technology in teacher training. It also publishes Teaching About Asia, a monthly e-newsletter for K-12 teachers across the United States.

– Suzanne Wu

Capital CONNECTIONS

›› TROY PARADE USC president Steven B. Sample led a delegation of trustees and administrators on the university’s annual visit to Washington, D.C., in March. The group updated federal officials about USC’s acquisition of the USC University Hospital and USC/Norris Cancer Hospital; and they met with several U.S. representatives as well as Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis MPA ’81. The university also hosted a reception that included Air Force secretary Michael B. Donley ’77, MA ’78 and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox ’73.

›› SHARP POINTS Pharmacies are increasingly becoming places where Americans get immunizations, Jeff Goad, associate professor of clinical pharmacy at the USC School of Pharmacy, testified at an Assembly Health Committee hearing in Sacramento. Medical clinics have not been able to keep up with the demand, he said, noting that pharmacies offer vaccination services on a walk-in basis nearly seven days a week and into the evening hours. “The pharmacy will likely become a traditional site in the future as the public comes to expect and demand this service,” he said.

›› VOTES AND MONEY An innovative campaign finance reform proposal promoted by Common Cause took Elizabeth Garrett, USC’s vice president for academic planning and budget, to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the nonprofit’s governing board. Garrett, whose scholarship is in law and the political process, has been a member of the board since 2005 and chair of its finance committee since 2006. The proposal, which includes six steps to end the pay-to-play culture in Washington and provide transparency in funding, can be seen at www.commoncause.org.

›› MILITARY AIDS USC School of Social Work dean Marilyn Flynn, vice dean Paul Maiden and director of Military Social Work and Veteran Services Jose Coll met with officials at the U.S. Department of Education and the U. S. Department of Defense to discuss USC’s military social work programs. “The interest in addressing needs of wounded warriors is intense in Washington, both on the Hill and in the Department of Defense,” said Flynn. “It is exciting to respond to this interest with all the creative energies available at USC.”

For more Capital Connections, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/capital_connections

People Watch

Jack of All Trades

Faced with recession blues, a USC alum found himself a whimsical remedy: Work 50 jobs in 50 weeks in 50 states

As a park ranger in Wyoming, Daniel Seddiqui ’05 could gaze out his “office window” upon a 1,267-foot volcanic neck called Devil’s Tower.

Even scarier than being a border patrol agent in Arizona was performing weddings in Las Vegas.

“I didn’t want to mess up the bride’s big day,” he explains.

Facing a dismal job market and an economic crisis unmatched since the Great Depression, this crafty USC alum found work as a park ranger, border patrol agent and ordained minister – and that’s just in three weeks.

Last fall, Seddiqui embarked on an unusual career adventure – working 50 jobs, each for one week, in 50 states. He calls it “Living the Map.”

Seddiqui is seeking that elusive thing – the perfect job that will motivate him to spring out of bed each morning. He also wanted to travel the country and experience different lifestyles. Blogging about his one-week careers, he believes, teaches others about the diversity of America’s people and environments.

“Today, I started my first day – again,” Seddiqui blogged on Sept. 29, while in Elk River, Minn., working for a medical device manufacturer.

The idea came to him in the middle of the night. After three years of working no-pay or low-pay gigs, and making no dent in his $60,000 debt, he felt drastic change was in order.

So he decided to put to the test the Trojan slogan “Fight On.” He would not find one job. By Tommy, he’d find 50!

En route to a new, albeit brief, career as a landscape architect in New Mexico, Seddiqui spoke by phone about the origins of his enterprise.

“I typed up a mock résumé showing work in each state and duties for each job,” he recounts. “Some came to me right away. A park ranger in Wyoming. A logger in Oregon. Then I got to North Dakota and I had no idea what people did. So I did some research.”

He confided his dream to a friend in Georgia. As they say, it takes just one person to believe in you. “She inspired me to make it happen,” he says. “Nothing was going to stop me.”

Except one not-so-minor detail.

“I had no money at all; not one cent,” he says, adding playfully, “I was going to save that story for Oprah.”

Seddiqui isn’t being flippant about the possibility of appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. During his odyssey, he’s become something of a media darling, covered by CNN, The Bonnie Hunt Show and National Public Radio, and in articles in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News and The Des Moines Register, to name just a few.

A documentary-programming channel offered to chronicle his journey, but Seddiqui didn’t want producers to script his every move. He turned them down.

“I’m grateful I’m keeping to my own path,” he says.

After taking out a loan, his first stop was Salt Lake City, where he worked for the humanitarian services division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

He’ll end his adventure in September in the Golden State – where it all began. His final job will be in Los Angeles as  – what else? – a movie director. He won’t be directing just any film; he’ll be working on his own. Studios have approached Seddiqui about a possible movie deal. But he may just remain independent.

“Right now,” says the 26-year-old entrepreneur, “I’m keeping my options open.”

– Pamela J. Johnson

To follow the weekly employment adventures of Daniel Seddiqui, go to www.livingthemap.com.

[FAST COMPANY] Obama’s Sports Advisers

In January, two Trojans – former track sprinter Allyson Felix and former football defensive back Jason Sehorn – were appointed to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Though they were named by outgoing president George W. Bush, the two will serve under President Barack Obama through May 2010. Felix is a three-time Olympic medalist and four-time world champion in track and field. She won a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics as part of the USA’s 1600-meter relay team. She also won silver medals in the 200-meter dash at both Beijing and the 2004 Athens Olympics. Although she turned pro directly out of high school and did not compete for the Women of Troy, the 22-year-old athlete graduated from USC with a degree in elementary education in 2008. “I’m excited to serve the council and my country from the viewpoint of a young woman,” says Felix.

To read other USC news about politics, go to http://uscnews.usc.edu/politics_society

Conversation with PHIL ETHINGTON

Map Man

Roll over, Rand McNally. This political scientist and cartographer narrates history in pixels, mapping Los Angeles in both space and time.

For a glimpse into an original, restless intellect, go to Phil Ethington’s Web site at www-rcf.usc.edu/~philipje/. Ethington, a USC College historian, political scientist, sociologist, cartographer and digital archive guru, is set to publish a history of Los Angeles that goes back 13,000 years. It will encompass a book/atlas, a collaborative interactive version and public art. Ethington talks with USC Trojan Family Magazine’s Allison Engel. 

You’ve called your project, Ghost Metropolis, a “history of the world.” Yes, because Los Angeles at least touches on the history of the world. It’s a highly diverse metropolis with populations from all over. You’ve heard the statistics: the largest Korean population outside of Korea and so on. This makes it ultra-hard to write a history of this place, because you wind up needing to write a history of all those places and all those peoples.

That sounds like a lifetime project. I start with the city’s Anglo and Latin founders – after the actual Native American founders – and focus on the Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranians, whose communities were linked to the way Los Angeles reached out to the world. For instance, Los Angeles was a very important base for the Vietnam War. The second big prosecutor of that war was Richard Nixon, representing the military-industrial complex, headquartered in L.A. I consider the large Vietnamese population, which is primarily in Orange County, to be the return tidal wave of our insertion of power into Southeast Asia. Many times we get émigré populations from hot spots like Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Philippines and Korea that were part of our global reach. If you’re going to tell the story of a global metropolis well, you need to follow the story around the globe. But it hasn’t been a lifetime. I started 10 years ago, and I’ll be finished this year.

That’s remarkable. I can’t go into great depth on everything. The book/atlas is going to have an unusual format. It will be 10 inches by 10 inches, which when you open it up, will be 20 inches by 10 inches, giving you a nice space for maps. My main goal is that it gets in under the coffee-table limit. I do want people to walk around with it and use it.

How fortuitous that you decided to map a city through time when Google Maps came about. Or, did you have the idea before? I discovered GIS – geographic information system, the computer system that generates maps – for myself back in the early ’90s. GIS describes the relationships between points, lines and polygons so it can reconstruct those relationships in any scale graphically, and analyze them. You can’t do this with paper maps. That’s where the precursor to Google and Mapquest comes in. At USC Libraries, we brainstormed a spatially structured information system, but it was too expensive to build on our own. We tried programming prototypes, but there weren’t nearly the kind of resources required for an online map server, which is what these big companies eventually created.

Where did that early work lead? For USC, that work led directly to the development of the library’s digital archives, which is now one of the biggest online collections in the world. USC now has a very cutting-edge archive because we had the foresight 10 years ago to geo-code the objects with latitude and longitude before anyone else realized that you could do that with archives. For myself, that line of work has culminated in a collaboration with my colleagues at UCLA called HyperCities. Basically, we’re using Google Maps as the back end to store and retrieve historical information in space/time coordinates, and also to create new forms of publications. So what I’m really working on is how to narrate stories in this space/time environment of cyberspace.

Your research encompasses how the oil business in Los Angeles was linked to the Mexican revolution, how Hollywood exported its racial politics to Africa and dozens of other topics. Are there any subjects that interest you not at all? There aren’t any. I love learning. That’s part of what’s great about my job. I’ve always been curious. But what I’m fascinated by is how it all fits together.

A longer version is at http://uscnews.usc.edu/university/a_conversation_with_phil_ethington_1.html

Milestones

›› SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CFO Robert Abeles has joined USC as interim senior vice president and chief financial officer, succeeding Dennis Dougherty, who retired last July.  A seasoned executive with a background in the commercial and nonprofit sectors, Abeles has worked for First Interstate Bank, KinderCare and the J. Paul Getty Trust. He holds a B.A. in economics and an MBA, both from UCLA.

›› COMMUNITY RELATIONS CHIEF Thomas Sayles has been named vice president for government and community relations. Sayles, raised near the University Park campus, holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a law degree from Harvard. He has wide experience in business, law and educational governance, including years on the Board of Regents for the University of California system and the board of the California Community College system.

›› VP FOR FINANCE Reporting to the new CFO is Margo Steurbaut, who has been appointed vice president for finance at the university. As director for budget and planning, Steurbaut leads a team responsible for an operating budget of nearly $2 billion. She holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Illinois State and an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business. Steurbaut joined USC in 1993.

›› VETERAN FUNDRAISER Courtney Surls has been named vice president for development, following the retirement of Alan Kreditor. She oversees development operations and USC’s relations with the philanthropic communities. Since 2004, Surls has been senior associate dean for external relations at USC Marshall. She has a bachelor’s degree in music from Iowa State University and a M.A. in educational administration from Loyola Marymount University.

For a complete list of USC trustees, senior officers and deans, visit www.usc.edu/about/administration

AWARDS APLENTY

Castells in the Air

He’s the most cited communications scholar and the fifth most cited social scientist in the world.

It has been a good winter for Manuel Castells, as honors have rained down upon the star communications scholar and sociologist. In December, the Spanish-born holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society was awarded his homeland’s 2008 National Sociology and Political Science Prize, bestowed by Spain’s Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas.

And in January, USC singled him out for its highest academic award: Castells became USC’s 22nd University Professor, a title denoting multidisciplinary interests and significant accomplishments in several fields.

But this isn’t surprising, really, as Castells’ career is one of the most dazzling in the academic firmament. His work – and its future impact on society – has been compared to that of Darwin, Marx and Freud, not to mention Max Weber. He has been a pro-bono adviser to the governments of a dozen countries, as well as a consultant with US AID, the European Commission, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and UNESCO.

“Professor Castells is by far the most cited communication scholar in the world and among the top five most cited scholars worldwide in all the social sciences,” according to USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias.

“He is regarded as the leading scholar of the cultural, social and economic changes connected with the Internet and the Web, and one of the intellectual founders of the new urban sociology.”

Asked to account for his enormous popularity, Castells has said: “Regardless of the quality of my work – that I cannot really judge myself, reviewers and intellectual historians will say – what has happened is that everybody feels an extraordinary, multi­dimensional transformation in our world, not just technological, but economic, cultural, political, psychological, environmental.

“People have a deep need to understand the overall process of change. Yet, there are few instruments of interpretation available because the social sciences specialize in narrow, easier-to-measure objects of research while the grand visions are usually provided by prophets, futurologists and ideologists with little scholarly rigor and unreliable information. My work is one of the very few that addresses contemporary social change from a global perspective while being em­pirically grounded and conducted in a scholarly fashion.”

 Castells has received honorary doctorates from 18 universities, national prizes or knight­hoods from six countries and prizes in global politics, journalism, social problems, architecture theory and urbanism. More than 10 books, in several languages, have been written about his work.

– Diane Krieger

Documenting a Love Affair 

A USC neighborhood choir captures the heart of music executive Tom Sturges, who ends up in a 10-year gig.

When a high-powered music executive was invited to tell students at a South Los Angeles school about his career, it was supposed to be a one-hour appointment.

Instead it turned into a 10-year association captured in the documentary Witness to a Dream, now making the rounds of the Southern California film festival circuit. The film tells the story of a project involving mentor Tom Sturges, an executive vice president at the Universal Music Publishing Group, and a group of students at the Foshay Learning Center, a member of USC’s Family of Schools.

More than a story about musical ability, the movie conveys what can happen when a few people make a commitment to helping youngsters succeed. From 1997 to 2007, the Foshay Learning Center Choir performed for more than 50,000 people, including the governor of California and former secretary of state Colin Powell. Every member of the choir graduated from high school, and 97 percent of the singers were accepted to four-year colleges. More than 90 percent have since graduated from college.

“One of those children will do something amazing,” Sturges proclaimed when he first heard the choir. As the film begins in 1997, a precocious seventh-grader introduces herself: “Hello, my name is Helen Carrillo and I am going to be the first Latina president of the United States.” The youngster eventually introduced herself to Sturges at a Christmas mixer, where he gave her his card and said, “Call me.” Naturally, she called. “He told us everybody could write music, though not everybody would be famous,” says Carrillo, now 23. “But music is inside all of us.”

Sturges, the son of renowned writer Preston Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story), was familiar with old Hollywood, yet he was making records with Shaquille O’Neal at the time. On the first day of the partnership, he challenged the youngsters to write a song that could earn them a trip to Disneyland. Over the next few months, he helped them write the song “Love Is Everywhere.” Then they traveled throughout Southern California performing that and other songs they wrote together.

“Seeing the group once, I just wanted to go back,” says Sturges, who still mentors the Foshay choir. “The person who just shows up for a few minutes and makes a speech doesn’t really impact the child.” Carrillo, now an assistant athletic coordinator and cheerleading coach at Gertz-Ressler High School in South Los Angeles, saw the movie for the first time in February, when more than a dozen participants in the film reunited for a screening at USC’s Galen Center.

The movie and the mentoring program now are touching another generation at Foshay. Nearly every time there is a screening, assistant principal Regina Boutte takes a busload of students to the theatre. “It’s very emotional and very real for them,” Boutte says. “They see that some of those kids made it to USC. And they can see how long Tom has been around.”

– Eddie North-Hager

[HYGIENE HELP] Soap Brigade

It began with a humble request to undergraduates: If you go on vacation and stay at a hotel, please save the free toiletries for a holiday homeless drive.  The USC chapter of Alpha Lambda Delta did not expect the overwhelming response from kindhearted students. They filled three 50-gallon bins with travel-sized shampoos, conditioners, toothbrushes, shaving cream and more. “I was abso­lutely shocked,” says Michael Zobel, a biology major and philanthropy chair of the society honoring academic excellence. “We sent out e-mails in April, and I was worried that no one would remember to collect items and then bring them to school.”

– Pamela J. Johnson

DONOR SURGE

Good News for Good Neighbors

USC’s Good Neighbors Campaign reaches a record and meets an anonymous donor’s $1 million challenge.

Despite the troubled economy, the Trojan Family has made helping others a priority by reaching a record-breaking goal of $1.1 million for the 2008 USC Good Neighbors Campaign.

The news was preceded by the USC College announcement that it had more than reached its goal of 50 percent participation in the campaign, guaranteeing a $1 million contribution to the USC Joint Educational Project (JEP) endowment by an anonymous donor. The final College participation rate was 56 percent, more than double its 2007 effort.

Howard Gillman, dean of the College and holder of the Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair, says he is proud of the faculty and staff of the College “who came together in the spirit of community to meet the gift challenge of our generous alum.”

He adds, “It is ex­tremely gratifying that this effort has not only helped the Good Neighbors Campaign, but also our nationally recognized Joint Educational Project, which since 1972 has had a profound impact on the lives of neighborhood children and on the service-learning culture of USC College.”

This extraordinary ex­pression of generosity sur­faced last year when one of the College’s alu­mni was so moved by the JEP experience that an offer was made to donate $1 million if College faculty and staff increased their participation rate to at least 50 percent. Since their 2007 rate was a mere 26 per­cent, reaching 56 percent was a significant achieve­ment.

“The College family really came through for us, and the JEP staff is so thankful!” says Tammara Anderson, JEP’s executive director, pictured at left with JEP student workers, all of whom began as volunteers.

“During these difficult economic times, this gift will assist staff in developing community-based research projects as well as maintaining existing programs that assist local schools and service agencies.”

During the past 36 years, JEP has placed more than 60,000 USC students in community assignments. Through these meaningful experiences, students have learned firsthand about real-life issues of poverty, immigration, educational inequalities and other concerns.

Carolina Castillo, USC director of civic and community relations, is pleased by the College’s achievement and by the results of the Good Neighbors Campaign in 2008.

“There was a tremendous amount of support from the university’s administration and deans, combined with the work of the campaign team, campaign leaders and everyone who made contributions this year that led to this achievement,” she says.

Monies contributed to the Good Neighbors Campaign fund partnerships that support five university-community initiatives in the neighborhoods surrounding the University Park and Health Sciences campuses.

– Susan Andrews and Katharine A. Diaz

[DROP INS] AT&T Aids USC Neighborhood

Every 26 seconds, another high school student drops out – 1.2 million in all each year. Some estimate about a third of all students and half of all African-American, Hispanic and Native American students will drop out. But something else is going on at USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative. In its 18-year history, the initiative has a 100 percent high school graduation rate – and 96 percent of those students go on to enroll in higher education.

AT&T noticed the contrast between the national statistics and those of the USC program and decided to award the initiative a $70,000 grant. “They were looking for programs that have a great track record in keeping high school students interested in staying in school and moving forward to higher education,” says Kim Thomas Barrios, the academic initiative’s director.

Karime Bradvica ’80, AT&T area vice president, says the competition for the grants was fierce, adding, “The program at USC rose above all the rest.” During the ceremony at the University Club that included several Neighborhood Academic Initiative students, Bradvica shared her story of coming from Mexico with her parents when she was 10. One day on their way to the Rose Garden in Exposition Park, they cut across the USC campus. “I could see myself here and I told my mom I wanted to come to USC for college,” Bradvica says. “She told me, ‘If you work hard and study hard you can come here, but you have to study hard to get scholarships.’ ” Now Bradvica is, in effect, giving out scholarships. The grant is part of AT&T Aspire, a $100 million initiative to address high school success and college and workforce readiness over the next four years.

 – Eddie North-Hager

For a longer version of this story, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/16089

Shelf Life

A ‘Groovy’ Jewish History

Pop-culture buffs Josh Kun and Roger Bennett unearth a mother lode of Jewish-Americana through lost LPs.

And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost
By Josh Kun and Roger Bennett
CROWN PUBLISHERS, $24.95

Who could ever forget a record album with the title Bagels and Bongos? Or Cha Cha with Tito Puente at Grossinger’s? Or Shalom, Pardner, an album of Jewish humor that somehow involves twisting with Chubbele Checker?

Memorable as they are, these LPs – and thousands more of Jewish music created in the heyday of vinyl records – had indeed been largely forgotten.

But that was before USC communications scholar Josh Kun and Roger Bennett, a board member of the Academy of the Recent Past, met at a conference of cultural entrepreneurs in 2005.

The two music and pop culture aficionados teamed up to write And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost. Kun and Bennett also became two of the founders of Reboot Stereophonic, a nonprofit record label that “aims to do for Jewish sounds what Smithsonian Folkways has achieved for American music.”

To find the gems showcased in their photo-filled book, Kun and Bennett scoured basements and garage sales, visited B’nai B’rith organizations around the country, kept an addictive vigil on eBay and tracked down performers themselves, “phoning them up like teenagers stalking pop heroes,” they wrote in their introduction. “Soon enough, it felt as though neither of us had a friend under the age of 80.”

They made many pilgrimages to Boca Raton, Fla., “our Shangri-la.” In addition to spending days in Goodwill stores, they discovered the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus, where the staff opened up its collection to the duo.

Their original interest in collecting Jewish album-cover kitsch deepened into scholarship as they were able to trace political and social movements, such as how LPs kept Yiddish alive, the Jewish-Latin craze of the 1950s, how songs of the Diaspora were adopted by the civil rights movement and how early Jewish female adults-only comics such as Belle Barth and Pearl Williams ran their own nightclubs.

Their grassroots look at Jewish life in America is not the history found in newsreels  or archives. They discovered history that was astonishingly cross-cultural.

“It turns out there were psychedelic Jewish folk gods, groovy disco cantors who wore turtleneck sweaters, Korean singers who knew every word of ‘Exodus,’ mambo wizards who held court in the Catskills, jazz legends who did Fiddler on the Roof medleys, Hasidic prog rockers and Jews who made funk albums about slavery,” the two wrote.

 – Allison Engel

[IN PRINT] Church and States

In the fight for immigrants’ rights, religious groups are doing more than praying and providing sanctuary. In Los Angeles, Catholic priests joined union leaders in mass protests that led to a minimum-wage hike for hotel workers. In Chicago, religious leaders helped created a national network of 65 groups to improve life for all low-wage workers. God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigrant Rights (University of California Press, $21.95), a new book by USC sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, chronicles how religious people are taking the lead in an area too controversial for most politicians to touch, paving the way for immigrants to be economically, socially and civically integrated. For example, in a chapter titled "Jesus Would Stand at the Border and Not Accept It," she describes people re-enacting Joseph and Mary looking for shelter after the innkeepers turned them away – a Catholic tradition called a “posada.” More than mummery, the Bible story that urges hospitality to strangers is being used to educate the public about the plight of the immigrant crossing the deadly U.S.-Mexico border. Such religious activism for social causes belongs to a long tradition of religious people working for social causes that were unpopular in their day, Hondagneu-Sotelo says. Slavery, child labor and the 12-hour workday were seen as acceptable practices until Christian abolitionists and the Social Gospel Movement raised moral objections and worked to eradicate these institutions.

 – Eddie North-Hager

For more on immigrant integration, go to www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/15199

NewRELEASES

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West
by James Lawrence Powell
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, $27.50

Where will the water come from to sustain the great desert cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix? Geologist James Lawrence Powell, executive director of the National Physical Sciences Consortium at USC, looks at the waning water supply at Lake Powell and the looming effects of population growth, global warming and droughts that threaten the West’s water situation. He shows how the falling of the region’s reservoirs poses an urgent threat.

No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle
by Howard Rosenberg and Charles S. Feldman
CONTINUUM, $24.95

Today’s media blitz scrambles our perspectives in ways that potentially shape how we think and act as a global society, argue USC film scholar Howard Rosen­berg and former USC communications scholar Charles Feldman in this fascinating exposé on the frantic blur of our information-steeped age. Fea­turing original interviews with a range of experts and practitioners, the authors dissect the 24-hour news cycle.

Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile
by Macarena Gómez-Barris
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, $24.95

In 1973, a military coup deposed the democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and installed a dictatorship that terrorized the country for almost 20 years. In this ethnography, USC sociologist and American studies scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris examines cultural sites and representations in Chile to uncover the lasting impact of state-sponsored violence. She links culture, nation and identity to show how those affected continue to live with violence, passing the trait down to younger generations.

To see more recent releases by USC faculty, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/features/in_print.html

RELIGIOUS RITE

The Cultural Defense

As the world gets smaller, a new book takes a global look at how minority culture interfaces with majority law.

Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense
Edited by Alison Dundes Renteln and Marie-Claire Foblets
HART, $46.50

A taxi driver refuses to pick up a blind woman with a companion dog. The driver is sued for discrimination and explains that, as a practicing Muslim, he does not want a dog, which he considers unclean, in his vehicle. Should the driver’s religious rights be taken into consideration by the court?

What about the victim of sudden unexplained death syndrome on whom a medical examiner performs an unauthorized autopsy? Do the next of kin, who are Hmong refugees, deserve compensation for emotional distress because they believe that mutilation of the dead threatens his chance of reincarnation?

In Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense, USC anthropologist and political scientist Alison Dundes Renteln offers the first comparative analysis of how culture is treated in a range of legal systems, including common law systems that rely on precedent and civil law systems that use a set of codes.

“Basically, there is no country that has an official cultural defense,” says Renteln, who co-edited the book with Belgian scholar Marie-Claire Foblets of the University of Leuven.

“People who reject this policy think everyone has to be treated identically. But the law does make certain dis­tinctions: We take into account whether the person is adult or juvenile, if the person is mentally ill or if he is a repeat offender.”

The underlying philosophical issue is: What does equal protection under the law mean in a case involving a cultural defense? Does the idea of equal protection require identical treatment?

Multicultural Jurisprudence offers arguments both for and against the accommodation of culture in the legal process. In her chapter, “The Use and Abuse of the Cultural Defense,” Renteln defines the legitimate uses of the cultural defense, proposing three conditions that, if carefully considered, should reduce the number of false claims.

• Is the litigant a member of the ethnic group?

• Does the group have such a tradition?

• Was the litigant influenced by the tradition when he or she acted?

For example, in 1996 a group of Rastafarians were busted in a multimillion-dollar marijuana sting. Assuming the defendants really were members of the religion, the cultural defense might be raised for a charge of simple possession.

However, as Renteln noted, the conspiracy to distribute, possession with intent to distribute and money laundering are hardly established parts of Rastafarian religious ceremony.

Other chapters argue against the use of the cultural defense. Among these are essays by Renteln’s former students.

Sylvia Maier, who earned her Ph.D. from USC and now teaches at New York University, writes about honor killings in Germany. In the German legal system, a crime is classified as murder rather than as manslaughter if it in­volves a “base” motive.

As recently as 2002, German defense attorneys successfully argued for a reduced charge of manslaughter in a case involving a Turkish man who killed his wife for wanting to divorce him. They argued that the desire to restore one’s honor is not a base motive in many communities and may be required by a religion or particular culture.

According to Maier, the German Parliament is now debating a bill that would classify all honor killings automatically as murder, with the prospect of a life sentence as a true deterrent. 

– Suzanne Wu

Arts & Culture

Hitch’s Women

They were cool and blonde on screen, but creative and influential describes the women in his professional circle.

Much has been written about how Alfred Hitchcock’s leading ladies endured a tortured existence both on his movie sets and as characters portrayed in his films. But if you look beyond the cinematic terror – cue pecking birds and bloody water circling the shower drain – you might be surprised to find how reliant he was on women for many critical aspects of his life’s work.

USC English professor Tania Modleski studies women’s contributions to Hitchcock’s work – from storyboarding and editing to writing and costuming. Her current research follows up on her 1998 book, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory.

Modleski debunks the notion that Hitchcock’s films are based solely on his genius. And reports of his seemingly hostile relationship with women, she contends, are oversimplified. 

“Recent books have suggested that he was very nasty toward women – a misogynist,” says Modleski, a four-time author with a background in feminist film theory. “It was much more complicated than that. He seemed to identify strongly with women and put male characters in compromising positions in his films.”

She cites the 1964 psychoanalytic Hitchcock thriller Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, and written by Jay Presson Allen, who is a woman. In one pivotal scene, the movie’s heroine – a frigid kleptomaniac – is raped by Mark, her ex-boss, who has trapped her into marriage. The camera zooms in on Marnie’s face, frozen with fear. With this camera technique, Hitchcock crystallizes how painful the situation is for Marnie while significantly undermining the character of her loving husband.

In addition to Hitchcock’s treatment of women in films, Modleski examines his collaboration with women on the production side. She looks at the extent to which original storyboarding by a woman, art designer Dorothea Holt, dictated certain scenes; the prevalence of core psychological messages from feminine literature in such films as Rebecca, based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier; and the extent to which Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville – an accomplished film editor in her own right – steered his creative decisions.

A shot in Vertigo, for example, was cut after Reville thought it made actress Kim Novak’s legs look fat (sending Hitchcock into a tailspin for fear that his wife didn’t like the film at all).

“There is so much female talent that is often overlooked,” Modleski says. “Hitchcock is always thought of as the sole author, but I know there were many women who contributed to his work. They should receive proper credit for helping him create ‘his’ vision.”

– Ariel Carpenter

[SCRIPTER AWARDS] A Slum Dunk

Weeks before its historic sweep at the Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire was already on a winning streak. With four Golden Globes already in the bag, on January 30 it scored the USC Libraries Scripter Award – a prize bestowed annually by the Friends of the USC Libraries on the year’s best screenplay adapted from a literary source. The film, based on Vikas Swarup’s international bestseller Q&A, edged out fellow Oscar contenders The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Iron Man, The Reader and Revolutionary Road for the Scripter.

More than 300 members of the literary, film and academic communities gathered in Doheny Memorial Library for the 2009 Scripter gala ceremony, emceed by actress and children’s author Jamie Lee Curtis. Accepting the award for Slumdog Millionaire was screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. Novelist Michael Chabon received the 2009 Scripter Literary Achievement Award. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Wonder Boys accepted his award from three-time Scripter winner Steve Zaillian.

 – Bill Dotson

ARTISTS R US

Getting Your Hands Dirty

Free arts workshops let students ‘get physical’ by throwing pots, snapping images, dancing and making music.

What was Deepa Chandrashekaran, a graduate student in building science, doing noodling at the piano and grinding her hips to a salsa rhythm? What were Jennifer Ho, a business administration major, and her friend Edward Gonzales, an electrical engineering major, doing constructing homemade lamps from wood scraps and 99-cent IKEA light bulbs? 

Getting their hands dirty, that’s what. On a Saturday in late January, they and 300 others, mostly (but not exclusively) USC students, were guinea pigs in an all-day arts festival hosted by the Visions and Voices program. The brainchild of USC theatre dean Madeline Puzo, who was helped by the university’s other art school deans, “Get Your Hands Dirty” consisted of two dozen morning and afternoon workshops in art, architecture, music, theatre, photography and dance – all taught by USC faculty, all free and all open to the USC community.

Puzo sees “Get Your Hands Dirty” as augmenting Visions and Voices, which since 2006 has been bringing students from all disciplines into meaningful contact with the arts and humanities. Stimulating as they are, most of these experiences primar­ily involve spectating – not the visceral act of art-making.

“A lot of people see the arts in an over-intellectualized way,” says Puzo. “With the exception of writing, the other art forms all work the body. You can’t be an actor without it being in your body. You can’t paint, sculpt, throw a pot, play the guitar, without also being physical.”

Puzo, who is herself an ardent amateur potter, believes such experiential arts training spurs creativity and improves one’s overall productivity. She isn’t alone. “We get a lot of students from business and engineering in improv and theatre games courses,” she says. “Studies show if you stay at one task and don’t give yourself a change and a rest, you actually decrease your learning capability,” she explains.

Some of the more fanciful workshops had titles like “Fingers on a Flute” (also recorders and bamboo pipes) and “Five Easy Pieces” (a modeling workshop using low-fire red clay). More down-to-earth sessions asked students to create a cardboard structure that would buffer an egg dropped from 20 feet onto concrete or to build an energy-efficient lighting fixture using only sustainable materials.

Hendrick Makaliwe, who earned his Ph.D. a few years ago in computer science, re­turned to campus to try his hand at sketching a self-portrait. It looks pretty good. “A long time ago, back in high school, I used to draw quite a bit,” says the USC Viterbi alumnus, who hails from Indonesia. “This is like a refresher.”

Over in the ceramics studio at Watt Hall, Anna Nguyen sculpts tiny objects out of plasticine clay – a fruit bowl, a toothbrush, a high-heeled shoe. “I love art,” says the freshman business major from Vietnam.

Not everyone comes from outside the arts. Mychael Solis-Wheeler is a senior majoring in theatre and minoring in musical studies. An Air Force ROTC officer who will begin active duty after graduation, he is savoring his waning college days, and taking the opportunity to fill in some blanks. “I never got a chance to take a class in the dance department,” he says, so he started the day with a salsa workshop. In the afternoon, he took the jazz singing workshop.

Plans are under way to make “Get Your Hands Dirty” workshops a permanent part of the Visions and Voices program.

– Diane Krieger

[EYES WIDE SHUT] A Capitalist ahead of Her Time

Lucrezia Borgia, the duchess of Ferrara, stands accused of poisoning her second husband. Victor Hugo portrayed her in thinly veiled fiction as a tragic femme fatale. New research by USC historian Diane Yvonne Ghirardo reveals that the model for Machiavelli’s book The Prince was less interested in political intrigue than in running a business, undertaking massive land development projects that “stand alone in the panorama of early 16th-century projects, not only those initiated by women,” Ghirardo contends. Forced by an economic downturn to become an entrepreneur, Borgia would control between 30,000 and 50,000 acres in northern Italy within six years. “This is a classic case of seeing only what you’re looking for,” Ghirardo says. “Because she was a woman, scholars only looked for transactions for clothes, for jewelry or for works of art. Nobody looked at the other entries in the account registers.”

 – Suzanne Wu

To read a longer article on Borgia, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/16179

Lab Work

A Better Rat Trap

Getting embryonic stem cells from a rat used to be an impossibility. Not anymore, thanks to USC-led research.

It’s somehow fitting that this particular scientific breakthrough should have occurred in the Chinese year of the rat.

Late last year, USC researchers for the first time derived authentic embryonic stem (ES) cells from the large rodent. This achievement will allow scientists to create far more effective animal models for the study of a range of human diseases.

“This is a major development in stem cell research because we know that rats are much more closely related to humans than mice in many aspects of biology,” says USC neurobiologist Qi-Long Ying, the study’s principal investigator. “The research direction of many labs around the world will change because of the availability of rat ES cells.”

The finding brings scientists much closer to creating “knockout” rats – animals that are genetically modified to lack one or more genes – for biomedical research. By observing what happens to animals when a specific gene is removed, researchers can identify the function of the gene and whether it is linked to a specific disease.

“Without embryonic stem cells it is impossible to perform precise genetic modi­fications for the creation of the disease model we want,” explains Ying, a researcher at the Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “The availability of these cells will greatly facilitate the creation of rat models for the study of different human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, addiction and autoimmune diseases.”

The first embryonic stem cell lines were established from mice in 1981 by British scientist Martin Evans of Cardiff University, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medi­cine or physiology. Re­search­ers have sought to establish rat embryonic stem cells as well, but they faced technical hurdles because conventional methods developed for the derivation of mouse cells did not work in rats.

Building on recent research into how embryonic stem cells are maintained, the USC researchers found that those cells in rats can be efficiently derived and grown in the presence of the “3i medium” – molecules that inhibit three specific gene-signaling components (GSK3, MEK and FGF receptor kinase).

This approach insulates the stem cell from signals that normally would cause it to differentiate, or turn into specialized types of body cells. By blocking these signals, Ying and his colleagues found that stem cells from rats, which previously have failed to propagate at all, could be grown indefinitely in the laboratory and remain in the primitive embryonic state.

An accompanying study led by re­searchers at Cambridge University repor­ted similar findings, independently verifying that authentic embryonic stem cells can be established from rats. Both papers were published in the journal Cell.

Until now, authentic embryonic stem cells have never been established from humans or animals other than mice. This key understanding into how the cells are maintained in culture may enable scientists to establish real embryonic stem cell lines from a number of other mammals, which could affect organ transplantations and the development of drug therapies.

USC researchers are working on generating the first gene knockout rat through embryonic stem cell-based technologies.

– Meghan Lewit

InquiringMINDS

›› PAIN IN THE JAW Even short-term use of common oral osteoporosis drugs may leave the jaw vulnerable to devastating necrosis, investigator Parish Sedghizadeh of the USC School of Dentistry found. In his first-of-its-kind study, nine of 208 patients who took the drug Fosamax developed jaw bone death. “We’ve been told that the risk with oral bisphosphonates is negligible, but 4 percent is not negli­gible,” he says. Even short-term usage poses a risk due to the drug’s tenacious 10-year half-life in bone tissue.

›› SIGN OF INTELLIGENCE Both deaf and hearing sign language users have more white matter in an important brain region than non-signers, say USC neuroscientists. Senior study author Hanna Damasio says the greater brain mass is in the insula, a part of the cerebral cortex associated with emotion, cravings and language. Her findings confirm that the insula is capable of adapting to language demands. The increase is a possible result of the complexity of multisensory integration required, particularly for hearing signers who produce both spoken language and signs.

›› MEETING ON THE HOLODECK Paul Debevec of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies unveiled 3-D videoconferencing in December at the Army Science Conference in Florida. Unlike holograms seen in Star Wars films, the 3-D image can be seen in person and does not require special glasses. The remote attendee can converse freely with live participants. The inventors see potential applications in entertainment and communications. They also hope the low-cost system will save time, money and carbon footprints.

›› GOOD REEF Satellite images of Earth at night show the bright blobs and shining webs that tell the story of our endless sprawl. Travis Longcore, a USC College geographer and expert in light pollution, collaborated with an international team to develop the first global index correlating night light with threats to coral reefs. “Using night light proximity, we were able to identify the most threatened and most pristine spots,” Longcore says. Concerns about artificial lighting increasingly extend beyond star enthusiasts to environmental and human and health issues, he says.

For more news from USC researchers, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/science_technology

SUPERSIZED STUDY

Psychiatry Tomorrow

A $19-million federal grant sends USC researchers on a quest for the genetic seeds of mental illness.

A groundbreaking effort is now under way to collect genetic information on tens of thousands of patients in order to study the inherited risks for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Led by three Keck School of Medicine investigators, the multi-institution project is backed by a $25 million grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health, with $19 million of it earmarked for USC. 

Together with Massachusetts General Hospital, the USC Center for Genomic Psychiatry will convene an international network of academic medical centers to create the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort.

Blood and DNA from approximately 40,000 subjects will be deposited into a repository, along with clinical and phenotypic data.

Keck School psychiatrists Michele Pato and Carlos Pato will head the national effort to collect data on 10,000 patients with schizophrenia as well as 10,000 individuals without the disorder.

The husband-wife team also will study 5,000 patients with bipolar disorder as part of a coordinated effort led by Massachusetts investigators Jordan Smoller and Pamela Sklar to collect samples from an additional 19,000 patients with bipolar disorder.

Taken together, this represents the largest coordinated effort ever undertaken to understand the underlying genetic risks for these illnesses.

“Our focus is both on determining genetic risks for serious mental illnesses and on developing a new model of care for these diseases,” says Carlos Pato. “This will be the major national effort in this area for the next five years.”

USC researchers will conduct large-scale genomic investigations in this population and also possess a unique ability to follow patients for long-term studies.

“This aspect of the design is critical to allow a number of follow-up studies and the opportunity to explore disease course and future treatment options,” Carlos Pato explains. “We are building a resource for future studies.”

The ultimate goal, says Michele Pato, is the development of treatments to better intervene in these disorders. “If we are able to identify the risks earlier, we may, through observation and pre-treatment, be able to limit the impact of these diseases on people’s lives,” she says.

Thomas Lehner, chief of the genomics research branch of the National Institutes of Health, says: “We’re very excited that we’re able to support cutting-edge re­search like this. The cohort will collect an unprecedented amount of data and will become a major resource for researchers around the world.”

– Meghan Lewit

[MOUSE METRICS] Starved Sick

If you are a mouse on the chubby side, then eating less may help you live longer. But for lean mice – and possibly for lean humans – the anti-aging strategy known as “caloric restriction” may be a pointless, frustrating and even dangerous exercise.

“Today there are a lot of very healthy people who look like skeletons because they bought into this,” says USC pharmacy researcher Raj Sohal. He and Michael Forster of the University of North Texas recently compared the life span and caloric intake of two genetically engineered strains of mice. The “fat” strain roughly doubles in weight over its adult life. That strain benefited from caloric restriction. The “lean” strain does not become obese. Caloric restriction did not extend the life of these mice. 

“Contrary to what is widely believed, caloric restriction does not extend the life span of all strains of mice,” the researchers conclude. It is only useful when, as in the case of the obese mice, an animal eats more than it can burn off.  “Your energy expenditure and your energy intake should be in balance,” Sohal explains. “It’s as simple as that.”  It’s probably better to cut calories than increase exercise to make up for overeating, Sohal says. Overly vigorous exercise can lead to injuries and long-term wear and tear.

 – Carl Marziali

To read a longer article on this research, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/16190