UGA News Roundup

Two have become one. They’ve joined their assets and one had even taken the other’s name.

The University of Georgia Foundation and the Arch Foundation for the University of Georgia have agreed to merge into a single cooperative entity. The relationship will take effect on July 1, 2011. The new entity will be known as the University of Georgia Foundation and will be headed by Bill Young, Jr., past chair of the UGA Foundation, and John Spalding, a former chair of the Arch Foundation. Young will be the first chair and Spalding will follow him. 

The Coca-Cola Foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to the Arch Foundation. This grant will support the Coca-Cola First Generations Scholarship program at UGA and provide students with scholarships.

Kurt Vonnegut continues to be right: life is high school.

And just as everyone wanted to be with the popular kids then, so on the Internet everyone wants to be with the most connected posters. The Internet isn’t the great social equalizer as people thought, embracing different viewpoints and political persuasions. Instead, it’s just as hierarchical as other social groups, according to a recent UGA study.

Some two percent of those discussion threads attract about 50 percent of the replies, according to Itai Himelboim, an assistant professor in the Grady College who wrote the study. “So although we have this wide range and diversity of sources, only a few are actually attracting attention,” he said.

 Himelboim, whose latest findings appear in the journal Communication Research, examined discussions among more than 200,000 participants in 35 newsgroups over a six-year period. He looked at political and philosophical newsgroups on Usenet, the oldest Internet discussion platform, and is currently exploring new social media outlets like Twitter.

What did surprise Himelboim was that the larger the group gets, the more skewed the network of interactions becomes. People exhibit what’s called a preferential attachment toward those with many connections, which suggests that having many connections makes it easier to make more connections. Himelboim said that because people can only spend so much time communicating with others, the growth of these so-called hubs comes at the expense of their less-connected counterparts.

In a related study that randomly assigned nearly 200 participants to one of several simulated forums, Himelboim and his colleagues Eric Gleave and Marc A. Smith of Connected Action Consulting Group found that posting high-quality content is necessary for attracting attention—but not sufficient. That is, high quality posts with few replies drew few additional replies and never became hubs.

So what does one need to do to attract attention on the Internet?

“That’s the million dollar question,” Himelboim said. “But just posting a lot will not make you a hub for attracting attention.”

A team of five former public relations students from the Grady College won a Silver Anvil Award, the Public Relations Society of America’s most prestigious honor for professional public relations campaigns on Thursday in New York City.

The team continued its winning ways after being named national champions of the Bateman Case Study Competition, sponsored by the Public Relations Student Society of America, in May 2010.

The Silver Anvil, symbolizing the forging of public opinion, is awarded annually to organizations that have successfully addressed a contemporary issue with exemplary professional skill, creativity and resourcefulness. The Bateman Team Silver Anvil was awarded in the government category for events and observances of more than seven days.

will have an exhibition featuring three of its four new study centers from Aug. 15 to Nov. 20. The exhibition highlights the C.L. Morehead Jr. Center for the Study of American Art, the Jacob Burns Foundation Center and the Pierre Daura Center. An introduction to the fourth center, the Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts, will be on display during GMOA’s biennial Henry D. Green Symposium, Feb. 2-4.

 The Study Centers in the Humanities were one of the key elements of GMOA’s expansion and were funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 “This special display in the new permanent collection wing will introduce visitors to the Study Centers in the Humanities and how the centers relate to the collections at the Georgia Museum of Art,” said Paul Manoguerra, chief curator and curator of American art at GMOA.

Hal G. Rainey, Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor in the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs, has been selected to receive the 2011 John Gaus Award and Lectureship.

The Gaus Award is given by the American Political Science Association and is designed to “honor the recipient’s lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.”

A professor in the department of public administration and policy, Rainey joined the UGA faculty in 1988. He is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on public management and organizational theory, and has published extensively on the similarities and differences among organizations and managers in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and on the privatization of public services.