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A strategy for promoting a culturally inclusive college communication curriculum was developed based on collaboration between two faculty members from the School of Communication at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (HU) and Ohio Dominican College (ODC). In particular the African American HU professor served as a mentor to the ODC professor so as to engage in curriculum development that would promote more inclusion of African-American perspectives in the ODC communication curriculum. The program lasted 3 years and focused on strategies to elicit change from the faculty rather than from the administration through the review of current courses to determine where important Black contributions may be added and to rework course syllabi to reflect the contributions of African-Americans to the discipline. The mentor and mentee worked to revise five of the mentee's courses. Interaction between the participants occurred via mail, the telephone and fax machines. In addition the two participants visited each other's campuses for research, attendance at classes, and general observation. The participants found the collaboration to yield tangible results in curricular development and less tangible but positive results in the experience of consistent interaction with a colleague from another institution. Attached is a student exit evaluation survey developed in the course of the collaboration. (Contains 22 references.) (JB)

Print news media coverage of Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign was analyzed to determine whether publishers followed their roles as liberal, moderate, or conservative publications in their coverage. It was hypothesized that print media coverage would be similar across publications regardless of editorial slant, because of the dominance of the race factor in American society. Analysis of the tendencies or patterns of news coverage of the Jackson campaign included three newspapers ("USA Today," the "Wall Street Journal," the "New York Times,") and four magazines ("Time,""New Republic," the "Nation," and "National Review"). Assertions produced by the different news sources were screened sentence-by-sentence to develop a list containing all basic propositions advanced by each publication in the series of articles appearing between October 10, 1983, and April 10, 1984. The resulting data, indicating differences across publications, did not support the hypothesis. Coverage of the Jackson campaign appeared to have followed the dictates of tradition in that publishers did not allow considerations of race to alter significantly their traditional roles as liberal, conservative, or moderate publications. (HTH)

A study used the 1993 Depository Libraries Shipping Lists for microfiche U.S. documents to determine the availability and timeliness of microfiche bibliographic records from OCLC. Results reveal that records were available for 44% of the sample (n=931) within 1 month of the shipping list date; after 1 year there was cataloging copy for 97% of the sample. (Author/AEF)

The Phoenix Mars Scout Lander will launch in August 2007 and land on the northern plains of Mars in May of 2008. In a departure from traditional planetary surface mission operations, it will have no direct-to-Earth communications capability and will rely entirely on Mars-orbiting relays in order to facilitate command and control as well as the return of science and engineering data. The Mars Exploration Rover missions have demonstrated the robust data-return capability using this architecture, and also have demonstrated the capability of using this method for command and control. The Phoenix mission will take the next step and incorporate this as the sole communications link. Operations for 90 Sols will need to work within the constraints of Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter communications availability, anomalies must be diagnosed and responded to through an intermediary and on-board fault responses must be tolerant to loss of a relay. These and other issues pose interesting challenges and changes in paradigm for traditional space operations and spacecraft architecture, and the approach proposed for the Phoenix mission is detailed herein.

This study conducted with eleventh graders in the Baltimore City Public Schools was based on a correlational survey which explored the relationship between viewer perceptions of black television characters, race, racial attitudes, and viewing frequency. One questionnaire measured viewing frequency, the viewer's perceptions of eight black and non-black television characters, the characters' degree of reality, and the degree of viewer identification with the characters. The Multifactor Racial Attitude Inventory (MRAI) was also used to measure different aspects of attitudes toward blacks. The study found that black shows are watched more by black adolescents than by white teenagers; that non-blacks rated general-audience characters higher than did black respondents 66 percent of the time; that blacks rated black characters higher than did non-blacks 100 percent of the time; that blacks tended to believe black characters were more true-to-life than non-blacks did; and that there was no evidence of consistent patterns or trends relative to racial attitude and viewer perceptions of television characters. Tables illustrating the findings are provided. (FM)