CHMP

Have you ever sat through a meeting and endured the pain of a text-heavy slide that the presenter then reads verbatim the text on the slides?

(Image from Flickr/CreativeCommons)

This sort of drivingly dull exercise is how the vast majority of academic presentations go.  The use of presentation software, most often the Microsoft-branded Powerpoint, ends up being a slow, painful experience widely known as “death by powerpoint.”

My own personal (anti-)favorite version of this is the text-filled slide, built using one of the standard, awful templates that come packaged with Powerpoint (PPT), that the presenter then *reads* to the audience with their back turned to everyone in the room while they look at the slides (as in the image here).   This is not only insulting (I’m not an idiot – but I feel like one when you read to me) it’s also a very ineffective way to communicate a message.  People can’t actually read and listen at the same time, or – they can, but they end up getting less of what you’re trying to get across to them.

To avoid this, academics doing presentations need to think differently about their use of slides.  A much more effective use of slides is to consider them visual illustrations of the key points you want to make.   Begin to think of your presentation as a “slide deck” filled with images and a little text, rather than a way to dump a huge bunch of text. Read the rest of this entry »

The lawsuit against U.S. oil giant Chevron brought by indigenous people in Ecuador’s Amazon can tell us a great deal about corporate propaganda, new forms of media activism – both good and bad – and the consequences these have for environmental health.

First, a little background if you’re not familiar with the case. Ecuadorean indigenous people said Texaco dumped more than 18 billion gallons (68 billion litres) of toxic materials into the unlined pits and rivers between 1972 and 1992, and that these activities had destroyed large areas of rainforest and also led to an increased risk of cancer among the local population. In 2001, Chevron acquired Texaco. The current trial began in 2003 when a U.S. appeals court ruled that the case should be heard in Ecuador.

A number of studies have attempted to quantify the health impact of the oil giant’s operations in Ecuador. Epidemiological surveys have confirmed what people in the area know from their own experience: rates of cancer, including mouth, stomach and uterine cancer, are elevated in areas where there is oil contamination. A court-appointed independent expert in the trial estimated that Chevron is responsible for 1401 excess cancer deaths.

The latest news in the case is that in February, 2011 a court in Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay more than $8.6 billion in damages ruling in favor of the 30,000 indigenous people represented by the suit.    However, Chevron has vowed to appeal the ruling, meaning that the long-running case dating from drilling in the South American nation during the 1970s and 1980s could last for years.

True to its word to fight the judgment at each step, just before the historic judgment lawyers for Chevron went to the U.S. District Court in New York and got a judge to issue an order to stop enforcement of the anticipated order.   The judge granted the order preventing enforcement, and the case remains in legal limbo. Read the rest of this entry »

On February 23, 2011 CHMP will host the second event in our Film & New Media series.  MADE IN INDIA, a film by Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha, is about the journey of an infertile American couple, an Indian surrogate and the reproductive outsourcing business that brings them together. The film weaves together these personal stories within the context of a growing international industry and explores a complicated clash of families in crisis, reproductive technology, and choice from a global perspective.

The event honors the 55^th UN Commission on the Status of Women (February 22-March 4) and will be held at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. After the screening, the filmmakers, Dr. Carole Vance of Columbia University and CHMP Co-Director Barbara Glickstein will moderate a discussion about the issues the film raises, the media’s role in reporting the growing phenomena of outsourcing surrogacy and how we can advocate for the health and human rights of the women involved.

Screening Info (link to the event page):

MADE IN INDIA: screening & discussion

February 23, 2011 – 6pm

ROOSEVELT HOUSE AT HUNTER COLLEGE
47-49 East 65th Street (between Park & Madison)
Event is FREE, but please RSVP: CHMP@hunter.cuny.edu

Photo credit (from Flickr/CreativeCommons)

We live in a media-saturated age in which we are almost constantly surrounded by images and sound created to capture our attention.   Within this crowded media landscape, documentaries about health are capturing more and more attention from a wider audience.

Documentaries are important for how they shape our thinking about health, illness and our bodies.   One of the classics of documentary filmmaking is Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) in which he recorded life inside the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) State Prison for the Criminally Insane.  Wiseman’s film documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists.  Tied up for years in legal battles with the State of Massachusets, the film is now widely available.

Much has changed in the 40+ years since Titicut Follies appeared.

The shift from more expensive analog celluloid (film) to digital (video cameras and digital editing) has meant an unprecedented burgeoning in documentaries.  Now, there are simply more documentaries being created than at any other time.  This means that there are many more documentaries, both in theaters and on the television, for viewers to choose as part of their media diet.   And, documentaries about diet can sometimes prove economically and critically successful.  For example,  Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004)  grossed over $11 million dollars (in the first year alone) and was nominated for an Academy Award.

The shift from film to digital video has also meant that there are many more documentaries about health on television as well.   Most recently, for example, the American cable television network HBO launched a documentary series called “Addiction,” funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Drug Addiction (NIDA), which presents a strong and unequivocal message that drug addiction is “a brain disease” (HBO, 2007). In the very near future, media mogul Oprah is set to launch her network of documentary films, OWN, that may just prove to be another game-changer in the distribution of docs.

At the same time as the shift from film to digital video, there’s been another important transformation: the rise of the Internet.  The pervasiveness of Internet technologies means that increasingly when we look for “information” we start with search engine rather than with a trip to the library.  Digital videos, often documentaries, are often what we stumble upon when we search for information.

Changes in traditional distribution networks for films have also expanded the audiences that see documentaries.  The conventional distribution networks, such as chain video stores and cable television channels, often made it difficult to find documentaries to watch.  With the seismic shifts in distribution wrought by what Anderson calls “the long tail“   documentaries that might draw a smaller audience can still be successfully distributed through online video outlets such as Netflix.

All of these changes together mean that we’re living in a kind of golden era of documentaries.  Many of these documentaries,  like Supersize Me, Food Inc,., and The Cove, deal with important health-related issues.   Today, there are simply more documentary films in existence than ever before due to the rise in the independent and documentary film industry, the widespread use of digital video cameras by the general public, and the rise of documentary films in television.  And, because of vastly diversified distribution networks, many of these documentaries are now widely available at relatively low cost.  In addition, literally millions of short documentary films and clips from longer documentaries are available at no cost through online video portals, such as YouTube.com.

Those of us who are concerned about the public’s health, and want to affect public policy in ways that can improve health, should figure out how to make the most of this golden age of documentaries.

For titles of health-related and social issue documentaries, see this list compiled by the author.

Jessie Daniels, Senior Fellow, The Center for Health, Media and Policy, Associate Professor, Hunter College

Jessie Daniels

I’m very excited about one of the projects that I worked on over the summer, and wanted to share the results of this with readers here.

The goal of this project was to create policy changes that would improve life for seniors in East Harlem, one of the designated “aging improvement districts” in New York City.   The project was a collaboration between members of the community in East Harlem, the Health Policy division at New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) and several of us at Hunter College, including Martin Dornbaum (of the HPEC / media center at Brookdale) and Joseph Pelaez and Jonathan Mena of ICIT.   We used some equipment obtained through a previous grant award (GRTI). The result of the collaboration was this video (15:53) which illustrates the research findings of NYAM’s community-assessment survey through the stories of several seniors living in East Harlem.

The video was screened last week (August 31) at a large event hosted by NYAM.  Those attending the event included service providers, policy makers, and members of the East Harlem community, including those featured in the video. As the video was being screened, at least one policy maker placed a phone call and implemented a change on the spot – and then announced it later in the meeting.  Community members cheered when they recognized friends and neighbors on screen.

While in many ways, this kind of ‘accountability’ meeting is an established practice in community-organizing and policy circles, I think the strategic use of digital video here – both to engage community members and influence policy makers – is a new and innovative development.

I also hope that this collaboration can serve as a model for how we might work together with our new neighbors in East Harlem.

Jessie Daniels, Senior Fellow, The Center for Health, Media and Policy, Associate Professor, Hunter College