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Upcoming Events
November 21
Lunch Colloquium
November 21
WEBCAST - LC
December 5
December 5
WEBCAST - LC
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find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
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Courses
If you would like to find other EUEC members interested in taking a MOOC together, an OLLI course together, or possibly teaching together in an OLLI course, click on the following link to send an email:
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes, Gray Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
Since the last newsletter, we have had two very interesting programs here, and you can read about them below and also click on links to see videos of the programs. A special thanks to our members (two for Amelia's program!) who write articles for our newsletters so you can read about what you missed. In less than one week's time span, we learned about the latest techniques used to spy on us with our smart devices, and then learned about our Neanderthal ancestors who lived over 40,000 years ago. That amazing variety continues with our next program when we explore the medical world of Sherlock Holmes.
Most of you are aware that we have been webcasting many of our programs beginning over a year ago. It has been a particular struggle trying to get acceptable sound quality. Fortunately, the sound problem seems finally to have been solved with the purchase of a new microphone. We have been able to record the webcasts, but until recently, the only means for making those recordings available has been to supply links that load the webcast files. We are now able to convert those files to video files that can be placed on our YouTube playlist. You will find the first links to such recordings in this newsletter, and I hope you find the resulting YouTube videos to be easier to watch than the previous links. We are also in the process of reorganizing access to our YouTube videos and I hope to reveal more about that soon.
Also in this issue are more reports about member activities. There is an excerpt in this issue of an interview with President Sterk, and you will note that she is very interested in making the impact of Emory in the world more visible. Please let us know about what you are doing so we can demonstrate even more fully how EUEC Members continue to make enormous contributions to Emory and the local and global community.
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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November 2 Program
 Tracking, Spying, and Customizing: Political Communication in the New Media Age.
Amelia Arsenault
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The Road Ahead for Emory
A recent Emory news article featured an interview with President Sterk. The entire interview may be read by clicking here. Of particular interest to EUEC were her answers to the following questions: The Presidential Selection Committee indicated early on that they were seeking a president who would be externally focused, nationally and internationally, but especially in Atlanta. How can Emory be more connected to Atlanta and the region? Emory must tell its story so that others will learn about where we lead. Emory's much more engaged with Atlanta than we acknowledge. If we're not able to verbalize or capture that engagement internally, then why would we expect the rest of the world to know about it? What is it that you wish people knew about Emory that they don't? I want people to have a better sense of how well connected Emory is with the world outside the university and the impact of what we do. I want them to know about our transformational work.
I want them to know about our global work in health and well-being; the translational research that takes place, especially between the School of Medicine and Emory Healthcare; the fact that we have a law school with clinics that serve youthful offenders or focus on the environment, international humanitarian law and more; and a business school that works with veterans and does a lot of work in social entrepreneurship. Or, that Oxford College trains students to be ethical leaders, and Emory College of Arts and Sciences focuses on the "nature of evidence." Candler School of Theology is actively involved in ministry that connects with local churches and has tremendous social impact.
EUEC Members continue to be involved locally, nationally, and internationally and serve as great ambassadors for Emory. Please let us know about your activities!
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OLLI courses for the winter have been announced. You can get more information about OLLI and register for courses at olli.emory.edu. You can see the complete catalog of courses by clicking here. The winter term is January 9 - March 2 and registration is now open. EUEC members Herb Benario, Dorothy Fletcher, David Goldsmith, and Bill Fletcher are teaching in this term, and Geoffrey Broocker is doing a Lunch & Learn on February 22. Thanks to all of these members for providing a great opportunity for the Atlanta community to learn!
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A summary of the October 18 meeting of the Faculty Council can be read by clicking here. Included is a brief summary of the Class & Labor II report presented by Nadine Kaslow and Gray Crouse.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium November 21
Doctors in the Sherlockian Canon
Arthur Conan Doyle, who began his career as a physician and only later turned exclusively to writing, modeled the Great Detective after his teacher and mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, a famous Edinburgh diagnostician. And of course, the stories are narrated by Dr. John Watson, an invalided army surgeon and general practitioner. With this in mind, earlier this year The Baker Street Irregulars published the new book Nerve and Knowledge: Doctors, Medicine, and the Sherlockian Canon. Its longest chapter, "Dressers to Professors: A Spectrum of Canonical Doctors," was written by Marilynne McKay, MD, Emory professor emerita of dermatology. British medical education changed significantly in the second half of the 19th century, and these changes are reflected in the wide variety of the numerous practitioners introduced in the Sherlockian tales. With almost fifty G.P.s and specialists to choose from, Marilynne will discuss several of the most interesting, particularly those based on newsworthy Victorian physicians. Liberally infused with animated readings from the classic tales, this presentation will entertain physicians, detective fans, and booklovers of all kinds.
About Marilynne McKay
EUEC Member Marilynne McKay hails from Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM. A graduate of the University of New Mexico with an MS from Oklahoma State University, she worked as a medical research technologist before deciding at the age of thirty to go to medical school. After completing her dermatology residency at the University of Miami, Marilynne came to Emory in 1980 as Chief of the Dermatology Service at Grady Memorial Hospital. She later served as Department Chair and was the Director of Emory's Office of Continuing Medical Education and Biomedical Media. Marilynne organized the first forum on teaching techniques at the American Academy of Dermatology and mentored junior faculty both at Emory and for the Women's Dermatologic Society. She also served on the School of Medicine and University committees on the status of women at Emory. Her many publications include articles and book chapters on vulvar disorders for generalists as well as specialists in dermatology, gynecology, and psychiatry. She was elected President of the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Disease and co-edited a classic textbook, Obstetric and Gynecologic Dermatology. She is now retired from active practice, but continues to teach residents several times a week in the Grady Dermatology Clinic.
After her first retirement from Emory in 1999, she returned to her hometown of Albuquerque, where she chaired the dermatology department at Lovelace Health System and pursued her interest in drama, completing a Master's Program in Directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UNM. Missing the green of Atlanta, she and her husband returned in 2005.
For several years Marilynne has served as a judge for Atlanta's Tonys - the Suzi Bass Awards - on both the Play and Musical Panels. She's at a theater once or twice every week and last year joined the Suzi Board of Directors.
A longstanding admirer of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Marilynne is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars of New York, and she writes and edits articles about the Great Detective. Her most recent publication, noted above, is a chapter on the spectrum of Medical Education in a book about doctors in the Sherlock Holmes Canon.
This year "just for fun," Marilynne is managing an online Hermès (ur-MAZE) scarf-of-the-day forum.
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November 2 Program
Tracking, Spying, and Customizing:
Political Communication in the New Media Age Amelia Arsenault, Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia State University Amelia Arsenault, PhD, presented this seminar on November 2, 2016, to an audience eager to learn the ins and outs of the use of data to influence our decisions. Dr. Arsenault is currently Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia State University and is sought after for her analysis of the use of media by marketing and political groups to learn more about your preferences, needs, and opinions. The use of social media tools and the attention they get both on- and offline has led marketing groups to track your digital fingerprints as you use your smartphones, computers, and laptops. These fingerprints are gathered and used to target you for advertising products or persuading you to follow a particular political candidate. Every time you access your phone or computer, some group is tracking where you go, what you order, or what questions you ask "SIRI"!
Within the last ten years, political groups have turned to data brokers or data miners to determine ways to get your vote. Data miners gather information on your life style, what you do for a living, how many children you have, charities you favor, your sex, race, etc. When you use your computer to pay a bill, order items, review a book/movie on Amazon, this is tracked and sold by data brokers to political groups, advertisers, marketing firms, etc. From your data, these groups can put "pop-up" ads on your phone, tablets, etc. to further influence your buying or political direction. Political groups also use "Guerilla Marketing," a method of paying bloggers to set up websites to catch your eye, and lead you to their party affiliation websites to further influence your vote. Frequently, these websites create attention by leaking stories that undermine the opposing party. In 2020, over 3 billion dollars will be spent by politicians using data miners, brokers, bloggers, or any other means to manipulate your mind in decision making.
Dr. Arsenault suggests downloading these apps to monitor or block the tracking of your usage: - Disconnect (for smartphones other than Apple) or Recon (for Apple)- allows you to monitor who is tracking you.
- Adblockers- will block ads.
Of course no app will keep data miners from tracking your every move. Be cautious!
--Pat Douglass ______________________________
On the internet no one knows you are a dog. That old joke has always boosted the spirits of many, believing they had anonymity while surfing the internet. Unfortunately, this is only partly true. That was the message delivered by Amelia Arsenault from Georgia State University at our November 2 program.
Her talk entitled "Tracking, Spying and Customizing: Political Communication in the New Media Age" brought home the message that much of what we do on our phones or computers is being tracked from a variety of sources. About 65% of the most common phone apps track our location (so they know where you live), what web pages we visit, what items we buy, what topics we search, and many other factors. Google even records your voice, and they are not the only well-known company using our data for a variety of purposes.
For years, this data collection was done to sell information to companies so they could better target their advertising aimed at you. This is still a high priority for much of this data. But now, this vast amount of data is also being mined by both political parties to better target their message to you. They track you based on how you live, not how you have voted in the past. This applies to both parties as they fight for control, and it applies to some who would use this data for their own benefit.
Besides discussing these uses, Amelia showed examples of people using the internet to write phony reviews of books in an attempt to slow their sales and stop their message from being heard. She talked of collections of bloggers for hire, who will open a web page saying anything you pay them to say, and much more. Young people get the majority of their news off the internet from sources like Facebook. Yet, with there being almost no control of what is written, it seems more reasonable to get your news from a variety of sources and not to trust any one source for everything.
Amelia's message was clear. We live in a new era of open communication, and with the great convenience of this communication comes a price. The United States lags in legislation to try to control the flow of this data. But even as we attempt to restrain access, those determined to use this information will search for new methods to obtain it. The rapid changes we see in technology are great for making our lives easier, but they also make controlling this data more difficult. This is a problem that will not go away anytime soon.
--Ron Gould
Click here to see the YouTube video of the webcast
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Lunch Colloquium November 7
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Replica and reconstructed skulls
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The Making of the Pre-Modern World: Archaeological Research Digs up Old Artifacts and New Ideas
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Emory College
Aaron Jonas Stutz
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Oxford College
Like a lot of children, I was enthralled by the story of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun by Howard Carter in 1922 and imagined myself growing up to be an archeologist who discovers something equally spectacular. That is, until I learned that mostly what archeologists do is squat in the hot sun somewhere, spending hours and hours carefully sifting rocks and soil, and the prizes are bones or pottery shards or the occasional stone tool. That did not strike me as exciting at all! Fortunately, it did Aaron Stutz, associate professor of anthropology on the Oxford campus of Emory, and his wife, Liv Nilsson Stutz, senior lecturer in anthropology on the Atlanta campus. Since 2008, they have been surveying and excavating a site called Mughr el-Hamamah in Jordan, and yes, they have mostly found bone fragments and crude stone tools but what they learned from those simple finds is as interesting as what we learned from the burial tomb of that long dead Pharaoh, if not more so.
At the colloquium on Monday, November 7, the Emeritus College learned that the bone fragments and other artifacts the Stutzes found have added immeasurably to our understanding of the migration patterns of Neanderthals who spread over a wide territory  in Europe, the Middle East, and Eurasia beginning around 200,000 years ago; and those of the other early people, relative newcomers, who moved out of Africa into the Middle East and beyond a mere 50,000 years ago. Given the depiction of the Neanderthals as primitive, brutish, aggressive and let's face it, stupid, in films and pictures and even in scholarship, it was something of a surprise to learn that we ALL have some small number of Neanderthal genes. While they had physical characteristics such as a large skull, a hea vy brow, wide nose, and no chin that marked them different from the ancestors of anatomically modern humans, their culture, social organization, and burial practices were very similar. Just how similar is still under discussion by scholars, but they may not have been a separate species from those other hominids with whom they co-existed. Certainly they interacted and likely interbred. Hence our Neanderthal heritage!
The professors Stutz are especially interested in what the artifacts at Mughr el-Hamamah tell us about the division of labor within the groups. A more sedentary existence developed as individuals cooperated and shared tasks. Plants were gathered that became part of the diet to supplement their primary food, the wild gazelle. All of these were  precursors to the development, much later, of agriculture and village life. These changes took place slowly over thousands of years. It is frustrating how little we can know today about lives lived 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 years ago. What was their life expectancy? How did they divide gender roles? We don't even know what finally happened to the Neanderthals as they vanished from the archeological record. Yet thanks to the work of the Stutzes we know a great deal more than we did. Who knew those piles of animal bones and sharpened shards of rocks could tell such a complex and rich story? Perhaps I should have been an archeologist after all! --Jan Pratt Click here to view the webcastClick here to return to top
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Faculty Activities
Eugene J. Gangarosa Professor Emeritus of Public Health The Rollins School of Public Health hosted a big party to celebrate EUEC Member Gene Gangarosa's 90th birthday. (You may recall also that Gene received an EUEC Distinguished Faculty Award this past spring.) You may read the article about the celebration by clicking here. Gene's autobiography, But Now They Are Angels: Reflections On My Life in Service to Public Health, was also published this past August:  Donna Brogan Professor Emerita of Biostatistics
Rollins School of Public Health  EUEC Member Donna Brogan attended the Conference on Women in Statistics and Data Science held in Charlotte, NC on October 20-22, 2016. There were about 400 attendees. She presented an invited paper titled "Challenging Sex Discrimination: Personal Reflections over Seven Decades".
Of note, she reports that this was the first time that she ever received a standing ovation from a group of statisticians for a presentation!
In late September of 2016 Donna visited her undergraduate school, Gettysburg College in PA (BA, 1960). She gave three presentations and, in addition, had informal meetings with students and college administrators.
For a large college-wide audience on September 29, she presented a seminar titled "Challenging Sex Discrimination: Personal Reflections over Several Decades."
As a guest lecturer in the freshman course "Why People Dance," she presented on September 29 a seminar titled "The Mathematics of Challenge Level Square Dancing." As a guest visitor in an upper level mathematics course in probability, she gave on September 30 an informal presentation and discussion on "Careers in Statistics."
Perry Sprawls, Ph.D., FACR, FAAPM, FIOMP
Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Emory University
EUEC Member Perry Sprawls reports that he has had a very busy year with the Sprawls Educational Foundation and its work in global health and the sharing of Emory radiological expertise and experience in many different places. Those places include Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and China. In September, he served as a Director, as he has for twenty years, in the College on Medical Physics which is a biannual post-graduate course on applied clinical physics and radiation issues sponsored by UNESCO and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is specifically for radiological scientists from the Developing Countries of the world. For that work, he was given the plaque shown above. Perry continues to serve as founding co-editor of the Medical Physics International Journal sponsored by the International Organization of Medical Physics (IOMP). This first-of-its-kind web-based open access journal is freely available in all countries and provides educational articles especially to support new and developing imaging methods. A more detailed report of his activities in the past year can be read by clicking here.
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Walking the campus with Dianne
Our last photo was recognized by a few Emeritus Members!! It is, of course, the suspension bridge located in Lullwater Preserve just off the paved path behind the President's house. The bridge takes you across the creek -- turn right and follow trails to the V.A. Hospital; turn left and follow the trail along the creek to Houston Mill Road. The bridge does swing and move a bit while one is traveling on it, but not so much as to be scary -- at least not for me!
 Let's go inside for our next walk: this piece of art is made of empty soda cans. If you are a distance away (as in the photo) you can see a distinctive picture, but if you are up close, it simply looks like a bunch of empty cans hanging on the wall.
Where will you find this on Emory's campus? 
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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