Blood Battle

By Kevin Fitzsimons Red Cross donor specialist Craig Mott takes a blood donation from Josh Jennings, a design engineer for the Office of Information Technology, who timed his donation to coincide with the Ohio State vs. Michigan Blood Battle, an annual component of Beat Michigan Week. Michigan ended up winning the blood battle, but the Buckeyes won the battle on the Big House field with a score of 26-20, preventing Michigan from sharing in the Big Ten championship.

Is it a small world after all?

Project aims to find how e-mail connects people worldwide

While everyone agrees that e-mail has helped make the world a smaller place, until now, no one has tried to map just what this small world looks like.

But in a new study supported by the National Science Foundation, an Ohio State sociologist is trying to discover how e-mail has changed -- or hasn't changed -- the way people interact around the world.

"What we're trying to do is map the social connections that link people together through e-mail," said James Moody, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State and leader of The Electronic Small World Project.

"We want to understand how information flows through e-mail, how different people are connected, and how small the social world we live in really is."

The study involves having e-mail users complete an online survey that asks them a variety of demographic questions, such as their age, sex, race, education, marital status and employment. It then asks about their use of e-mail, including to whom they e-mail and how often they communicate. Participants also answer questions about the nature of their e-mail relationships.

So far, about 500 people have completed the online survey. The ambitious goal is to have a half-million people complete the survey.

Moody, who has studied the nature of social networks among teen-agers and among neighbors, said he is interested in seeing how electronic relationships are similar to and different from those in the physical world.

"This is all new. There have been no other large-scale studies that I know of that looked at global relationships on e-mail. But in offline relationships, like those in high school, we have found that relationships are dynamic -- they change a lot. One goal is to see if that is the same with e-mail relationships."

Moody said he will contact people a year after they have completed the survey to see how their e-mail relationships have grown and changed over time.

One goal of the project is to test some of the assumptions people have made about online communication. For example, some researchers have suggested that online relationships can break down barriers of race and sex and economics because those characteristics aren't obvious over the Internet. But has this promise been fulfilled?

"This is an exploratory study, so we don't know the answers to these questions. But my suspicion is that there are still going to be economic and racial divisions, even over e-mail," he said. "My basic hypothesis is that online relationships are going to look a lot like face-to-face relationships in terms of whom we associate with."

However, it is also likely that e-mail is making the world a smaller place in some ways, Moody says. In one famous study done in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram found that Americans were only about six acquaintances away from anyone else in the country. This concept was made famous in the play Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare.

Moody said it is possible that e-mail has shortened that distance by making it easy for us to create and maintain relationships with people who are geographically distant.

"We see this phenomenon when we receive the same e-mail joke from a dozen different people we know. Millions of us are getting the same message that all started at one place. This suggests we're pretty well connected. This study will help to measure this connection."

As well as answering important questions about the nature of social networks online, Moody said The Electronic Small World Project will also yield practical benefits. One benefit could be to better understand how computer viruses spread and how to prevent them from running amok.

"Just as it is easy to spread a joke over the Internet, it is also easy to spread viruses," he said. "If we can understand the nature of these communication networks, we can learn how viruses spread and what we can do to help prevent them."

In addition, he said the research may lead to better ways to share and find information. Everyone who uses e-mail has knowledge that may be useful to someone else. Moody said if we better understand the structure of e-mail networks, we may develop ways to tap that information. "It is just a matter of connecting the right people."

Once the study is complete, Moody said participants will be able to go to the Web site and see how their e-mail relationships compare to those of others and see the pattern of connections throughout the world.

"New forms of technology can transform how people interact," Moody said. "We want to find out the role e-mail has had in transforming communication."

Faculty will be expected to have a seat at the budgeting table

A representative group of faculty in each Ohio State college will be expected to participate in budget planning with deans and other administrators as units approach a Jan. 30, 2002, deadline to complete reports detailing what they will do in the next three years to meet the goals of the Academic Plan.

University Senate leaders have worked with deans and the central administration to ensure that faculty involvement will be built into the reallocation efforts in each college. The plans due to the provost at the end of January are expected to outline how resources will be used to achieve unit goals -- including provision of competitive merit-based salaries appropriate to those units -- and will be prepared in the context of tight budgeting this fiscal year and next.

This year, the Columbus campus alone is responding to a $19.4 million loss in state funding because of the state's 6 percent cut to higher education -- and most other state agencies -- for FY 2002. Next fiscal year, a Universitywide compensation initiative will begin, requiring that an estimated $36 million be identified to address the budget cuts and to provide merit-based salary increases designed to improve Ohio State's national competitiveness with regard to compensation, and to preserve the rest of the academic core (see details in the Nov. 8 onCampus).

With so much at stake as the University maintains progress toward its academic goals in an era of budget uncertainty and reallocation of resources, and as the University prepares its transition to a new budgeting process under which colleges will have greater ability to enhance their revenues and control their costs, a consensus has been reached that faculty should have a voice in the discussions. In fact, an Oct. 15 memo from Executive Vice President and Provost Edward J. Ray and Senior Vice President for Business and Finance William J. Shkurti to deans and vice presidents indicated that the forthcoming unit plans "must be developed in an open and consultative fashion."

For some in the Senate, communication is key.

"We're hoping that open and meaningful consultation about budget reallocation takes place as colleges plan to uphold the president's promise for faculty compensation 1 percent above the benchmarks of our peer universities," said Jane Case-Smith, chair of the Senate's Steering Committee and an associate professor in the School of Allied Medical Professions. Added Marilyn Blackwell, chair of Faculty Council and Vorman-Anderson Professor of Nordic Languages and Literatures, "We want to be at the table."

Case-Smith, Blackwell and Susan Fisher, secretary of the University Senate and professor of entomology and veterinary biosciences, have jointly prepared a proposal to describe the process of convening faculty budget advisory committees in the colleges and to define their responsibilities. Because of the complexities of crafting a proposal that appropriately applies across the University, the three Senate leaders have suggested a short-term measure encouraging faculty involvement in decisions being made for the reports due in January.

Under their proposal for the most immediate budget deliberations, the Senate leaders recommend that a plan for consulting with faculty and for reporting budget information to college faculty be included in the reallocation plans presented to the provost. They also recommend that representative faculty advise deans on budget issues to support congruence between budget decisions and each college's academic goals and priorities, and that deans communicate to faculty about college budgets, including compensation and resource allocations.

As a follow-up, the University Senate's 70 faculty members and all deans will be surveyed in February about the composition of faculty advisory groups in their respective colleges, how faculty were consulted for the plans due in January, and how information was communicated within each unit.

"We are trying to get a sense of not just what's in place, but how it works from the perspective of faculty and deans," Case-Smith said. "We'll see whether faculty feel they have a voice."

Those proposing an advisory role for faculty in budget decision-making contend such a mechanism will promote alignment of fiscal resources with academic goals in budget planning and help build trust between administrators and faculty. They also note an increased flow of information would increase faculty understanding of and responsibility for fiscal resource management. An open discussion of the proposal at the Senate's Nov. 8 meeting demonstrated that a number of issues must be addressed, such as the specific charge to faculty advisory committees, their composition, the most appropriate selection process, and an optimum design for information flow to and from the committees.

Though a more detailed approach to formally assembling such committees isn't likely until spring, Case-Smith said that most deans have appeared to be supportive of the principles of establishing a more structured way to involve faculty in college budgeting. Some deans have indicated they already seek faculty advice on a number of college issues, and others have expressed interest in convening their own committees.

For example, in the College of Humanities, Dean Michael Hogan has numerous mechanisms in place to receive advice from faculty, staff and students, ranging from ad hoc and standing advisory committees to scheduled dean and fiscal officer visits to each department.

"We don't have a budget advisory committee in our college, but we have a dozen different formats for engaging faculty in advising the dean on all issues, including the budget and compensation," Hogan said. "My feeling is you can't get too much information and advice. There's a long tradition of strong involvement here. I think we have plenty of avenues and mechanisms to receive considerable expressions of advice and interest from faculty, staff and students."

That said, Hogan said he does not oppose formation of a committee specifically devoted to budget matters, but he noted that because Ohio State's 18 colleges have a variety of traditions and customs of their own, any Universitywide call for established committees should acknowledge those differences.

In Humanities, Hogan said it has been helpful for all involved to participate in consultative discussions at the departmental and college level: Faculty, staff and students learn about the complexities of the issues at hand, and administrators appreciate the informed input.

"I do feel strongly that it's important that faculty feel that their opinions are sought and valued," he said. "I will listen to the debate about these budget advisory committees as the proposal unfolds and will be informed by it."