Football and Research Money: Big Ten Wins

During a conversation the other night, we were debating the relative merits of the various university athletic conferences.

I work at Texas Tech, a member of the Big XII Conference. I grew up in Kansas City, which was the heart of the former Big 8 Conference. I also earned my master's degree at Kansas State, so I am partial to the Big XII. Bad news for me below.

My Ph.D. is from Indiana, and my first faculty position was at Ohio State, so I am partial to the Big Ten, too.

Some of my other colleagues are from Southeastern Conference schools, and I was talking smack about the traditional football powerhouse conference.

So I wondered how the conferences stack up academically. It's difficult to pick any one metric for academic success, but I decided to go with research funding. Research is the lifeblood of major universities, and funding fuels that research. I turned to the Center for Measuring University Performance and their 2007 Top American Research University Report.

So how do the conferences of the Bowl Championship Series stack up?

Well, it's not quite easy to tell. Apples and oranges, and something like that. Some university totals appear to include their medical school and some don't. So there's no total for Baylor University, which suggests they have less than $20 million in annual federal research funding. However, Baylor College of Medicine had $458,694 in research funding in 2005. To include or not include? Also, there is no amount for Boston College. Pittsburgh leads the Big East, and if it were not for Pitt (which surely includes their medical school), the Big East would average about half of the next lowest conference.

No matter Baylor's fate (I decided to exclude the medical college), the news is not good for the current top powers in football. The Big XII and SEC have the top four ranked teams in the land and five of the top seven. However, gridiron greatness does not translate to research power.

The Big XII is dead last among the six BCS conferences, and the SEC is fourth (if you include Baylor's medical school, the Big XII jumps to fourth).

The Big Ten, led by Michigan, leads the way. Although, the Big Ten is "down" this year, Michigan is the most successful program in college football. So these data may be spurious. Florida also tops the SEC in football and research dollars.

In rank order, here are the final data for average annual funding for each institution for 2005 and 2004.

Conference, Average Amount, Top Program
Big Ten, $477,259,000, (that school up north)
Pac 10, $422,266,000, UCLA
ACC, $296,778,000, Duke
SEC, $210,054,000, Florida
Big East, $209,668,000, Pittsburgh
Big XII, $201,376,000, Texas A&M

Headed to California to Talk Advertising

I'm headed to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Advertising in San Mateo, California today.

There, members of the Texas Tech team will present research on:

Straight Eye for the Queer Ad: Stop, Look, and Dislike
James Angelini, University of Delaware
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University

Love is in the Heart: Physiological Responding to Preferred Brands
Wendy Maxian, Texas Tech University
Nikki Siegrist, Texas Tech University
Wes Wise, Texas Tech University
Jessica Freeman, Texas Tech University
Kayla Altman, Texas Tech University
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University

Physiological Responses as a Measure of Effectiveness of Brand Placements in Video Games
Harsha Gangadharbatla, Texas Tech University
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University
Wes Wise, Texas Tech University
Brandon Nutting, Texas Tech University
Kelli Brown, Texas Tech University
Wendy Maxian, Texas Tech University
Nikki Siegrist, Texas Tech University
Lakshmi Tirumala, Texas Tech University

Gender, Arousal, and Presence as Predictors of Recall of Brands Placed in Videogames
Harsha Gangadharbatla, Texas Tech University

Hope to see you there!

Academic Research Study, Chance at $250

If you're not a communications professor or graduate student, consider participating in a study for a chance at cash!

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Greetings.

Your opinion is important to us. You are invited participate in an academic Texas Tech University research study about attitudes, memory, and lifestyle.

If you choose to participate in the study, you will be entered into a raffle to win one of 8 cash prizes. The top prize is $250, and second prize is $100. There will be six $25 cash prizes.

To participate in the study, all you have to do is click on (or copy and paste) the link below and answer some questions. If you choose to participate, you will answer questions about your attitudes, memory, and lifestyle. This entire study should take less than 30 minutes.

All of your responses will be completely anonymous. Your data will in no way be connected to your name. You will have to provide contact information for the raffle, but it will be used only to enter you in the prize drawing and to let you know if you've won.

Click on the link below to get started. We encourage you to pass the link or this message along to anyone you know who might be interested in participating. Simply forward this message, or the link, on to them. The study will be open to responses until March 12, 2008, at midnight.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

Thank you for your time and helping us out!

Please copy and paste the URL below to get started:

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UPDATE: Study now closed. Thank you for your interest.

Harvard Steps toward Open Publishing

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University professors may publish more research online, free to readers, after the school's arts and sciences faculty adopted a new policy that may be a blow to scholarly journal publishers.

The policy was approved in a voice vote yesterday, according to Robert Mitchell, director of communications for the 730-member arts and sciences faculty. The meeting was held at the university's Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus.

Read the entire story here.

Thanks to AEJMC Web site for alerting me to this.

I have been arguing for such a model for a while now (for example, read here). More on this topic, soon.

News Story on Our Political Ads Research

The local Fox News affiliate came by the lab on Friday to do a story about an article we have appearing in the December 2007 Journal of Advertising.

The research was done with James R. Angelini, of the University of Delaware, and Sungkyoung Lee, of Indiana University.

You can read a news release about the research at the Texas Tech Web site.

Thanks Kids: All I Can Say Is 'Wow'

From ScienceNow.com:

See http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1005/2

In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers--women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men--earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.

I, however, ran across this on FARK.com, which my productivity regrets that I learned about today.

Industry, Academics Still Not Talking

I am increasingly frustrated by the chasm between academic research about the media and industry research about the media.

The chasm is in readership, not interest or topic. We could learn a lot from each other, but we don't. We cannot learn from industry because their research is proprietary, and, frankly, they won't share.

Why they chose not to learn from us is another matter.

Reading today's Daily News from Advertising Age, there is an interesting story on video game advertising.

One of the subheadlines reads, "Interactivity, motion work best."

Yup. I could have told them that. I've done a little bit of research on video games, and I've done quite a bit on various forms of media. These two principles are pretty much gimmes. Obviously people more senior than me have done far more research.

But it has been my experience that industry does not pick up the phone. They do not pick up the journals. They just reinvent the wheel. And although we can be eggheads in our ivory tower, we have the added benefit of time and perspective.

We can take the time to build theory. We can look at the bigger picture. This is seldom the case in industry, where researchers have to satisfy this client on this day.

There are so few actual obstacles that preclude working together, yet so many seem to remain nonetheless.

Experiments Seem to Control Me

One of the primary advantages of experimental design, I told my undergraduate research methods class yesterday, is control. We can control almost everything (as in hold the same, not in the authoritarian kind of way).

The problem for the scientist, then, is that you have to control everything. I am in the midst of a two-week run to get two experiments ready to go. The details are tedious, unending, and not of interest to anyone but me.

The project is all consuming, so I have been unable to muster anything remotely interesting to say here. When the experiments are done, however, there should be many interesting things to say.

Until then, my life is a blur of Adobe Audition, MediaLab, and Macromedia (Adobe) Dreamweaver.

Yes, No, Audition, and the Human Brain

First, let me offer "mad props" to Adobe for their wonderful software, Audition. My copy arrived Friday, and I already love it.

I spent Saturday in the lab editing audio instructions generously recorded by my colleague, Todd Chambers, Ph.D. I was trimming the edges of the files and getting rid of breathing pauses.

As I have mentioned before, I grew up around a family advertising agency, and I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent in a recording studio. I still get a special nostalgic feel when I hear the high pitched "chirp" of video tape getting up-to-speed or slowing down.

Along the way, I also learned some things. Before his advertising career, my dad (also named Sam Bradley) was a radio man. So I have heard great stories about his radio career. Enough so that I began my career as a broadcast journalism major at New Mexico State.

Although that career did not last long, I did gain experience editing analog recordings (although I had nothing that could be called skill), and I even actually taped some audio tape together.

Over the years, I actually learned a thing or two. I can recall dad talking about how much easier it is to remove pauses and breaths in the digital world. And it was this that led me to cleaning up Todd's recording in Audition.

As perhaps only a hopeless academic is apt to do, I noticed something scientific while I was editing. Admittedly it is only a tangential little linguistic phenomenon of interest to scientists, but pretty darned cool to me nonetheless.

Permit me one more digression, and I will explain.

When I first arrived in Bloomington in January 2002, I happened across an article by world-famous IU psychologist, Richard M. Shiffrin (see full citation below). In that study, they used audio to record answers to memory questions. Participants either were to acknowledge "yes" they had seen the material or "no" they had not.

They used a computer to record response times, or how fast it took people to say "yes" or "no." And when you're keeping track of time, you need things to be on an even playing field. And it seems that all things are not equal with "yes" and "no."

In order to make them equal, they had participants say the letter "P" first. So they said "P-yes" and "P-no" instead of "yes" and "no."

Nobel and Shiffrin (2001) wrote, "The 'P' sound was inserted at the beginning of the verbal response to equate the onset times for different phonemes. Differences as large as 150 ms in initial phonemes have been reported (see, e.g., Pechmann, Reetz, & Zerbst, 1989)."

For some reason likely due to me being a nerd, this stuck with me.


While editing Todd's recordings Saturday, I noticed a difference between "yes" and "no" that illustrated the very reasoning behind "P-yes" and "P-no."

It takes "no" longer to get up to full volume than "yes."

Too cool!!!!

I do not have copies of Todd's recording here, so I quickly recorded myself saying "Yes" and "No" and imported those into Audition. With roughly equal onset times, you can see that "Yes" (above) ramps up much more quickly than "no" (below).

To me, this is very, very cool. First, the cognitive processing of phonemes is of great interest. This difference suggests that humans are able to understand the word "yes" more quickly than "no." Interesting, perhaps.

But also cool is that is was quicker to record and edit these audio clips than it was to write this posting. Some days, I hate technology. But most days it is pretty damned cool!

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Nobel, P. A., & Shiffrin, R. M. (2001). Retrieval processes in recognition and cued recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 384-413.

Shake That Content Analysis

Today it came time to teach content analysis in the undergraduate research methods class.

Talk about a party on a Friday afternoon.

A colleague suggested playing an Eminem song and having the students code it for sexual references.

A great idea.

I toyed with the idea for more than an hour, settling on his Shake that song (read the quite controversial lyrics here).

We talked about defining sexual references and obscenity and indecency, as this is a current topic of concern.

I also tried to make sure that any student who wanted to could leave before we played the song.

The educational exercise worked quite well as the students struggled with the definitions.

"This is hard," one said.

Another fell back on Potter Stewart's "I'll know it when I see it."

After the song, the counts for sexual references ranged from 6 to almost 60. Exactly the point! Content analysis based coding is quite difficult.

In the end, I hope no one was needlessly offended.

Perhaps most interestingly, almost the entire class agreed that the printed lyrics (which we did not look at) would be more offensive than the song.

Hmmm. Context can make something less offensive. I think that means something.

Sequential MPEGs Lead to Flashing Woes

Update: This single line of code makes the flash much briefer!

jP.setBackground(Color.black);

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A small copper wire comes in the back of my house. Through that small, little copper wire comes myriad cable television channels, digital cable (and dozens of channels of digital music), broadband Internet, and my landline (which we never use and need to get rid of).

That's an amazing damned wire. One stupid wire.

This week I am trying to get an experiment ready to run. For that experiment, I need to show multiple video clips in a sequence. They're chopped up in a particular order for very particular reasons.

I would like for those clips to go together seamlessly. However, this seems impossible. The MediaLab software we use goes to a blank screen between clips, which results in a flash between clips.

I hate this flash. I have spent days trying to get rid of this flash. Finally I resorted to programming myself in Java. I spent much of the day today trying to get the code right. I'm a hack as a programmer, so I have to beg, borrow, and steal code.

Finally, at 8:30 p.m. tonight, after my kids went to bed, I got two clips to play back-to-back in Java.

And guess what?

Flash! That's what!

My laptop is new and pretty darned fast. Millions or billions of calculations per second.

Showing two MPEG clips back-to-back without a flash? Priceless, apparently.

Lest you think that I'm simply being obsessive about the flash (admittedly probable), there is a scientific reason that I hate the flash.

We study the orienting reflex, a preattentive reflex in response to novelty in the environment. Something so simple as a scene change in a television program reliable elicits an orienting reflex (see the work of Annie Lang).

So I know that a huge flash between clips will sure as heck elicit an OR.

And since I am studying cardiac response, I would strongly prefer not to artificially elicit a massive OR.

One little cable can carry as much information at the Library of Congress, but playing two clips in serial eludes modern computation.

Go figure!

If You're in Vermont, Stop By, See Research

Texas Tech University
College of Mass Communications
Accepted Presentations
American Academy of Advertising
Annual Meeting
Burlington, Vermont

April 12-15, 2007

Bradley, S. D. (2007, April). The roles and misdeeds of peer review in advertising. Special topics session to be conducted at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

Bradley, S. D., Maxian, W., Laubacher, T. C., & Baker, M. (2007, April). In search of Lovemarks: The semantic structure of brands. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

Callison, C., & Mohammed-Basin, S. (2007, April). Hey ya-shake it like a Polaroid picture: Product mention in popular music genres. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

Daugherty, T., Gangadharbatla, H., Kim, Y. J., & Logan, K. (2007, April). Assessing the value of product placement from the consumer’s perspective. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

Gangadharbatla, H. (2007, April). Active versus passive gamers: A comparison Of recall, attitudes and purchase intentions of brands placed in video games. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

Gangadharbatla, H., & Smith, J. (2007, April). eWOM: The effect of individual level factors on viral consumers' email pass along behavior. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Advertising, Burlington, VT.

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To give credit where credit is due, I borrowed this idea from colleague Robert F. Potter, Ph.D., in the department of telecommunications at Indiana University.