Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; Trib Live, November 12, 2019

Patrick Varine, Trib Live; Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

"Rory Cooper, who was recognized earlier this year by the office with a trading card created to honor U.S. inventors, holds more than two dozen patents related to mobility-improvement research. Cooper is the director at Pitt’s Human Energy Research Laboratories, a U.S. Army veteran and also serves as director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America Research Foundation...

Cooper was recognized in the patent office’s SUCCESS report, an update on progress achieved through the 2018 Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success (SUCCESS) Act. The act aims to promote patent applications by women, minorities, veterans, the disabled and other underrepresented classes.

“Without diversity of thought, potentially life changing work for wheel chair users and others with disabilities might not be possible,” Cooper said. “We have a world-class team at our labs that is committed to helping people with disabilities and older adults live full lives and contribute to society as much as they can and they like.”"

Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa); Harvard Business Review, 8/8/16

Even Apfelbaum, Harvard Business Review; Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa) :

"When it comes to issues of race, gender, and diversity in organizations, researchers have revealed the problems in ever more detail. We have found a lot less to say about what does work — what organizations can do to create the conditions in which stigmatized groups can reach their potential and succeed. That’s why my collaborators — Nicole Stephens at the Kellogg School of Management and Ray Reagans at MIT Sloan — and I decided to study what organizations can do to increase traditionally stigmatized groups’ performance and persistence, and curb the disproportionately high rates at which they leave jobs.

One tool at any organization’s disposal is the way its leaders choose to talk (or not to talk) about diversity and differences — what we refer to as their diversity approach. Diversity approaches are important because they provide employees with a framework for thinking about group differences in the workplace and how they should respond to them. We first studied the public diversity statements of 151 big law firms in the U.S. to understand the relationship between how organizations talk about diversity and the rates of attrition of associate-level women and racial minority attorneys at these firms. We assumed that how firms talked about diversity in their statements was a rough proxy for their firm’s approach to diversity more generally.

Two findings were particularly intriguing."

How to Crack Down on Social Media Threats; New York Times, 8/3/16

Room for Debate, New York Times; How to Crack Down on Social Media Threats:

"Last week, a prominent feminist writer abandoned social media after a rape and death threat was directed at her 5-year-old daughter. Online violent threats are not uncommon, especially for women and minorities, but when they are reported, police are often not responsive.

How can law enforcement crack down on threats of violence made on social media?"

Why So Few "Diversity Candidates" Are Hired; Harvard Business Review, 6/24/16

[Video] Harvard Business Review; Why So Few "Diversity Candidates" Are Hired:

"Finalist pools can reinforce the status quo. For more, read "If There's Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There's Statistically No Chance She'll Be Hired.""

Shonda Rhimes Talks Diversity Award, Is 'Kind Of Pissed' That There Needs To Be An Award; HuffingtonPost.com, 1/27/14

HuffingtonPost.com; Shonda Rhimes Talks Diversity Award, Is 'Kind Of Pissed' That There Needs To Be An Award:

"This past Saturday (Jan. 25), Shonda Rhimes and "Scandal" executive producer Betsy Beers received a Diversity Award from the Directors Guild of America.

So how does Rhimes feel about being honored in such a way? Not too great.

“When I heard I was getting a Diversity Award, I was really, truly, profoundly honored ... but I was also a little pissed off,” Rhimes said, according to EW. “So was Betsy. So over many, many, many bottles of wine we discussed this.”

“We’re a little pissed off because there still needs to be an award. Like, there’s such a lack of people hiring women and minorities that when someone does it on a regular basis, they are given an award.""

Homeland is brilliant drama. But does it present a crude image of Muslims?; Observer, 10/13/12

Peter Beaumont, Observer; Homeland is brilliant drama. But does it present a crude image of Muslims? : "How we portray the "other" – those whom we fear or are suspicious of – reinforces cultures of conflict. In some respects it has always been thus. The author and journalist Robert Winder detailed in his book Bloody Foreigners how Charles Dickens, in creating the character of Fagin for Oliver Twist, refashioned a real social problem. The boys' "rookeries" were run by Italian gangmasters in Clerkenwell's Little Italy, but in keeping with contemporary suspicion and hostility to Jews Dickens made Fagin Jewish – something he later regretted... Stuart Hall, the cultural theorist who has examined the phenomenon of "reception theory" as applied to televisual media – building on the work of Hans Robert Jauss in the late 1960s – has argued, indeed, that the messages in television drama "intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions". In other words, television drama such as Homeland not only reflects cultural and social anxieties at any given time, it reflects back those anxieties, reinforcing and shaping them. Crucially there is strong evidence that counter-stereotypical fictional depictions in popular culture may have a positive impact, with some arguing that it can help turn around prejudicial attitudes."