Tuesday, January 18, 2000
Tale of two cities
A ounce of prevention
Foods and nutrition professor’s research gets down to the basics
Admissions office checks data on why students enroll--or don’t
Webb to coordinate undergraduate minority recruitment
Faculty honored for teaching, influence on students
Administrative Changes
The big chill
Newsmakers

‘Better’ pizza prohibited
For decades, the federal courts and the Federal Trade Commission have been the arbiters in defining the thin line where puffery ends and consumer fraud begins in advertising slogans. The question got more interesting when a federal judge in Dallas ruled this month that Papa John’s is prohibited from using the word “better” to describe its pizza--and awarded Pizza Hut $467,619 in damages to boot. “It is hard to generalize about what the FTC and the courts would consider puffery,” Kent Middleton, a professor in UGA’s College of Journalism and Mass Communication, told the New York Times. “But the test is: would the average reader or viewer be deceived by this?”
Generally, companies cannot make inaccurate statements about facts that can be proven or are not obvious jokes, said Middleton, co-author of The Law of Public Communication. But there is nothing wrong with making vague and ridiculous claims to goad people into buying products, he added.


100-year club grows
A USA Today cover story on a Florida woman who turned 100 on New Year’s Eve notes that she is part of the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, according to census data: Americans whose lives span a century. Next year, an estimated 72,000 Americans will have reached the century mark. Their surprising good health is providing a blueprint of the future for generations to come.
The article quotes Leonard Poon, director of UGA’s Gerontology Center, who leads broad studies of centenarians in Georgia. He has found that up to one-third of 100-year-olds remain physically independent and mentally sharp. “Contrary to the popular image of very frail centenarians, there is a portion that is vibrant and hardy,” he said.



Hill of beenz has worth
The Internet has transformed commerce, but it hasn’t really changed money itself, according to the Wall Street Journal. But after years of hype about “digital cash” and other schemes, some new ways of moving money are emerging--including beenz, which are earned and spent only on the Web. Sites can dispense beenz to reward visitors for shopping or surfing. Consumers, in turn, can redeem them for products and services at participating Web merchants.
But beenz are still a long way from a true currency, according to George Selgin, an economics professor who studies private currencies and related issues. “These are still dollars,” he told the WSJ. “Apart from the technology of moving the dollars around, the medium of exchange is still the same.”


Boycott call ‘inappropriate’
An Associated Press article, picked up in newspapers around the country, quotes political science professor Han Park’s reaction to a call for a boycott of businesses considered anti-Hispanic by Teodoro Maus, the Mexican consul in Atlanta. In an interview on a Spanish-language radio station, Maus said Hispanics should boycott Georgia companies that mistreat them and suggested a national boycott of shops that do not offer services in Spanish.
Park, director of UGA’s Center for the Study of Global Issues, said the comments were inappropriate. “His office is designed to protect, not Mexican Americans, but Mexican citizens,” Park said. “Advising them to boycott some products, that really is not protecting or promoting their interests. It’s a political retaliation . . . he’s not there in Atlanta to do that sort of thing.”
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