Patricia Zimmermann and Thomas Shevory, Ithaca College faculty members and codirectors of the College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, worked with media organizations in Indonesia and Mexico to select 11 films that were screened at an international film festival in Bangalore, India, August 27 to 30. “The festival offers a chance for a broad-based assessment of water consumption patterns, dam placements, droughts, floods, and other issues affecting our future,” Zimmermann said. The festival, which took place less than a month after the devastating floods in Pakistan, also featured a conference highlighting the decreasing accessibility of freshwater due to pollution, climate change, and threats from global warming.

Business School: Michael McCall, professor of marketing and law, gained national attention for his research on customer loyalty and reward programs. As a consumer psychologist, McCall is the lead author of a recent hospitality paper, “Building Customer Loyalty: Ten Guiding Principles for Designing an Effective Customer Reward Program.” McCall finds that “there’s very little evidence that customer reward programs actually work.” The reason, he claims, is because these programs tend to focus on the most frequent rather than the most valuable customers. “The idea is to use these programs to develop relationships and foster engagement.” Best way to do that? Good old-fashioned customer service.

HSHP: Danette Johnson, professor of speech communication, and Nicole Lewis ’09 published research recently in the scholarly journal Communication Reports. Their article, “Perceptions of Swearing in the Work Setting: An Expectancy Violations Theory Perspective,” is the result of a study done before Lewis graduated. Their study examines how the use of swearing has changed in terms of context in the workplace. “Results suggest that hearers view expressions of swearing in formal situations as more unexpected than swearing in social gatherings,” Johnson and Lewis say in their article. “Hearers also view some swearing expressions as more unexpected than others.”

H&S: As part of the Psychology of Humor Research Team in the Department of Psychology, Shawn O’Toole ’07 and Barney Beins, professor and department chair, explore the link between humor and personality in “Searching for the Sense of Humor: Stereotypes of Ourselves and Others,” published in the August 2010 issue of Europe’s Journal of Psychology. Their study examines how people’s self-reports of humor competence matched an independent measurement of sense of humor. “Participants completed the multidimensional sense of humor scale and inventories based on the ‘big five’ model of personality,” Beins and O’Toole say in their article. “The results revealed that participants had a realistic view of their humor competence.”