The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta will kick off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on Friday, April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discuss and share in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The UF-Morehouse international conversation will use technology to bridge that divide, Oliverio said. “We’re going to have a cultural exchange, a scholarly dialogue and a motivational call to action for the students of today to carry forward the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who proceeded with the nonviolent resistance movement of Mahatma Gandhi in India and influenced Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” he said. “Using technology to literally connect places across the globe simultaneously, we will create a shared virtual space around the world on the network and have performances and workshops over that global platform.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

The topic of the April 4 90-minute session is King’s challenge to citizens in “transcending tribe, race, class, nation and religion to embrace the vision of World House.” Speaker presentations as well as performances by artists, dancers and musicians are planned from each participating location, which, besides UF and Morehouse, are the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India; Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg, South Africa. UF presenters from the Digital Worlds Institute’s Research, Education and Visualization Environment in 101 Norman Hall include Stephanie Evans, an African American studies and women’s studies professor, and drummer Mohamed DaCosta, a lecturer in UF’s College of Fine Arts School of Theatre and Dance. The 60-minute April 11 session will feature UF social anthropologist Faye Harrison and poet Sharon Burney of UF’s African American Studies Program.

Now, University of Florida history professor William Link hopes to offer a more complete, less polarized portrayal of the controversial right-wing politician. His new book is “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” to be released Tuesday by St. Martin’s Press.

Helms, who spent 30 years as one of North Carolina’s U.S. senators, is mostly known for his enduring opposition to the civil rights movement and vitriolic condemnation of gay people and what he called sexual immorality, Link said. But Helms’ lasting impact on American politics cannot be understood without going beyond those labels, he said.

“He’s so important to the rise of the new conservatism, and if you want to understand politics today, you have to understand that,” Link said. “He was much more than a Southern racist.”

In many ways, the modern style of politics characterized by heavy use of media and television advertising can be traced directly back to Helms’ early campaigns in North Carolina, Link said.

At the end of his career, Helms had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy during his time as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which coincided with the presidency of Bill Clinton, Link said. He was strongly opposed to multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, and he helped to defeat American involvement in international arms proliferation agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

If these positions sound familiar, Link said, it’s probably because many of them are alive today in the policies of George W. Bush. In fact, many of Helms’ previous staffers hold positions in the current administration.

Though many of Helms’ opinions and contributions are highly controversial, the book tries to avoid making value judgments, Link said.

“It’s not at all a politically motivated book,” he said. “It’s a full and fair biographic portrayal.”

Link said he struggled most to stay impartial when discussing Helms’ positions on race and homosexuality, which he does not agree with.

“I think there’s an inherent difficulty as a biographer writing about things you don’t like,” he said.

Link spoke to more than 60 people in the course of writing the book, including colleagues, subordinates, friends and enemies. He also had access to speeches, newspaper coverage, and all of Helms’ correspondence since 1953. Helms himself was unavailable due to his failing health.

The book impressively captures the multiple, diverse facets of Helms and his career, said Donald Critchlow, history professor at St. Louis University.

“Nearly every page seems to bring new insight and revelation,” he said.

Critchlow will speak at UF on Tuesday about the ascendancy of the modern Republican right. His speech starts at 7 p.m. in the Ocora Room in Pugh Hall. The event is free.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

“Ethnic and national distinctions between Jews and Arabs blur in the soccer arena,” said Tamir Sorek, a UF professor in sociology and Jewish studies who is author of the new book “Arab Soccer in a Jewish State,” published by Cambridge University Press. “Arabs who are spectators in the stadium are much more integrated into Israeli society.”

Sorek found that Arab soccer fans are more likely than non-soccer fans to vote for Zionist political candidates, a vote that is incompatible with their own interests. For example, among those who attended at least one soccer game, 64 percent said they intended to vote for the Zionist candidate in the 1999 election for Israeli prime minister compared with 27 percent who did not go to soccer games at all, he said.

Sorek’s book is based on research he began in 1998 while a graduate student at Hebrew University. He surveyed 173 males between the ages of 16 and 40 and interviewed a separate set of 448 men aged 18 to 50 who make up a representative sample of Israel’s Arab population. Participants were asked about their sports preferences, degree of involvement in soccer and their voting intentions regarding political candidates.

His research involved Arab citizens of Israel, not Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“Despite these surprising findings, there is no evidence yet that integration in soccer contributes to the Arabs’ acceptance by the Jewish majority as citizens with equal rights,” Sorek said. “Arabs face discrimination in matters of government budgets, employment opportunities and prospects for development of their towns and villages. Deep involvement in the soccer arena, however, seems to dull their feelings of discrimination.”

Arab fans in the bleachers show solidarity with Jews by cursing and cheering their team in Hebrew, Sorek said. They also demonstrate their team spirit by wearing scarves printed in Hebrew and buying bumper stickers in the language, he said.

Sorek said he would have expected Arab-Palestinian displays of national identity in the stadium based on the experience of other minorities. At the very least, these groups bring their flags to soccer games and in extreme cases turn stadiums into sites of political protest, as with the Athletic Bilbao team representing Spain’s Basque minority and the Sporting Youth of Kabylia Club in Algeria serving as a rallying point for the Amazigh ethno-nationalist cultural movement, he said.

“Surprisingly, despite the significance Arab men in Israel give to sports and especially to soccer, the soccer field is far from being a site for political resistance or explicit national identification,” he said.

Even at games played while there were nationalist tensions, the fans refrained from waving their flags, Sorek said. “They know the Jewish Israeli interpret the Palestinian flag as a defiant act of political protest and as something directed against them,” he said.

His research also showed that Arab municipalities were much more likely than their Jewish counterparts to give money to soccer clubs. Sorek said he believes the main reason for Arab municipalities’ strong support is their aspiration for further integration in Israeli society.

“In the soccer sphere they have the opportunity to feel as equal citizens because they are not judged by their ethnicity, religion or national identity as Palestinians,” he said. “They even represent Israel in international competitions.”

Sorek, who grew up Jewish in Israel playing soccer with Arab teams, said the idea for the study came from observing the large number of soccer players who were Arab. Although Arabs represent only 16 percent of the country’s population, they make up 36 percent of the Israeli Football Association, he said.

“Although soccer provides excellent opportunities to reduce the social distance between Jews and Arabs in Israel, it is far from being a cure for their troubled relationship,” he said. “For that to happen, the Israeli state should first change its policy toward its Arab citizens.”

Paul Silverstein, a Reed College anthropology professor, called the book “essential reading for anyone interested in everyday life in the Middle East.”

Fifty-eight percent of Florida voters said they would vote for the new “super exemption” measure, two percentage points shy of the 60 percent super majority needed to make the change to Florida’s constitution, said David Denslow, a UF economics professor who led the research.

“Whether the amendment will pass remains a wide-open question,” he said. “Besides the statistical insignificance of the difference between 58 and 60 percent, there is half a year remaining before the vote.”

The referendum, which goes to voters Jan. 29, would allow homeowners to choose between keeping the 3 percent property tax cap already available under the Save Our Homes provision or a new provision that would increase their homestead exemptions. If the amendment goes into effect, homes bought after that date would not qualify for the Save our Homes cap.

The survey indicates that nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, are inclined to stay with Save our Homes even if the referendum gives them a choice, Denslow said. And few respondents who report owning less expensive homes — a group that would benefit from the new super exemption — said they would switch, he said.

UF’s Survey Research Center added questions about the proposed property tax amendment to its monthly consumer confidence telephone survey in July. Of the 287 Florida homeowners who responded, 277 said they had formed an opinion. They were also asked the selling price of their homes. The survey had an error rate of between 3 and 4 percent.

The tax-cutting measure the Legislature is sending to voters allows homeowners to stay with the terms of the current Save Our Homes Amendment, which restricts the increases in their property tax bills to the rate of inflation or 3 percent of the assessment for the prior year, whichever is lower. Or they could take the new super exemption that knocks 75 percent off of the first $200,000 of a home’s value and 15 percent off the next $300,000.

Most likely to benefit in the near term would be people planning to buy expensive homes, Denslow said. “Anyone who moves into a new house that is worth $500,000, for instance, would be better off immediately because they would get a $195,000 exemption compared to a $25,000 exemption under the existing system,” he said.

However, if house prices were to rise as rapidly over the next five years as they did between 2000 and 2006, homeowners might be better off with Save Our Homes, which would limit annual increases in their assessment, he said.

Another group to gain by making the switch would be those with houses worth less than $200,000 because the taxable value of their house would be no more than 25 percent of its market value, Denslow said. Yet 71 percent of homeowners surveyed who said their houses were worth $200,000 or less said they would remain with Save Our Homes, he said.

Denslow believes they may be reluctant to make the change because it is irrevocable.

“Once you go with the super exemption, you have given up the Save Our Homes exemption forever,” he said.

Survey respondents were more likely to say they would remain with Save Our Homes if they had lived in their current houses for several years and expected to remain there for a long time, Denslow said.

Sixty-four percent of Republicans favored the proposed amendment, as did 58 percent of Independents and 54 percent of Democrats.

Denslow predicts the impact of the proposal would be “substantial” and vary widely by county. Rich, rapidly growing counties, such as Palm Beach, won’t be hurt too badly because a large proportion of its housing stock is worth more than the $200,000 exemption line, while counties such as Levy and Dixie, where growth is much slower and most new homes are much cheaper, will suffer, he said.

The loose coalition of groups opposed to American involvement in the Iraq war, which helped defeat Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections, is considerably less sympathetic to the Democrats and plans massive protests at the party’s national convention next summer in Denver, said Michael T. Heaney, a political science professor.

“We see a very clear shift in the anti-war movement against the Democratic Party just in the last couple of months,” said Heaney, who has written an article on anti-war activists that appears in the July edition of American Politics Research journal. “And the basic reason for that is the anti-war forces are very disappointed that the Democrats have not kept their promise to bring the troops home, which was their mandate after the 2006 election.”

The upshot is that instead of focusing their energies on demonstrating at next year’s Republican Party convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul as they did at the party’s 2004 convention in New York, the key players in the anti-war movement have decided to shift their emphasis to the Democratic gathering in Denver, Heaney said.

“We’re going to see tens of thousands of people protesting outside the Democratic National Convention,” he said.

The danger for the Democrats is that the news media will seize upon the disunity and project an image of the party not having its act together, which will ultimately create public uneasiness with the idea of a Democratic candidacy, he said.

“It definitely has the risk of costing the Democrats the election,” he said. “And this should be an election that the Democrats walk away with just based on the fact that the American public is so dissatisfied with the war in Iraq.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom that anti-war groups are aligned with the Democratic Party, Heaney and Fabio Rojas, a sociologist at Indiana University, found divisions within the movement. Roughly 40 percent of these activists support the Democrats, 20 percent a third party such as the Green Party and 2 percent the Republicans. Another 39 percent identified themselves as independents. (Percentages total 101 percent due to rounding).

The anti-war movement is split between those who believe working with the Democrats is the best way to bring about change, an approach that prevailed in the past, and those who think the Democrats are too pro-war and should be shunned, a position favored now, he said.

“In our article we develop this concept that we call the ‘party in the street,’ which is a network of activists and organizations that have joint loyalty to both the Democratic Party and to social movements,” he said. “And this ‘party in the street’ is highly unstable, which we will be seeing the political implications of in 2008.”

To complicate matters, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is a lightning rod for anti-war activists because of her past support for the war, Heaney said.

“I’ve heard nothing positive about her from the anti-war movement,” he said. “From their point of view, she’s taken too much of a hawkish stance and they’re worried that she will continue the occupation of Iraq.”

The Democrats could find their party as divided in 2008 as it was in 1968, with many of its natural supporters on the left camped outside the convention hall, Heaney said.

The Republicans, for their part, have an opportunity to appear strong against a divided Democratic Party by nominating someone who played no part in the war, such as Rudy Giuliani, Heaney said. The Republican Party could even take a “we’re going to fix Iraq” kind of position much like Richard Nixon took in 1968 by promising ‘peace with honor,’ he said.

If the Democrats in Congress were to strongly back a safe and orderly withdrawal from Iraq, that would help appease the anti-war constituency, he said.

Heaney and Rojas studied anti-war protests at the 2004 Republican convention in New York City as well as demonstrations in seven other cities during 2005 and 2007. They found that most demonstrators were between the ages of either 18 and 27 or 48 and 68, with about half having been involved in other social movements. The article is available at http://apr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/4/431.

“The antiwar movement is the largest social movement in the United States today, with tens of thousands of activists and millions of supporters,” Heaney said.

James Gimpel, a University of Maryland government professor, praised the study. “This is an important paper because it is not the product of the ivory tower,” he said. “This research is based on real-world field observations of anti-war activists in action.”

The difference lies in the “raunch” factor.

Proof that true love never dies shows up in the song lyrics of today’s generation, which match the romantic pantings from the songs of their baby boomer parents’ youth, said Chad Swiatowicz, who did the study for his master’s thesis in sociology at UF.

“American culture is in love with love,” he said. “War may be a national concern today as it was three decades ago, but in both eras it’s the subject of love and relationships that dominates pop music.”

The most notable difference between the song lyrics of the two eras was the prevalence of bad language in today’s songs, Swiatowicz said. Many of the words, particularly in rap songs, are blatantly sexual and would have been considered obscene in the 1960s, he said.

“The tolerance for offensive language in pop music has drastically increased in the last 30 years,” he said. “Older songs like ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ are G-rated compared to today’s lyrics.”

Exactly what the raw verbiage reveals about today’s generation is difficult to ascertain, Swiatowicz said. “It’s often the case that young people want to distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation and the use of language is one way to do so,” he said.

Swiatowicz analyzed the lyrics of the year’s 10 most popular songs listed in Billboard’s online archives for two eras, 2002-2005 and 1968-1971. He found that 24 of the 40 songs in the modern era — 60 percent — and half the songs of the classic era were devoted to the subject of love and relationships.

From “Sunshine of Your Love” in 1968 to “Crazy in Love” in 2003, and “I Can’t Get Next to You” to “I’m With You” from 1969 and 2003, the songs are variations on similar themes.

Some were cheerful and celebratory of love, while others sounded a more pessimistic tone, addressing the temptation of infidelity or the insecurities of being at a lover’s beck and call, Swiatowicz said. The subject of infidelity came up far more frequently in the modern era, perhaps because younger people were more likely to grow up in families where parents had divorced, he said.

Despite wars marking both eras – the conflict in Vietnam in the late ’60s and early ’70s and the confrontation in Iraq more recently – few of the most popular songs of either era protested American involvement in these conflicts

“For as much unrest taking place during the Vietnam era, only one top 10 song of the four-year span was explicitly detracting of the war,” he said.

This 1970 song, “War,” protests sending young men to fight and possibly die, Swiatowicz said. “War has shattered many a young man’s dream, made him disabled, bitter and mean,” bemoan the lyrics.

“This doesn’t deny that other anti-war songs achieved popularity; they just weren’t big enough to reach the top 10,” he said.

There also was only one hit song from the modern era that was clearly anti-war, but that’s not surprising since the draft no longer exists, Swiatowicz said.

Another difference between the two eras is that songs from the classic period address broader social issues, as with “People Got to Be Free,” “Indian Reservation” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Swiatowicz said. These older songs convey the importance of it being in everyone’s interest to get along peacefully and live a life free of hatred and oppression, as in “Joy to the World” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” while only one song from the recent era was more global in addressing current events, he said.

“In the modern era, a lot of these songs were more individualistic, treating subjects like self-esteem and personal issues, such as depression or anxiety,” he said.

Deena Weinstein, a De Paul University sociology professor and author of the book “Heavy Metal,” said she is not sure “love” is the operative word with pop music. “Most pop and popular rock songs have been focused on sex and romance,” she said. “In 1967 the Rolling Stones agreed to change the words to ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ to ‘Let’s spend some time together’ because Ed Sullivan’s TV show demanded it; it was the same year as the summer of love.”

“Determining a specific dollar value for quality of life is a challenging undertaking,” said project co-director Timothy McLendon, staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility at UF’s Levin College of Law, which conducted the study along with UF’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. “Therefore, we offered local decision makers a number of options for protecting historically valuable assets that contribute to the community.”

Florida residents also recognize the importance of historic preservation, according to a survey commissioned as part of the overall study. Based on surveys of more than 1,500 Floridians during November and December 2005, and January 2006, the most threatened historic resources in Florida include historic and scenic landscapes; old homes and neighborhoods; and old downtowns. Respondents, likewise, saw a need to preserve Florida’s historic resources for future generations, scenic reasons and education. The survey was conducted by UF’s Bureau of Economic & Business Research as part of its monthly statewide consumer confidence survey.

The report includes models and tools available to further historic preservation in Florida and to measure the impact of historical structures, events and related activities on the enhancement of the quality of life in Florida.

Specifically, the use of community indicators is described as a tool for decision-makers to measure their success in improving the quality of life in their communities. Community indicators are bits of information that are combined to provide a picture of what is happening in a community. For historic preservation purposes, these may include items like the number or type of local ordinances; the number of projects qualifying for historic tax credits or exemptions; changes in property values; numbers of historic districts; and visitors to and support for local historic museums. Other tools included in the report are preservation laws and policies, tourist-related tax revenues, and creative solutions to conflicts of gentrification, sustainability and rehabilitation.

“We’re excited to have this wonderful study to confirm that along with the economic impacts that result from historic preservation, the quality of life is indeed improved as well,” said Caroline Tharpe Weiss, executive director of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, which provided key support for the study.

Sprinkled throughout the report are examples of model communities and projects that have succeeded in using the tools to enhance quality of life. DeFuniak Springs and Fernandina Beach are described as communities whose historic roots lure tourists and improve the economies of their regions. The St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum; the Fort Christmas Historical Park in Central Florida; and the Riley House museum near Tallahassee are provided as case studies of how history museums can be important community resources.

Also described in the report are conservation districts in Tampa, Sarasota and Zephyrhills that offer ways for local governments to balance historic preservation through protection, rehabilitation and revitalization, all contributing to a neighborhood’s culture. Other incentive programs, including tax credits and exemptions and grants have been key to preserving and improving Florida communities.

The 18-month study was funded with historic preservation grant assistance provided by the Bureau of Historic Preservation, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State, assisted by the Florida Historical Commission. The study was a collaborative effort involving multiple UF partners: the Center for Governmental Responsibility; the Department of Urban and Regional Planning; the Center for Building Better Communities; the Graduate Program in Museum Studies; and the Center for Tourism Research and Development.

The Quality of Life study complements an earlier study on the Economic Impacts of Historic Preservation in Florida released in 2002. The full Quality of Life report is available at: www.law.ufl.edu/cgr, or copies may be obtained from the Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State 850-245-6333.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they considered high-rises to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but an even larger number, 60 percent, reported feeling safe in these buildings, the UF study found. The findings were from interviews with 384 people walking into one of the seven tallest structures in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 14, a month before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“People may still believe skyscrapers are terrorist (targets) but so are subways, stadiums and airplanes and that doesn’t stop people from riding to work, going to football games or flying across the country to see their family,” said Brandon Moore, who did the research for his master’s thesis in building construction at UF.

If anything, the skyscraper has become even more popular since Sept. 11, with the number under construction nearly doubling, Moore said. Between 2002 and 2006, 1,334 skyscrapers in the United States were built or scheduled to be completed, compared with 593 from 1996 to 2000, he said.

“Skyscrapers are the biggest man-made achievement we see on a day-to-day basis,” Moore said. “They have too much symbolic value to be toppled by terrorists.”

The stature of these buildings in America’s cultural and physical landscape was recognized by survey respondents. Sixty-five percent said they were proud of the nation’s skyscrapers, and 56 percent said they could identify cities by their skylines.

Moore said the findings could apply elsewhere because Tampa is a typical mid- to large-sized American city, which, like other parts of the South and West, is booming. Tampa has 57 skyscrapers, the tallest being the 579-foot AmSouth Building. Sixteen high-rises are under construction.

Although Tampa may not be considered a major terrorist target like Manhattan, a highly publicized incident involving a small private plane crashing into the 42-story Bank of America building occurred on Jan. 5, he said.

Besides symbolic value, economics and conservation may also explain the skyscraper’s growing popularity; it allows the maximum amount of people in the smallest amount of space, Moore said.

“Suburbia is losing its appeal with strip mall after strip mall, subdivision after subdivision and the hassle of having to drive everywhere with the cost of fuel,” he said. “People are starting to want to live in the city, where they can walk to work or walk to the gym.”

Building vertically instead of horizontally makes sense because a building that takes up the space of one city block can house an entire community, with medical offices, pharmacies, grocery stores and apartments that house hundreds of residents, Moore said.

“With the world’s growing population and diminishing supply of land, the skyscraper is the building of the future, even though it’s been around for more than a century,” he said.

The skyscraper was invented after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed most of the downtown’s wooden-framed, low-level buildings, Moore said. Steel was used to rebuild downtown because it was more fire resistant, and one of its unforeseen physical properties was that it allowed buildings to be taller, he said.

The world’s first skyscraper was Chicago’s 10-story Home Insurance Building built in 1885, but once New York approved skeleton steel construction in its building code at the turn of the century it quickly became the nation’s skyscraper capital. It was not until 1974 that Chicago regained distinction with construction of the Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building at 1,451 feet until the 1,483-foot twin Petronas Towers were built in Malaysia in 1998.

Today the skyscraper is something of an “Asian Tiger” because of its stronghold in China, Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan, Moore said. Eight of the world’s 10 highest buildings are in Asia, including the tallest, the 1,671-foot Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan. The other two on the list are the Sears Tower, fourth, and the Empire State Building in New York City, ninth.

“With scarce land, booming populations and thriving economies, it is no wonder that many Asian nations are taking the lead in skyscraper construction,” Moore said. “As pagodas and shrines disappear, the skyscraper is taking their place.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Next week’s elections may change the country’s political landscape, but residents of some states will have a much easier time than those of others if they want to examine the results for themselves, according to new University of Florida research.

Laws in Montana and Florida provide access to the most election information, while Rhode Island’s and North Dakota’s laws provide access to the least, UF researchers say.

Survey results, released this week from the Marion Brechner Center Citizen Access Project at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, show that overall, Montana’s laws ranked the highest. Montana requires that “all records” pertaining to elections and voter registration are public records” unless “designated otherwise.”

In Florida, election boards must post at poll sites the results of the vote for each office or item on the ballots. A certificate of the results must be delivered to the supervisor of elections for immediate publication. Each county canvassing board must file a public report with the state Division of Elections on the conduct of the election, including information on equipment malfunctions or other difficulties or unusual circumstances.

“Many people laughed at Florida’s hanging chads six years ago,” said Bill Chamberlin, an eminent scholar of mass communications in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, “but what many Floridians knew was that we could at least by law see the ballots. That’s not true in many states.”

Rounding out the top five states in public access to election-related records are Delaware, New York and Ohio.

Montana, even with its high score, didn’t receive a perfect from the project’s Sunshine Review Board. The state scored “5” on the Citizen Access Project Sunshine Index of 1 (being the lowest) to 7 for elections records access. Chamberlin said states didn’t receive higher scores primarily because no state performs high across the multiple categories rated – voting registration records, ballots, vote tallies and other records associated with elections such as poll books and inspection reports.

“In an era when the public questions voters’ access, new voting equipment and revised voting systems, it only makes sense that by law the public has a way to check up on the voting process,” said Joel Campbell, Freedom of Information Committee chairman for the Society of Professional Journalists. “Transparency only helps build more confidence in the fairness of elections. Clearly, some states need to update their laws to allow better public oversight.”

Rhode Island, one of the least accessible states, has no law allowing, or prohibiting, the public inspection of election records other than election tallies and voter registration lists. North Dakota ranked low because it has no law governing access to election records and the state’s voter registration list is available only to political parties and candidates.

Other low-ranked states include Hawaii, Nebraska and Arkansas, all of which received slightly more than 3 on the Citizen Access Project Sunshine Index.

Statutes in Maine, Indiana, and New Hampshire declare that ballots are not public records. At least 19 other states restrict access to ballots except under special authority, usually through a court order. They are: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The Citizen Access Project’s Sunshine Review Board members who participated in ratings of election records included Shannon Martin, Charles Tobin, Harry Hammitt, Frosty Landon, Ian Marquand, Linda Lightfoot, Kevin Goldberg, Eric Turner, Patrice McDermott, Suzanne Piotrowski, Sandy Davidson, Joe Davis and Susan Ross. They specialize in access to government information as public officials, university professors, journalists or lawyers.

The Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project is building a database of open meetings and open records law summaries from the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It ranks state laws and then posts the comparisons online with appropriate summaries and citations. The project is funded by Marion Brechner, an Orlando, Fla., broadcast executive.

For more information about the project, visit www.citizenaccess.org.

“The entire economy will have to adjust to these higher insurance costs,” said Wayne Archer, director of UF’s Center for Real Estate Studies, which recently completed a new quarterly survey of Florida real estate trends. “It’s a big enough hit, just like gas prices, that it will ultimately affect every business and every price that is property intensive.”

The unusually active 2004-05 hurricane season precipitated the higher rates, and while these have already struck homeowners and apartment owners, who are passing costs on to tenants by raising rents, commercial tenants have not been affected yet on a large scale, Archer said.

Commercial leases are usually for longer periods of at least five years, and as these agreements are renewed over the next few years, businesses are likely to respond to the cost by increasing rents, resulting in their tenants raising the price of their products, he said.

“The most dramatic increases will be in the cost of real estate, but consumer prices will also go up some, just as rising gas prices put pressure on costs across the board,” he said.

The insurance crisis was identified as the biggest trend in Florida’s real estate market in the center’s new statewide quarterly survey. Industry executives, real estate lawyers, market analysts, title insurers, financial advisers, market research economists, real estate scholars and other experts in the field from around the state were asked a series of questions by UF’s Survey Research Center in July. The softening housing market was the second most mentioned trend.

“The respondents were very conscious that the housing market is softening,” Archer said. “With inventories of single-family homes building up, they’re apprehensive about what might begin to happen to prices and sales. They’re even more concerned about condos and think prices could begin to fall in some cases.”

While 69 percent of the survey respondents expect condo prices to lag behind inflation or even decline, only 47 percent of the respondents were as pessimistic about single-family home prices, Archer said. And while nearly 70 percent expect a downturn in absorption rates – the rate at which properties are able to be leased or sold – 61 percent expect the same pattern in single-family housing, he said.

Condos typically are a more volatile market than single-family housing and frequently a magnet for speculators who have no professional real estate experience, Archer said.

“Condos seem to be an easy way for fairly immature investors in real estate to speculate in a market they think is trending upwards,” he said. “Often they are naïve about when overbuilding occurs and as a result tend to be overly optimistic.”

The recent explosion in apartment-to-condo conversions is beginning to slow and will slacken even more as the housing market continues to soften, Archer said.

Unusually low interest rates over the past few years encouraged many people to buy homes, which left a weak market for apartments, encouraging apartment owners to convert their rental units into condos to capture would-be buyers, he said.

Archer said if a sharp downturn in the housing market occurs, as some predict, Florida will be less affected by it than other states because of the insulating effect of its high population growth rate. Despite some people’s worst fears, housing is unlikely to suffer the same fate as tech stocks at the beginning of the decade, he said.

“Unlike tech stocks, housing has a use, which means it can’t just evaporate,” he said. “Even in the worst cases the prices may go flat, but unless the project is just unbelievably poorly conceived and constructed, it won’t lose its value.”

The highest percentage of survey respondents was optimistic about the investment outlook for property in Miami-Dade County, the southwest coast and in the Lakeland-Winter Haven area. They were least optimistic about the Daytona area, Orlando and Tampa-St. Petersburg.

Florida’s insurance crisis is scheduled to be the subject of a conference the center is sponsoring from noon to 5:30 p.m. Friday at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center in Gainesville. For more information, contact the center at 352-273-0311. More information is available on the center’s Web site at www.realestate.ufl.edu .

Pirates practiced the same egalitarian principles as the Founding Fathers and displayed pioneering spirit in exploring new territory and meeting the native peoples, said Jason Acosta, who did the research for his thesis in history at the University of Florida.

“Hollywood really has given pirates a bum rap with its image of bloodthirsty, one-eyed, peg-legged men who bury treasure and force people to walk the plank,” he said. “We owe them a little more respect.”

Acosta, a descendant of a pirate who fought for the United States in the Battle of New Orleans, studied travel narratives, court hearings, sermons delivered at pirate hangings and firsthand accounts of passengers held captive by pirates. Comparing pirate charters with the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, he said he was amazed by the similarities.

Like the American revolutionaries, pirates developed three branches of government with checks and balances. The ship captain was elected, just as the U.S. president; the pirate assembly was comparable to Congress; and the quartermaster resembled a judge in settling shipmate disputes and preventing the captain from overstepping his authority, he said.

Colonists and pirates also were alike in emphasizing written laws, democratic representation and due process, Acosta said. All crew members were allowed to vote, ship charters had to be signed by every man on board, and anyone who lost an eye or a leg was compensated financially, he said.

These ideals grew out of both groups’ frustration at being mistreated by their leaders; the British forced the colonists to quarter troops and pay taxes, and captains on merchant ships beat their shipmen, starved them and paid less than promised, Acosta said.

“It’s no wonder that many sailors seized the opportunity to jump ship and search for a better way of life, namely piracy, which offered better food, shorter work shifts and the power of the crew in decision-making,” he said.

A golden age of pirating emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as these Brethren of the Sea sailed the world’s waterways, plundering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold, silver and other merchandise, shaping the modern world in the process, Acosta said.

Pirates mapped new territory, expanded trade routes, discovered good ports and opened doors with the native peoples, Acosta said. “They really helped European nations explore the Americas before Europeans could afford to explore them on their own,” he said.

By selling stolen silks, satins, spices and other merchandise in ports and spending their booty in the colonies, pirates created an economic boom, helping struggling settlements and making Port Royale in Jamaica and Charleston, S.C., huge mercantile centers, Acosta said. “They didn’t bury their treasure, they spent it, helping colonies survive that couldn’t get the money and supplies they needed from Europe,” he said.

Without the infusion of money into the New World from piracy, it is possible that Britain and France may not have been able to catch up with Spain, Acosta said.

“Had it not been for pirates, Britain might have had trouble holding onto the American colonies,” he said. “Pirates decimated the Spanish so badly that Spain finally had to give up some of its American empire just to get pirating to stop.”

Native Americans and black slaves oppressed by the Spanish in the Caribbean gave pirates inside information on where to dock ships and find supplies, Acosta said. Slaves fleeing plantations were welcomed on pirate ships, where they shared an equal voice with white sailors, he said.

Acosta said he believes pirates would be given a place in the history books if they had been able to write their stories and leave diaries like the more literate American colonists.

A Gainesville middle school teacher, Acosta occasionally brings up pirates in his classroom, where he has a captive audience, thanks to the popularity of the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which has a sequel opening July 7. “I had one group of students in my class who just went around the playground all the time saying, ‘Aaar, we’re the pirates,’” he said.

Richard Burg, an Arizona State University professor and expert on pirates, said Acosta is performing a great service by emphasizing pirates’ democratic and egalitarian ways. “The men who sailed under the skull and crossbones were ordinary folk, like America’s revolutionaries, standing firm against oppressive governments and economic systems,” he said. “Mr. Acosta is one of the few scholars who understand this.”

“There is an assumption that the ’Israeli lobby’ rests upon a monolithic, highly mobilized American Jewish community that makes Israel the No. 1 issue in American politics,” said Kenneth D. Wald, a UF political science professor who did the research with Bryan Williams, a UF graduate student in political science. “We found enormous variability within the American Jewish community in the extent to which Israel factors into domestic political thinking.”

Although Israel’s fate is an overriding political consideration for a small number of Jews in this country, many others consider it a nonissue, said Wald, whose paper has been accepted for publication in the July issue of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Most American Jews fall somewhere in between, he said.

The issue has received prominent attention recently with the March publication in the London Review of Books of a paper by two American political scientists. They claim the thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East derives largely from the activities of the “Israeli Lobby,” a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Newspaper editorial columns have since appeared debating the merits of the paper, which was written by John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on Internal Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Wald’s study looked at the extent American Jews incorporate Israel into their political thinking and what factors influence that tendency. He used a series of telephone surveys called the “culture polls” conducted by Zogby International, a polling firm led by an Arab-American. In 1999 and 2000, 589 Jewish participants were asked to answer a series of multiple-choice questions on subjects such as how important they consider U.S. support for Israel, the importance of candidates’ positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict to their voting decision and whether they had ever written a letter or made a telephone call to express their views on the Arab-Israeli conflict to a government official, newspaper or magazine.

“We found that the more people are integrated and involved in the ethnic community, based on cultural and social ties, the more likely they are to put Israel at the center of their political thinking,” Wald said.

The study showed the most important factors were synagogue attendance, Jewish pride and respondents’ age. Older Jews were much more likely than their younger counterparts to factor Israel into the political priorities for the United States, he said.

“Being older means that you have lived through a time when there was no state of Israel or when its survival was very much in doubt,” Wald said. “Young people never knew a time when there wasn’t a state of Israel and in most cases when that state didn’t seem to be something of a superpower.”

Younger Jews’ lack of attachment to Israel presents political challenges for pro-Israel organizations in the future, especially because American Jews comprise only 2 percent of the U.S. population, Wald said. “Older Jews who lived through the time when Israel was created and its survival was at stake are slowly passing out of the population and being replaced by a younger group for whom Israel does not have the same political priority,” he said.

Wald said he did the study because of his interest in the importance people attach to their ancestral homeland when they engage in politics in the United States. He believes the results show that Jews’ concern and mobilization for Israel are not different from other ethnic groups in the United States and cast doubts on the claims in Measheimer and Walt’s paper.

“There is a long history in this country of ethnic groups getting involved in the making of American foreign policy,” he said. “Typically, they try to influence the government to adopt policies that advance the interests of their homeland.”

For centuries, the American Irish community pressured the United States to push Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland, and today’s Cuban-American lobby exerts enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean as do Armenian-Americans on Turkey and Greek-Americans regarding Cyprus, he said.

“We all differ in the degree to which we are part of an ethnic community and how important it is to us,” Wald said. “Many Americans are Italian and that Italianness may manifest itself in eating habits and some family traditions, but I doubt if most Americans of Italian extraction could name the prime minister of Italy.”

The research shows that the middle ground can be reached on intellectual terms but often is not because individuals view their opponents’ arguments as attacks upon their core values and therefore themselves, said John Chambers, a UF psychology professor.

“Members of partisan social groups often view their adversaries with suspicion, distrust and outright animosity,” said Chambers, whose study appears in this month’s issue of Psychological Science. “It is not unusual to hear loyal members of the Republican Party complain about Democrats’ ‘attack on traditional family values and the free market,’ and to hear loyal Democrats chastise Republicans for their ‘war on the poor’ or their ‘siege on the environment.’”

Such inflamed beliefs not only characterize disputes between these two political parties, but also can be heard in debates between other social groups with competing ideologies, such as labor-management conflicts, environmentalist-business struggles, tensions between warring nations and race-related problems, Chambers said.

People with contrasting views assume their adversaries contest the core values they care about most deeply, but opposing groups share more beliefs than they realize, he said.

The study surveyed 199 abortion-rights and anti-abortion students in an elementary psychology course at the University of Iowa. They were presented with two abortion-rights value issues – women’s reproductive rights and freedom from government interference in private lives – and two anti-abortion issues – the value of human life and a moral code of sexual conduct. The students were asked to rate their own opinions and to estimate that of the typical person with the opposite view.

“To be sure, real differences of opinion existed between the groups,” said Chambers, who did the research with Robert Baron, a University of Iowa psychologist and Mary Inman, a Hope College psychologist. “Compared to pro-life participants, pro-choice participants had more favorable personal attitudes toward the pro-choice issues and less favorable attitudes toward the pro-life issues, and vice versa.”

But abortion-rights participants perceived much more disagreement with their adversaries about the abortion-rights issues, such as women’s reproductive rights, than they perceived about anti-abortion issues, such as a moral code of sexual conduct, Chambers said. On the other hand, anti-abortion participants perceived much more disagreement with their abortion-rights adversaries about the anti-abortion issues than about the abortion-rights issues, he said.

At the same time groups perceived large differences of opinion with their adversaries about issues that were important to their own side, the groups actually believed that they and their adversaries agreed on issues that were important to their adversaries’ side, the study shows. For example, abortion-rights people believed that they and anti-abortion people both favored anti-abortion issues, such as the value of human life.

“What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues,” Chambers said. “Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.”

Chambers believes the findings can be used to better understand inter-group conflict and how groups perceive each other, and to reduce stereotyping. If both sides can think about their differences in terms of what is most important to their adversaries, it might reduce conflict.

“Pro-life people need to understand that pro-choice people are not necessarily opposed to the value of human life or a moral code of sexual conduct, but they’re just more strongly in favor of women’s reproductive rights and freedom from government interference in private lives,” he said. “At the same time, pro-choice people should see that pro-life people are not against women’s reproductive rights and freedom from government interference, they’re simply more supportive of the value of human life and a moral code of sexual conduct.”

Walter Stephan, an emeritus psychology professor at New Mexico State University and expert in the area of inter-group relations, said Chambers’ research is valuable. “If the findings from this study can be put in the hands of partisans, they hold the promise of reducing the intensity of some of the major conflicts of our times,” he said.

Florida has a liberal Supreme Court, with five of its seven members appointed by Democratic governors, said Lawrence Kenny, a UF economics professor who recently analyzed the results of studies on vouchers.

“I think people need to keep in mind that state supreme court rulings often reflect the ideology of the court more than the constitutionality of the issue,” he said.

Much has been made of the importance of the Florida ruling because other states have provisions similar to Florida’s constitution requiring that public education be “uniform,” but in Wisconsin, a state with such a “uniformity” clause, the state Supreme Court upheld vouchers in 1992, Kenny said.

He also noted that vouchers were unlikely to be overturned in Ohio, where the state Supreme Court in 1999 had approved its current school voucher program, and in Washington D.C., whose voucher program was approved by Congress.

Politics are important, he said, as vouchers are most likely to be approved in conservative Republican states with at least one large struggling school district.

“Political ideology plays a powerful role in explaining the success of educational choice proposals,” Kenny said. “With very few exceptions, voucher proposals have come to a vote only in states where Republicans have controlled both the executive and legislative branches of government.”

Republicans are more supportive of vouchers because of their faith in markets and private institutions, believing competition from private schools makes education more efficient, Kenny said. Democrats, in contrast, are more likely to oppose vouchers because they have greater confidence in the public sector and are politically aligned with teacher unions, he said.

And conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate Republicans to favor vouchers because they are most bullish on the marketplace, Kenny said.

Vouchers also fare better in precincts with problem-plagued schools, fewer teachers, legislators who receive smaller contributions from teacher unions and larger numbers of students already enrolled in private schools, he said.

Kenny, whose work is published in the July issue of the journal Public Choice, said the study is the first to examine what factors determine which states adopt vouchers. He believes this option for school choice is likely to become more widespread in the future.

“In a number of battles, teacher unions claim that vouchers are going to destroy the educational system,” Kenny said. “With vouchers now in place in several states, I think a growing amount of evidence will show the public school system is not threatened and that vouchers can help students learn more.”

Vouchers in Milwaukee — the only such program approved by Democratic majorities in the statehouse — and Cleveland have expanded as people have become less intimidated by them, Kenny said. “If the public school system is really having trouble, then opposition fades, even among Democratic ranks,” he said.

Florida’s voucher program was the only one to pass that did not specifically target a large, struggling metropolitan school district, Kenny said. But when Florida became the first state to authorize vouchers statewide in 1999, it was the first year that Republicans controlled the governor’s office and both chambers of the state Legislature, he said.

States with larger Republican majorities in the legislature also are more likely to authorize charter schools, Kenny said. And charter schools, as well as vouchers, are less likely to be approved in states with strong teachers’ unions, he said.

”Vouchers would cause some public school teachers to be thrust into the private, non-unionized sector, where wages are lower, there are no certification requirements, merit pay systems are more common and there are no union-imposed work restrictions,” he said. “As a result, public school teachers are staunch opponents of vouchers.”

Eric Brunner, economics professor at Quinnipiac University, said that most studies of school choice programs have focused on how expanded school choice affects school performance. “Dr. Kenny’s study is important because it provides some of the first evidence on why some states are willing to implement school choice programs while others are not,” he said.