James H. Quello A Biographical and Historical Note Compiled by Lauren Lincoln-Chavez for the James Quello Archive Early Life James Henry Quello (April 21,1914-January 24, 2010) was born in Larium, Michigan, a northern Italian copper mining colony. In the 1920’s, the Quello family relocated to Detroit, where Quello’s father opened a grocery store in Highland Park, later working for Ford Motor Company as a factory worker and foreman. In a neighborhood dominated by the Klu Klux Klan, James H. Quello experienced discrimination and racial violence due to his Italian-American heritage. He describes his early years as where he “start[ed] becoming […]
Joelle Gehring, PhD, a biologist for the FCC, works with communications tower operators to minimize bird collisions with towers, which are so serious that they are posing risks to endangered migratory birds. Dr Gehring noted that current estimates are that “6.8 million birds … collide with U.S. and Canadian communication towers during migration. Joelle described the development of her research aimed at identifying what features of communications towers are leading to so many birds colliding with and being killed by collisions with these towers. The title of her talk was ‘Reducing Avian Collisions with Communications Towers: From Research to Implementation’. […]
This week, the Quello Center had the privilege of hosting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Biologist, Dr. Joelle Gehring (event page) to discuss her work on reducing avian collisions with communications towers. Dr. Gehring’s work, which was recently profiled by NPR, presently involves collaborating with federal regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and communication tower owners to adjust tower lighting in order to reduce migratory bird collisions. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the efforts of Dr. Gehring and her colleagues have the potential to reduce avian fatalities by 4-5 million per year in the U.S. and Canada […]
The Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission is a temporary position—with a term of a year or so of late—typically bestowed on economists with impressive credentials and experience related to media or telecommunications. Having worked at the FCC long enough to overlap with several chief economists, I noticed an interesting pattern. Many join the FCC full of hope—capable as they are—that they will reform the agency to better integrate “economic thinking” into regular policy decisions, but to quote a former colleague, “leave the agency with their sense of humor intact.” I have heard many a former FCC economist rail […]
Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, in a letter to FCC Chairman Wheeler, Republicans urged the FCC to avoid “controversial items” during the presidential transition. Shortly thereafter, the Commission largely scrubbed its Nov. 17 agenda resulting in perhaps the shortest Open Commission Meeting in recent history. Start at 9:30 here for some stern words from Chairman Wheeler in response. Viewers are urged to pay particular attention to an important history and civics lesson from the Chairman in response to a question at 17:20 (though this should not indicate our agreement with everything that the Chairman says). So what is the […]
The Quello Center is off and running in creating a digital archive of James H. Quello’s papers. Our archive team includes myself, having never created such an archive, plus Anne Marie Salter at the Center, Valeta Winsloff from Media and Information who supports our design work and blogging, Scout Calvert with the MSU Library, who is orchestrating this project, and Lauren E. Lincoln-Chavez, who has hands on experience in developing archives and special collections, and is based in Detroit. The collection contains over 1,000 papers, including speeches, statements, letters, and remarks by James Quello during his long tenure as an […]
On June 14, 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C. Circuit) upheld the FCC’s 2015 network neutrality regulations, soundly denying myriad legal challenges brought by the telecommunications industry (U.S. Telecomm. Ass’n v. FCC 2016). Thus, unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, Congress rewrites the rules, or INSERT TRENDING CELEBRITY NAME truly breaks the Internet, we can expect to receive our lawful content without concerns that it would be throttled or that the content provider paid a termination fee. How did we get here? As my colleague Kendall Koning, a telecommunications attorney and Ph.D. candidate […]
