Introducing and applying a new Australian alcohol advertising code

This article introduces the new Australian Alcohol Advertising Review Board (AARB) Code and assesses television advertising practices against its advertising content provisions. The Code is administered by independent experts to provide an alternative to the industry‐led Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code Scheme that has attracted substantial criticism. The new Code aims to balance the alcohol industry's right to promote a legal product against critical protections for young people and public health. To assess whether the new Code will require substantial changes to alcohol advertising practices, a content analysis was conducted of alcohol advertisements aired prior to its introduction on all four free‐to‐air commercial television channels over two months. A majority of the analysed advertisements (48 of 64) contained at least one element that could be construed as a breach of the AARB Code. The largest numbers of potential breaches were for the provisions relating to the association of alcohol with success and using appeals that are likely to be attractive to young people. The results demonstrate that the Australian alcohol industry will need to reassess current advertising practices to achieve compliance with the new Code. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Tortured and the Torturers: Six Films on Prisoner Abuse

During World War II, German naval codebreakers in the B-Dienst made extensive breaks into Naval Cypher No. 3, an enciphered code used by the Allies for the vital Atlantic convoys. It is often suggested that they did not discover that Cypher No. 3 was insecure until May 1943. This article shows that the British had learned about this much earlier, in August 1942, and that they informed the US Navy then. British solutions of messages encrypted with the Wehrmacht's Tunny teleprinter cipher machine had revealed that the B-Dienst was solving Naval Cyphers Nos. 3 and 4. Surprisingly, those ciphers were not replaced until June 1943.     

Heifer International: Growing a learning organisation

Heifer International (HI) has been applying participatory approaches to rural development for nearly 60 years. Organisationally, HI focuses on building the capacity of its country programmes and NGO partners to work independently toward a unifying mission. An open structure allows HI to validate and incorporate the rich and diverse experience of its project holders and country programme offices into organisational planning and daily operations. This article analyses three recent HI initiatives which incorporate deliberate processes to facilitate organisational learning. It outlines different strategies that HI uses to institutionalise learning without imposing limitations on it.     

Women,microfinance, and savings: Lessons and proposals

Microfinance--both credit and savings--has potential to improve the well-being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal savings mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services designed to address the development issues that confront women. The proposals call for safe-deposit boxes and for matched-savings accounts for healthcare or education.     

The Imagined Globe: Remapping the World Through Public Diplomacy at the Asia Society

Debates about public diplomacy have recently turned to the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in what had been primarily a conversation about state-to-state affairs. We contribute to this conversation through an in-depth analysis of the Asia Society. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1956, the Asia Society was established to educate Americans about Asia at a time when there was much less contact between the USA and Asia. Since then, the institution has undergone several reinventions, each contributing to and reflecting changing understandings of Asia and its relationship to the USA. We track the kinds of artwork the Asia Society collects and puts on display, the range of countries it categorizes as Asian, and the goals and content of its programming to reveal these shifts in scale and focus and demonstrate how they mirror and drive forward shifts in US-Asian relations. We argue that understanding how cultural institutions contribute to changing geographic imaginaries and geopolitics is an important, often overlooked aspect of public diplomacy. They are both a catalyst and reflection of changing political economic dynamics that, in turn, shape how citizens imagine their world and their nation’s place within it.