From Tastes Great to Cool: Children''s Food Marketing and the Rise of the Symbolic

Children's exposure to food marketing has exploded in recent years, along with rates of obesity and overweight. Children of color and low-income children are disproportionately at risk for both marketing exposure and becoming overweight. Comprehensive reviews of the literature show that advertising is effective in changing children's food preferences and diets.This paper surveys the scope and scale of current marketing practices, and focuses on the growing use of symbolic appeals that are central in food brands to themes such as finding an identity and feeling powerful and in control.These themes are so potent because they are central to children in their development and constitution of self. The paper concludes that reduction of exposure to marketing will be a central part of any successful anti-obesity strategy.     

Do graduated university incubator firms benefit from their relationship with university incubators?

Business incubators have become a popular policy option and economic development intervention tool. However, recent research shows that incubated firms may not benefit significantly from their incubator relationships, and may even be more vulnerable to failure post departure (graduation) from an incubator. These findings suggest that the impact of business incubation on new venture viability may be contingent on the type of support offered by an incubator and attributes of business environments within which incubation services are provided. Incubation services that protect and isolate ventures from key resource dependencies may hinder venture development and increase subsequent vulnerability to environmental demands. Alternatively, incubation services that help ventures connect and align with key resource dependencies are likely to promote firm survival. We propose that incubators vary in the services and resources they offer, and that university incubators typically provide greater connectivity and legitimacy with respect to important contingencies associated with key industry and community stakeholders. This leads us to propose that university affiliation is an important contingency that affects the relationship between firms’ participation in incubators and their subsequent performance. The purpose of this study is to evaluate this contingency by examining whether firms graduating from university incubators attain higher levels of post-incubation performance than firms participating in non-university affiliated incubators. We test this by evaluating the performance of a sample of graduated firms associated with the population of university-based incubators in the US contrasted against the performance of a matched cohort of non-incubated firms. The analysis uses an enhanced dataset that tracks the number of employees, sales, and the entry and graduation (departure) points of incubated firms from a university incubation program, so as to delineate the scope of influence of the incubator.     

YMCA training of industrialists in human relations

The involvement of the YMCA in fostering the idea of human relations training for industrialists was a natural outgrowth of its history and mission. It found itself in the position to bring together the social gospel ideas and the industrialists who were seeking ways to implement these ideas into their businesses by virtue of its existing interest in the welfare of the industrial worker and its own training needs. The YMCA took advantage of its unique situation to establish a forum which could provide training in human relations practices and purposes through its “Human Relations in Industry Summer Conferences.”.     

Intelligence and the significance of Khe Sanh

John Leopold spied his way into becoming the most famous member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the intewar period. Too short, and from the wrong ethnic background to have become a Mountie under normal circumstances, the immigrant Leopold was accepted specifically because of his eastern European origins. He infiltrated the fledgling Communist Party of Canada and after is exposure in 1928 became the RCMP's top expert on communism. His life provides insight into the developing Canadian security state, the nature of undercover intelligence gathering at the time, and the toll a life of secrecy can exact.     

Racial Socialization and Racial Identity: African American Parents’ Messages About Race as Precursors to Identity

This study uses two waves of data to examine the relationships among patterns of racial socialization experiences and racial identity in a sample of 358 African American adolescents (60% female and 40% male). Using latent class analyses, we identified three patterns of adolescent-reported racial socialization experiences: High Positive, Moderate Positive, and Low Frequency. Adolescent-reported racial socialization experiences at Wave 1 were associated with Wave 2 adolescent racial identity approximately one year later. Specifically, High Positive and Low Frequency racial socialization were associated with racial centrality, assimilationist ideology, and nationalist ideology. These findings suggest that various patterns of racial socialization practices play an important role in the developing significance and meaning that African American adolescents ascribe to race.

Angry White Men: Individual and Contextual Predictors of Support for the British National Party

The British National party (BNP) is the most successful extreme right party in Britain's electoral history and is the fastest growing political party in twenty-first century Britain. This article presents the first ever individual-level analysis of BNP supporters, utilising a survey data set uniquely compiled for this purpose. We find that support for the BNP is concentrated among older, less educated working-class men living in the declining industrial towns of the North and Midlands regions. This pattern of support is quite distinct from that which underpinned the last electorally relevant extreme right party in Britain – the National Front (NF) – whose base was young working-class men in Greater London and the West Midlands. Extreme right voters in contemporary Britain express exceptionally high levels of anxiety about immigration and disaffection with the mainstream political parties. Multi-level analysis of BNP support shows that the party prospers in areas with low education levels and large Muslim minority populations of Pakistani or African origin. The BNP has succeeded in mobilising a clearly defined support base: middle-aged working-class white men anxious about immigration, threatened by local Muslim communities and hostile to the existing political establishment. We conclude by noting that all the factors underpinning the BNP's emergence – high immigration levels, rising perceptions of identity conflict and the declining strength of the cultural and institutional ties binding voters to the main parties – are likely to persist in the coming years. The BNP therefore looks likely to consolidate itself as a persistent feature of the British political landscape.     

An Analysis of Hounsfield Unit Values and Volumetrics from Computerized Tomography of the Proximal Femur for Sex and Age Estimation

Sex and age are two elements in the establishment of a biological profile for forensic identification. While the pelvic bones are the most ideal structures for sex estimation, the condition of a body is not always ideal due to the nature of death, such as in mass disasters, or postmortem processes. This study utilized CT scans and resultant 3D models of 100 male and 100 female adults of known ages ranging from 18 to 98 years old to collect volumetric and Hounsfield unit measurements of the proximal femur. Equations were created to establish logistic regression models for sex estimation and linear regression models for age estimation. The resultant sex estimation method had an accuracy of 93.5% and utilized the volume of the proximal femur. This study provides three linear regression models for age with an accuracy range of 86%–92% ±12 years. As imaging technologies are increasingly adopted for forensic purposes, the power of 3D data will provide the opportunity for more quantitative and reproducible analyses. The proposed method for sex and age estimation provides a reliable tool that can be utilized in both day-to-day casework and disaster victim identification.     

Mother-daughter dyads view the family: Associations between divergent perceptions and daughter well-being

Divergent perceptions (or disagreements) within the mother-daughter dyad and the association of such divergence with daughter's affective and behavioral well-being were examined in the current study. One hundred sixty-one mother-daughter dyads (daughters aged 14–18 years; mothers aged 37–59 years) completed paper- and-pencil measures assessing their perceptions of family cohesion and family conflict; daughters also rated their own depressive affect and dieting behavior. While the means for groups of mothers and daughters on family cohesion and conflict were similar, dyads varied substantially in their level of agreement. Disagreements on family cohesion were associated with daughter dieting behavior; maternal employment status was more highly associated with daughter depressive affect than either family conflict or cohesion. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for studying the divergent perceptions of family members, and for family systems and relationship approaches to understanding the family.The research presented in this paper was supported by the W. T. Grant Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Portions of this paper were presented at the 3rd biennial meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Atlanta, Georgia.Received Ph.D. in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include the interplay among developmental processes during transitions into and out of adolescence.Received Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include familial adaptation to chronic illness and the role of family processes in self-image and depression during adolescence.Received Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include girls' psychological adaptation to pubertal change, biosocial aspects of female reproductive events, and development of biologically and socially at risk children and adolescents.