Celebrity Studies Today

Celebrity, being often unearned and ephemeral, is the lowest form of fame. Nevertheless, it’s a real and fascinating display of personal significance in our time. Celebrities are, of course, questionable role models, but characters of strange and singular greatness such as Elvis and Michael Jackson, everyone knows, aren’t really to be imitated. Celebrities, although they often have interesting political and spiritual opinions, are easily distinguished from political leaders. Celebrity, I show, is more a downside than not of democracy.     

Application of a simple extraction procedure using aqueous ammonia to the analysis of basic drugs in blood by gas chromatography

A simple and reliable previously reported extraction procedure has been extended to the analysis of a wide range of basic and neutral drugs in postmortem blood and other tissues. The method employs 200 microliters of blood treated with water and ammonia and extracted with diethyl ether. The concentrated extract is generally sufficiently clean for direct analysis by gas chromatography and high pressure liquid chromatography. Recovery, precision and linearity data are presented for selected drugs.     

Family violence and Asian drinkers

This is a study of 70 consecutive referrals to the Department of Psychological Medicine, National University Hospital, for treatment of drinking problems. There were 31 Chinese and 39 Indian drinkers, with 63 males and 7 females. Family violence with physical abuse occurred in 21 cases (30%). One of three wives of drinkers had been physically abused, but no children were victims. Drinkers with family violence were generally younger and more severely dependent on alcohol than the non-violent drinkers. There was no relationship between family violence and the ethnicity or marital status of the drinkers.     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

Parent-child Communication,Social Norms,and the Development of Cyber Aggression in Early Adolescence

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - To understand the development of cyber aggression during adolescence, it is important to consider the temporal variability of its potential predictors. This study...