Political Issues (political + issues)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Discourse, Policy Controversies and the Role of Science in the Politics of Shrimp Farming Development

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 5 2005
Christophe Béné
This article revisits through a policy analysis the ongoing debate on shrimp farming aquaculture. It describes the changes in policy orientations that have taken place in recent years, and tries to relate them to the advocacy strategies developed by different networks and policy communities. The analysis reveals in particular the crucial contribution of the ,power of expertise' and shows how it has been instrumentalised by certain advocacy networks to depoliticise the debate. While this has allowed a number of key stakeholders to refocus the debate on technical solutions, it has prevented other groups concerned with more intractable social and political issues from engaging successfully in the policy process, thus leaving the long-term sustainability of aquaculture still a contentious issue. [source]


POLITICAL MONETARY CYCLES UNDER ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS: THE INDEPENDENT TREASURY AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 3 2005
Jac C. Heckelman
The theory of opportunistic political business cycles predicts incumbent politicians will alter their economic policies to spur short-run growth to attract additional votes for the upcoming election. There has not been much emphasis on the possibility of historical political business cycles prior to the Keynesian Revolution. No study has yet undertaken a systematic approach to testing for policy cycles during this period. Our study will bridge this gap by considering cycles in monetary policy for the periods of 1879,1914 until the start of Fed operations, and 1914,1932 until abandonment of the gold standard. To properly test for political cycles, it is necessary to develop reaction functions for the Treasury and compare against the reaction function later held by the Fed. This also reveals that creation of an independent monetary authority to be insulated from political pressures changed the manner in which policy was directed, aside from political issues. The evidence is not consistent, however, with monetary cycles closely tied to electoral concerns. [source]


British Masculinities on Trial in the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2008
Louise Carter
This article uses the deluge of pamphlets, public addresses, newspaper articles and sermons addressing the Queen Caroline Affair to construct a case study of the opposing constructions of British masculinity vying for dominance in 1820. The literature surrounding the attempted royal divorce reveals a contest between the libertine example of manhood characterised by George IV and the more sober, chivalrous and respectable image of masculinity increasingly espoused as the British ideal. This episode, therefore, offers an unusually rich insight into contemporary constructions of masculinity and the way in which they were utilised within the public sphere. Moreover, this article argues that such gendered concerns were not only as crucial to motivating opposition to the king's actions as political issues, but that gender concerns and political issues were indivisible, as appropriate manly behaviour in both public and private increasingly came to be seen as a core component of a man's overall reputation and fitness to exercise authority. [source]


,Saving the Solomons': a New Geopolitics in the ,Arc of Instability'?

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2006
JOHN CONNELL
Abstract The recent crisis in the Solomon Islands is reviewed in the context of historical and regional antecedents. In the past two decades political and ethnic disputes have flared in several parts of Melanesia and nearby parts of the ,arc of instability'. Tensions and violence in the Solomon Islands, based on social, economic and political issues, exemplify regional development concerns. The collapse of the economy and civil order resulted in the Solomon Islands being characterised as a ,failed State'. Localised warfare brought external military intervention, with a regional assistance mission led by Australia, which paralleled other involvement in the region. Involvement has emphasised renewed Australian interest in the region, in the light of global geopolitical shifts, and a more controversial approach to regional security and development. [source]


Love-making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578,1582

HISTORY, Issue 284 2001
Natalie Mears
The marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and Francis, duke of Anjou, have provided an important lens for exploring the nature of the Elizabethan polity. Conyers Read argued that Elizabeth deliberately exploited courtship rituals to gain ascendancy over ministers and foreign princes. Wallace MacCaffrey and Susan Doran argued that Elizabeth's commitment to the match was genuine, but that she was prevented from concluding the match because she lacked conciliar support. This article re-examines these arguments in the light of recent research on the language of courtship and archival study into the nature of the political agenda and crown-council relations. It suggests that English interest in the negotiations evolved from growing anxiety about the unresolved succession and that the relationship between Elizabeth and her councillors, especially over her marriage, was more nuanced than has been conventionally thought. Courtship rituals were adopted to express relationships between Elizabeth and her courtiers, but these reflected a revival of chivalric court culture and were not adopted as forms of political action. The article suggests that the twists and turns of the negotiations have to be seen in the context of the active role that Elizabeth took in policy-making, the personal and political issues the marriage raised and Elizabeth's own conception of how effectively an alternative (political) resolution would work. Elizabeth was shrewd enough to see that rules framed for chivalrous love-making might very aptly be applied to diplomatic purposes, and very probably for that reason she always liked to mingle an element of love-making in her diplomacy. [source]


Social Science, Geophilosophy and Inequality

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2002
Michael J. Shapiro
This chapter begins with a treatment of the inauspicious debut of social science in Hawaii, noting how it aided and abetted colonization. However, although much of the analysis is aimed at elucidating current political issues in Hawaii, its organizing concern is with a general critique of the historical role of social and political science "knowledge." Accordingly, much of the chapter deals with a trajectory of discourses on political analysis, nation,building, and equality throughout the twentieth century, to which the primary contributions have been from American social science. Finally, I turn to a way of theorizing inequality that challenges the predicates of state,centric discourses on rights and equality before the law. [source]


Mobile discourse: political bumper stickers as a communication event in Israel

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2000
L-R Bloch
The use of political bumper stickers in Israel began as a spontaneous protest medium, evolving into a routinized form of public discourse, taking place throughout the year, independently of national elections. The rules of interaction of this nontraditional means of political communication are identified and the complex relationships between the messages within their social situation are investigated using an ethnographic model. This analysis reveals that the medium does indeed constitute a structured means of expression with identifiable forms, rules, and usages, affording the person in the street a way of participating in the national discourse, bypassing traditional avenues of influence. The detailed examination of a single political bumper sticker reveals a structure parallel to the overall code, further demonstrating the intricacy of the messages. The analysis shows how this political discourse reflects social norms peculiar to Israel and how its use has become an affirmation of cultural identity. Because the fundamental properties of political bumper stickers have now been exposed, it is possible to examine how the actual use of this medium changes the structure of political agency in society through the presumption that ordinary individuals have the right of access to the public debate of national political issues, a right heretofore exclusively the prerogative of institutional power holders. [source]


Communication Communities or "CyberGhettos?": A Path Analysis Model Examining Factors that Explain Selective Exposure to Blogs,

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 1 2009
Thomas J. Johnson Ph.D.
This study used an online panel of Internet users to examine the degree to which blog users practice selective exposure when seeking political information. The research employed a path analysis model to explore the extent to which exposure to offline and online discussion of political issues, and offline and online media use, as well as political variables and demographic factors, predict an individual's likelihood to engage in selective exposure to blogs. The findings indicate that respondents did practice selective exposure to blogs, predominantly those who are heavy blog users, politically active both online and offline, partisan, and highly educated. [source]


The Political Economy of Low Inflation

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 1 2001
Jonathan Kirshner
What are the politics of inflation? This question is usually raised solely when inflation rates are high. All levels of inflation, however, high and low, are the outcome of political conflicts. But no current approach to the study of inflation , sociological, neoclassical, modern political economy , adequately captures the full range of political issues at stake, and this leads to problems for both theory and policy. This paper critiques the existing perspectives on inflation and then focuses on three theoretical issues raised by those critiques: the economic costs of inflation; the concept of monetary neutrality from economic and political perspectives; and the importance of disaggregating economic growth statistics. Finally, the paper introduces and explores a contending approach to the analysis of the political economy of inflation: a ,micro-politics' perspective. This approach is the only one to address the politics of low inflation, which is of great significance for contemporary political economy. [source]


Lobby Groups and the Financial Support of Election Campaigns

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 3 2000
M. Socorro Puy
We study a model of competition between two political parties with policy compromise. There is a special interest group with well-defined preferences on political issues. Voters are of two kinds: impressionable and knowledgeable. The impressionable voters are influenced by the election campaigns. The objective of the parties is to obtain the maximum votes. Parties compete for financial support from a given interest group. Each party proposes a platform in exchange for an amount of campaign funds, and the interest group decides whether to accept or reject each of these proposals. We show that parties' competition resembles, to a certain extent, Bertrand competition. Furthermore, in equilibrium only one party gets funds from the interest group. This result differs from the one obtained in a similar model by Grossman and Helpman in which, in equilibrium, both parties are financed by the interest group. This difference arises because Grossman and Helpman assume that it is the interest group who makes the proposals to the political parties. [source]


Civic Spaces: Mexican Hometown Associations and Immigrant Participation

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 1 2010
S. Karthick Ramakrishnan
The study of civic participation and social capital in the United States has, until recently, been silent on the role of immigrant-serving organizations. There is a new line of scholarship, which indicates that ethnic organizations are generally disadvantaged in relation to White mainstream organizations on factors such as resources and political visibility. Our fieldwork on Mexican hometown associations (HTAs) in Los Angeles shows that transnational associations are even more disadvantaged than ethnic organizations that primarily serve the native born. However, this marginality leaves some counterintuitive advantages, namely the creation of safe spaces where undocumented immigrants, recent immigrants, and those with limited English proficiency can get involved in civic and political activities. We explore the extent to which these dynamics vary by gender and immigrant generation, and over time as Mexican hometown associations increasingly turn their attention to political issues in the United States. [source]


Evaluating enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems using an interpretive approach

KNOWLEDGE AND PROCESS MANAGEMENT: THE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE TRANSFORMATION, Issue 2 2002
Walter Skok
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems may be defined as the implementation of standard software modules for core business processes, usually combined with customization for competitive differentiation. The aim is to provide breadth of integration and depth of functionality across multi-functional and often multi-national organizations. However, current research has shown that there has been a notable decrease in the satisfaction levels of ERP implementations over the period 1998,2000. The environment in which such software is selected, implemented andused may be viewed as a social activity system, which consists of a variety ofstakeholders e.g.users, developers, managers, suppliers and consultants. In such a context, an interpretive research approach is appropriate in order to understand the influences at work. This paper reports on an interpretive study that attempts to understand the reasons for this apparent lack ofsuccess by analyzing issues raised by representatives of key stakeholder groups. Conclusions are drawn on a wide range of organizational, management, cultural and political issues that provide guidance in managing such large-scale, complex business projects. These conclusions have led theauthors to review the area of critical success factors (CSFs) for IS projects and to identify those peculiar to ERP projects. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Conducting a Salary-Equity Study: A Consultant's View

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 117 2003
Gerald W. McLaughlin
A case-study approach illustrates the various statistical and political issues that analysts often encounter when conducting a salary-equity study for a single institution. [source]


Biotechnology, the Environment, and Sustainability

NUTRITION REVIEWS, Issue 2003
Dr. Harry Kuiper
This article reviews the environmental impact of genetically modified crops through discussion of environmental risk assessment and includes several case studies. Influence of European regulatory and political issues is considered. [source]


Policy Design and the Acceptability of Environmental Risks: Nuclear Waste Disposal in Canada and the United States

POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 1 2000
Michael E. Kraft
This article examines the controversial process of developing high-level nuclear waste disposal policy in Canada, with some comparison to experience in the United States. It argues that a policy design perspective can assist in understanding the difficult social and political issues associated with waste disposal and the environmental and health risks that it poses. I examine several critical questions related to such an endeavor and link them to long-term goals of building a sustainable society. Success in formulating and implementing a nuclear waste policy in Canada will depend on the nation's capacity to create requisite processes of public participation. Particularly important are those actions that can help the public understand and assess environmental risks, including related ethical and social issues, and build public trust and confidence in the siting processes and the implementing agencies. [source]


Truth and Fiction: A Study of the Gender Gap in the US National Legislature

POLITICS, Issue 3 2001
Stephanie L. Hallett
In the United States, women are generally perceived to vote more liberally than men. Analysing voting patterns from 12 US Congresses (the 94th to 105th Congress) on a range of political issues, I conduct an estimation explaining voting behaviour by gender, differences in party identification and affiliation with different geographical regions in the United States. My results indicate that women do generally vote more liberally than men, but this difference can be attributed to differences in party identification and regional representation more than to gender differences. [source]


Trusting souls: A segmentation of the voting public

PSYCHOLOGY & MARKETING, Issue 12 2002
Leon G. Schiffman
When a 30-year decline in the American voters' trust of political office holders and the election process is contrasted to their enduring trust of the democratic form of government, there is strong confirmation of the need to take a multidimensional approach in measuring political trust. To this end, a segmentation scheme based on two well-established political trust measures (i.e., incumbent-based trust and regime-based trust) is proposed. In particular how two specific trust segments differ in terms of the time they spend on various political and election-related activities is examined. Among other things, the findings reveal that the dual-trusting segment (i.e., those who were both regime and incumbent trusting) were substantially more likely than the regime-only trusting segment (i.e., those who were regime trusting and incumbent untrusting) to watch television debates or speeches and have informal discussions with friends and co-workers on topics related to the election. There were no meaningful differences between the two segments when it came to giving or raising funds, or campaigning for a candidate or political party. However, when it came to voting-related decision making, the results suggest that dual-trusting individuals were significantly more likely to spend more than a little time considering how they were going to vote for President, U.S. Senate, and on particular political issues. The article ends with suggestions for future research, as well as some thoughts on how politicians and their advisers might more fully embrace the relational marketing paradigm, especially as it pertains to the connection between elected officials and the voting public. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source]


Clinical psychologists do politics: Attitudes and reactions of Israeli psychologists toward the political

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 3 2009
Nissim Avissar
Abstract This article presents an analysis of a survey among Israeli clinical psychologists, examining their attitudes towards diverse political issues. The survey involved the distribution of 600 questionnaires, 115 of which were returned. Within this framework, psychologists were asked to relate to questions regarding political issues in psychotherapy and the ways of dealing with them, socio-political issues in psychology studies and training processes, socio-political involvement of psychologists as citizens or as professionals, and more. This inquiry enabled the current state of affairs to be portrayed with regard to common professional-political conceptions and stances toward political aspects of psychotherapeutic work. The survey's findings point to a divide within the Israeli psychologist community, as expressed by divergent and contradictory opinions that arise in response to a sizable portion of the issues examined. It is quite possible that this rift marks a process of change and indicates the decline of the conservative psychodynamic conceptual system. This theoretical perspective had, up until recently, a hegemonic position within the Israeli psychotherapeutic milieu. In most cases this standpoint was applied in a dogmatic manner, justifying a passive social-political stance in the name of anonymity and neutrality. It appears that still, today, this epistemic position is predominant within the Israeli psychotherapeutic culture. However, nowadays, a large minority of Israeli clinical psychologists seems to be sensitive to different political aspects of psychotherapy and favourable toward working in a politically informed and socially responsible manner. As political issues are almost entirely absent from psychology academic programs and clinical training processes, there is much confusion and helplessness as to how such issues and phenomena should be treated in therapy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Psychotherapy, political resistance and intimacy: Dilemmas, possibilities and limitations, Part II

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 3 2009
Manuel Llorens
Abstract The following paper discusses the challenges faced by psychotherapists working in Venezuela during years of political and social unrest as a way of examining psychotherapy's dilemmas when dealing with political issues. It is the second part of a two-part piece. In the first part limitations of the traditional psychotherapeutic technical recommendations in a highly polarized political setting were considered. In this second part examples of the difficulties presented in Venezuela will be shown. Reflexive psychotherapeutic alternatives to traditional technical considerations such as neutrality will be considered. The possibilities opened up by the perspectives that lead us to engage simultaneously with the personal and social aspects of life, the inclusion of the power differential in the therapeutic relationship and the potential that psychotherapy has to act as a form of resistance to unjust circumstances when thought of as a space where the intimate and the political are intertwined will be considered. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Psychotherapy, political resistance and intimacy: Dilemmas, possibilities and limitations, Part I,

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 2 2009
Manuel Llorens
Abstract The following is the first part of a two-part paper that discusses the challenges faced by psychotherapists working in Venezuela during years of political and social unrest as a way of examining psychotherapy's dilemmas when dealing with political issues. This first part will discuss limitations in the ability of traditional psychotherapeutic technical recommendations to address clinical material stemming from highly polarized political scenarios. Historical examples of how these limitations have led to abuse will be shown. The specific difficulties of traditional notions of neutrality will be questioned. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Speculating on mysteries: religion and politics in King Lear

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 2 2002
Frankie Rubinstein
In a play about a pagan king and a mismanaged kingdom, where immorality, betrayal, civil strife and expectation of foreign intervention were omnipresent and the political landscape was beset by intrigue and domestic and foreign spies, Shakespeare created a surrogate for sixteenth and seventeenth century England. King Lear deals with theological ,mysteries' and doctrinal disputes and their political implications. Shakespeare exploits the fused religious and sexual language that was a tool in the deadly disputes, daringly conflating the sacrilegious and the religious: cannibalism is shorthand for the mystery of the Eucharist, and astrology, for divine influence. The pivotal speech of Act V, sc. iii, 9,20, alludes metaphorically to the profound religious and political issues of the Catholic,Protestant controversy; for example, King Lear takes upon himself ,the mystery of things' in his role as one of ,God's spies', in which we hear, also, ,God's (s)pies' or magpies, whose black and white plumage led to their being a frequent contemporary mockery of bishops in their black and white garb. Such crucial phrases and the punning changes Shakespeare rings on them lead to the core of the play and the divine denouement to come. Man's , and woman's , passing judgement on their fellows, presumptuous playing at God, and pretensions to the mantle of Christ are treated with a religious irony and irreverent levity in proportion to the moral falseness and religious and political bigotry of the times. [source]


The World Wide Web and the U.S. Political News Market

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010
Norman H. Nie
We propose a framework for understanding how the Internet has affected the U.S. political news market. The framework is driven by the lower cost of production for online news and consumers' tendency to seek out media that conform to their own beliefs. The framework predicts that consumers of Internet news sources should hold more extreme political views and be interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news. We test these predictions using two large datasets with questions about news exposure and political views. Generally speaking, we find that consumers of generally left-of-center (right-of-center) cable news sources who combine their cable news viewing with online sources are more liberal (conservative) than those who do not. We also find that those who use online news content are more likely than those who consume only television news content to be interested in niche political issues. [source]


Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
Frank R. Baumgartner
We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment. [source]


Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2006
Jennifer Jerit
In a democracy, knowledge is power. Research explaining the determinants of knowledge focuses on unchanging demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This study combines data on the public's knowledge of nearly 50 political issues with media coverage of those topics. In a two-part analysis, we demonstrate how education, the strongest and most consistent predictor of political knowledge, has a more nuanced connection to learning than is commonly recognized. Sometimes education is positively related to knowledge. In other instances its effect is negligible. A substantial part of the variation in the education-knowledge relationship is due to the amount of information available in the mass media. This study is among the first to distinguish the short-term, aggregate-level influences on political knowledge from the largely static individual-level predictors and to empirically demonstrate the importance of the information environment. [source]


Front and Back Covers, Volume 25, Number 4.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 4 2009
August 200
Front and Back cover caption, volume 25 issue 4 ETHNOGRHAPHIC DOCUMENTARIES AND PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY Ethnographic documentaries are a shop window for anthropology. These cover photos represent three well received films shown at the most recent RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film held at Leeds Metropolitan University in July. The festival is a biennial event at which visual anthropologists, filmmakers and documentarists mingle. The front cover image is from the film Black mountain. A once unremarkable site of multi-faith pilgrimage to a Sufi saint has been transformed and its local history rewritten. The film documents the journey of Charlotte Whitby-Coles, a PhD student who, whilst researching religious pilgrimages, stumbled on the politicization of a pilgrimage site in western India. Her research suggests that Kalo Dungar (Black Mountain), situated in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, provides a micro-example of current political issues in India today that threaten the ideal of ,unity in diversity' for the country. The top image on the back cover is taken from Between the lines, a film by Thomas Wartman on India's ,third gender' that follows photographer Anita Khemka as she explores the hidden hijra subculture of Bombay. Khemka is fascinated by the spiritual powers of the outcast hijras , biological men who dress as women but reject identification with either gender. Accompanying three hijras, Khemka discusses intimate details , their matriarchal surrogate families, castration ceremonies, sexuality, begging and prostitution. Khemka's ability to initiate personal dialogue about persistent cultural stereotypes of gender provides insight into a social group currently at the forefront of the fight for gender equality in India. The lower image is from the film Enet Yapai by Daniela Vavrova. Enet Yapai was six years old when Vavrova first met her in 2005 in Ambonwari village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Between November 2007 and April 2008 she followed Enet and her mother Alexia on their way to process sago, catch fish or collect grass for baskets and mats. This experimental film captures the subtleties of the interaction between Enet Yapai, the camera and the filmmaker. For details of the prizes awarded at the festival, see p. 29 of this issue or http://www.raifilmfest.org.uk. [source]


How the New Government Utilizes Emerging Internet Media in Japan

ASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 4 2010
Masahiro Matsuura
The newly elected Hatoyama administration has launched several projects on the Internet to facilitate interactions with the public. Politicians use Twitter to tweet their political activities and interact with other users. Government agencies have launched several new Web sites, such as hatomimi and jukugi kake-ai, and integrated video-steaming sites, such as ustream.com. Notwithstanding these efforts, however, the new administration has not yet been able to apply these forums to resolving hard political issues. [source]


Receiving: The Use of Web 2.0 to Create a Dynamic Learning Forum to Enrich Resident Education

ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE, Issue 2009
Adam Rosh
Receiving (http://www.drhem.com) is a powerful web-based tool that encompasses web 2.0 technologies. "Web 2.0" is a term used to describe a group of loosely related network technologies that share a user-focused approach to design and functionality. It has a strong bias towards user content creation, syndication, and collaboration (McGee 2008). The use of Web 2.0 technology is rapidly being integrated into undergraduate and graduate education, which dramatically influences the ways learners approach and use information (Sandars 2007). Knowledge transfer has become a two-way process. Users no longer simply consume and download information from the web; they create and interact with it. We created this blog to facilitate resident education, communication, and productivity. Using simple, freely available blog software (Wordpress.com), this inter-disciplinary web-based forum integrates faculty-created, case-based learning modules with critical essays and articles related to the practice of emergency medicine (EM). Didactic topics are based on the EM model and include multi-media case presentations. The educational modules include a visual diagnosis section (VizD), United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) board-style cases (quizzER), radiographic interpretation (radER), electrocardiogram interpretation (Tracings), and ultrasound image and video clip interpretation (Morrison's Pouch). After viewing each case, residents can submit their answers to the questions asked in each scenario. At the end of each week, a faculty member posts the answer and facilitates an online discussion of the case. A "Top 10 Leader Board" is updated weekly to reflect resident participation and display a running tally of correct answers submitted by the residents. Feedback by the residents has been very positive. In addition to the weekly interactive cases, Receiving also includes critical essays and articles on an array of topics related to EM. For example, "Law and Medicine" is a monthly essay written by an emergency physician who is also a lawyer. This module explores legal issues related to EM. "The Meeting Room" presents interviews with leading scholars in the field. "Got Public Health?", written by a resident, addresses relevant social, cultural, and political issues commonly encountered in the emergency department. "Mini Me" is dedicated to pediatric pearls and is overseen by a pediatric emergency physician. "Sherwin's Critical Care" focuses on critical care principles relevant to EM and is overseen by a faculty member. As in the didactic portion of the website, residents and faculty members are encouraged to comment on these essays and articles, offering their own expertise and interpretation on the various topics. Receiving is updated weekly. Every post has its own URL and tags allowing for quick and easy searchability and archiving. Users can search for various topics by using a built-in search feature. Receiving is linked to an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, allowing users to get the latest information without having to continually check the website for updates. Residents have access to the website anytime and anywhere that the internet is available (e.g., home computer, hospital computer, IphoneÔ, BlackBerryÔ), bringing the classroom to them. This unique blend of topics and the ability to create a virtual interactive community creates a dynamic learning environment and directly enhances resident education. Receiving serves as a core educational tool for our residency, presenting interesting and relevant EM information in a collaborative and instructional environment. [source]


HIDDEN DISCIPLINES IN MALAYSIA: THE ROLE OF BUSINESS HISTORY IN A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2009
Article first published online: 28 OCT 200, Shakila Yacob
business history; business economics; economic history; Malaysian history; multi-disciplinary studies Business history plays a crucial role in the understanding of the history and socioeconomic development of Malaysia. This paper analyses that role through an assessment of the most relevant colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary literature. Malaysian business history adopts a multidisciplinary approach, which has the potential to propel the discipline to address potentially sensitive political issues in Malaysia, though in the past business history's assimilation into other disciplines has discouraged, with notable exceptions, its potential to explore sensitive topics. In conclusion, the paper outlines the challenges faced by Malaysian business history academics and argues for extending the discipline's boundaries. [source]


Imagining Europe: political identity and British television coverage of the European economy

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2000
Neil T. Gavin
The article considers European economic news coverage on British television and its relationship with the UK public's perceptions of and identity with Europe. Stress is placed on the symbolic content of news about Europe; stories about the economic entitlements offered to citizens within the European Union; and portrayal of material benefits or losses for Britain. The results suggest that coverage offers mixed signals about Europe. As yet, they offer an unlikely platform for the development in the United Kingdom of European solidarity or identity. The results are assessed in the light of the way journalists approach political issues. The implications for statistical modelling of the media's relationship with attitudes towards Europe are also considered. [source]


International Communication, Ethnography, and the Challenge of Globalization

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2003
Patrick D. Murphy
This article articulates media ethnography with international communication theory in the context of globalization. It explores the history and regional trajectories of media ethnography, as well as anthropology's epistemological and political issues of representation that have become relevant to media studies. The authors argue that rethinking the limits and potential of media ethnography to address cultural consumption also necessarily involves considering how ethnography can serve to engender a vision of international communication theory grounded in the practices of everyday life. This reformulation is crucial at a time when some media scholars celebrate difference via microassessments of postcolonial locales and the plurality of cultures without attempting to consider global structural concerns. In fact, the authors argue, if media ethnographies are rigorously developed, they can offer international communication theory the material to bridge the gap between meaning and structure without losing site of the complexity, context, and power imbalances inherent in processes of globalization. [source]