From the Freak Show to the Living Room: Cultural Representations of Dwarfism and Obesity1

This article examines how cultural representations of deviant bodies vary based on historically informed narratives of bodily stigma. Using content analysis of 40 episodes of reality television programming, I contrast cultural representations of dwarfism and obesity. Over time, dwarfism became constructed as an identity project with the aim of bodily acceptance, whereas obesity became regarded as a body project with the goal of body transformation through weight loss. The mostly positive historical characterizations of dwarfs allowed them to easily adopt the tenets of the disability rights movement as they evolved from freak show performances to television as an educational platform. They have adopted a social model of disability, positive social identity, self‐acceptance, and full social participation. By contrast, the past and contemporary representations of obesity have been overwhelmingly negative. Obese freak show performers were openly mocked, and classifying obesity as a disability has not yet gained traction as a civil rights movement. Instead, obesity is viewed through the lens of individual responsibility and limits of social participation are emphasized. Body modification through weight loss constructs an identity based on self‐change. Generally, this article suggests that cultural representations as de‐stigmatization projects are enabled or constrained by historical factors and the nature of the bodily stigma.     

Spring Festival Drama Show

"Pull the saw, drag the saw, An opera is by Granny's door; Mom will go and so will Dad Granny has invited us all..." This is the nursery rhyme that is always ringing in my ears during the Spring Festival. Whenever I hear it, my childhood days come rushing back to me and I remember how much joy the opera performances at the Spring Festival brought us. It is true that I always watched the     

The Role of Public Confessions in Show Trials: An Analysis of the Moscow Show Trials

Authority figures may organize show trials featuring public confessions when they are faced with deep rooted contradictions within the social order and want to increase their legitimacy, delegitimize defendants, and justify increased social control in society. An analysis of the court report of the Moscow Show Trials found that these public confessions frame conflicts rooted in contradictions within the social order as acts of deviance that can be resolved with additional social control. The public confessions accomplished this using four main themes: establishing credibility, labeling the defendants as deviant, endorsing the power holder, and demonstrating closure.     

Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.     

十里秦淮水,映出花灯红

中国彩灯,饮誉古今;秦淮灯会,久负盛名。秦淮灯会是流传于南京地区的民俗文化活动。在干百年来广布年节灯会的神州大地上,秦淮灯会脱颖而出,赢得了“天下第一灯会”的美称。2006年,秦淮灯会被列入国家级非物质文化遗产名录。     

亮出你的市场个性——usp营销新思维

在琳琅满目的市场中,如何让企业的产品鹤立鸡群,展现出其独特的魅力,让顾客一见钟情而别无他求,惟有“亮出你的市场个性!”市场上种类繁多的商品让顾客眼花缭乱,有如“雾里看花”。特别是同行业产品,看似林林总总,感觉却是千人一面。许多产品设计千篇一律,质量、价格、外观也都相差无几,惟一的大差别就是品牌的迥异,实在是缺乏独特的个性。尽管很多企业使尽浑身解数以期焕发出独特的市场魅力,却往往还是使顾客难以为之动容。企业要想在市场上绘出迷人的风景,就必须要有令人“动情之处”,亮出独特的市场个性,确立独特的营销主题。独特的营销…     

隐性教育法在电视真人秀节目中的运用及价值

电视真人秀节目作为近几年电视节目中异军突起的节目形态,深受广大电视观众特别是青少年的喜爱和追捧。真人秀节目形态多样,贴近现实生活,承载丰富的思想文化内涵,探索、挖掘其背后蕴含的榜样暗示、情境感染、情感感化、艺术陶冶、自我教育等隐性教育方法,具有积极的育人作用和社会价值意蕴,有利于发挥社会主义核心价值观的导向作用,促进传统文化教育力量的回归。     

An extension of the Moulin No Show Paradox for voting correspondences

In this article, we analyse the possibility of extending the Moulin theorem to Condorcet voting correspondences. Moulin (1988) established that every Condorcet voting function suffers from the No Show Paradox, or Abstention Paradox, which means that in some voting situations some voters would achieve a better result by abstaining (in other words, could manipulate the election by abstaining). This problem is similar to that of extending the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem on voting manipulation through casting an insincere ballot to voting correspondences. The main result of the paper states that for every Condorcet voting correspondence there are situations in which every optimistic or pessimistic voter with some preferences could manipulate the election by abstaining. Another result states, by counterexample, that some Condorcet voting correspondences are free from the Abstention Paradox from the point of view of other types of voters.     

如何在中职语文教学中体现人文精神的培养

中职教育是我国实施科教兴国战略,提高劳动者素质,促进社会主义现代化建设的重要内容,是我国国民教育体系中的重要环节,但目前我国中职教育中还存在一些问题需要解决。从中职语文教学和人文精神的关系入手,阐述了其重要性,并对如何在中职语文教学中体现人文精神培养进行了探讨。     

李西宁：《CHA》为媒，圆梦世博

Li Xining rose to fame by promoting innovation and reform in contemporary acrobatic performances. Her acrobatics in ＂Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger,＂ ＂Taiji＂ and ＂Shaolin Warriors＂ were well received by domestic and foreign audiences, and, given such performances, she became known as a ＂woman of wonder.＂ The ＂Dragon and Lion＂ program, a gala broadcast by TV stations and developed in cooperation with Sun Circus, won three Emmy Awards in 2001.     

Infants Show Ratio‐dependent Number Discrimination Regardless of Set Size

Evidence for approximate number system (ANS) representations in infancy is robust but has typically only been found when infants are presented with arrays of four or more elements. In addition, several studies have found that infants fail to discriminate between small numbers when continuous variables such as surface area and contour length are controlled. These findings suggest that under some circumstances, infants fail to recruit either the ANS or object file representations for small sets. Here, we used a numerical change detection paradigm to assess 6‐month‐old infants' ability to represent small values. In Experiment 1, infants were tested with 1 versus 3, 1 versus 2, and 2 versus 3 dots. Infants successfully discriminated 1 versus 3 and 1 versus 2, but failed with 2 versus 3. In Experiment 2, we tested whether infants could compare small and large values with a 2 versus 4 condition. Across both experiments, infants' performance exhibited ratio dependence, the hallmark of the ANS. Our results indicate that infants can attend to the purely numerical attributes of small sets and that the numerical change detection paradigm accesses ANS representations in infancy regardless of set size.     

Do Socially Anxious Children Show Deficits in Classifying Facial Expressions of Emotions?

Studies with socially anxious adults suggest that social anxiety is associated with problems in decoding other persons' facial expressions of emotions. Corresponding studies with socially anxious children are lacking. The aim of the present study was to test whether socially phobic children show deficits in classifying facial expressions of emotions or show a response bias for negative facial expressions. Fifty socially anxious and 25 socially non-anxious children (age 8 to 12) participated in the study. Pictures of faces with either neutral, positive (joyful) or negative (angry, disgusted, sad) facial expressions (24 per category) were presented for 60 ms on a monitor screen in random order. The children were asked to indicate by pressing a key whether the facial expression was neutral, positive, or negative, and to rate how confident they were about their classification. With regard to frequency of errors the socially anxious children reported significantly more often that they saw emotions when neutral faces were presented. Moreover, reaction times were longer. However, they did not feel less certain about their performance. There is neither an indication of an enhanced ability to decode negative facial expressions in socially anxious children, nor was there a specific tendency to interpret neutral or positive faces as negative.     

Show Me the Money: Incorporating Financial Motives into the Gambling Motives Questionnaire

Although research has only recently begun to measure what motivates all levels of gambling involvement, motives could offer a theoretically interesting and practical way to subtype gamblers in research and for responsible gambling initiatives. The Gambling Motives Questionnaire (GMQ) is one measure that weaves together much of the gambling motives literature, but it has been criticized for neglecting financial reasons for gambling. This study uses a series of factor analyses to explore the effect of adding nine financial motives to the GMQ in a heterogeneous sample of 1,014 adult past-year gamblers. After trimming trivial financial motives, the penultimate factor analysis of the 15 GMQ items and four financial motives led to a four-factor solution, with factors tapping enhancement, social, coping and financial motives, as predicted. A final factor analysis performed on a modified GMQ-F (i.e., 16 items, including a financial subscale) revealed the same four factors, and hierarchical regression showed that the financial motives improve the GMQ-F’s prediction of gambling frequency. This study provides evidence that omitting financial motives is a clear gap in the GMQ, yet suggests that the GMQ is a promising tool that can be conceptually and empirically strengthened with the simple addition of financial items.     

"Show me your impact": evaluating transitional justice in contested spaces

This paper discusses some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for evaluating the effects of programs in support of transitional justice - the field that addresses how post-conflict or post authoritarian societies deal with legacies of wide spread human rights violations. The discussion is empirically grounded in a case study that assesses the efforts of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and one of its Guatemalan partners to evaluate the effects of a museum exposition that is attempting to recast historic memory and challenge racist attitudes in post-conflict Guatemala. The paper argues that despite the increasing trend to fund transitional justice programs, many international aid donors are stuck in traditional and arguably orthodox paradigms of program evaluation. This is having a negative effect not only upon the administration of aid but also upon how transitional justice research is perceived and valued by local populations. The case study experience indicates that there is no perfect evaluation model or approach for evaluating transitional justice programming - only choices to be made by commissioners of evaluation, evaluators, and those being evaluated. These are profoundly influenced by the extreme politics and moral values that define transitional justice settings as contested spaces in which calls to remember the tragic past must be balanced with aspirations to re-build a hopeful future.