NEWS MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGICAL RISKS: The Case of Pesticides after Silent Spring

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring vaulted pesticide risks to a prominent place on the media agenda. This article reports on a study of the relative weight of attention given by the New York Times to alarming or reassuring messages about pesticides in the immediate aftermath of Silent Spring . Theoretically, it uses a combination of inductive and deductive approaches to explain the empirical findings. Three models of media coverage are examined: conflict theory, sensationalism, and problem frame. These models are employed chronologically as analysis revealed a complicated pattern of coverage which first highlighted, then downplayed, risk.     

The Bayesian choice of crop variety and fertilizer dose

Recent contributions to the theory of optimizing fertilizer doses in agricultural crop production have introduced Bayesian ideas to incorporate information on crop yield from several environments and on soil nutrients from a soil test, but they have not used a fully Bayesian formulation. We present such a formulation and demonstrate how the resulting Bayes decision procedure can be evaluated in practice by using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The approach incorporates expert knowledge of the crop and of regional and local soil conditions and allows a choice of crop variety as well as of fertilizer level. Alternative dose–response functions are expressed in terms of a common interpretable set of parameters to facilitate model comparisons and the specification of prior distributions. The approach is illustrated with a set of yield data from spring barley nitrogen–response trials and is found to be robust to changes in the dose–response function and the prior distribution for indigenous soil nitrogen.     

Drinking,Smoking, and Morality: Do ‘Drinkers and Smokers’ Constitute a Stigmatised Stereotype or a Real TB Risk Factor in the Time of HIV/AIDS?

This paper follows up an unexpected finding from a community survey that identified drinking and smoking as the most important tuberculosis (TB) risk factor, far ahead of ones commonly associated with TB such as poverty, overcrowded living conditions, and HIV-positive status. It reports perceptions of drinking and smoking from a three-phased study of the stigma associated with TB, consisting of a qualitative pilot study using focus-group discussions (2006), a larger-scale community survey (2007), and follow-up group discussions (2009). The community attitude survey was conducted with a sample of 1,020 adults living in a low-income township in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. The study found that the moral and the biomedical understanding of TB risk are intertwined. In the community survey, perceptions of drinking and smoking as TB risk were predicted by fear of contracting TB and being a self-reported born-again Christian. In the follow-up study, heavy drinking and smoking in shebeens (unlicensed township liquor outlets) was associated with a risky lifestyle that can spread both TB and HIV. The paper discusses the similarities and differences in the roles of church and shebeen in providing social support to township dwellers to cope with problems of daily life. It is tentatively concluded that the stereotypical shebeen ‘drinkers and smokers’, alternatively pitied and maligned by moral society, might serve as the scapegoat that deflects pollution from the ‘new’ TB linked to the AIDS epidemic.     

Adolescent Fathers' Parenting Stress,Social Support,and Involvement with Infants

The present study examined the relationship between concurrent measures of adolescent fathers' parenting stress, social support, and fathers' care‐giving involvement with the 3‐month‐old infant, controlling for fathers' prenatal involvement. The study sample consisted of 50 teenage father–mother dyads. Findings from multivariate regression revealed that fathers' parenting stress was significantly and negatively related to fathers' care giving as perceived by both fathers and mothers. The relationship between support for father involvement provided by the young man's parents and father reported care‐giving involvement approached significance. Social support from both teenagers' parents buffered the negative influence of parenting stress on fathers' involvement with the baby. Policy and intervention implications are discussed.     

'Tie, tied and tight': The expansion of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speech in Memphis, Tennessee

This paper explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. While often considered a feature characteristic of White Southern speech, /ai/ monophthongization has also been recorded in Black speech, both within and outside the South. However, expansion of glide-weakening to the less common pre-voiceless contexts has been considered unique to European-American dialects. Evidence of extensive glide-weakening in the African-American community in Memphis will be presented and compared to the degree and contexts of glide-weakening in the European-American community. The results will show that not only is /ai/ monophthongization a feature of Memphis speech generally, regardless of ethnicity, but that African-Americans in fact lead in glide-weakening in all contexts. The role of Southern identity in the expansion of /ai/ monophthongization is discussed as a critical component in the selection of features in both Black and White speech in the Memphis area.     

Do the Benefits Justify the Costs? An Evaluation of the ‘Sitter Service’ in Scotland

This research identified the costs and benefits of the sitter service in Scotland. A ‘sitter service’ is one that provides home‐based childcare outside the hours of 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on weekdays and at weekends to support children of shift workers, single parents/carers and for children who require additional support. Nine sitter services, organised by voluntary or not‐for‐profit organisations in Scotland, were contacted; their costs were compared and the views of sitters and users identified. For very little expenditure, they provided a service that resulted in a range of individual and community benefits. However, the research concludes that most sitter services are hat small scale and piecemeal funding endangers their long‐term viability.