JOURNAL:  Political Psychology
AUTHORS: Travis N. Ridout, Kathleen Searles
SUMMARY: Recent research in the area of campaign advertising suggests that emotional appeals can influence political attitudes, electoral choices and decision-making processes. Yet is there any evidence that candidates use emotional appeals strategically during campaigns? Is there a pattern to their use? For instance, are fear appeals used primarily late in the campaign by trailing candidates in order to get voters to rethink their choices? And are enthusiasm appeals used more commonly early on in order to shore up a candidate's base? We use affective intelligence theory—and supplement it with the idea of a voter backlash—to generate expectations about when candidates use certain emotional appeals (namely, anger, fear, enthusiasm, and pride) and which types of candidates are most likely to do so. 

CULTURAL REFERENCE: A song by American singer Leslie Gore, which appeared on their 1963 album ​I'll Cry If I Want To.

JOURNAL:  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
AUTHORS: Christopher T. Burris and  John K.Rempel
SUMMARY: According to amoebic self theory, the boundary defining the self encompasses 3 levels of self-representation--bodily, social, and spatial-symbolic. Study 1 related a newly developed measure of individual differences in sensitivity to boundary threat across these 3 domains to values and disgust sensitivity. Four subsequent studies focused on spatial-symbolic threat sensitivity and related it to right-wing authoritarianism, aversive reactions to unfamiliar out-groups, and revulsion to vermin. A final experiment illustrates how a salient spatial-symbolic threat (dust mites) can elicit reactions toward out-groups that closely parallel mortality salience effects observed in research inspired by terror management theory, even though dust mites do not elicit mortality concerns. The importance of preserving the familiar in order to preserve the self is discussed.

CULTURAL REFERENCE: A song by American rock band R.E.M., which appeared on their 1987 album Document

BOOK:  Women and religion in the west: Challenging secularization
AUTHOR: Linda Woodhead
SUMMARY: The contemporary contradictions of femininity are nicely captured by the hugely successful L'Oreal advertising campaign "Because I'm worth it", launched in 1973 and still running today. On the one hand, the slogan captures just how much has changed for women as they have been allowed access to male projections of independent, self-referential, entitled self-hood as never before. On the other hand, the very necessity of having to make such an assertion and, more importantly, to prove one's worth by buying expensive beauty products in order to make oneself more attractive and "worthy" indicates just how fragile the sense of entitlement may be.

CULTURAL REFERENCE:  ​The misogynist adverts by L'Oreal.

JOURNAL:  American Journal of Physiology
AUTHORS: Minga M. Sellers, John N. Stallone
SUMMARY: Historically, the vasodilatory prostanoids, especially prostacyclin and prostaglandin E2, are believed to contribute significantly to the regulation of normal vascular tone and blood pressure (BP), primarily by counteracting the prevailing effects of the systemic vasoconstrictor systems, including angiotensin II, the catecholamines, and vasopressin. In contrast, the primary vasoconstrictor prostanoid thromboxane A2 (TxA2) is produced in far smaller quantities in the normal state. While TxA2 is believed to play a significant role in a variety of cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarction, cerebral vasospasm, hypertension, preeclampsia, and various thrombotic disorders, its role in the regulation of vascular tone and BP in the normal physiological state is, at best, uncertain.

CULTURAL REFERENCE:  ​Sympathy for the Devil" is a song by the Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The song is an ironic homage to the Devil, written in the first-person narrative from his point of view, recounting atrocities committed throughout the history of humanity.

JOURNAL:  Society and Natural Resources
AUTHORS: Mairi Jay & Munir Morad

SUMMARY:  Ecological modernization theory holds that capitalist economic structures can be transformed to avoid long-term environmental damage, through the introduction of modern environmental technologies and reforming modern institutions. Empirical evidence, drawing on ecological modernization practices in some European and North American contexts, lends support to this view. However, it is not clear yet whether the practices of ecological modernization can be applied with equal success to agricultural industries (such New Zealand's dairy sector), based on farmers as multiple producers. 

CULTURAL REFERENCE: CRY OVER SPILT MILK is used when something bad has happened, but you cannot change it now.
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Source of the image: the language corner

JOURNAL:  Lecture Notes in Computer Science
AUTHORS: Ulf Nilsson

SUMMARY:  Magic sets and, more recently, magic templates are used in the field of deductive databases to facilitate efficient bottom up evaluation of database queries. Roughly speaking a top down computation is simulated by first transforming the program and then executing the new program bottom up. In this paper we give a new and very simple proof that this approach is equivalent to the collecting interpretation of the abstract interpretation framework of C. Mellish. As a side-effect we also prove that “bottom up” abstract interpretation based on the magic templates transformation is equally powerful as this particular abstract interpretation framework, but less powerful than other (more precise) abstract interpretation frameworks.

CULTURAL REFERENCE: A Kind of Magic is the title track of the 1986 album of the same name by the British rock band Queen. The single reached number three in the UK Singles Chart, top ten in a number of European countries, and #42 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

JOURNAL:  Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
AUTHORS:   Alasdair M. Barr, William J. Panenka, G. William MacEwan, Allen E. Thornton, Donna J. Lang, William G. Honer and Tania Lecomte


SUMMARY:  The psychostimulant methamphetamine (MA) is a highly addictive drug that has surged in popularity over the last decade in North America. A burgeoning number of clandestine drug laboratories has led to dramatic increases in MA production, which have resulted in significant public health, legal and environmental problems. In the present review, we provide a comprehensive description of the factors relating to MA use and the major health-related consequences, with an emphasis on MA-induced psychosis. It is hoped that increased knowledge of MA abuse will provide the basis for future treatment strategies.

CULTURAL REFERENCE: Need for Speed is a series of racing video games published by Electronic Arts. The series released its first title, The Need for Speed in 1994. It is a film released in 2014 based on the series of video games. The film stars Aaron Paul as street racer.

JOURNAL:  Advances in Complex Systems
AUTHORS: Andrzej Nowak, Wieslaw Bartkowski, Katarzyna Samson, Agnieszka Rychwalska, Marta Kacprzyk, Magda Roszczynska-Kurasinska and Magdalena Jagielska

SUMMARY:  The speed of social and technological changes is constantly increasing. Change is a pre-requisite for economic development but this increasing speed carries additional costs that may largely affect the ability of the social systems to adopt them. While the financial costs constitute a limit to adoption, the psychological and social costs may also profoundly change the adoption potential. In an agent-based model of a heterogeneous population of adopters we explore the consequences of increasing the speed of novelty introduction on their satisfaction and the degree to which new trends may permeate the system.

CULTURAL REFERENCE: Need for Speed is a series of racing video games published by Electronic Arts. The series released its first title, The Need for Speed in 1994. It is a film released in 2014 based on the series of video games. The film stars Aaron Paul as street racer.

JOURNAL:  Computer (IEEE Computer Society)
AUTHORS:   Peter Gutmann

SUMMARY:  Like other flexible objects, the public key infrastructure sacrifices some utility in trying to be all things to all people. Mainly, PKI's generic, all-purpose identity certificates fall short of what the marketplace demands, forcing vendors to develop more economically efficient, useful, and imaginative business models. Thus, we must adapt the PKI design to the real world rather than trying to constrain the real world to match the PKI.


CULTURAL REFERENCE:  The "Dead Parrot Sketch, is a popular sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch portrays a conflict between disgruntled customer Mr Praline and a shopkeeper, who hold contradictory positions on the vital state of a "Norwegian Blue" parrot.