On the dimensionality of the Attachment Style Questionnaire in Italian clinical and nonclinical participants

This study examined the utility of the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) in an Italian sample of 487 consecutively admitted psychiatric participants and an independent sample of 605 nonclinical participants. Minimum average partial analysis of data from the psychiatric sample supported the hypothesized five-factor structure of the items; furthermore, multiple-group component analysis showed that this five-factor structure was not an artifact of differences in item distributions. The five-factor structure of the ASQ was largely replicated in the nonclinical sample. Furthermore, in both psychiatric and nonclinical samples, a two-factor higher order structure of the ASQ scales was observed. The higher order factors of Avoidance and Anxious Attachment showed meaningful relations with scales assessing parental bonding, but were not redundant with these scales. Multivariate normal mixture analysis supported the hypothesis that adult attachment patterns, as measured by the ASQ, are best considered as dimensional constructs.

Graphic satire and public life in the age of terror

This paper investigates media representations of international insecurity through a selection of newspaper cartoons from some of the major daily Australian broadsheets. Since 2001, cartoonists such as Bruce Petty, John Spooner and Bill Leak (in The Age and The Australian) have provided an ongoing and vehement critique of the Australian government’s policies of ‘border protection’, the ‘war on terror’ and the words of mass distraction associated with Australia joining the war in Iraq. Cartoonists are often said to represent the ‘citizen’s perspective’ of public life through their graphic satire on the editorial pages of our daily newspapers. Increasingly, they can also be seen to be fulfilling the role of public intellectuals, defined by Richard A. Posner as ‘someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments and corporations’. Cartoonists enjoy an independence and freedom from censorship that is rarely extended to their journalistic colleagues in the print media and it is this independence that is the vital component in their being categorised as public intellectuals. Their role is to ‘question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions’ (Posner, 2003: 31). With this useful — if generalised — definition in mind, the paper considers how cartoonists have contributed to debates concerning international insecurity in public life since 2001.

Relationship of body condition score and blood urea and ammonia to pregnancy in Italian Mediterranean buffaloes

The relationship of body condition score ( BCS) and blood urea and ammonia to pregnancy outcome was examined in Italian Mediterranean Buffalo cows mated by AI. The study was conducted on 150 buffaloes at 145 +/- 83 days in milk that were fed a diet comprising 14.8% crude protein, 0.9 milk forage units . kg(-1) dry matter and a non- structural carbohydrate/ crude protein ratio of 2.14. The stage of the oestrous cycle was synchronised by the Ovsynch- TAI programme and blood urea and ammonia levels were assessed on the day of AI. Energy corrected milk ( ECM) production and BCS were recorded bi- weekly. The pregnancy risk was 46.7% and was slightly lower in buffaloes with BCS < 6.0 and BCS > 7.5. There were no significant differences in ECM, urea and ammonia between pregnant and non- pregnant buffaloes. However, pregnancy outcome was higher ( P = 0.02) in buffaloes with blood urea < 6.83 mmol . L-1. The likelihood of pregnancy for buffaloes with low urea blood level was 2.6 greater than for high urea level and exposure to a high urea level lowered the probability of pregnancy by about 0.25. The findings indicate that buffaloes are similar to cattle and increased blood levels of urea are associated with reduced fertility when animals are mated by AI.

Television satire, decmocracy and the decay of public language: John Clarke's verbal caricature

This paper examines the contributions of John Clarke to the field of political satire through his interviews with straight-man Bryan Dawe on ABC TV’s The 7.30 Report. Clarke’s work represents one of the last vestiges of what was once a vigorous satiric tradition in TV comedy, specifically the practice of political caricature. There was The Mavis Bramston Show in the 1960s and The Naked Vicar Show in the 1970s, while The Gillies Report in the 1980s was probably the best example of sustained political caricature in television comedy. Even in later sketch-based shows such as Fast Forward and The Late Show in the early 1990s, political caricature was a significant component of the material, whereas it seems to have all but disappeared from current television comedy. The paper investigates the disappearance of this type of comedy from Australian television screens and also discusses why the longevity, consistency, not to mention accuracy, of Clarke’s satire is so important in the current political climate. Clarke’s political caricature is almost entirely language-based, expertly parodying the spin-doctored rhetoric of our elected representatives and business leaders. This leads to a secondary focus of the paper, which is a discussion of Clarke’s unique form of satire in the context of what an historian (and former satirist) identifies as ‘the decay of public language’.