Iowa State Daily (December 2, 2011)

ContentsState Gym prepares to openCyclones open NCAA at homeRomer pegs policies to solve crisisCandidate presents 'road map' for centerYoung Cyclones ready for rivalEducation should not be a profitable ventureAdvocacy group protests local shop's pet purchases

Rechtshilfe in Zivilsachen: ausgewählte Auszüge aus der neuen Wegleitung des Bundesamtes für Justiz

Die vorliegenden Beiträge in deutscher und französischer Sprache befassen sich mit Aspekten der Rechtshilfe in internationalen Zivil- und Handelsprozessen. Zur Zustellung von gerichtlichen und aussergerichtlichen Urkunden sowie zur rechtshilfeweisen Beweiserhebung (z. B. Einvernahme mittels Videokonferenz) äussern sich Dr. Alexander Markus sowie Dr. Danielle Gauthey Ladner. Dabei wird insbesondere auf die neue Wegleitung des Bundesamtes für Justiz zu den verschiedenen Haager Übereinkommen eingegangen. Alexander Hilfiker erläutert die Möglichkeiten der Internet-Recherche. Die menschlich vielfach schwierigen Probleme der Kindesentführungen behandeln David Urwyler, Sonja Hauser und Hervé Boéchat. Auf aktuelle Fragen der Anerkennung und Vollstreckung von Zivilurteilen gehen Dr. Samuel Baumgartner und Jean-Marc Wichser ein. Das Thema Vollstreckung von ausländischen Konkurserkenntnissen ist Gegenstand der Beiträge von Prof. Dr. Karl Spühler und von Prof. Dr. Sylvain Marchand.

Ordinary Families -Extraordinary Care Giving

Children with severe emotional problems often have multiple needs that require disparate services including child welfare, juvenile justice, health, mental health, substance abuse, and mental retardation (Stroul, 1996). However, the primary care giving responsibilities for these youngsters still remain with their families. It is the family who shelters and clothes them; provides guidance, affection, recreation, nurturing; gets them to appointments with doctors and therapists and to school dayin- and-day-out, year after year (Lourie, 1995). Despite the invaluable and irreplaceable care provided by families, they are often maligned by a system which characterizes them as having their own problems and inadequacies. The purpose of this research is to learn more about the strengths of families who care for children with severe emotional disabilities (SED). This exploratory descriptive study made use of focus groups attended by parents who are caring for such children. In order to improve services to these families, it is important that we understand how the notion of strengths play out in their everyday lives. Observations are made about the care giving plan, which all families devise in the course of caring for their child with special needs. Implications for paid professionals who serve these families are offered by presenting a model for putting family care givers at the hub of the service provision wheel.

A patient-reported outcome measure to identify occurrence and distress of post-surgery symptoms of WOMen with vulvAr Neoplasia (WOMAN-PRO) - a cross sectional study.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to describe the (a) symptom experience of women with vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia and vulvar cancer (vulvar neoplasia) during the first week after hospital discharge, and (b) associations between age, type of disease, stage of disease, the extent of surgical treatment and symptom experience. METHODS This cross-sectional study was conducted in eight hospitals in Germany and Switzerland (Clinical Trial ID: NCT01300663). Symptom experience after surgical treatment in women with vulvar neoplasia was measured with our newly developed WOMAN-PRO instrument. Outpatients (n=65) rated 31 items. We used descriptive statistics and regression analysis. RESULTS The average number of symptoms reported per patient was 20.2 (SD 5.77) with a range of 5 to 31 symptoms. The three most prevalent wound-related symptoms were 'swelling' (n=56), 'drainage' (n=54) and 'pain' (n=52). The three most prevalent difficulties in daily life were 'sitting' (n=63), 'wearing clothes' (n=56) and 'carrying out my daily activities' (n=51). 'Tiredness' (n=62), 'insecurity' (n=54) and 'feeling that my body has changed' (n=50) were the three most prevalent psychosocial symptoms/issues. The most distressing symptoms were 'sitting' (Mean 2.03, SD 0.88), 'open spot (e.g. opening of skin or suture)' (Mean 1.91, SD 0.93), and 'carrying out my daily activities' (Mean 1.86, SD 0.87), which were on average reported as 'quite a bit' distressing. Negative associations were found between psychosocial symptom experience and age. CONCLUSIONS WOMAN-PRO data showed a high symptom prevalence and distress, call for a comprehensive symptom assessment, and may allow identification of relevant areas in symptom management.

Ethical Consumption and Social Context: Experimental Evidence from Germany and the United States

This research examines the role of social context in ethical consumption, specifically, the extent to which anonymity and social control influence individuals' decisions to purchase organic and Fair Trade coffee. Our research design overcomes biases of prior research by combining framing and discrete choice experiments in a survey. We systematically vary coffee growing method (organic or not), import status (Fair Trade or not), flavor, and price across four social contexts that vary in degree of anonymity and normative social control. The social contexts are buying coffee online, in a large grocery store, in a small neighborhood shop, and for a meeting of a human rights group. Subjects comprise 1,103 German and American undergraduate students. We find that social context indeed influences subjects' ethical consumer decisions, especially in situations with low anonymity and high social control. In addition, gender, coffee buying, and subjective social norms trigger heterogeneity regarding stated ethical consumption and the effects of social context. These results suggest previous research has underestimated the relevance of social context for ethical consumption and overestimated altruistic motives of ethical consumers. Our study demonstrates the great potential of discrete choice experiments for the study of social action and decision making processes in sociology.

“Therapeutic Advertising”: When Do Female Consumers Really Benefit?

This research examines whether female consumers benefit from brand strategies that attempt to decrease their self-discrepancies by setting more realistic ideals (i.e., therapeutic advertising, such as Body Shop, Aerie, and Always). The results of our preliminary study reveal that therapeutic advertising leads to stronger self-conscious emotions than idealistic advertising. More specifically, it leads to stronger emotions of both pride and shame. However, the latter only holds true for female consumers low in self-liking and high difficulties in abandoning unattainable goals. Female consumers who like themselves and are able to abandon unattainable goals do not feel more ashamed when being exposed to therapeutic advertising compared to idealized advertising. These findings have implications for marketing managers and policy makers.

Uncertain Belongings. Absent mourning, burial, and post-mortem repatriations at the external border of the EU in Spain

Since the mid-1980s, migrants from North African and sub-Saharan countries have irregularly crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, in the hope of a better future for themselves and their families. Travelling in small, poorly equipped boats without experienced captains has cost the lives of myriad border crossers. Many of these bodies will never be recovered and the bereaved will never know whether their relatives and friends are alive or not. The bereaved are thus condemned to a state of not knowing and uncertainty. Exploring the junction of death and belonging, I firstly open a discussion about the enigmatic relation between a dead body and a dead person and argue for the importance of the physical presence of the body for mourning. Secondly, I show how the anonymity of dead border crossers and their uncertain belongings are generated, concealed, or rewritten. Following the story of an undertaker, I thirdly examine post-mortem border crossings. Depicting the power relations within identification processes, I outline the ambiguity of the term belonging by emphasising the constitutive significance of personal belongings such as clothes to restore a person’s identity. Reflecting on the ethical relationships which different actors (including the researcher) undertake with the deceased, I aim at gaining a better understanding of the multiple belonging of dead border crossers found on Spanish shores.

The story of Community preference for food security

"Préférence communautaire" is an in-built notion of the CAP since its inception with the Treaty of Rome (1957). Its’ simple objective laid down at the Stresa Conference in 1958 is to prefer community produce over imports wherever possible, while at the same time promoting agricultural exports and FDI (“vocation exportatrice de l’Europe”). Does this contrast or correlate with the notion of “food sovereignty” which originated in 1996 as a notion of small farmer self-sufficiency (Via Campesina), and which now has found its way into the official EC discourse? Recent CAP reforms indeed seem to continue banking on border protection and on the occasional export subsidy. Nonetheless, coming together with claims to mitigate climate change, “food sovereignty” à la CAP fails to acknowledge efficiency losses at home and negative spillover effects on the right to food of food exporting developing countries. This chapter asks whether new non-tariff and domestic support measures are just new wine in the old cask of fortress Europe, together with the FDI promotion instruments of the FED and others. Might the increasing dynamics and new challenges of agricultural trade and investment lead to lower market and production shares for European farms? It concludes that in the medium term the WTO Green Box has the only legal and effective tools to promote EU agriculture and food.

How Entrepreneurs Become Skilled Cultural Operators

Cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management perspectives portray entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators and often assume them to be capable from the outset to purposefully use ‘cultural resources' in order to motivate resource-holding audiences to support their new ventures. We problematize this premise and develop a model of how entrepreneurs become skilful cultural operators and develop the cultural competences necessary for creating and growing their ventures. The model is grounded in a case study of an entrepreneur who set up shop and sought to acquire resources in a culturally unfamiliar setting. Our model proposes that two adaptive sensemaking processes - approval-driven sensemaking and autonomy-driven sensemaking - jointly facilitate the gradual development of cultural competences. These processes jointly enable entrepreneurs to gain cultural awareness and calibrate their symbolic enactments. Specifically, while approval-driven sensemaking facilitates recognizing cultural resources to symbolically couple a venture's identity claims more tightly with the cultural frames of targeted audiences and gain legitimate distinctiveness, autonomy-driven sensemaking enables recognizing cultural constraints and more effective symbolic decoupling to shield the venture from constraining cultural frames and defend the venture's autonomy and resources. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical implications of our study for cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management research.

Electrostatic sampling of trace DNA from clothing.

During acts of physical aggression, offenders frequently come into contact with clothes of the victim, thereby leaving traces of DNA-bearing biological material on the garments. Since tape-lifting and swabbing, the currently established methods for non-destructive trace DNA sampling from clothing, both have their shortcomings in collection efficiency and handling, we thought about a new collection method for these challenging samples. Testing two readily available electrostatic devices for their potential to sample biological material from garments made of different fabrics, we found one of them, the electrostatic dust print lifter (DPL), to perform comparable to well-established sampling with wet cotton swabs. In simulated aggression scenarios, we had the same success rate for the establishment of single aggressor profiles, suitable for database submission, with both the DPL and wet swabbing. However, we lost a substantial amount of information with electrostatic sampling, since almost no mixed aggressor-victim profiles suitable for database entry could be established, compared to conventional swabbing. This study serves as a proof of principle for electrostatic DNA sampling from items of clothing. The technique still requires optimization before it might be used in real casework. But we are confident that in the future it could be an efficient and convenient contribution to the toolbox of forensic practitioners.

«Einige Zeit aufs Singen verwendet». Musik als Kernressource dörflicher Kultur am Beispiel des schweizerischen 18. Jahrhunderts

Dealing with popular music in premodern times historical research usually focuses on so called “Volksmusik”. But already in the 18th century researchers were disappointed to find only few traces of imaginary “traditional” music in Switzerland. They unfortunately overlooked that common people kept on with their own stubborn musical culture: Beginning with the Reformation the authorities encouraged the communities to employ schoolmasters who were able to teach music. Their goal was that everybody should be able to participate in liturgical music actively. Over generations even people with no special musical talent adopted their own repertoire of psalms plus techniques of reading music and polyphonic singing. Spontaneous choral singing evolved into a common everyday practice. The most ambitious and brightest teachers even taught instrumental lessons at home on their proper pianos and chamber organs or encouraged the villagers to build new prestigious organs in their churches. The financial burden of such instruments weighted heavily on the communities. Some of them received financial support from the government, albeit unwillingly because it was obvious to the rulers that the villages just wanted to overtop each other. Homemade music was the most important issue in the cultural life of most parishes. Rich communes spent a lot of money to win the best voices on-site for their church choirs. Belonging to an elitists’ singer association paved the way to the farmer-village’s highlevel sociability.