Alcohol brands on Facebook: the challenges of regulating brands on social media

In September 2012, the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) made 'landmark decisions' relating to the use of Facebook by vodka brand Smirnoff and beer brand Victoria Bitter. The ASB determined that (i) a brand's Facebook page is a marketing communication tool, and (ii) all contents on the page fall under the industry's self-regulatory code of ethics, including consumer-created content such as user-generated comments and photos. The decisions come in response to a submission that the authors made regarding the Facebook pages of the two brands. These submissions were based on a research project that had monitored the use of Facebook by several Australian alcohol brands since the late 2010 to identify how these brands use social media as experiential social spaces to engage consumers in the co-creation of content. This article reviews the ruling by analysing the advertisers' response to the complaint, the regulators' justifications for the decisions, and the possibilities and limitations of regulating social media in general. It argues that although the ASB has acknowledged that brands are responsible for all contents on their Facebook pages, the regulators' approach is of limited effectiveness given the way Facebook allows brands to embed themselves in the mediation of everyday life

QCD corrections to Associated t-tbar-H production at the Tevatron

We present in detail the calculation of the O(alpha_s^3)inclusive total cross section for the process (p pbar-> t tbar h) in the Standard Model, at the Tevatron center-of-mass energy sqrt(s_H)=2 TeV. The next-to-leading order QCD corrections significantly reduce the renormalization and factorization scale dependence of the Born cross section. They slightly decrease or increase the Born cross section depending on the values of the renormalization and factorization scalesComment: 46 pages, 13 figure

Post-Fire Succession and Disturbance Interactions on an Intermountain Subalpine Spruce-Fir Forest

Four general post-fire successional pathways leading to a climax Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry)/subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa [Hook] Nutt.) forest were identified operating on the T.W. Daniel Experimental Forest in northern Utah. These included initial colonization by seral quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.), seral lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud.), colonization by lodgepole pine followed by a low intensity surface fire, and immediate colonization by late successional Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. Post-fire establishment of the late successional species occurred earliest in the Engelmann spruce/subalpine fir pathway followed by the lodgepole pine and lodgepole pine ground fire pathways, and the quaking aspen pathway. The late successional species grew fastest in the Engelmann spruce/subalpine fir pathway followed by the quaking aspen, lodgepole pine, and lodgepole pine ground-fire pathways. Conceptual models were presented showing how perturbations by fire, insect epidemics, and disease could interact to influence succession and shape the subalpine landscape. The subalpine forest changes through time to facilitate different types of disturbance that have varying effects on succession. In the continued suppression of fire, species and age class diversity will be reduced and disturbances may occur that are larger and more intense than those that have occurred historically

UNITED NATIIONS

Symbols of United Nations documents are composed of capital letters combined with figures. Mention of such a symbol indicates a reference to a United Nations document. The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal aspects, status of any country, territory, city or area, or of its authorities, nor do they concern the delimitation of their frontiers or boundaries. The maps and country reports are only for information purposes. Related data was sent by the countries concerned and the respective content is their complete responsibility. In the few cases that countries did not provide data, the secretariat provided data from available sources. The UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) under the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) in the United Nations Secretaria

Awareness in repeated games

In this paper we provide a framework to reason about limited awareness of the action space in finitely repeated games. Our framework is rich enough to capture the full strategic aspect of limited awareness in a dynamic setting, taking into account the possibility that agents might want to reveal or conceal actions to their opponent or that they might become “aware of unawareness" upon observing non rationalizable behavior. We show that one can think of these situations as a game with incomplete information, which is fundamentally different, though, from the standard treatment of repeated games with incomplete information. We establish conditions on the “level of mutual awareness " of the action space needed to recover Nash and subgame perfect Nash equilibria from the standard theory with common knowledge. We also show that the set of sustainable payoffs in games with folk theorems does not relate in a monotone way to the “level of mutual awareness"

DOES THE MINIMUM LEGAL DRINKING AGE SAVE LIVES?

"The minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) is widely believed to save lives by reducing traffic fatalities among underage drivers. Further, the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act, which pressured all states to adopt an MLDA of 21, is regarded as having contributed enormously to this life-saving effect. This article challenges both claims. State-level panel data for the past 30 yr show that any nationwide impact of the MLDA is driven by states that increased their MLDA prior to any inducement from the federal government. Even in early-adopting states, the impact of the MLDA did not persist much past the year of adoption. The MLDA appears to have only a minor impact on teen drinking. "("JEL "H11, K42) Copyright (c) 2008 Western Economic Association International.