13,338 research outputs found
New Zealand culture of intoxication: Local and global influences
This article shows that attitudes towards and behaviours involving the consumption of alcohol in New Zealand have long been problematic. It provides an historical account of social, economic and legislative factors which have influenced the development of the New Zealand drinking culture. Accordingly, it tracks a combination of local and global alcohol-related influences and documents the interrelationships amongst these factors. In particular, it proposes that the liberalisation of alcohol licensing laws and advertising/sponsorship regulations, alongside the growth of the alcohol-based hospitality industry have promoted the normalisation of an alcohol-based leisure lifestyle. Against this backdrop, the growth of consumer culture , tertiary student culture and the New Zealand drug culture, along with the development of new alcohol products and the establishment of commercial and social-networking websites have conjointly enabled the growth of a culture of intoxication, which is characterised by drinkers intentionally drinking to intoxication and viewing this behaviour as socially acceptable
Pleasure, profit and pain: Alcohol in New Zealand and the contemporary culture of intoxication
This book details the rich, complex and often contested role of alcohol in New Zealand society. It explores the three fundamental alcohol rights that continue to fight for dominance of the national drinking culture: the rights of individual drinkers to enjoy the pleasures of alcohol, the rights of society to protect itself from the harms of alcohol, and the rights of the alcohol industry to profit from the sale of a legal commodity. Historically, most of our intoxicated drinkers were adult males and drinking was typically separated from family, food and entertainment. With the sweeping social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, women and later young people, increasingly engaged with alcohol. A growing proportion of these groups have since joined men in a culture of intoxication, or binge drinking culture as it is often termed. New Zealand is not alone however, in having a culture of intoxication, with similar alcohol consumption patterns evident in many other developed nations. This book identifies the local and the global influences that have affected New Zealand society (and much of the rest of the world) since the late 1900s and details how these influences have sustained the contemporary culture of intoxication. Finally, this book will propose that to implement effective change to our national drinking culture, the rights of the alcohol industry and of individual drinkers will need to be pulled back from the liberal excesses that the 1980s and 1990s provided. A re-balancing is required in order to strengthen and sustain society’s right to protect itself from alcohol-related harm
Delayed inhibition of an anticipatory action during motion extrapolation
Background: Continuous visual information is important for movement initiation in a variety of motor tasks.
However, even in the absence of visual information people are able to initiate their responses by using motion
extrapolation processes. Initiation of actions based on these cognitive processes, however, can demand more
attentional resources than that required in situations in which visual information is uninterrupted. In the
experiment reported we sought to determine whether the absence of visual information would affect the latency
to inhibit an anticipatory action.
Methods: The participants performed an anticipatory timing task where they were instructed to move in
synchrony with the arrival of a moving object at a determined contact point. On 50% of the trials, a stop sign
appeared on the screen and it served as a signal for the participants to halt their movements. They performed the
anticipatory task under two different viewing conditions: Full-View (uninterrupted) and Occluded-View (occlusion of
the last 500 ms prior to the arrival at the contact point).
Results: The results indicated that the absence of visual information prolonged the latency to suppress the
anticipatory movement.
Conclusion: We suggest that the absence of visual information requires additional cortical processing that creates
competing demand for neural resources. Reduced neural resources potentially causes increased reaction time to
the inhibitory input or increased time estimation variability, which in combination would account for prolonged
latency
Determination of the resistivity anisotropy of SrRuO by measuring the planar Hall effect
We have measured the planar Hall effect in epitaxial thin films of the
itinerant ferromagnet SrRuO3 patterned with their current paths at different
angles relative to the crystallographic axes. Based on the results, we have
determined that SrRuO3 exhibits small resistivity anisotropy in the entire
temperature range of our measurements (between 2 to 300 K); namely, both above
and below its Curie temperature (~150 K). It means that in addition to
anisotropy related to magnetism, the resistivity anisotropy of SrRuO3 has an
intrinsic, nonmagnetic source. We have found that the two sources of anisotropy
have competing effects
On the Erasure and Regeneration of the Primordial Baryon Asymmetry by Sphalerons
We show that a cosmological baryon asymmetry generated at the GUT scale,
which would be destroyed at lower temperatures by sphalerons and possible new
B- or L-violating effects, can naturally be preserved by an asymmetry in the
number of right-handed electrons. This results in a significant softening of
previously derived baryogenesis-based constraints on the strength of exotic B-
or L-violating interactions.Comment: 10 pp. LaTex (2 figures, included) UMN-TH-1201/9
Nano-Kelvin thermometry and temperature control: beyond the thermal noise limit
We demonstrate thermometry with a resolution of 80 using an isotropic crystalline whispering-gallery mode
resonator based on a dichroic dual-mode technique. We simultaneously excite two
modes that have a mode frequency ratio very close to two (ppm). The
wavelength- and temperature-dependence of the refractive index means that the
frequency difference between these modes is an ultra-sensitive proxy of the
resonator temperature. This approach to temperature sensing automatically
suppresses sensitivity to thermal expansion and vibrationally induced changes
of the resonator. We also demonstrate active suppression of temperature
fluctuations in the resonator by controlling the intensity of the driving
laser. The residual temperature fluctuations are shown to be below the limits
set by fundamental thermodynamic fluctuations of the resonator material
Selenium Supplementation in Pregnancy-Maternal and Newborn Outcomes
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
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