Family and Peer Influences on Substance Attitudes and Use among Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth

Juvenile justice-involved youth experience high rates of substance use, which is concerning given associated negative consequences, including health and functional deficits. Family and peer factors are associated with a high risk of substance use among justice-involved youth. It is hypothesized that this risk process operates through pro-drug attitudes. However, limited research has been conducted on the mechanisms through which family and peer factors increase risk for substance use among juvenile justice involved youth. The current study examined both the direct and indirect effects of family and peer substance use on youth's substance use (alcohol and illicit drug use). We also examined whether this relationship differs by race. 226 detained youth (81.9% male; 74.3% Black) were recruited from an urban county in the Midwest and completed a clinical interview and substance use assessment battery. A direct effect of family/peer risk on illicit drug use was found for all youth, though the effect was stronger among White youth. Results also supported the indirect effect pathway from family/peer risk to both illicit drug use and alcohol use through pro-drug attitudes. This pathway did not vary by race. These findings suggest that interventions should focus on targeting both family/peer risk and pro-drug attitudes to reduce substance use. Given the racial difference in the direct effect of family/peer risk on illicit drug use, there may be other factors that influence risk more strongly for White youth, which warrants further investigation

Sacral Kingship and Resistance to Authority in the Middle English Life of Edward the Confessor

In medieval England, the life of St. Edward the Confessor functioned as ideological myth; Henry III used it to show that the Plantagenet dynasty had reconciled two ‘nations’ within England after the Norman Conquest. Edward’s post-Conquest hagiography generally supports a sacralized monarchy and its prerogatives. However, a lesser-known, anonymous version of Edward’s life exists in Middle English verse and resists royalist mythmaking from a more populist perspective. In the South English Legendary and in several Middle English chronicles, a counter-tradition of writing about Edward continues to sacralize the saint-king but simultaneously positions him as a symbol of resistance to Plantagenet rule. In this tradition, the rhetoric of sacral kingship works unexpectedly: rather than sanctifying the authority of the ruling house, it reminds readers of a previous, dead monarch, whose claim to sanctity (the fulfillment of Edward’s famous prophecy of the green tree) should act as a check on the abuse of power by the presently-reigning dynasty. From this point of view, resistance to the Crown can be seen, not as discouraged and limited by the idea of sacral monarchy, but instead as partly motivated by it

Teaching and Doing Strategy as an Intentional Strategic Innovation Mindset

There are many important keys in learning, teaching, and doing strategy today. We propose rethinking the learning strategies employed at the MBA level to make the degree more relevant. Recent calls from academia and practice indicate the need to stress adaptability using soft knowledge and skills to make MBA courses more aligned with the realities of strategic decision-making in today’s business environments. We emphasize that while traditional strategic framework models and diagrams have their place, today’s professionals must be prepared to make decisions in unstructured and highly ambiguous situations that traditional models do not address

Building a Sports Marketing Program in a College or School of Business

The purpose of this paper is to serve as one roadmap for helping marketing and business faculty understand better how to build a Sports Marketing program within a college or school of business. Specifically, this paper lays out specific coursework that can comprise a robust and industry-relevant sports marketing program and provides connected sports business and sports analytics classes and content that can undergird and support a new or growing sports marketing program. This business education development solves a curriculum problem related often to the need for new, innovative, and industry-relevant business curriculum and new occupational pathways for business students. Finally, this paper lays out a blueprint for intentional collegiality and partnership amongst marketing and business faculty, alumni, advisory board members, and industry partners in helping a newly created sports marketing program not only grow, but be connected to strong industry internships, job placements, and newly related occupational pathways for business students

Spatial variations of the effects of bus rapid transit on residential property values

Public transport investment is normally targeted at increasing accessibility which land rent theory identifies will increase land values. There is clear interest in how much land values increase to establish whether there is sufficient uplift to capture to help pay or contribute to investment plans. Identifying uplift for residential land has been well studied in the context of new light rail systems and bus rapid transit (BRT) systems in developing countries but there is little evidence for BRT in developed countries. This paper has two objectives. First, to examine long term impact of BRT in a developed world context in Brisbane, Australia as studies in Sydney, Australia, suggest little uplift in comparison to developing world contexts but this maybe from its isolated suburban location in contrast to the extended BRT network in Brisbane. Second, to consider the spatial distribution of uplift which is an essential pre-requisite to understanding the distributional impact if uplift is used to contribute to infrastructure provision. Spatial modelling is used to examine the accessibility impacts of the BRT and this is followed by Geographical Weighted Regression, used to examine the spatial distribution of accessibility. The results show there is greater uplift in Brisbane, as compared to Sydney, Australia which is likely due to the greater network coverage of BRT in Brisbane and a relative lack of rail based competition

The Structure of a Bacterial DUF199/WhiA Protein: Domestication of an Invasive Endonuclease

SummaryProteins of the DUF199 family, present in all Gram-positive bacteria and best characterized by the WhiA sporulation control factor in Streptomyces coelicolor, are thought to act as genetic regulators. The crystal structure of the DUF199/WhiA protein from Thermatoga maritima demonstrates that these proteins possess a bipartite structure, in which a degenerate N-terminal LAGLIDADG homing endonuclease (LHE) scaffold is tethered to a C-terminal helix-turn-helix (HTH) domain. The LHE domain has lost those residues critical for metal binding and catalysis, and also displays an extensively altered DNA-binding surface as compared with homing endonucleases. The HTH domain most closely resembles related regions of several bacterial sigma70 factors that bind the −35 regions of bacterial promoters. The structure illustrates how an invasive element might be transformed during evolution into a larger assemblage of protein folds that can participate in the regulation of a complex biological pathway

On the equivalence between the effective cosmology and excursion set treatments of environment

In studies of the environmental dependence of structure formation, the large scale environment is often thought of as providing an effective background cosmology: e.g. the formation of structure in voids is expected to be just like that in a less dense universe with appropriately modified Hubble and cosmological constants. However, in the excursion set description of structure formation which is commonly used to model this effect, no explicit mention is made of the effective cosmology. Rather, this approach uses the spherical evolution model to compute an effective linear theory growth factor, which is then used to predict the growth and evolution of nonlinear structures. We show that these approaches are, in fact, equivalent: a consequence of Birkhoff's theorem. We speculate that this equivalence will not survive in models where the gravitational force law is modified from an inverse square, potentially making the environmental dependence of clustering a good test of such models.Comment: 4 pages, 0 figures, accepted to MNRA

Implicit body representations and the conscious body image

Recent studies have revealed that somatosensory processing relies on a class of implicit body representations showing large distortions of size and shape. The relation between these representations and the conscious body image remains unclear. Dissociations have been reported in the clinical literature on eating disorders between different body image measures, with larger and more consistent distortions found with depictive measures, in which participants compare their body to a visual depiction of a body, than metric measures, in which participants compare their body to some non-body standard. Here, we compared implicit body representations underlying position sense to the body image measured with both depictive and metric methods. The body image was measured using both a depictive method (template matching) in which participants judged whether their hand was wider or more slender than a shown hand picture, and a metric method (line length) in which participants judged whether different parts of the their hand were shorter or longer than a presented line. Consistent with previous findings, characteristic distortions were found for the implicit body representation underlying position sense. These distortions were also found in attenuated form for metric – but not depictive – body image measures. While replicating the basic dissociation between implicit body representations and the conscious body image, these results demonstrate that this dissociation is not absolute and specific tasks may utilise both to varying degrees depending on task demands. Metric measures may not be pure measures of body image, but some combination of visual and somatosensory body representations