The effects of peer influence on adolescent pedestrian road-crossing decisions

Objective: Adolescence is a high-risk period for pedestrian injury. It is also a time of heightened susceptibility to peer influence. The aim of this research was to examine the effects of peer influence on the pedestrian road-crossing decisions of adolescents. Methods: Using 10 videos of road-crossing sites, 80 16- to 18-year-olds were asked to make pedestrian road-crossing decisions. Participants were assigned to one of 4 experimental conditions: negative peer (influencing unsafe decisions), positive peer (influencing cautious decisions), silent peer (who observed but did not comment), and no peer (the participant completed the task alone). Peers from the adolescent’s own friendship group were recruited to influence either an unsafe or a cautious decision. Results: Statistically significant differences were found between peer conditions. Participants least often identified safe road-crossing sites when accompanied by a negative peer and more frequently identified dangerous road-crossing sites when accompanied by a positive peer. Both cautious and unsafe comments from a peer influenced adolescent pedestrians’ decisions. Conclusions: These findings showed that road-crossing decisions of adolescents were influenced by both unsafe and cautious comments from their peers. The discussion highlighted the role that peers can play in both increasing and reducing adolescent risk-taking

Hotel Franchising: Perspectives and Prospects

The outlook for lodging franchising in the new marketplace made possible by the growth of technology is the best it has been. The CEO of the Hotel Division of Cendant, the world\u27s largest franchisor, offers opera- tors opportunities to gain larger shares of a growing market

Losing Control: Regulating Situational Crime Prevention in Mass Private Space

In this article the author puts forth an approach to regulating Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) (i.e. steps to preemptively eliminate or reduce crime, such as preemptive exclusion and closed circuit TV monitoring in Mass Private Space (i.e. private property that has characteristics normally associated with public spaces, such as a large shopping mall). It has become increasingly common for owners of mass private space to employ SCP techniques such as close circuit television monitoring, exclusion of persons based upon behavior or risk factors and limits on attire, such as colors associated with gangs. While there has been a lively scholarly debate in this area, the primary literature provides fixed substantive solutions to the problem, which overlook the process by which such regulation is formulated as well as the variations among private spaces and their relationship to the community. The instant article, rather than simply seeking to come up with another place in which to draw the line between permissible and impermissible SCP techniques, puts forth a proposed structure by which regulation of SCP can be formulated. This proposal recognizes that not all mass private property is the same, particularly in regard to the role that mass private property plays in a given community. As such, the present article posits two main themes: 1) There is no one size fits all solution to the problem as to what steps the owner of a mall or similar property should be able to implement; rather what a given mass private property owner should or should not be able to do will depend on the unique characteristics of the property in question and the role it plays in the locale in which it is located; 2) the primary authority for regulating SCP in mass private space should reside in the representatives of the community in which the property is located, such as a city council

A 21st Century Approach to Personal Jurisdiction

[Excerpt] Personal jurisdiction doctrine plays a major role in many civil disputes in the United States. When the defendant resides in, is incorporated or headquartered in (in the case of a corporation or other business), or is otherwise found in the particular state where suit is brought, personal jurisdiction generally is found to exist and is unproblematic. Major personal jurisdiction issues usually arise when a plaintiff sues the defendant in a state other than the one in which the defendant is located. In many cases involving parties located in different states, where a suit takes place is as extensively litigated an issue as the underlying dispute that led to the litigation in the first place. In the last seventy years, most personal jurisdiction disputes have been litigated under the famous minimum contacts standard first articulated in International Shoe v. Washington. There is little dispute about what the Court said in that case. But the Supreme Court’s inability to cogently explain and consistently apply the standard annunciated in International Shoe has confounded litigants and lower courts alike. Predicting whether a particular state court has jurisdiction can be frustrating. Parties and courts are hard pressed to know whether jurisdiction in a particular forum will be upheld. The problem is not that personal jurisdiction has not been given sufficient attention; it is that it has gotten too much attention. Although I recognize the irony of writing an article about a topic while decrying the focus on that topic, my hope is that this article might nonetheless ultimately make personal jurisdiction doctrine simpler, more predictable, and therefore less important. Within the more than fifty jurisdictions in the United States, where a suit takes place really should not matter very much. Modern travel and communication makes suits throughout the country relatively easy for most parties. Federal and various state judicial systems are more alike than different. And, even though substantive law may vary from state to state, modern conflict of law approaches allow the application of appropriate substantive law irrespective of the location of litigation. The reason that personal jurisdiction has become so important is that modern case law made it so. The Court’s jurisprudential approach, which focuses on due process, state lines, and minimum contacts, assumes that personal jurisdiction involves a highly complex, constitutionally important area of law. But, it is not that personal jurisdiction is inherently complex or important. It is only that the Court’s unfortunate approach has made it so. Personal jurisdiction should be, and can be, straightforward, low drama, and simple. For defendants who are located in the United States personal jurisdiction should be primarily a matter of state policy, with minor policing by the Supreme Court and Congress. This article argues that a state-focused approach to personal jurisdiction is both theoretically sound and practically superior to the current minimum contacts approach. Section II of this article provides a critical history of personal jurisdiction. Section III provides an organized critique of the current landscape. With Section II having provided detail of the cases from International Shoe through the Court’s case law in its most recent term, Section III hones in on what is fundamentally wrong with the current approach. Section IV delineates a new approach to personal jurisdiction. With prior sections arguing that due process and minimum contacts are both a practical hindrance and a theoretical mismatch, this Section advocates for a non-constitutional approach to personal jurisdiction grounded primarily in state legislative policy choices. Section V evaluates the new proposal by considering how common personal jurisdiction scenarios will play out under the proposed approach. It demonstrates that if left primarily to state policy makers, with minor federal constitutional and legislative involvement, the resultant doctrine will be consistent with both constitutional and systemic structural norms. It will also result in fairer, more logical, and easier standards to apply than the current minimum contacts approach

Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations

This study examines what drives organizational adoption and use of social media through a model built around four key factors - strategy, capacity, governance, and environment. Using Twitter, Facebook, and other data on 100 large US nonprofit organizations, the model is employed to examine the determinants of three key facets of social media utilization: 1) adoption, 2) frequency of use, and 3) dialogue. We find that organizational strategies, capacities, governance features, and external pressures all play a part in these social media adoption and utilization outcomes. Through its integrated, multi-disciplinary theoretical perspective, this study thus helps foster understanding of which types of organizations are able and willing to adopt and juggle multiple social media accounts, to use those accounts to communicate more frequently with their external publics, and to build relationships with those publics through the sending of dialogic messages.Comment: Seungahn Nah and Gregory D. Saxton. (in press). Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations. New Media & Society, forthcomin

Anisotropic splitting of intersubband spin plasmons in quantum wells with bulk and structural inversion asymmetry

In semiconductor heterostructures, bulk and structural inversion asymmetry and spin-orbit coupling induce a k-dependent spin splitting of valence and conduction subbands, which can be viewed as being caused by momentum-dependent crystal magnetic fields. This paper studies the influence of these effective magnetic fields on the intersubband spin dynamics in an asymmetric n-type GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. We calculate the dispersions of intersubband spin plasmons using linear response theory. The so-called D'yakonov-Perel' decoherence mechanism is inactive for collective intersubband excitations, i.e., crystal magnetic fields do not lead to decoherence of spin plasmons. Instead, we predict that the main signature of bulk and structural inversion asymmetry in intersubband spin dynamics is a three-fold, anisotropic splitting of the spin plasmon dispersion. The importance of many-body effects is pointed out, and conditions for experimental observation with inelastic light scattering are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure