"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"

 Ed talked about using red ink to critique an essay.  It is interesting that the online word review option uses red as the default to cross out text as well.



  Recapitulation theory is still considered plausible and is applied by some researchers in fields such as the study of the origin of language,^[8] cognitive development,^[9] behavioral development in animal species.^[10

Welcome home Ed!

Dr. Ed Fink is here on campus teaching a short course for several days!

The Greater Lansing Food Bank helps people who are hungry

 

Programs

At the Greater Lansing Food Bank, our mission goes beyond serving the emergency food needs of our clients. Our programs are also designed to foster self-sufficiency, sustainability and community building.

The Garden Project

Part of the GLFB’s mission is to help those in need toward self-sufficiency. The Garden Project does just that.
This program provides access to land, how-to education, free seeds and plants, tool lending, a networking hub and more. This helps ensure that everyone in our community can have access to fresh, healthy food.
We support a network of more than 90 community gardens and more than 400 home gardens, serving an estimated 7,000 people. The Garden Project also manages our gleaning program, which rescues quality produce from Michigan State University and area farms to distribute through our network of agencies.

Food Movers

Moving perishable food from sources that have too much to the places food is needed is the role of Food Movers.
Food Movers rescues prepared food from restaurants, commercial kitchens and event centers that would otherwise go to waste, and delivers it to our network of pantries, kitchens and shelters.

Lansing Roots

Helping people grow food as a source of income as well as nourishment is the goal of Lansing Roots, a new program launched by the Greater Lansing Food Bank in 2013.
Lansing Roots is designed to help limited resource or historically underserved individuals begin successful market gardening and farming through an incubator farm setting. Lansing Roots is made possible through a Beginning Farmer Rancher Development Program grant administered by the USDA-NIFA.

culture in the diffusion of innovations

Cultural differences in, and influences on, consumers’propensity to adopt innovations

Sangeeta Singh

Department of Marketing, Norwegian School of Management,

Sandvika, Norway

International Marketing Review
Vol. 23 No. 2, 2006
pp. 173-191

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between national culture and

adoption of new products, ideas, or behaviour to suggest a framework for distinguishing between

innovative and imitative behaviour.

Design/methodology/approach – The four dimensions propounded by Hofstede are used to

distinguish national cultures for developing hypotheses pertaining to patterns of adoption of new

products, namely innovative and imitative behaviour of consumers and the sources of influence that

instigate them into such behaviours.

Findings – Results from the study provide support for some of the hypothesised effects which

suggest that indeed, certain dimensions of culture are a key factor in determining whether or not

consumers will display a propensity to innovate. Specifically, it was found that cultures characterised

by small power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance and masculinity will demonstrate

innovativeness. The findings also indicate that consumers coming from different national cultures

are going to vary in their susceptibility to normative influences and interpersonal communications.

Consumers coming from a large power distance, strong uncertainty avoidance and/or feminine

cultures are going to be convinced into adopting new products through normative influences while

those from more collectivistic cultures are more likely to be swayed by interpersonal communications.

Originality/value – These results offer possibilities of influencing consumers into adopting new

products by using different methods that are dependent on the national culture.

Keywords National cultures, Innovation, Interpersonal communications, Behaviour

Paper type Research paper.

Coolest review assignment ever!

09-Oct-2014

Dear Dr. Bresnahan:

Thank you for agreeing to review Manuscript ID RA-IJPP-Oct-2014-143 entitled "Burying the Hatchet?
Elite Influence and Public Opinion on the Washington Redskins Controversy" for The International Journal of Press/Politics.  Please try your best to complete your review within the next month.

My work on Native American sport mascots!  Who would have ever thought I'd be doing a review for this journal!

The Howard Journal of Communications, 19:165_181, 2008

The Effects of Involvement in Sports

on Attitudes Toward Native American

Sport Mascots

MARY JIANG BRESNAHAN

Department of Communication, Michigan State University, East Lansing,

Michigan, USA

KELLY FLOWERS

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Florida,

Gainesville, Florida, USA

This study investigated whether the degree of involvement in sports

affected attitudes about the acceptability of Native American sport

mascots. A multidimensional measure of sport involvement showed

that high sport involvement predicted greater acceptance of Native

American mascots. Only 16% of respondents found any of the

Native American sport mascots presented in the study to be at all

offensive whereas the rest of the participants showed approval.

Men scored significantly higher on every indicator of sport involvement

and also showed more approval for Native American

mascots. Implications of these findings for continued use of Native

American sport mascots by sports organizations are discussed.

check out Limesurvey

Timo Lüke · 19.30 · 0.21 · Universität Potsdam

I think LimeSurvey is great! We do all our survey research with LS and whatever we wanted to do LS was always able to do it... ;) We used SurveyMonkey before, but got to it's limits very soon. So we switched to LS and used the saved money for other things. :)

*Free & Open Source (only hosting your installation is not for free)
*you can do anything regarding question types, answer formats, survey logic - and if nobody did it before you can always implement it
*they have a very active and helpful community

I thought hard, but don't know of any Cons by now...

• http://www.limesurvey.org/
  LimeSurvey - the free and open source survey software tool!

  LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an Open Source PHP web application to develop, publish and collect responses to online & offline surveys.

Linked BA-MA degree in Communication

27+ people showed up last night to inquire about the linked degree program in communication.  They asked many great questions and Dr. Wittenbaum did a great job spreading enthusiasm and explaining the advantage of this option!

more on revised self construal

The rejection avoidance items are a new idea but the authors need to work on these items.  First off there are only 3 items which makes it hard to consider validity.  One of the items has poor face value.  It is very long and seems to be double barreled.  But the authors are on the right track.

Rejection avoidance scale
I worry about what people think of me, and always feel that someone is watching me 0.90
I find myself being concerned about what other people think of me 0.80
Sometimes when I do things I get so anxious and confused thinking about how everything
will turn out that I have trouble even getting started 0.44

This third item sounds like procrastination rather than rejection avoidance.

interesting new self-construal scale validation study 2013

Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2013), 16, 142–151

Two faces of interdependence: Harmony seeking and

rejection avoidance

Hirofumi Hashimoto1 and Toshio Yamagishi2

1Department of Social Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, and

2Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, Tokyo, Japan

We argue that the current concept of interdependent self-construal as ‘harmony seeking’ has overlooked a strategic aspect of interdependence, which we term ‘rejection avoidance’. Using newly constructed scales of interdependent self-construal, one for harmony seeking and one for rejection avoidance, we find that Japanese respondents showed lower independence and higher rejection avoidance than Americans, while no cultural difference was found in harmony seeking. These findings explain why past efforts to demonstrate cultural differences in interdependent self-construal using self-report measures exclusively focusing on the harmony seeking aspect have failed.

Course offering for Spring 2015

If you are looking for a great elective graduate course for Spring 2015, please consider enrolling in

Com 828, Cross-Cultural Communication

meets Tuesdays 1:50 until 4:40 in S134 S. Kedzie (3 credits)

Topics covered:

Facework and culture

Stakeholding Theory

Updated Self-Construal Measure

Smoking prevention and cessation in China

HIV and Hepatitis B Stigma in China

Underserved populations in the US

Culturally sensitive solutions to community problems

Sustainability and culture