Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Over the last two years, there have been a number of high-profile cases of teenagers utilizing their home computers, web cameras, and other web-based commercial establishments like PayPal to establish and conduct their own home-based interactive Internet pornography businesses. This presentation will consider recent journalistic and public policy discourses surrounding these sites – often run surreptitiously out of minors’ rooms – especially the uneasy representation of teens as simultaneously stars, victims, producers, perpetrators, and entrepreneurs. It will also examine the web-based investigative practices used to uncover mediated child porn crimes in order to elucidate and problematize new uses of the Internet in investigative reporting. I argue that what is being produced is not only a classic narrative of underage victims and adult perpetrators but also a new set of complex social, legal, and professional relationships enabled by and embedded within these new technologies.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Objectives. To determine whether a required course addressing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) would change students’ attitudes and perceptions toward the subject, including their likelihood to recommend various natural products and CAM therapies.
Methods. A three-part, 48-question survey was administered to all 3rd-year Pharm.D. students on the first and last days of the course. Part 1 of the survey was based upon a validated tool and assessed students’ attitudes and perceptions toward CAM in the areas of professional competence, personal interest, personal experience, personal beliefs, and philosophical congruence. Parts 2 and 3 assessed the students’ likelihood to recommend a number of popular natural products and CAM treatments as both primary and adjunct therapy. The degree of change for each question was assessed and analyzed in order to determine the impact of the course.
Results. Fifty-three students (93%) completed both the pre- and post-survey. The absolute value of the change for each of the forty eight survey questions was significant (p<0.001).
Implications. A required course addressing CAM and natural products significantly changed students’ attitudes and perceptions toward the subject, as well as their likelihood to recommend various CAM therapies and natural products in a professional setting.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: From 1961 to 1971, the US sprayed 72 million liters of chemicals on South Vietnam. International criticism of U.S actions is widely credited with prompting the United States to ratify key international treaties banning the use of chemical and biological agents. Yet the response of the Hanoi government to America?s use of chemical warfare during the conflict, and its efforts to secure reparations since the war?s conclusion, have not been widely recognized. These chemicals, which included Agent Orange contaminated with Dioxin, directly caused thousands of deaths, and have continued to cause abnormal births into the third generation. This paper uses recently rediscovered official publications from the Hanoi government during the war, in combination with materials from a recent lawsuit filed by National Lawyer's Guild in association with the Vietnam Lawyers Association on behalf of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange (VVAO) to document and analyze the perspective of a victim-state and its population to the widespread use of ?non-lethal? weaponry. During the Vietnam War, the Hanoi government actively campaigned against U.S. military use of using chemical warfare from 1961 onward, accusing it of attempting to starve the Vietnamese people into surrender. According to the communists, this tactic was part of a ?special war? to test methods for defeating national-liberation movements. On January 30, 2004, victims of these attacks in the United States filed a lawsuit against the chemical companies that produced the dioxin-laden defoliants/herbicides, including Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Diamond Shamrock and others. On March 10, 2005, the lawsuit was dismissed on grounds that the use of these chemicals during the war, although toxic, did not fit the definition of 'chemical warfare' and therefore did not violate international law. Together these materials offer a novel glimpse into an important, though under-examined, moment in the history of chemical and non-lethal weapons use.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: If the television brought the outside world into the home, web cam technology inverts this trend by transmitting activities in the home to outside viewers. In the last two years, there have been a number of cases of children and teenagers utilizing web cams -- in conjunction with other internet technologies like PayPal -- as a means of connecting and engaging in commercial sexual exchange with adults. Several high-profile investigative reports have set about exposing teens’ use of web cams to fuel home-based interactive Internet porn sites. My presentation will consider discourses surrounding these sites -- often run surreptitiously out of minors’ rooms -- including the uneasy representation of teens as both criminals and victims in exposes in the New York Times and elsewhere. It will also consider the construction of gender in these exposes, which unlike stories of sex trafficking, focus on sites run by both girls and boys.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Although unions are a traditional constituency of leftist parties in Brazil, leftist deputies have increasingly voted for legislation that counters unions’ interests. What accounts for this disparity in representation? I argue that institutions shaped leftist deputies’ decisions at both the electoral and congressional level. Leftist deputies had institutionally-induced electoral incentives to support fiscal adjustment policies that were favored by business firms who had become important new financial contributors to leftist deputies’ campaigns. They also faced institutionally-induced congressional incentives to vote with the governing coalition, regardless of how reform affected traditional allies, or face sanction by the party and President. Analyzing leftist deputies’ votes in the 51st (1999-2003) versus 52nd Congresses (2003-2007), I show that both campaign contributions from corporations and membership in the governing coalition play a significant role in determining leftist deputies’ anti-union votes.