Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that a culture of psychiatry has constructed a new subject of health, who needs to continually self-scrutinize for mood and behavioral flaws. A concise history of health policy and related business health marketing activities is provided to establish the dominant depression discourse now circulating in American culture. This discourse contends that most Americans possess distresses that can be termed “symptoms“ which distinguish them as “at risk” of major depression and other mental disorders. This new cultural epistemology has created a ready population for on-line health information and self-help technologies, serving primarily, a new middle class population of mental health subjects. The paper reveals a common logic among broad spectrum discourses of health policy, advocacy groups and a broadening recovery industry. The paper details how some industry technologies, ranging from consumer health sites to cybertherapy, target a middle class niche markets of consumers, constructing them as needing

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: People often use the Internet to search for specific information to answer specific questions: Is it going to rain tomorrow? Did the Cubs win last night? On the other hand, people often go online just to surf, with no prior information goal in mind. This study compares the controlled and automatic allocation of cognitive resources between these two different tasks. This study also replicates previous research suggesting that choosing from extensive options carries a cost in terms of the cognitive resources available to encode that which has been chosen.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Ethnopolitical organizations try to reach varied audiences. Some of those audiences are
domestic and some are international. One of the key tools that organizations are using to
impact the political discourse is the internet. One key gatekeeper in the process of using
the internet is the search engine. Here we examine what factors determine the success of
organizations in generating a high number of websites that mention their organization in
google internet hit returns as one way to measure organizational success in reaching out
to a wider audience. We explore this question within the context of the Minorities at
Risk Organizational Behavior dataset that has information on 98 ethnopolitical
organizations active in the Middle East.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: My paper primarily focuses on Tsui’s early films however. It posits that the films’ mind-bogging juxtapositions, irrational arrangements, and ridiculous combinations parallel Ben Highmore’s notion of “collage practice” whose chief purpose it is to use the combined techniques of mixing and remixing extant materials and resources so as to foster new ways of seeing the familiar and the known. It concurrently postulates that Tsui’s film-collages highlight accents of difference that speak to and of his “flexible citizenship” in the transnational arena of cultural production. These accents simultaneously accentuate corresponding issues of physical estrangement, cultural displacement and geographical dislocation consequent to colonialism, diaspora and globalization. They both reflect and drive the transnational sensibilities of Tsui’s film-collages, cutting a swathe with Hamid Nacify’s notion of “accented cinema” in which conflicting themes about homelands, borderlands and diasporalands abound. This postulation necessarily challenges the contentions that Tsui’s films are “very Chinese indeed, referring as they do to Chinese history and culture, a Chinese environment,” and that “[t]he role of Tsui’s nationalism, therefore, is mainly to signify his ‘Chineseness’”.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I develop a career concerns model of government policy choice within a fully dynamic optimal stopping framework to predict the degree of surfing (opportunistic timing) and manipulation (politically motivated economic intervention) under alternate institutional structures and voter characteristics. Among other results, I find that the likelihood of early elections rises with longer maximum term lengths and with future uncertainty but diminishes in the value of office-holding; manipulation increases with the maximum term length and with the value of office-holding; but surfing and manipulation, acting as substitutes, are inversely associated. The model presented here suggests that governments should be highly opportunistic in calling elections and that countries that allow opportunistic election timing should experience less economically distortionary political intervention.