Volume Of Mail Research Articles

Implementation of a Spam Detector in Python for Corporate Companies

Many companies, while not categorizing spam as a form of attack, may still consider it a significant threat. When referring to spam, it represents an excessive volume of unwanted and unsolicited electronic mail sent to company email accounts [1]. Although it is often used for marketing purposes, in many cases, it is also employed by malicious actors for detrimental purposes against the company. For instance, spam can be used to propagate viruses or infiltrate corporate computers [1] [2]. Furthermore, spammers may send emails with the aim of directing users to phishing web pages, attempting to obtain confidential information from authorized personnel within the company. In general, spam is, at its simplest, an annoying form of mail, and in its worst cases, it serves as an enabler for spyware, viruses, intrusion, and phishing threats [3].

Excluding Agency

Excluding Agency

Detection of Opioids on Mail/Packages Using Open Port Interface Mass Spectrometry (OPI-MS).

Opioids (and their more potent synthetic analogues) are used therapeutically as effective pain killers; however, recreational use and consequent overdoses are implicated in the deaths of thousands of people across the world annually. Trafficking of opioids and other illegal drugs through international mail has become a significant challenge for law enforcement personnel. Hundreds of millions of letters are sorted by the U.S. and Canadian postal services every day. Chemical analysis of this immense volume of mail requires a very fast sampling/detection method. This work explores the use of real-time mass spectrometry analysis with the recently developed Open Port Interface (OPI) for acoustically dispensed nanoliter volume sample droplets, a type of liquid microjunction surface sampling probe, for rapid and easy non-intrusive detection of fentanyl, heroin, and oxycodone. The OPI coupled to mass spectrometry is a novel sample introduction method that allows the rapid analysis of sample surfaces without preparation or modification. Opioids on different packaging materials (e.g., paper, bubble wrap, Ziploc bags) were rapidly (<10 s) interrogated by the OPI, and the sensitivities of the method compared. Furthermore, an opioid surrogate (caffeine) could be facilely detected on envelopes after processing through postal services.

The Fun and the Fury of Transforming American Studies

The Fun and the Fury of Transforming American Studies Lisa Duggan (bio) On December 4, 2014, two overwhelming events shaped the year to come, for me and many other members of the American Studies Association. At 9 a.m. Anna McCarthy called to tell me that José Muñoz (one of the cochairs and a chief architect of this year’s ASA conference) had died suddenly in the early hours of the morning. At about 12 noon, the ASA announced publicly that the resolution supporting the academic boycott of Israel, approved by our National Council, would be sent to the membership for a vote. These events together generated a complex field of joy and misery, mourning and conflict. Together they produced pressures that tested the stamina of everyone involved in keeping the ASA going and in planning this conference. In recognition of that fact, I would like to take a moment to thank some of the people who bore up under the pressures to keep the ASA strong (with increased membership, individual and institutional, and strong fund-raising) and whose efforts bring us together here. Curtiz Marez, ASA president, 2013–14 John Stephens, ASA executive director T’sey-Haye Preaster, 2014 conference coordinator The National Council and Executive Council Fred Moten, Jack Halberstam, and Sandy Soto, program cochairs The Program Committee Jewish Voice for Peace and the Center for Constitutional Rights, especially Liz Jackson of Palestine Solidarity Legal Support Ryan Senser and Stephanie Willerton, Christina Hanhardt, Conor Reed, and Lex Taylor (research and map) J. DeLeon (for technical assistance with this presentation) These two events pulled in seemingly opposite directions: the death of a beloved friend and colleague toward somber withdrawal into the circle of mourners, the boycott vote announcement toward vigorous public engagement [End Page 281] in the worlds of media, politics, law. The planning of the theme “The Fun and the Fury” also seemed to pull us in one direction, to focus on new ways of thinking through and sharing our scholarship, with our collective mourning and our intense public engagement pushing and pulling us in other ways. But many of us began to see connections. The fun and the fury of mourning José, celebrating his work and each other as well as raging at mortality, did come to overlap with the fun and the fury of responding to both the enormous joy that created the boycott vote and the considerable dissent and rage over that vote in multiple arenas. To illustrate these overlaps, and in honor of José, I want to begin with what he might have considered an ephemeral archive, or what Jack Halberstam might call a “silly archive.” I want to start with the hate mail we collected on the website bdsloveletters.com. For me, the volume and tone of the hate mail I began to receive on December 4 was something of a revelation. Though others here have long experience with this kind of epistolary emoting, I had had little. After I recovered from my initial shock, I started to find it interesting. Aside from the messages that simply argued against the boycott, in a range of tones and linguistic styles, there was an avalanche of fascinatingly insulting messages. I started to ask my most vigorous and vivid correspondents to send me more! Some did. I began to trace the thematic patterns in the messages. I found it particularly noteworthy that so many of these e-mails featured sexual themes. This is my area of research interest, after all! I always find it enlightening to try to connect sexual themes to political economic forces and global events. So here was a surprisingly rich archive. As an example, here is one of several messages I received from one correspondent: From: XXXXX Date: December 16, 2013 at 3:35:12 PM EST Subject: congratulations congratulations on your election to the presidency of the American Study Association It is groups like the ASA who are exemplars in the proactive support of Islamo terrorists, suicide bombers, killers of Jewish babies & unarmed civilians. Your promotion & adherence to deviance from sexual norms makes your election especially noteworthy. We know how warmly the Islamos embrace dikes, homos, switch hitters, gender-confused...

In Pursuit of Prestige: the Folly of the US News and World Report Survey

Oh my goodness! That is a sanitized version of my actual response when I realized in late December 2011 that another US News and World Report (USNWR) survey had arrived and that I had missed my opportunity to vote. Somehow, my questionnaire got lost among the large volume of mail that flows through my office. Fortunately, after some frantic and determined communication with USNWR, we were directed to the group running the survey (it is subcontracted to someone else) and I was able to submit my opinion. When I glanced at the ballot, I wondered how administrative voters at the 124 other colleges and schools of pharmacy listed would have informed opinions about the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. They may know that a required research experience for all our doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students is a key and highly valued feature of our curriculum because it was described at a 2011 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy meeting and a few years ago in an American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education editorial. (1) They may know about the positive impact our faculty members and alumni have had on the profession of pharmacy, pharmaceutical science, and society since 1868. But would they know, for example, that we have instituted a new PharmD curriculum in the past 2 years that extensively uses active-learning techniques? Would they know the extent to which our academic medical center/health system and college are operationally, educationally, and philosophically integrated? I concluded that only a few of the USNWR survey respondents would know about these defining attributes and most of these individuals would be our graduates. I also concluded that, despite being in academia for 35 years, I knew comparatively little about many of the colleges and schools on the list, especially the newer ones. I was not always this invested in the periodic USNWR survey. In fact, when I received my first questionnaire as a dean in fall 2007, I casually completed and returned it. The results were published in 2008 and we were ranked fifth. That we were perceived positively by our fellow educators was gratifying, but because of the survey's limitations (eg, it only measured focused exclusively on our PharmD program, and based its conclusions on a relatively low response rate of 56%), I chose to ignore the results. I assumed everyone else, including our key constituents (university administrators, alumni, current, and prospective students), would either be unaware of the rankings or ignore the findings for the same reasons I had. I was wrong. Soon after the results were published, I started receiving comments from our PharmD students. They were upset that we had dropped from previous rankings (I think from third to fifth) and that we had tied (rather than outranked) Ohio State University (spillover from the 2 universities' storied rivalry in football and other sports). The students wanted to know what I was going to do to improve our standing next time (a tough question). Similar observations also arrived from our alumni. I was troubled but understood that both constituent groups are prone to ascribe disproportionate value to these ranking systems because they are not familiar with our internal assessment processes. Then, to my chagrin, our university administrators started commenting on the rankings. Fortunately, it was positive for us, as our college was one among many highly-ranked units on campus, and our alleged superiority provided fodder for playful one-upmanship with my University of Michigan dean colleagues, enlivening otherwise serious meeting topics. However, I also recognized that our administrators were using these rankings to argue for more resources as a means to protect or improve their/ our strong reputation, an administrative practice common both nationally and globally. (2) The collective interest in these ranking systems was troubling and I was faced with a dilemma: how to acknowledge our positive reputation among our fellow educators, while guarding against repercussions from future unpredictable shifts that inevitably occur in reputational surveys. …

Emerging Spamming Threats

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networking spam, television advertising and file sharing network spam. Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is universally reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions. Spamming is now considered to be a serious threat to the Internet and is posing a serious threat to both ISP and users' resource. Service providers are under mounting pressure to prevent, monitor and lessen spam attacks directed toward their customers and their infrastructure. The Internet is part of the serious national infrastructure. Attacks that are seen everyday on the Internet include direct attacks, remote reflective attacks, worms, and viruses. Emerging classes of messaging abuse in the mobile environment have led to neologisms like SMishing, or SMS phishing. A SMiShing attack could introduce viruses or other malware to the network or add massive charges to corporate cell phone bills.

Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature

AAAiile journalism is often seen as the antithesis of literature, the two enjoyed close and productive relationship in the Soviet Union in the decade following the Revolution.1 The influence of the Bolshevik press was key to Red victory in the Civil War, and much of Bolshevik journalism's power stemmed from its application of literary methods to factual genres and harnessing of literary talents such as Vladimir Mayakovsky.2 Early Soviet journalism's innovative emphasis upon the presentation of factual material for political persuasion rather than information was the inspiration for remarkable 1920s cultural forms such as Dziga Vertov's revolutionary newsreel and the ubiquitous newspaper feuilleton.3 Yet this groundbreaking approach to propaganda was not the most unusual feature of 1920s Soviet newspapers. This honor belongs to journalists' active solicitation of readers' letters leading to a volume of mail probably unprecedented in world history.4 By 1922 such letter-writing had been christened the movement of worker correspondents (rabochii korrespondent, or rabkor). For writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Zoshchenko the torrent of correspondence furnished source material for stories of disputes in restaurants,

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. By David M. Henkin. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 238. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Konstantin DierksDavid Henkin has, for the second time, written a marvelous book. His first monograph, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), was a strikingly original account of an important new kind of literacy in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, exemplified in the reading of commercial signs on city streets. That book pulled the histories of literacy and of cities in new directions. Henkin's equally original new monograph, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth- Century America, broadens the concern to and nation. Whereas scholars tend to write the history of through the invention of technologies such as the telegraph or telephone, Henkin focuses instead on the everyday use of communications. This enables him to discern a communications revolution in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s premised not on technological innovation, but on popular culture-the sudden and concerted application of an old technology to new purposes, by new groups of people. Earlier in the nineteenth century the postal system operated by the federal government was primarily a carrier of newspapers, business correspondence, and letters on special occasions. By the 1870s that postal system had become a widespread medium enabling many ordinary Americans to experience a peculiar new and modern sensation of connectedness-for good, as well as for ill.In making this argument Henkin's second book shares a common theme with his first, namely an unsung element in the emergence of modernity in the United States. In both books, Henkin asks us to appreciate the modernity of the nineteenth century with fresh and subtle eyes, without the usual technological determinism. Richard John accomplished something comparable with his account of the development of the federal postal system in the early national era, enabling us to appreciate the formation of perhaps the first modern large-scale enterprise, ironically by a government otherwise committed to smallness even in its military apparatus {Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press, 1995). John examined the role of the post office in crucial political debates of the early national era, but Henkin shifts our gaze in the subsequent antebellum era from political controversy to everyday life, from newspapers to letters, from the elite to the masses. The most important context was not political or institutional, but geographical and social: the extraordinary mobility animating the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.That mobility came from broad historical patterns like a rush of migration westward, and from concerted historical events such as the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). The United States Congress responded to the emergence of such geographical mobility-and mimicked the pioneering example of the British Parliament-by dramatically reducing the cost of postage, first in 1845 and again in 1851. The most significant result was not the speed of mail across space, but access to and use of the post by more and more Americans. The volume of mail carried by the postal system more than tripled in a decade, and Henkin highlights new practices and new expectations as ordinary Americans swiftly turned something novel into something normal-into habit, into culture. Americans of all sorts wrote more and more letters, and they used those letters to send money and daguerreotypes to one another, filling the mail with objects as well as words. …

The social magic of correspondence: conceptions of the mails in early nineteenth century Ireland

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the post in Ireland underwent fundamental changes in terms of its methods of operation, the scope of its delivery and the actual usage of the postal service. The volume of mail sent, the changing pattern of delivery routes and the time and expense of sending a letter all changed over the course of the century. The conceptions of the post were changing from that of being a purely functional instrument of limited appeal to that of being an acknowledged tool in the growth and development of industry and trade, in the operation of the structures of government and a vital link for individuals to people and places outside their immediate social circle. This paper draws upon various sources, both those of the state and of private individuals, and uses Bourdieu's theoretical perspectives, to build a framework for analysing the differing conceptions of the mails. These changing conceptions reveal how different groups positioned themselves in order to take advantage of and shape new forms of cultural capital in the early nineteenth century.

Red and black interpostal accountancy marks

The volume of interpostal mail increased by several thousand percent during the 19th century. Countries with bilateral revenue sharing agreements, including the Australian colonies, used four types of Accountancy Mark systems from 1843 to 1876. Marks on interpostal mail showed the amount of shared revenue between two or more postal entities. Accountancy Marks were shorthand notations for journal entry instructions to record amounts owing to, or amounts owing from other postal authorities. For prepaid mail, the calculation of shared revenues to be paid to the destination country was marked in red on outgoing mails, and for unpaid mail, the amount owed to the sender country for its share of unpaid mail was marked in black. Red was used to indicate a credit entry in the sending country account, and black was used to indicate a debit entry for an amount owed to the sending country. During the 33-year period, the system was changed from the recording of a simple manuscript or handstamp numeral marking, to PD, PP, and P abbreviation handstamps. The system was then modified to include Articles handstamps and Letter or Way Bills. Finally, a system of country-designated handstamps was used with specific amounts due. The paper supplies illustrations of how Accountancy Mark calculations were performed, and discusses the cost and time disadvantages and reliability issues of the Accountancy Mark system together with linkages to accounting.

The Nature and Causes of the Increase in Direct Mail Volume in the Last Half of the Twentieth Century

This paper examines the reasons for the large and apparently permanent jump in volume of direct mail in the period 1950 to 1996, especially in the period 1975 to 1988, when the number of pieces sent rose 133% per capita. Based on available statistical and anecdotal evidence, the long run causes are determined to be mostly the growth in demand for all advertising by firms, and the increased information firms have obtained about consumers. Falling direct mail costs, changes in demographic factors, and increased consumers' trust in purchasing from mail order firms, are argued to have had a smaller impact.

Combining agent technology and similarity-based reasoning for targeted E-mail services

Software agents are programs designed to perform tasks autonomously. Mail-agents attempt to provide useful functions about electronic mail (E-mail) service, such as information filtering, gathering, and scheduling. With Internet use continuing to explode, the information overload is growing so fast that the same virtues that made E-mail so popular are now becoming a negative technologic boomerang (see the volume of junk or spam mail). Industrial as well as academic research has faced this problem in terms of automated filtering methods in order to distinguish, at the receiver-side, legitimate E-mail from spamming. Here we describe an alternative approach: our mail system is skilled to find, at the sender-side, “appropriate” destinations for a sending message by triggering a spidering process on (a portion of) the Web. This process performs a distributed computation using mobile agents: by applying a similarity-based reasoning on information extracted from the web pages of potential addressees, the agents are able to compute a numeric value in [0,1] which provides, for any address, a measure of the “interest” in receiving the E-mail. The overall architecture is implemented in Java using the basic issues of Internet protocol.

Mobile mail-agents through similarity-based reasoning

Bots, or software agents are programs designed to perform tasks autonomously. Mailbots attempt to provide useful functions about electronic mail (E-mail) service such as filtering information, gathering information, and scheduling. With Internet use continuing to explode, the information overload is growing so fast that the same virtues that made E-mail so popular are now becoming a negative technologic “boomerang” (see the volume of junk or spam mail). Industrial as well as academic research has faced this problem in terms of automated filtering methods in order to distinguish legtimate E-mail from spamming. Here we describe an alternative approach: our mailbot is skilled to find “appropriate” destination of the message triggering a spidering process on an Intranet-based network. The spidering performs a distributed, mobile computation via pervasive agents: by applying a similarity-based reasoning on designed users resources the agents are able to deduct if the contacted user may be interested or not in receiving the E-mail. The overall architecture is implemented in Java using the basic issues of Internet protocol.

Zip code caveat: bias due to spatiotemporal mismatches between zip codes and US census-defined geographic areas--the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project.

Zip code caveat: bias due to spatiotemporal mismatches between zip codes and US census-defined geographic areas--the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project.

Interview With E. Paul Torrance on Creativity in the Last and Next Millennia

I interviewed E. Paul Torrance on a bright, cold day in early December at his home in Athens, GA. He still lives in the house near the university that he and Pansy, his wife, moved into shortly before she passed away. The first thing one notices upon arrival at his doorstep is the quilted toy chest on his large front porch. Years ago, the volume of mail coming and going from the Torrance household exceeded the size of a normal mailbox, and he has been using the toy chest as a mailbox ever since. We settled in his study, surrounded by his files and books. He sat with Cherokee Princess, his beautiful, fluffy white cat with calico markings, on his lap. I sat across from him with my notepad and pen and a small tape recorder on a little table to his left. The conversation was comfortable and relaxed, punctuated frequently by laughing and occasionally when Paul rose to get a book or paper to show me. I marveled that he found what he wanted so easily, even books from several decades ago. I was especially impressed that he remembered dates so well and the names that went with them. He'd had a busy day, attending a Christmas party at the Sunday School where he and Pansy used to teach, as well as attending to his correspondence and various projects. After the hour-and-a-half interview, I think we were both a little tired, but his eyes still sparkled with mirth and intelligence. Approximately two weeks later, we met to go over my transcribed notes, and he clarified some issues for me. I was also referred to his recent article on the issue of creativity in the new millennium published in the Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving (2000). C: Now that we are on the cusp of the new millennium, we can look backward and forward to see where research on creativity has been and where it may be going. As an international leader in creativity research, I'd like to ask you to stand on the cusp and tell the readers of JSGE what you see. Most scholars say that research on creativity really began with the impetus of J.P. Guilford's speech to the APA in 1950. Do you agree? T: No, I would disagree. There's no question about it that Guilford gave great impetus to it all along, especially after his 1950 speech before APA when he was president. But, even before that, Guilford had been doing some things and so had other people. And there was some creativity testing even before 1900. They were using the Rorshach and so forth. They were using it differently, I think, then: All they used were common responses and uncommon responses. That had continued and, of course, been validated and indicated originality. The Rorshach people also used movement, human movement, mechanical movement, different kinds of movement for different things. Most of all it goes along with creativity--people who are fast moving. I had that experience with the fighter pilots. I had the experience of being head of the task force studying fighter pilots over Korea. We tested the aces and nonaces and those who had no hits at all, and we found they were all higher than the general population; but, of course, the aces were much higher than the near aces and no hits. Their attitudes were, of course, different, too, but that would be a different story. C: Is that where you got the idea to put the movement and action on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking as an indicator of creativity? T: I got a lot of my ideas from there, ideas about the biographical inventory that worked out quite well. And I was making progress with that, but Cal Taylor was a competitor. I decided I had enough else to do so I'd leave it with him, but that was a mistake. I'm sorry that I did because he never did make known his answer key and that sort of thing, so it didn't become useful. So, he's now dead and gone, and so is the biographical inventory C: Do you still have yours? T: I still have that, but I haven't developed it. …

TPH: History and Memories of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, 1925–1966

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ForumFull AccessTPH: History and Memories of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, 1925–1966MARY V. SEEMAN, M.D., MARY V. SEEMANSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Toronto, Ont., CanadaPublished Online:1 Sep 2000https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.9.1537-aAboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Edward Shorter is a historian who specializes in the history of psychiatry. One would wish he had given this slim volume a less local title because its contents are of broad interest to the mental health professions as well as to the general reader. This book would be of special interest to readers of The American Journal of Psychiatry because most of the chapters of this multiauthored book revolve around a central character, Clarence B. Farrar (1874–1969), who was not only the Director of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital (and University Chair of Psychiatry) from 1925 to 1947 but also the eighth Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, from 1931 through 1965. In a journal whose editors have all enjoyed felicitous longevity, C.B. Farrar has out-tenured and outlived, thus far, everyone. In his 91st year, Farrar was replaced by Francis J. Braceland as Editor-in-Chief; he served 4 more years as Editor Emeritus until his death at age 95. The C.B. Farrar Archives, maintained by his widow, Joan Farrar, contain every issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry from its inception in 1844 as The American Journal of Insanity.In his chapter describing Farrar’s association with the Journal, extending from 1927 to 1969 in all, Peter Faux describes the evolution of North American psychiatry during a historical period of tidal changes. A side note of interest: The American Journal of Insanity became The American Journal of Psychiatry, volume 1, in 1918. In 1933, it was at volume 15. Farrar changed it to volume 91 in 1934, reinstating its historical heritage.According to Faux, Farrar worked 7 days a week at editing. He rarely used the telephone, preferring to correspond in writing. An American, Farrar was apparently always viewed with suspicion by Canadian Customs officials, who regularly censored the volume of suspicious incoming foreign mail addressed to the editorial office. Five boxes of Farrar’s correspondence are currently housed in the APA Archives. Faux sums up Farrar’s criticism of American psychiatry during this period as “sharply divided into…schools, centered on prominent men with distinctive views,” an appraisal that, 40 years later, appears precise and accurate. On psychotherapy, Farrar wrote a classic article in 1957 (1) in which he included a vignette of John Stuart Mill being cured of mental disorder by reading a Wordsworth poem. Farrar concludes with the message, quoted from Anatomy of Melancholy (his style was to hide behind other men’s words), “He doth the best cures, according to Hippocrates, in whom most trust,” a truth to make twenty-first-century American psychiatry pause.There is much to reflect on in this volume besides the wisdom, in his maturity, of Farrar. Initially, he was very much caught up in the vogues of the day: S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure (isolation from family, bed rest, milk diet, massage, electroshock); Paul Dubois’ psychotherapy of rational persuasion; “resting” jackets for menstrual “excitement”; Henry Cotton’s surgical cures of “reflex” problems (removing teeth, uteri, colons); the eugenics movement (sterilization of “mental defectives”); warm baths; insulin coma; Metrazol shock; leucotomy. He was not, however, caught up with Freud: “the shadows of Freud linger as the last touch of mysticism in medicine.” This disbelief became a problem for Farrar’s reputation when, by the 1950s, the chairs of all the best psychiatry departments in the United States (although not Canada) were psychoanalysts.This book is multidisciplinary, with contributions from all mental health professions and from a patient. The chapter by Peter Keefe, which sets a patient’s memories beside excerpts from her hospital chart, is brilliant and beautifully written. Although intended to commemorate Toronto Psychiatric Hospital as a model of interdisciplinary harmony, the book demonstrates by its contents and its emphases the ascendancy of psychiatry over other mental health disciplines. This has not changed much over the years. In sum, the story of the birth and death of Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, as portrayed in these pages, is the story of psychiatry, concealing its adolescent embarrassments under progressive layers of modified nomenclature, geographic moves, administrative changes, philosophical revisions, and procedural renewals but retaining inexplicably its nostalgia for an idealized past.Edited by Edward Shorter. Toronto, Wall & Emerson, 1996, 320 pp., $35.00 Canadian (paper).

Perpetual motion of the worst kind.

Perpetual motion of the worst kind.

Local rules and fitness landscapes: A catastrophe model

This paper examines the imposition of “local rules” in five mail delivery centres of Australia Post. Local rules are patterns of behaviour used by subunits of an organization to optimise their payoff. These local rules may ultimately benefit the total organization. Fitness landscapes are used to examine the emergence of local rules in this workplace. This research examined the relationship between the time taken to sort the mail and the volume of this mail. Work rates show a clear catastrophe shift; that is, work rates suddenly drop when the volume of mail exceeds a certain level, as Postal Delivery Officers apply local rules to maximise gains inherent in the pay structures. Such behaviour is close to that predicted by Kauffman (1995) in computer simulations of lattices and may be indicative of the application of local rules in organizations. The implications of the use of local rules are that behaviour in social systems may be dictated by systemic and emergent processes which are outside immediate management control. A further implication is that organizations may be structured to a significant extent by such local rules.

Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture * Mary Bogin (bio) Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture. By Rima Apple. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+245; illustrations, notes, index. $48 (hardcover); $18.95 (paper). Vitamania is a well-documented chronicle of America’s enthusiastic embrace of vitamin supplements, first marketed as tablets in the 1920s. Rima Apple begins with the promotional campaigns for cod liver oil in the 1910s and ends with an analysis of why 43 percent of American adults daily ingested vitamin supplements at a cost of more than one billion dollars in 1993. Her well-written social history of vitamin supplements illuminates the question of how Americans make their own interpretations of scientific findings when exposed to a cacophony of information in the form of advertisements, government pronouncements, physicians’ and pharmacists’ advice, and articles in the popular media. Apple does not explain the technological development of vitamin preparations and food fortification or review the scientific research on vitamins. Nor does she try to determine whether vitamin supplements are necessary for optimal health. Instead Apple explores how Americans perceive the adequacy of their diet and the need to supplement it with vitamins. “In the face of fierce disagreement among scientists, . . . why has the American consumer’s love affair with vitamins continued unabated for nearly a century?” [End Page 804] Apple asks (p. 1). Her book provides a useful overview of the history of drug regulation in the twentieth century, from the Food and Drug Act of 1906 to the rigorous clinical trials for new drugs required under the Kefauver-Harris Amendment of 1966. Despite conflicting scientific interpretations of the efficacy of vitamin supplements (except in cases of gross vitamin deficiencies such as rickets and beriberi) and continuing opposition from the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the percentage of Americans consuming vitamins has increased. Apple carefully lays out the arguments of the many sides in the controversy, including those of pharmacists, the vitamin industry, government regulators, members of Congress, organic farming advocates, the grocery industry, Ralph Nader watchdog groups, and consumers. She offers rich documentation from trade journals, court cases, internal memos from vitamin manufacturers, congressional hearings, the FDA archives, advertisements, the popular press, and popular books such as Linus Pauling’s Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970). Particularly gripping are Apple’s last four chapters on the FDA’s repeated attempts between 1940 and 1994 to regulate the vitamin industry in order to protect consumers from fraudulent claims by vitamin producers. In four major campaigns, the FDA tried to control the selling of vitamins by requiring manufacturers to prove their dietary claims for supplements. In 1973 the FDA proposed new rules that would have divided vitamin products into three categories based on potency, with higher-potency vitamins being classified as drugs, subject to strict clinical trials to prove efficacy. Fearing that the ultimate aim of the FDA was to take supplements off the market or make them available only by prescription, pharmaceutical companies and consumers mounted a fierce defense of the right to take vitamins of any potency in any combination. The volume of mail from consumers to the FDA and members of Congress reportedly was rivaled only by the number of letters received on the Vietnam War and Watergate. Apple shows that consumers resented the paternalism of the proposed FDA regulations and opposed government interference in their freedom of choice to take vitamins. In response to the objections, Congress passed two laws, one in 1976 and one in 1994, to prevent stricter FDA rules and to allow consumers free access to vitamin supplements. Much of the book is an analysis of the aggressive advertising and industrial marketing strategies of vitamin manufacturers. Apple charts the history of how vitamin therapy was sold to middle-class Americans in advertisements that often posed as factual scientific information. For example, Miles Laboratories, the manufacturers of One-A-Day and Flintstones children’s vitamins, implanted the idea between 1945 and 1970 that even Americans with a well-balanced diet needed vitamins to correct insidious nutritional deficiencies that lurked subclinically. Miles characterized vitamins as “nutritional insurance.” [End Page 805] Apple concludes, however, that advertising...

The Emotionality of Privacy

La vie privee, et plus specifiquement le droit de la personne a la vie privee, est un probleme sensible a des niveaux politique, social et personnel. Cet article explique donc que le droit de la personne a la vie privee est un probleme d'autant plus sensible qu'il est lie au moi de la personne, au fait que la personne pense controler ce qu'elle pense de son moi. Cet article propose donc un point de vue psychologique de la notion de vie privee