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Come on –Everybody’s doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good-drinking, drugs and casual x. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Ronberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials u the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word.
Ronberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of example of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze ts out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe x among their peers.
学前专业 The idea ems promising，and Ronberg is a perceptive obrver. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a riously flawed understanding of psychology.” Dar
e to be different, plea don’t smoke!” pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers-teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Ronberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertirs, so skilled at applying peer pressure.
But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Ronberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it’s prented here is that it doesn’t work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed.
There’s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of rearch shows that positive health habits-as well as negative ones-spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we e every day.彭姓男孩取名
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Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can lect our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It’s like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that’s the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.体育教学设计模板
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鼻子干怎么办 A deal is a deal-except, apparently ,when Entergy is involved. The company, a major energy supplier in New England, provoked justified outrage in Vermont last week when it announced it was reneging on a longstanding commitment to abide by the strict nuclear regulations.
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Instead, the company has done precily what it had long promid it would not challenge the constitutionality of Vermont’s rules in the federal court, as part of a desperate effort to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant running. It’s a stunning
move.
The conflict has been surfacing since 2002, when the corporation bought Vermont’s only nuclear power plant, an aging reactor in Vernon. As a condition of receiving state approval for the sale, the company agreed to ek permission from state regulators to operate past 2012. In 2006, the state went a step further, requiring that any extension of the plant’s licen be subject to Vermont legislature’s approval. Then, too, the company went along.怎样做酱豆
Either Entergy never really intended to live by tho commitments, or it simply didn’t foree what would happen next. A string of accidents, including the partial collap of a cooling tower in 207 and the discovery of an underground pipe system leakage, raid rious questions about both Vermont Yankee’s safety and Entergy’s management– especially after the company made misleading statements about the pipe. Enraged by Entergy’s behavior, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 last year against allowing an extension.
Now the company is suddenly claiming that the 2002 agreement is invalid becau of the 2006 legislation, and that only the federal government has regulatory power over nuclear issues. The legal issues in the ca are obscure: whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that states do have some regulatory authority over nuclear power, legal scholars say that Vermont ca will offer a precedent-tting test of how far tho powers extend. Certainly, there are valid concerns about the patchwork regulations that could result if every state ts its own rules. But had Entergy kept its word, that debate would be beside the point.
The company ems to have concluded that its reputation in Vermont is already so damaged that it has noting left to lo by going to war with the state. But there should be conquences. Permission to run a nuclear plant is a poblic trust. Entergy runs 11 other reactors in the United States, including Pilgrim Nuclear station in Plymouth. Pledging to run Pilgrim safely, the company has applied for federal permission to keep it open for another 20 years. But as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviews the company’s application, it should keep it mind what promis from Entergy are worth.
