Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

This case study highlights several communication insights that have emerged from the South Korean national response to COVID-19. In particular, it focuses on how innovative disease control programm...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0973258620981170

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), Crisis Communication Principles and the COVID-19 Response in South Korea

This study tests the processes through which child abuse public service announcements (PSAs) are effective. The proposed model builds upon the persuasion mediation model of Dillard and Peck (2000 ), which integrates emotional response and perceived effectiveness as antecedents of issue attitudes and behavioral intention. The model tested the mediating role of perceived effectiveness in the persuasion process. Multigroup structural equation modeling was performed for three different types of child abuse prevention PSAs shown on YouTube to 486 college students. The model was well fitted across all three child abuse PSAs. Emotional response seems to exert the largest influence on behavioral intention directly and indirectly through perceived effectiveness and issue attitudes. In addition, perceived effectiveness has both a direct and an indirect impact on behavioral intention.

Mechanisms of Child Abuse Public Service Announcement Effectiveness: Roles of Emotional Response and Perceived Effectiveness

As people have become increasingly concerned about their health, programs about health have proliferated on South Korean television. This study’s purpose is to identify the factors associated with ...

Intention to View Health TV Programs in South Korea: An Application of the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking:

This article explores how Charles Taylor’s account of moral personhood and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot’s account of justificatory regimes can add breadth, depth, and specificity to discussions of ethical dilemmas in public relations. These frameworks are analyzed for their potential to make the following contributions to public relations ethics. First, they convey that there is more to ethics than choosing the right duties and actions. Second, they reveal the diversity of goods that people consider to be ethically worthy and admirable, as well as the complex personal issues involved in ranking these goods. Third, they emphasize that these different goods often need to be articulated and evaluated in different ways. Last, they can either point toward new ways of resolving ethical dilemmas or show why such resolutions are not possible.

The Personal Dimensions of Public Relations Ethical Dilemmas

This commentary calls attention to a topic neglected in the scholarly reception of Habermas’s work—the concept of communication relief. In his recent public sphere theory, he classifies different media forms that are necessary for coordinating different types of social action. He identifies three such media forms: linguistic agreement, steering media, and generalized communication. Although communication scholars acknowledge his ideas on linguistic agreement, they have overlooked those on steering media and generalized communication. Accordingly, this analysis focuses more on the latter two media forms, which fall under the broader concept of relief mechanisms. Extending the media theories of Talcott Parsons, Habermas identifies four types of relief mechanisms: money, power, influence, and value commitment. Money and power perform steering media functions that promote efficiency. Influence and value commitment perform generalized communication functions that promote not only efficiency but also understanding. Implications for normative theories of mass-mediated democratic communication are discussed.

Thomas Hove

Papers

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), Crisis Communication Principles and the COVID-19 Response in South Korea

Mechanisms of Child Abuse Public Service Announcement Effectiveness: Roles of Emotional Response and Perceived Effectiveness

Intention to View Health TV Programs in South Korea: An Application of the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking:

The Personal Dimensions of Public Relations Ethical Dilemmas

Understanding and Efficiency: Habermas’s Concept of Communication Relief