When Violence Rises and Politicians Fall

On final rises and fall-rises in German and Swedish

This study explores the intonational signalling of a ‘request address’ in German and Swedish. Data from 16 speakers (9 Germans, 7 Swedes) were elicited under controlled conditions, and intonation contours produced on the test phrase “Wallander?” were classified according to their phrase-final pattern. Both ‘rises’ and ‘fall-rises’ were produced frequently by both Germans and Swedes, which is in...

When Topologists Are Politicians...

Mechanotransduction: Vinculin Provides Stability when Tension Rises

By beautiful imaging and state-of-the-art experiments, vinculin is established to be a central switch in mechanotransduction at integrin-based focal adhesions. Cycles of tension-regulated vinculin switching control focal adhesion dynamics and signaling to enable polarized cell migration and alignment.

Spanish politicians discourse about the responses to violence against women.

OBJECTIVE This study analyzes the discourse of some members of the Spanish parliament (MPs) in the 2 years before the Gender Violence Act was passed in 2004 to examine how gender-based violence is construed when legal measures are proposed. METHODS Ten members of six different parties of the Spanish parliament were interviewed between November 2002 and March 2003. Each interview was recorded ...

When Can Politicians Scare Citizens Into Supporting Bad Policies?

Many people claim that politicians use fear to manipulate citizens. Using a model, we examine how select attributes of fear affect a politician’s ability to scare citizens into supporting policies that they would otherwise reject. In the model, the politician can alert citizens to the presence of a threat. But his claim need not be true. How citizens respond to this claim differs from most game...