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With an audience of over 1 billion users per month, YouTube is an attractive medium for delivering Extension programming. Amidst growing competition for viewership, determining content that is in demand by Extension clientele on YouTube is a daunting challenge that Extension educators face. The YouTube Search function of Google Trends and monitoring of existing YouTube views for related content can help guide topic selection in developing Extension-authored video content. Example applications of these tools are detailed to show how to select relevant YouTube topics with viral appeal and extend the reach of Extension programming.

Item analysis can serve as a useful tool in improving multiple-choice questions used in Extension programming. It can identify gaps between instruction and assessment. An item analysis of Mississippi Master Cattle Producer program multiple-choice examination responses was performed to determine the difficulty of individual examinations, assess the effectiveness of distractors for individual items, and identify specific topics appropriate for placing further educational emphasis. Specific problems with items and distractors with examinations were identified and slated for revision. The item analysis results were then combined with program participant feedback to provide further insight into the instructional needs of Extension clientele.

In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie 'O' celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie 'O', means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by gay men which differentiates them from other Jackie collectors. To this end, the paper also focuses on 'vocabularies of appreciation' (Armstrong, 2001), or kitsch consumption among this loose social circle and, in this process, categories of 'us' and 'them' are performed (see Bourdieu, 1984; Miller, 1987; Pierce, 1994).

In 2020 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-10 most disabling diseases. Today, it is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United Kingdom. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK, which re-imagines obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals among women who self-diagnosed as having 'magical thinking OCD'. Referring to variations in the brain, OCD is often described as a type of neurodiversity. While, in popular culture, representations of OCD practices invariably invoke anthropological ideas of magical correspondence and animism as objects are assumed to possess an overpowering agency over the person who is supposed to master their possessions. This study aims to firmly place the notion of OCD in the realm of a spectral material culture and initiate a wider sociological conversation about the 'haunting' of a wide range of subject-objects. In doing so, I want to remove magic from the normative shadow of concepts such as the mysterious and the ghostly and instead employ the ordinary everyday as a sociological analytic for understanding the magic of mass-produced things and global processes of automation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, 50.00 £, paper 14.99 £, +374pp. This compilation reflects the rapid expansion throughout the 1990s of African philosophy in North American universities. Recognising [...]

The effect of a DNA immunostimulant on inflammatory and immune responses, performance, and health in calves following abrupt weaning and introduction to a concentrate diet was tested. Sixty-four single source Angus crossbred steers were weaned on day 1 and assigned to receive a DNA immunostimulant (TRT) or saline (CON) on days 0, 2, 4, and 6. On day 0, steers received clostridial and respiratory vaccines and anthelmintic; they were then transported 2 h, allocated to pens (n = 8 per pen), and introduced to total mixed ration. Daily intake, ADG, and feed efficiency were measured. Serum haptoglobin, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) were assayed by ELISA or AlphaLISA on days 0, 2, 4, 6, 14, and 28; serum-neutralizing antibodies (SNA) to bovine herpesvirus-1 and bovine viral diarrhea virus-1 (BVDV-1) were quantified on days 0, 28, 68, and 135. In a subset of cattle (n = 6 to 8 per treatment group), the percent macrophages and activated gamma delta (γδ) T cells in blood was determined by flow cytometry on days 2 and 6, and expression of mRNA for TNF-α, interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), IL-4, and IL-10 by stimulated blood mononuclear cells was assessed by real-time reverse transcriptase PCR on day 6. After 70 d, cattle were shipped 1,205 km to a feedlot and performance and health were followed. There was a significant effect of time on serum TNF-α, IL-1β, haptoglobin, and SNA (P < 0.001); the range in concentration among cattle on each day was large. The ratio of IFN-γ to IL-4 expression was significantly higher (P = 0.03) for TRT cattle, suggesting that treatment activated T-helper type 1 cells. There was a trend toward an improved feed conversion (P = 0.10) for TRT steers over the 70-d backgrounding period. There was no effect of treatment on feedlot performance or carcass merit (P > 0.10). During backgrounding, 1 TRT steer died of enterocolitis. In spite of backgrounding, cattle experienced an outbreak of bovine respiratory disease (BRD) in the feedlot and 1 of 31 TRT cattle and 5 of 32 CON cattle died of BRD. The immunostimulant modified some immune responses during backgrounding. Large variability in inflammatory responses during backgrounding indicated that events around weaning induce systemic inflammation that varies substantially among cattle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KOEN STROEKEN, Moral Power: the magic of witchcraft. Epistemologies of Healing, Volume 9. New York NY: Berghahn Books (hb $99--978 1 84545 735 8; pb $29.95--978 0 85745 659 5). [...]

BILLINGTON, ROSAMUND, JENNY HOCKEY & SHEELAGH STRAWBRIDGE. x, 293 pp., bibliogr. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. £42.50 (cloth), £13.99 (paper) Looking at this book for the first time, my initial thought was: [...]

The Changing Face of Death. Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (eds), Macmillan Press, 1997, 40.00 £, xiv + 202pp. This is an absolutely [...]

This article examines the cosmology and secret practices of West African traditional priests in New York City in preventing the spread of witchcraft, an evil invisible spirit transmitted between female members of the Akan matrilineage. Explored is an uncanny dynamic as everyday habitus becomes increasingly strange in the world of a young Ghanaian woman in the Bronx, who has become petrified of insinuations of witchcraft from close family members. In trying to hide the young woman from infection by her fellow witches, Akan priests attempt to ‘capture’ her habits and everyday routines, calling upon the iconic magic of New York City in order to ‘misplace’ familiarity within the anonymity of Manhattan. In this process, the transmission of the witch’s spirit to the intended victim is disturbed as the victim’s life and things are moved. Nowhere to be found, the witch shifts her attention to other victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the relationship between cosmology and financial transactions via the sacred and deeply secret discourses of West African traditional priests in Europe is explored, who believe that they can spiritually manipulate the monetary pricing of stocks and shares. Of particular interest is how West African witchcraft discourses, while still embedded in kinship relationships, become symbolically caught up in the economy and in the volatile movement of industrial commodity indexes. In analysing the financial imaginary and constant reconfiguration of the marketplace by different networks of stakeholders, Ghanaian fetish priests allow for a fiscal elasticity and material distorting of monetary flows such that the incoherence and uncertainty of global financial practices and the fictious pricing and purchase of unstable commodities are shaped and magnified through a thick Akan cosmology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]