Do you know of any scholarly articles that have been written about what questions parents ask other parents when they are setting up play dates and stuff like that? Like do they ask about swimming pool safety, clean products, guns, alcohol?

THANK YOU!

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: These sorts of reference questions really should go to the Reference Department at the library or through one of the other contacts at http://library.duke.edu/services/ask/ Ol’ AP doens’t always get to them right away.

I would check Sociological Abstracts for academic articles in this area, or perhaps ERIC (education, but in the broadest sense of the word). This will be a difficult search to do in any database, even Google. You may want to use concepts like “parenting,” “community support,” “support systems,” “parenting skills.” These seem to sort of point in the right direction. “alcohol” in the title field and “parent*” in the title field got some stuff that might be good, but mostly about parent-child communication, not parent-to-parent. The folks in Reference can walk through such searches with you.

There are quite a few working scholars on the Duke staff these days (myself included). We don’t have faculty status, but we still need books and articles for our work. I have been pleased before to be able to use the book/article delivery service, which has been tremendously helpful to me. Now I am told that staff members are not eligible to use it. Has something changed? If so, this seems to perpetuate an unfortunate hierarchy on campus, and I’d like to request that staff be allowed to take advantage of the delivery service, too. Many thanks. Anne Whisnant, Franklin Center.

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: Duke staff with research needs that are aided by the BARD service need to check with Circulation Dept. staff. They can set your status to grad student or faculty for the purposes of library borrowing. I’ve been told that your status has already been updated.

There has been a problem with sheer volume since the BARD service went online, and we found that limiting it to faculty and grad students was necessary given the level of staffing we have to provide this service. But we’re willing to work with non-faculty Duke researchers if they ask us for help. Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience.

Is there a free (or low fee) website that I can use to send mass emails from my own email address? It would need a feature that allows people to subscribe or unsubscribe.

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: I don’t know of this off-hand. I’d just do a Google search with words like “bulk email” and “freeware.” You could throw in words like “unsubscribe,” hoping that it would be a feature. A search of www.tucows.com for “bulk email” yields a few cheap programs that might work, although you’d need to investigate the subscribe/unsucbsribe part.

These are all clients, and it seems you want a website you, or the subscribers, can work from. You may need to create something on a webpage that allows people to subscribe/unsubscribe from there, like using a simple HTML form.

When did the US get universal male suffrage? What kind of legislation did it require?

When did Canada, Britain, Germany and Japan get it?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: It’s fuzzy. Some states had it earlier than others, and for some elections (say, presidential) prior to other elections (say, U.S. senator).

For starters, you can see the Wikipedia articles on “Voting rights in the United States,” where they indicate that landless white men go voting rights by 1856, non-white men technically by 1870, and Native Americans by 1924 (after, for instance, white women). These involved a variety of constitutional amendments and presidential executive orders and state laws. You can also see the Wikipedia articles on “Suffrage” and “Universal suffrage.” They have a very abbreviated placeholder for the entry “Universal manhood suffrage,” which is what you’re asking about.

You could write a book on this. The folks in the Reference Dept. can help you find library books and articles to begin your extensive research. Perhaps you could start doing a search in the catalog for books assigned subject headings such as “suffrage — united states — history” Also, you might want to go at it by searching for sources on the political history of these various countries.

I’ll leave it to you to research the specifics for Canada, Britain, Germany (apparently in some states before unification), and Japan (1925).

Does water have flavor, or is it the absence of flavor?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: Pure water, that is, distilled water, is tasteless. Flavor is added by minerals, by chlorine, by the plasticizers in bottles, and other such stuff.

I am looking for a list of the 50 greatest movies of all time. What list is the most reliable (as there are many)?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: They all stink. The list that’s in your own head is probably the most reliable. The American Film Institute’s list done back in 2000 is suspicious (just US films; biased towards the usual sentimental favorites). http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/movies.aspx
The Village Voice has a somewhat more rounded listing: http://www.filmsite.org/villvoice.html
Sight & Sound magazine combines polls by listing the number of times different films made their decennial top 10 lists: http://www.filmsite.org/sightsound.html
These and other polls are linked from the References in a Wikipedia article entitled “Films that have been considered the greatest ever”

How many parents (of children under 18) are there in the USA? And if you can, how many parents are there with kids who are between 5 and 14?

Do you have kids, AP?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: AP can’t find these figures in standard sources. Since this seems the sort of thing of interest to marketers, I recommend that you contact the fine folks at the Ford Library of the Fuqua School of Business. For a ballpark idea (no age breakdown), according to Table A-7 of the Census Bureau report “Examining American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000” — http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/censr-24.pdf — in 2000 there were 32,967,528 “partner households” with “children in household.” (This is further divided between spouse and unmarried partners.) I guess multiply that by 2 to get the total number of persons in a partnership, or 65,935,056. Then, there were 12,178,781 “nonpartner households” with “children in household.” That sounds like single-parent families. The sum is 78,113,837, although some of these children might well be 40 years old! Still, I’m guessing this might be an approximation of the “children under 18” category.

Everyone who asks a question or makes a comment is like one of AP’s children.

did they want to put a fourth guy on stone mountain originally? Who was it and why did he get excluded?

http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ga/dekalb/postcards/mmodel.jpg

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: Several sources state that the second sculptor to tackle the project, Augustus Lukeman, planned four figures, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, “Stonewall” Jackson, and an unnamed color-bearer. Perhaps this last figure was supposed to symbolize the average draftee. In any case, by the time the monument was completed in 1970 (dedicated by Vice President Spiro Agnew), they were pretty sick of the project dragging on for so long. Eliminating the fourth guy was one of several shortcuts taken.

Why do they put alcohol in cough medicine and the like? Does it do something no other substance can resonably do that makes it worth using alcohol, which many people would rather not injest (like kids)?

thanks

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: There seem to be homeopathic cough syrups, such as made by Boericke & Tafel (B&T), that don’t contain alcohol. I’m guessing that as a central nervous system depressent, alcohol helps kill feeling and reduce coughing, but AP is no medical researcher so can’t tell you what works and what doesn’t work for your cough. It may be because cold medicines have a goal of helping you sleep. It may be because the main ingredients are more soluble in alcohol than in just water or in an oil-based substance.