环境保护与世界性的环境正义

现代性发展带来了全球性的环境问题。面对全球性的环境问题,发达国家或地区的人们认为环境问题主要是由于发展中国家或地区急剧膨胀的人口增长所导致的,他们对环境问题具有不可推卸的主要责任。与此相对,发展中国家或地区的人们认为环境问题在根本上是源于以发达国家或地区为首设置的不平等社会制度或结构问题所导致的。然而,归责并不能解决问题,面对全球性的环境问题,提出解决问题的实际方案才是第一要务。我们有理由相信,基于对发达国家或地区和发达中国家或地区的两种不同视角的分析,当我们把人类整体的繁荣昌盛作为思考问题的起点时,一种能力方法理论可以支持我们提出一种多维度、多层次的全球性环境正义理论。     

近代来华西方人记述中国环境变化文本的传播及影响

以近代来华西方人记述中国环境变化的文本为中心,选取若干典型案例,对其传播方式、途径、受众以及对中外的影响程度分别作了考察。翻译是此类记述传播的主要途径;在传播介质上,除文字印刷品之外,照片、图片等的重要性同样不可低估。有留学背景的林学家、农学家等既是主要受众者,也是重要的传播者,这与他们在语言方面的优势密不可分。研究认为,此类记述不但是西方人了解中国环境的重要渠道,也是中国国内学者认识本国环境的重要信息来源。更重要的是,这也是西方近代自然科学知识在中国传播的一种特殊方式。     

美国环境保护地役权制度探析

环境保护地役权是权利持有者对于不动产施加限制或积极性义务的一种非占有性利益。自 １９ 世纪晚期以来,美国的环境保护地役权制度获得了长足的发展,使用保护地役权和土地信托来保护未开发的土地在美国已经成为一种非常流行的机制。 美国环境保护地役权在性质上属于属人地役权、公共地役权和约定地役权,作为混合财产权形式的代表,它较好地平衡了土地的经济价值与生态价值,从而成为一种有别于“命令与控制”模式的柔性环境规制手段。     

农业伦理学对环境伦理学的补充与超越

农业伦理学旨在探究农作活动的行为规范和农业的应然状态,与发展相对成熟的环境伦理学相比,它具有不同的理论侧重点,可对环境伦理学作出补充甚至超越。表现为农业伦理学聚焦作为基本实践活动的农作,关注人与环境间的关系,对环保有直接性和主动性;农业伦理学超越了人类中心主义与非人类中心主义,直接促进人的完善。     

Fraternally yours: the union architecture of Oskar Stonorov and Walter Reuther

For architect Oskar G. Stonorov (1905–70) and labour leader Walter P. Reuther (1907–70) unions were not simply instruments for collective bargaining. They were also agents for transforming established social practices that denied the working class access to decent housing, parks and art; discriminated against African Americans; and destroyed the natural environment. Architecture and site planning were key to this transformation as they addressed concerns of social justice and environmental quality. Stonorov and Reuther shared an aesthetic agenda as well – to expose workers to the emancipating beauty of modern design – as they believed well-designed housing contributed to both their personal lives and productivity at work. From 1941 until their deaths in 1970 they devised plans for workers' housing and town planning, sculpture, urban renewal and environmentally sensitive site planning. They sought to involve workers in the design process, mark union territory on former elite-owned properties, give control of housing production to organized labour and advance workers' educational opportunities. This article examines their architectural endeavours as part of a labour narrative and as an index of the turbulent social and political changes taking place from the inter-war years to 1970.     

Building a Human Health Risk Assessment Ontology (RsO): A Proposed Framework

Over the last decade the health and environmental research communities have made significant progress in collecting and improving access to genomic, toxicology, exposure, health, and disease data useful to health risk assessment. One of the barriers to applying these growing volumes of information in fields such as risk assessment is the lack of informatics tools to organize, curate, and evaluate thousands of journal publications and hundreds of databases to provide new insights on relationships among exposure, hazard, and disease burden. Many fields are developing ontologies as a way of organizing and analyzing large amounts of complex information from multiple scientific disciplines. Ontologies include a vocabulary of terms and concepts with defined logical relationships to each other. Building from the recently published exposure ontology and other relevant health and environmental ontologies, this article proposes an ontology for health risk assessment (RsO) that provides a structural framework for organizing risk assessment information and methods. The RsO is anchored by eight major concepts that were either identified by exploratory curations of the risk literature or the exposure‐ontology working group as key for describing the risk assessment domain. These concepts are: (1) stressor, (2) receptor, (3) outcome, (4) exposure event, (5) dose‐response approach, (6) dose‐response metric, (7) uncertainty, and (8) measure of risk. We illustrate the utility of these concepts for the RsO with example curations of published risk assessments for ionizing radiation, arsenic in drinking water, and persistent pollutants in salmon.     

How Large Are Your G-Values? Try Gosset’s Guinnessometrics When a Little “p” Is Not Enough

Abstract

A crisis of validity has emerged from three related crises of science, that is, the crises of statistical significance and complete randomization, of replication, and of reproducibility. Guinnessometrics takes commonplace assumptions and methods of statistical science and stands them on their head, from little p-values to unstructured Big Data. Guinnessometrics focuses instead on the substantive significance which emerges from a small series of independent and economical yet balanced and repeated experiments. Originally developed and market-tested by William S. Gosset aka “Student” in his job as Head Experimental Brewer at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Gosset’s economic and common sense approach to statistical inference and scientific method has been unwisely neglected. In many areas of science and life, the 10 principles of Guinnessometrics or G-values outlined here can help. Other things equal, the larger the G-values, the better the science and judgment. By now a colleague, neighbor, or YouTube junkie has probably shown you one of those wacky psychology experiments in a video involving a gorilla, and testing the limits of human cognition. In one video, a person wearing a gorilla suit suddenly appears on the scene among humans, who are themselves engaged in some ordinary, mundane activity such as passing a basketball. The funny thing is, prankster researchers have discovered, when observers are asked to think about the mundane activity (such as by counting the number of observed passes of a basketball), the unexpected gorilla is frequently unseen (for discussion see Kahneman 2011 Kahneman, D. (2011), Thinking Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [Google Scholar]). The gorilla is invisible. People don’t see it.     

考虑消费者网购体验滞后的产品定价研究

随着电子商务技术的发展，网络购物越来越便利。与此同时，网络购物带来的产品体验滞后也导致了消费者对产品的认知不确定性。而这种不确定性正在成为消费者策略性退货行为的主要原因，如消费者同时购买多件具有横向差异的产品，在收到货物后经亲身体验后保留一件而将其他产品退货。本文通过构建Hotelling模型，探讨了企业在考虑此种影响情况下的最优定价策略，分析得出：当消费者的退货成本增加时，企业最优定价也随之增加；消费者对产品的先验效用差异化越小，企业的最优定价也越低。同时发现，若某种产品无消费者单独购买，企业的最优定价会随消费者偏好的增加而增加；而当两种产品均有消费者单独购买且消费者退货成本较大时，企业的最优定价不但不会随消费者偏好的增加而提高，反而会随消费者偏好增加而减少。此外，本文给出了消费者策略性退货行为存在的临界条件，当消费者的退货成本高于这一临界条件时消费者的策略退货行为将消失。     

Communicating Geographical Risks in Crisis Management: The Need for Research

In any crisis, there is a great deal of uncertainty, often geographical uncertainty or, more precisely, spatiotemporal uncertainty. Examples include the spread of contamination from an industrial accident, drifting volcanic ash, and the path of a hurricane. Estimating spatiotemporal probabilities is usually a difficult task, but that is not our primary concern. Rather, we ask how analysts can communicate spatiotemporal uncertainty to those handling the crisis. We comment on the somewhat limited literature on the representation of spatial uncertainty on maps. We note that many cognitive issues arise and that the potential for confusion is high. We note that in the early stages of handling a crisis, the uncertainties involved may be deep, i.e., difficult or impossible to quantify in the time available. In such circumstance, we suggest the idea of presenting multiple scenarios.     

Changes in the Factors Influencing Public Acceptance of Nuclear Power Generation in Japan Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster

Public support for nuclear power generation has decreased in Japan since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in March 2011. This study examines how the factors influencing public acceptance of nuclear power changed after this event. The influence factors examined are perceived benefit, perceived risk, trust in the managing bodies, and pro‐environmental orientation (i.e., new ecological paradigm). This study is based on cross‐sectional data collected from two online nationwide surveys: one conducted in November 2009, before the nuclear accident, and the other in October 2011, after the accident. This study's target respondents were residents of Aomori, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures in the Tohoku region of Japan, as these areas were the epicenters of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the locations of nuclear power stations. After the accident, trust in the managing bodies was found to have a stronger influence on perceived risk, and pro‐environmental orientation was found to have a stronger influence on trust in the managing bodies; however, perceived benefit had a weaker positive influence on public acceptance. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.