Increase in non-native species richness leads to biotic homogenization in vacant lots of a highly urbanized landscape

Urban Ecosystems - Vacant lots, unused lands covered by spontaneous vegetation, are widespread in urban landscapes. Although they are of less conservation value than natural ecosystems, they can...     

Learning environments for infants

Learning environments in a sample of communal families and a sample of two-parent married nuclear families are compared for both intragroup and acrossgroup differences likely to influence childrearing and socialization outcomes. Learning environment variables include family and demographic backgrounds of parents; newborn health, developmental, and feeding patterns; personnel, size, and density in households; caretaking patterns; work loads and domestic tasks for mothers; kin and social supports for mothers; beliefs and value orientations of the parents; and change and mobility in families. Creedal and domestic types of communes also differed. The learning environment variables are interdependent with each other and with demographic features of the groups, and there is rapid change in communal lifestyles; both these features suggest that intragroup and longitudinal data are essential for generalizing about the effects of lifestyles on young children.     

Differentiation of rural development driven by industrialization and urbanization in eastern coastal China

With the socio-economic transformation, regional development factors recombination and followed industrial restructuring have changed the rural areas in eastern coastal China deeply. The interaction between the material and non-material elements affecting rural production and lifestyles shaped different rural development types depending on a carrier, which is composed of different industries. Accordingly, this paper makes the definitions of four rural development types, i.e., farming industry dominated rural development type (FIT), industry dominated rural development type (IDT), rural development type focusing on business, tourism and services industries (BTT), and balanced rural development type (BDT), and classifies the rural development types in eastern coastal China. Then, taking the social representation approach and basing on the major factors affecting the long-term rural development and the exertion of the functions of the countryside with regard to society, the assessment indicator system of rurality degree index (RDI) was established to distinguish the rurality degree of different types. The results indicated that, to some extent, the RDI may accurately reflect the status quo of rural development and the exertion of the functions of the countryside with regard to society, and can also reflect the different stage in what the same rural development type in different region stays. The authors argue that the study on the interaction of rural development factors in the process of economic and social transformation and the subsequent rural development model is very important to deeply understand the rural development and to smoothly achieve coordinated and balanced rural–urban development in developing countries, which are experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization.     

The elderly in rural environments

This paper provides a critical examination of the research available on the rural elderly in America. A detailed review of the many studies and topical areas investigated by rural gerontologists is not attempted. Rather, several ‘salient aspects’ of rurality (occupational, ecological and sociocultural) are identified as a basis for describing and explaining the status and experiences of older people in rural areas. The meaning of these dimensions as they relate to rural environments and the elderly is explored through both a general discussion and an application to two substantive issues — health status and life satisfaction. This examination illustrates the sizeable gaps that exist in what we currently know about the rural elderly and the problems/drawbacks of approaches traditionally used to study this topic. The paper concludes with a call for a more unified and conceptually based approach to future rural elderly research, that focuses on how and why the ‘salient aspects’ of rurality produce different circumstances and experiences for the elderly, and that emphasizes rural variation, not just ‘rural vs urban’ comparisons.     

Equitable opportunities in economic environments

 In this paper, we extend the axiomatic analysis of equitable opportunities developed in Kranich [6] from finite to continuous opportunity sets. This extended framework is amenable to economic applications. The main results establish conditions under which an ordinal ranking of profiles of opportunity sets can be represented by a cardinal advantage function which describes both the extent of inequality and the distribution of advantage among the agents. Received: 3 November 1993/Accepted: 18 December 1995     

Populist communication and media environments

Populist leaders and movements have long adapted their communication practices to fit their media environments. Yet, research on the relationship between media and populism has been limited until recently. This article offers an overview of how media researchers have been identifying populist media and communication practices and investigating ways in which media structures may constrain or enable the growth of populist movements. It discusses three different scholarly frameworks that suggest that social media platforms and shifts in news media may be providing new opportunities for populist messages to circulate more widely. These shifts may be a contributing factor to a recent surge in populism across many countries. Finally, this article raises normative questions about journalistic practices and media policy in response to concerns about right‐wing populist communication practices.     

Avian use of suburban greenways as stopover habitat

Greenways may provide stopover habitat for migrating birds in otherwise inhospitable suburban landscapes. We examined the effect of greenway forested corridor width, vegetation composition and structure, and adjacent land cover on the species richness and abundance of migrating songbirds during spring and fall migration in Raleigh and Cary, North Carolina, USA. Generally, migrating birds were more abundant in wider forest corridors during spring and fall migration. During the spring, migrants were detected more commonly in greenways with taller trees and a higher percentage of hardwood trees. In the fall, migrant richness and abundance was highest in greenways with lower canopy cover, possibly because of the increased vertical complexity of the vegetation at these sites. Forest-interior migrant richness was not correlated with corridor width in either season, but these species were more abundant in greenways bordered by less bare earth and pavement cover in the spring. No other bird groupings were correlated with adjacent land cover measures. Although migrants used greenways of all widths, forested corridors wider than 150 m should be conserved whenever possible to provide stopover habitat for forest-interior migrants. Shrub cover should be retained to maintain vegetative complexity. Habitat for the greatest diversity of migrants can be provided by constructing greenways in areas of lower development intensity and encouraging residents to retain shrubs and trees on properties bordering greenways.     

Nonbinary social choice for economic environments

Assume a finite integer l2 and a social choice correspondence mapping each (p, Z) into a nonempty subset (p, Z) of Z, where p is a profile of individual preferences and Z is a set of outcomes of cardinality l or more. Suppose that satisfies Arrow's choice axiom, independence of infeasible alternatives, and the Pareto criterion. If the preference domain is the family of profiles of classical economic preferences over the space of allocations of public goods, then is dictatorial.I am grateful for some especially helpful comments by Jerry Kelly, John Weymark, and two anonymous referees. In fact, they uncovered so many errors that I must revive the traditional disclaimer: All remaining mistakes are my own responsibility. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation, grants no. SES 9007953 and SES 9209039.     

Skill training in multimodal virtual environments

Multimodal, immersive, virtual reality (VR) techniques open new perspectives for perceptual-motor skill trainers. They also introduce new risks and dangers. This paper describes the benefits and pitfalls of multimodal training and the cognitive building blocks of a multimodal, VR training simulators.     

Stakeholder driven indicators for eHealth performance management

The goal of the present article is to compile a corpus of indicators of eHealth development evaluation that would essentially reflect stakeholder approaches and complement technical indicators of assessment of an eHealth system. Consequently, the assessment of the development of an eHealth system would reflect stakeholder approaches and become an innovative solution in attempting to improve productivity of IT projects in the field of health care. The compiled minimum set of indicators will be designed to monitor implementation of the national eHealth information system. To ensure reliability of the quality research, the respondents were grouped in accordance to the geographical distribution and diversity of the levels and types of the represented jobs and institutions. The applied analysis implies several managerial insights on the hierarchy of eHealth indicators. These insights may be helpful in recommending priority activities in implementation of an eHealth data system on the national or international level. The research is practically useful as it is the first to deal with the topic in Lithuania and its theoretical and practical aspect are particularly relevant in implementation of an eHealth data system in Lithuania. The eHealth assessment indicators presented in the article may be practically useful in two aspects: (1) as key implementation guidelines facilitating the general course of eHealth system development and (2) as a means to evaluate eHealth outcomes.     

The lexicographic egalitarian solution on economic environments

This paper considers solutions to distribution problems defined on economic environments. It shows that there is a unique resource-egalitarian and symmetric solution that proposes always Pareto optimal allocations and satisfies Inidivual Restricted Monotonicity; this property requires the poor people of the society to be strictly better-off when social resources increase and the initial outcome is a welfare unequal position. That unique solution is the lexicographic extension of the maxmin criterion.I wish to express my gratitude to Salvador Barberá. I am also very grateful to Hervé Moulin for his encouragement and to Carmen Herrero, Iñigo Iturbe and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. I thank very specially the valuable reading of John Roemer and illuminating conversations with Serge Christophe Kolm. Financial support from Gobierno de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged     

The conservation challenge in sustaining rural environments

The focus of this paper is on obstacles to conservation and specific conservation initiatives. While policy makers are influenced by the social constructions of rural and while there is unlikely to be common agreement on what is rural, convergences can occur on the most efficacious approaches towards conservation through widening communities of knowledge achieved by greater efforts to evaluate strategies and to share experiences from different localities. The paper begins with a brief conceptualization of the trade-offs involved between commodity and non-commodity uses of rural lands. A more elaborate discussion follows of the dominant factors which undermine conservation of rural environments. In the face of these obstacles the paper examines a wide variety of strategies and actions from OECD countries to provide a better balance between commodity and non-commodity functions. Although governments are expected to continue to play an important leadership, policy setting and regulatory role, it is clear from the examples presented in this paper that many important initiatives are coming from non-governmental organizations and that partnerships between public and private sectors and between private and non-governmental sectors have significant potential to clarify issues, to establish common ground and galvanize constructive action.     

An argument for context‐driven intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality has fundamentally changed feminist theorizing and the study of women and gender. However, intersectional research, theorizing, and practice also have been subject to important critiques. This article provides a brief genealogy of intersectionality and summarizes major critiques. We recognize value in these critiques as well as the ongoing power of an intersectional lens. We therefore advocate what we call “context‐driven intersectionality,” arguing that attention to the historical, political, economic, and social factors that shape power relationships and social structures is critical to conducting robust intersectional analyses that avoid reification of social categories and inequalities.     

Youth-led participatory photo mapping to understand urban environments

A large body of research has shown that the neighborhood environment is an important developmental setting for youth. However, there remains a need for deeper qualitative accounts of how youth perceive and experience the neighborhood environment. This study elicited youths' perspectives on their neighborhood environment and its implications for their well-being using Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM), a method that integrates photography, community mapping, and walk-along interviews. Participants (n = 6) were black youth age 14–19 recruited from a youth program in Boston, Massachusetts. Participants designed neighborhood tours and through their analysis of the photographs and maps created on those tours, reflected primarily on the stark juxtapositions between lower-income areas of the community and an influx of new construction and neighborhood changes. They also focused on the social and physical environmental features present in lower income areas of the community, honing in on both youth-supporting aspects and those that impede their opportunities such as violence. These findings suggest the importance of understanding youths' perceptions of their neighborhood residential environments and the implications of these perceptions for neighborhood and youth well-being.     

Why institutional environments for agroforestry seed systems matter

Rethinking the logic of institutional environments aiming to facilitate agroforestry smallholders in economic development, this article compares smallholder input supply systems for crop and tree seeds in sub‐Saharan Africa and reflects on two basic challenges: (1) how to develop a large number of relevant tree crops for different agroecologies, (2) how to reach smallholders in rural areas. Policy options for improving agroforestry input supply systems are discussed, whereby our article concludes with suggestions how sectoral approaches for crop seed systems can be modified to agroforestry seed‐seedling systems. Biophysical differences have practical implications for how the logic of the ‘African green revolution’ would be translated into a corresponding revolution for agroforestry.     

Social choice in economic environments with dimensional variation

An argument for welfarist social evaluation is presented that replaces the independence axiom with a consistency axiom for social-evaluation functionals in economic environments. This axiom (consistency across dimension or COAD) requires that, if two allocations contain suballocations in common, and if individual utility functions are projected down to the smaller economy where allocations change, then these small allocations must be ranked in the same way that their ancestral allocations were.The basic result is applied to different information environments and a variety of ethical axioms appropriate to economic environments is investigated.We are indebted to Charles Blackorby, Erwin Diewert, Ed Morey, Bill Schworm and John Weymark for helpful discussions, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Killiam Foundation and the National Science Foundation, for research support.