A GIS for environmental assessment of air pollution impacts on urban clusters and natural landscape at Rosetta City and region,Egypt

An air pollution problem is taking place in the Rosetta region resulting from the brick industry. Polluting point sources cause plumes that disperse by the prevailing wind, covering urban areas of Rosetta City and surrounding landscape of agricultural fields. A model for pollutants plumes was designed through a GIS to calculate the dispersal of total suspended particulate (TSP) loads over the landscape and to estimate its spatial distribution and to analyze its relationship with other geographic land use attributes.TSP pollutant concentrations starting from 100 g/m³ cover more than 34 km² of sensitive land cover through all the year. A concentration level of 100 g/m³ affects about 93% of the sensitive palm trees cultivation, 47% of cultivated land, and 92% of urban areas. TSP concentration level of 200 g/m³ was found to be affecting the same percentage of built-up urban areas.Concentration levels exceed the permissible limits mentioned in the Egyptian law of environment (90 g/m³). The situation is hygienically deteriorated, and large areas of agricultural land are strongly affected or subjected to future impact. Recommended measures are mostly involved with transferring this industrial activity to a safer location at the southwest of the city. The study proposes that brick mills sites on the river Nile bank be utilized for urban development projects and for the promotion of tourism.     

Is there a need for a theory of urban ecology?

Although urban ecosystems are governed by the same ecological laws as rural ecosystems, the relative importance of certain ecological patterns and processes differs between the two types of ecosystems. For instance, as compared to rural areas, urban habitats are usually more islandlike, more often represent early successional stages, and more easily invaded by alien species. All these features are results of the intense human influence on urban landscapes. The question then arises whether a distinct theory of urban ecology is needed for understanding ecological patterns and processes in the urban setting. The answer is no, because urban ecosystems can be successfully studied using existing ecological theories, such as the metapopulation theory. However, due to the intense human presence approaches that include the human aspect are useful in studying urban systems. For instance, the human ecosystem model, which emphasizes human impact by identifying social components with connections to ecology, is a useful approach in urban studies. This model, combined with the urban–rural gradient approach, forms an effective tool for studying key ecological features of urban ecosystems. Better understanding of these features would increase our ability to predict changes that land use causes in urban ecosystems, and would help to integrate ecology better into urban planning.     

Responsible Promotion of Gaming and Dealing with Problem Gamblers

In this paper, the Chief Executive of Christchurch Casino indicates the need to conduct gaming in a socially responsible manner. Even though there are other forms of gambling, Casinos attract greater amounts of media attention and political advocacy. And while governments have become silent partners to legalised gaming, there are areas where governments fall short of their financial or legislative obligations to the community. In contrast, there are actually sound economic reasons for casinos to be responsive to community concerns about gambling.     

Pathological Gambling: Psychosomatic,emotional and marital difficulties as reported by the Gambler

Two parallel self-administered surveys were distributed at three conferences of Gamblers Anonymous. One survey was for members of Gamblers Anonymous and the other was for members of GamAnon. Approximately 500 respondents completed the surveys. This article is a report of some of the data from the gamblers' survey. This survey focused on two time periods of the compulsive gambler's life—during the desperation phase of the illness (Custer, 1982) and the phase following a period of abstinence from gambling. Specific areas covered in this preliminary report focus on the psychosomatic problems encountered by the gambler, emotional difficulties, sexual estrangement, and the need for mental health services. It is anticipated that some of these needs can be met through training or therapy sessions in professional gambling treatment centers and at Gamblers Anonymous conferences.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Sixth National Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking, Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 1984.Robert Yaffee computer scientist, was assisted by senior research assistants: Nancy Frankel, Danny Frankel, Deborah Becker, Douglas Rosen, Leslav Giermanski, Jaime Beauchamp, and Thomas Reingold. Other research assistants included Joseph Lautner, Trudy Myers, Arvind Chawla, and John Morales. To all of these individuals, the National Foundation for Study & Treatment of Pathological Gambling acknowledges its gratitude for their contribution to this project.     

A Sense of Place: The Politics of Immigration and the Symbolic Construction of Identity in Southern California and the New York Metropolitan Area

American immigration has long been characterized by spatial concentration within major urban areas. Los Angeles and New York City are two of the most important immigrant meccas today. Recent studies of immigrant adaptation within these cities have emphasized material factors at the expense of cultural considerations. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to demonstrate extreme differences in the symbolic construction of identity vis-a-vis immigrants in these two urban areas. Using The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as indicators of elite cultural orientations, a content analysis is performed. The results demonstrate the social construction of an exclusive threat narrative in Southern California, and an inclusive immigrant as victim narrative in the New York metropolitan area. I argue that this extreme variation in cultural orientations must be understood as the result of divergent material and symbolic contexts. In order to demonstrate the importance of cultural factors, this paper focuses on symbolic differences between these areas and the influence these differences have on the political process of inclusion/exclusion.     

Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.     

Racial classification in criminology: The reproduction of racialized crime

The (re)production of knowledge about crime is cultural in terms of the questions asked, the comparisons made, and the hypotheses selected to explain crime causation. Since criminologists do not operate in a vacuum, any prejudgments, biases, and beliefs acquired before their professional socialization may well persist and affect their approach to research over the course of their academic careers. Because American criminologists live in a society that racializes a number of problem behaviors, including crime, it is conceivable that widely held beliefs about race that predate graduate training will find their way into assumptions about the relationship between race and crime. Such preprofessional beliefs are transformed into facts when they meet with widespread agreement from other criminologists and thus come to be taken for granted in the objective pursuit of knowledge. Crime is racialized, for example, when the criminal behaviors of individual black offenders are understood in terms of racial traits, racial motives, or racial experiences. When traits, motives, or experiences are classified as the property of whole races or racial communities, these conceptions of race assume causal significance in explaining criminal behavior. Because these traits, motives, and experiences are supposedly shared by entire races or race-class categories, the predisposition to criminality becomes generalized beyond individual Black criminals to whole races or racial communities of noncriminal Blacks. When crime is thus racialized, whole communities or whole categories of phenotypically similar individuals are rendered precriminal and morally suspect. In addition, such racializations in academic criminology can be used to justify increased control of individual black criminals in the larger society; these controls can also legitimately be extended to encompass whole communities and whole categories of phenotypically similar persons who are not involved in crime. This paper will address the role that racializing assumptions play in traditional criminological theories.     

Alcohol Consumption and Self-Control of Gambling Behaviour

This paper reports the results of a preliminary investigation into whether the drinking of alcohol contributes to impaired control of gambling behaviour. The sampling method consisted of a two-phase survey design, collecting data both prospectively within session and retrospectively via a take-home questionnaire. One hundred sixteen people were interviewed while in a gaming venue playing on an electronic gaming machine (egm) of whom 34 men and 11 women also returned take-home surveys. Comparisons of the sample to previous studies suggested that the sample was representative of the population of egm players. Results indicated a consistent theme of alcohol use contributing significantly to impaired control of gambling behaviour, with level of involvement (Corless & Dickerson, 1989) contributing the most significant variance in the independent variables. Limitations of the study are discussed, but the case is argued that this type of process research is essential in better understanding how these two types of popular leisure activities may interact, possibly leading to the previously recorded chronic, excessive alcohol intake and problematic gambling (e.g. McCormick, Russo, Ramirez & Taber, 1984).     

Crime and International Tourism

Using a panel data set of European countries, this paper investigates the impact of crime on international tourism. Violent crimes are negatively associated with incoming international tourists and international tourism revenue indicating that international tourists consider the risk of victimization when choosing a location to visit. This impact is smaller in magnitude in Southern European countries with a coastline which are generally more attractive tourist destinations in terms of sea tourism, suggesting that victimization risk and attractiveness of the destination may be substitutable traits.     

The Nomothetic-Idiographic Issue: Some Roots and Recent Trends

A review of the history of the nomothetic-idiographic issue suggests that the problem of the uniqueness of the individual is secondary in this context to that of the right approach to the study of the human person. Idiographic approaches emphasize the need for an unmutilated conceptualization of psychological processes. The requirements of this unmutilated kind of research need to be integrated with those of nomothetic science asking for the controlled gaining and analyzing of information regarding psychological processes. One form of such a kind of integration is represented by biographical studies based on semistructured interviews and a systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of their contents. Findings from such research as especially related to developmental and personality psychology are reported here by summarizing a series of studies conducted at the University of Bonn.     

Dual relationships: Client perceptions of the effect of client-counselor relationship on the therapeutic process

Sixty-seven former clients of a large metropolitan counseling center were surveyed as to the frequency with which they experienced 21 specific forms of client-counselor contact during therapy. Thirteen behaviors surveyed described forms of social contact and eight behaviors described forms of physical contact. Respondents also evaluated the 21 behaviors as to their presumed effect on the therapy by rating each behavior on a scale ranging from –2, very detrimental, to +2, very beneficial. Four client-counselor behaviors were rated by a majority of respondents as beneficial to therapy, and eight client-counselor behaviors were rated by a majority of respondents as detrimental to therapy.     

Rethinking craft administration: Managerial position,work autonomy,and employment security in the building trades

The organization of work in the construction industry often has been presented as the exemplar of craft administration wherein managerial positions are of relatively low significance. Occupational control of employment and work structure in this context presumably is manifest through the craft union. On the other hand, research on other industries has shown the managerial position in the firm to be a source of extrinsic and intrinsic reward. This results from the manager's pivotal position in the bureaucratized labor process. This paper seeks to reconcile these perspectives. Data from a survey of 246 unionized construction workers and 14 local union officers from nine building trades are used to assess the impact of the managerial position and union involvement on work autonomy (self-direction and freedom from supervision) and employment security (unemployment and trade agreement infringements). In general, the results indicate that managerial affiliations to employers' firms are associated with greater autonomy and more employment security. Union involvement has contradictory consequences for individual tradespeople.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.     

The Influence of Gaming Expenditure on Crime Rates in South Australia: A Local Area Empirical Investigation

Although there has been much speculation about the possible links between gambling and crime rates, relevant quantitative evidence has been practically non-existent in Australia to date. This paper reports the results of research that utilised a model designed to investigate the potential relationship between electronic gaming machine expenditures and property (income-generating) crime rates reported to police in local areas in South Australia in 2002–2003. The research found that the higher the expenditures on gaming machines in a particular local area per adult, the higher the income-generating crime rate in that area. No such relationship was found between gaming machine expenditure and non-income-generating crime rates. However, further research is required before any policy-relevant conclusions can be drawn.     

Revolutionary Mexico and the world economy

Conclusion Obregón and Calles encountered intense but disunited resistance at home and abroad. They responded with land and labor reforms to coopt campesinos and urban workers, thereby undercutting popular opposition and enlisting the masses in the campaign against regionalist bosses, Porfirian oligarchs, and foreign investors. These populist alliances helped the Sonoran diarchy build more loyal and professional military and civilian bureaucracies, which in turn helped regulate local and metropolitan firms, increase and stabilize tax revenues, and develop the economy's infrastructure. Following Obregón assasination in 1928, Calles forestalled collapse by integrating many military and civilian bosses into a central party organization. Yet the state remained only partially consolidated. At the end of the Calles administration, regionalist cliques retained considerable political autonomy, and a major campesino rebellion challenged federal authority. Furthermore, dependence on foreign petroleum and mining companies limited government revenue and spending. In mid-1927, Calles inaugurated several years of conservative domestic policies and open collaboration with North Americans. But Calles did not purge all progressive elements from the state machinery. His quest for political stability led him to enroll in the official party many elites who depended on mass followings and who opposed the rightward shift of government policy. During the Great Depression, these elites formed a coalition with intellectuals, small business, and the lower classes that after electing Lázaro Cardenas president, ended Callista hegemony and undertook far-reaching reforms. Thus the Cardenistas completed what Obregón and Calles had begun: the Mexican state's transformation from the poorly centralized oligarchic structure of the Porfiriato to the highly centralized, mass-inclusionary structure of the postrevolutionary era. In the next decade, Mexico joined the ranks of the world's intermediate, semiperipheral economies thanks to import-substitution and metropolitan capital. Since then, Mexican governments have maintained political stability and spurred industrialization by steering a pragmatic course between reformism and conservatism, nationalism and collaborationism.In regard to future research, this essay suggests that we consider not only Mexico's relationship to North Atlantic powers in the 1920s but also its standing vis-à-vis the states and classes of other late-industrializing countries. One possibility is to study the interplay of metropolitan actions to control the raw materials and markets of the periphery with the politics of resistance and accommodation throughout the Caribbean basin: How did international and local conflicts affect the distribution of United States and Western European investments in the Caribbean basin? What impact did metropolitan investments have on the region's struggles over state power and pattern of economic change? How did the state-building struggles and economic changes of the 1920s influence the region's nationalist break-throughs and defeats during the Great Depression and World War II? What were the consequences of nationalist successes and failures for the subsequent paths of state making and economic development in the Caribbean basin, as well as for North Atlantic investors and governments after World War II?     

Re-Visioning Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Constructionist notions have become commonplace in theoretical discussions of the self, but are seldom translated into consideration of specific social work practice concerns such as ADHD. Explorations of ADHD, on the other hand, typically emphasize a narrow, medically-oriented symptom picture that is devoid of the psychosocial context in which the so-called symptoms emerge. A transactional approach to the understanding of ADHD is advanced. This article promotes a link between constructionism and social work's psychosocial or person-in-environment perspective. Such a perspective supports approaches to the assessment of ADHD that illuminate larger cultural messages and their constraining influence on individual meaning-making. Intervention, conducted at multiple levels, must be geared to the establishment of more hopeful and affirming narratives.     

Nevada gaming: revenues and taxes (1945-95)

In 1931, Nevada legalized casino gambling, an act which allowed its gaming industry to develop. Because many jurisdictions outside Nevada are now embracing legalized gambling as a path to a brighter economic future and because this proliferation presents Nevada with new challenges and opportunities, it is a good time to review the Nevada experience. Here, the focus is on gaming revenues and gaming tax collections during the 1945–95 period. We find that the growth rate of Nevada's gaming industry has slowed over time, with the relative importance of gaming in the Nevada economy peaking in the late 1970's. The Nevada economy has since been gradually diversifying, something which will increasingly pressure Nevadans to look for government revenue sources other than gaming if current levels of government services are to be maintained.     

城市旅游开发和旅游城市建设的思考

城市既是本地居民的生活空间,也是外来游客的旅游目的地。长期以来,我国城市建设以工业生产为主,服务业落后。在城市规划和开发中对于公共服务设施大都是以常住居民人口作为基础,很少考虑外来游客的规模数量,致使旅游城市功能残缺,对外来游客环境不友好。尤其是在城市改造过程中的大拆大建和推陈出新,割裂了城市文脉和历史传统的有机联系,成为国外设计师的试验场。在新型城镇化建设中,应该重新思考旅游城市建设方向。     

Gambling and the Law®: Endless fields of dreams

This article examines the current trends of proliferation of commercial gaming, especially in the United States, in the context of the third wave of legalization of gambling that has been experienced since the founding of the nation. The author looks at the historic foundations of the spread of casino-style gambling, and notes the types of casino gaming that have led the way in the current expansion. He also points out why it is reasonable to expect that this wave too may come crashing down, as general acceptance of wide-spread casino gaming in America may indeed be short-lived.Gambling and the Law^® is a registered trademark of I. Nelson Rose.     

Bargaining with set-valued disagreement

It is arguable that in many-two person bargaining situations disagreement leads to a set of possible payoffs with no probabilities attached to the elements of the set. Axioms are developed for bargaining games of this kind and solution concepts are derived from these axioms. Particular attention is paid to what are here called the max-max and rectangular general solutions. The latter can be applied to an important sub-class of bargaining games where the disagreement set is equal to the feasible set.A part of this work was done while I was a visitor at the University of Stockholm. For valuable discussions and comments I am grateful to T.C.A. Anant, Salvador Barbera, Bhaskar Dutta, Efe Ok, Jorgen Weibull and an anonymous referee of this journal. The paper also benefited from a presentation at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.