City dwelling wild bees: how communal gardens promote species richness

Urban areas consist of wide expanses of impervious surfaces which are known to negatively affect insect biodiversity in general, but green spaces within cities have the potential to provide necessary habitat and foraging resources. Although, communal gardens were primarily intended to provide fresh, regional food to denizens, these green islands also host a surprisingly high number of wild bee species.

The gardens were characterized based on structural elements such as flower frequency, the relative percentage of lawn, trees, shrubs, planted crops and infrastructure (e.g. seating possibilities or garden houses). Further, the effects of different landscape structures surrounding the gardens and distance to the city center were analyzed on the total wild bee species richness and functional traits. Focusing on these putative influencing factors, statistical analyses calculating random decision forests along with generalized linear mixed models were applied. With 113 observed wild bee species, communal gardens provide habitat for a quarter of all known species in Vienna. In conclusion, results revealed that only elements within the gardens had an effect on species richness, with flower frequency as the major positive driver. The examined communal gardens promote and conserve wild bees independent from the location within the city or garden size. Furthermore, these green patches are important sanctuaries, hosting rare and threatened species as well as remarkably special wild bee communities.

     

A parsimonious multivariate poisson model for market basket analysis

Intensified research on multivariate Poisson models offers new opportunities for the analysis of purchase quantities in market basket data. The investigation of positive or negative correlations in quantity decisions among product categories facilitates a deeper understanding of consumer purchase behavior. The applied multivariate log-normal Poisson model introduces interdependencies between categories with multivariate normal-distributed latent effects by means of a covariance matrix. As the size of this covariance matrix depends on the number of categories in the model, its ation may become tedious. Furthermore, we assume that quantity decisions do not interact for all pairs of categories. That is why we propose to use covariance selection to derive a parsimonious representation of the correlation structure. For two market basket data sets, we show that the vast majority of off-diagonal elements in the covariance matrix are irrelevant. For a data set with product categories, the model with a partly restricted covariance matrix achieves a better fit to the holdout data than the model with full covariance matrix. For a data set with subcategories of the broader category beverage, the proposed model with restricted covariance outperforms the model with full covariance matrix even on the calibration data. We conclude that interactions of quantity decisions are overall the exception, even for complements-in-use.     

Wenn die Arbeitsfähigkeit gefährdet ist: Möglichkeiten institutioneller Konfliktbearbeitung

Mediation and conflict-moderation in organisational conflictsOrganisations are subject to permanent changes and must therefore master the task of permanently dealing with conflicts from a new. If the functioning of work of subsystems or the organisation as a whole is threatened, rapid interventions are demanded. The author introduces mediation as a intervention method. Two methods are compared in a practice test: mediation and conflict-moderation.     

Contributions of the German “Expression Psychology” to nonverbal communication research

An attempt is made to survey research on nonverbal behavior performed by German speaking Expression Psychologists. In this first part of a series of articles (other parts will cover research on facial expression, body movement, and speech and voice) theories and concepts of this nearly unknown branch of psychology are reviewed and discussed. Topics include the nature of expressive behavior, the relation between states/traits and expressive behavior, and the perception of expressive behavior.... we should now concentrate on searching for new avenues of approach, particularly in the study of human social communication, without worrying too much about rigid conformity with the canons of experimental respectability. We need more ideas, not more experiments; any provocative theory would be preferable to the inductive collecting of bits and pieces that has become our respectable habit. (Israel & Tajfel, 1972, p. 4)Editor's Note: The subsequent three parts of this series, to be published in consecutive issues of theJournal, further explore this area of theory and research often little known to American psychologists. Comments and contributions about the series are welcomed.     

Wilfried Kerntke (2004): Mediation als Organisationsentwicklung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Sanctuary Cities: Policies and Practices in International Perspective

Sanctuary cities in the USA, UK, and Canada aim to accommodate illegalized migrants and refugees in their communities. The concept of the “sanctuary city,” however, is highly ambiguous: it refers to a variety of different policies and practices, and focuses on variable populations in different national contexts. In this article, I examine the international literature to show how urban sanctuary policies and practices differ between national contexts and assess whether there are common features of sanctuary cities. I uncover legal, discursive, identity‐formative, and scalar aspects of urban sanctuary policies and practices. These aspects assemble in ways that differ between countries. The article concludes by raising important practical and theoretical questions about urban sanctuary.     

Effects of distortion of spatial and temporal resolution of video stimuli on emotion attributions

Whether recognition of emotion from facial expression is affected by distortions of pictorial quality has rarely been tested, with the exception of the influence of picture size on emotion recognition. On the other hand, this question is important for (low-cost) tele-communication and tele-conferencing. Here an attempt is made to study whether emotion recognition from facial expression is impaired when video stimuli are distorted both with respect to spatial (pixel) resolution and with respect to temporal resolution (refreshment rate).N=56 stimuli, in which professional actors encoded 14 different emotions, were presented to groups of judges (N=10 in each condition) in six different distortion conditions. Furthermore, judges were confronted with a control condition, presenting the non-distorted stimuli. Channel of information (close-up of the face versus full body recording) was in addition manipulated. Results indicate (besides main effects for type of emotion encoded and for channel) that emotion recognition is impaired by reductions of both spatial resolution and temporal resolution, but that even very low spatial and temporal resolutions result in recognition rates which are still considerably above chance expectation. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of facial expression and body movement in communicating emotions, and with respect to applied aspects concerning tele-communication.