Influence of urbanization on the avian species-area relationship: insights from the breeding birds of Rome

Urban Ecosystems - The species-area relationship (SAR) is one of the most investigated patterns in ecology and conservation biology, yet there is no study testing how different levels of...     

Exploring Networking of Third Sector Organizations: A Case Study Based on the Quartieri Spagnoli Neighborhood in Naples (Italy)

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In the last decades, European Third Sector Organizations have been increasingly affected by marketization and the...     

Gaze Following in Newborns

Eye gaze has been shown to be an effective cue for directing attention in adults. Whether this ability operates from birth is unknown. Three experiments were carried out with 2‐ to 5‐day‐old newborns. The first experiment replicated the previous finding that newborns are able to discriminate between direct and averted gaze, and extended this finding from real to schematic faces. In Experiments 2 and 3 newborns were faster to make saccades to peripheral targets cued by the direction of eye movement of a central schematic face, but only when the motion of the pupils was visible. These results suggest that newborns may show a rudimentary form of gaze following.     

The Role of Foreign Banks in Poland

The paper examines the process of the Polish banking sector's internationalisation, with a particular intention of describing incentives and the impact of foreign banks entry. In order to carry out an assessment of changes in the banking market structure and banks' performance, the study introduces arguments and motivations of foreign capital inflow into local financial systems with implications for the stability and the development of the banking sector. The role of foreign capital in the Polish economy derives from an analysis of the effects of foreign banks penetration, in terms of changes in competitiveness, efficiency, and stability of the banking sector. An assessment of concentration level and development prospects have also been included.     

Simultaneous inference on diversity of biological communities

In environmental statistics, surveys on the structure of biological communities are generally carried out by focusing on diversity indexes. A more complete analysis may be performed by means of an appropriate function giving a spectrum of different measures of diversity: diversity profiles. They can be expressed as a function of the unknown abundance vector of the ecological population. In this paper we develop a non parametric approach based on bootstrap in order to make inference on diversity profiles. The proposed procedure is applied on biological data of four parks in Milan, Italy.     

Pharmacological treatments of pathological gambling

Medication treatment studies have demonstrated short-term efficacy of various SRIs, opioid antagonists, and mood stabilizers in sub-samples of adult treatment seeking pathological gamblers. Pathological gambling is frequently comorbid with bipolar spectrum disorders, substance abuse/dependence, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and comorbidity may influence treatment response in pathological gambling. This review focuses on recent research examining the treatment of pathological gambling and highlights methodological challenges for future studies.     

On two conjectures about perturbations of the stochastic growth rate

The stochastic growth rate describes long-run growth of a population that lives in a fluctuating environment. Perturbation analysis of the stochastic growth rate provides crucial information for population managers, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. This analysis quantifies the response of the stochastic growth rate to changes in demographic parameters. A form of this analysis deals with changes that only occur in some environmental states. Caswell put forth two conjectures about environment-specific perturbations of the stochastic growth rate. The conjectures link the stationary distribution of the stochastic environmental process with the magnitude of some environment-specific perturbations. This note disproves one conjecture and proves the other.     

Real household income and attitude toward immigrants: an empirical analysis

Previous studies have analyzed the (aggregate) effects of unemployment on attitudes towards immigrants and on right-wing crimes. In this paper, we investigate the effects of economic prosperity on attitudes towards immigrants, focusing not only on unemployment status but also on real household income. Using panel data from the German Socioeconomic Panel on around 33,000 individuals over the period 1992–2004 we find a robust negative relationship between real personal household income and self-declared concern about immigrants, both in levels and first differences. Both job loss and income reduction concerns about immigration. Our findings document an interesting interaction between economic variables and social attitudes which does not depend on economic growth per se but on its capacity to generate higher economic wellbeing at individual level, not only for unemployed people but also for those in employment, who may face a fall in real income during economic downturns.