Commuters' eye contact with strangers in city and suburban train stations: Evidence of short-term adaptation to interpersonal overload in the city

In the present study experimenters attempted to make eye contact with commuters as they approached an express train linking city and suburb and, 20 minutes later, as commuters left the same train. During both the morning rush from suburb to city and the evening rush from city to suburb, commuters were less willing to meet an experimenter's eye at the city train station than at the suburban station. These results support the hypothesis that reduced eye contact with strangers in the city is a short-term adaptation to interpersonal overload in the city. Most generally the results indicate a convergence of laboratory and field data toward the conclusion that crowding effects on behavior are best understood as adaptation to interpersonal overload.     

Mediation: a Family Therapy Technique?

Family mediation dovetails with family therapy approaches, in particular the brief, solution-based family therapies, such that these two interventive approaches may be considered to be notionally quite similar. Comparisons are made, and the implications of moving from mediation to therapy are explored, for both workers and clients.     

Female labour force integration and the alleviation of urban poverty: a case study of Kingston,Jamaica

The author posits that female labor force integration in Jamaica accomplishes little in alleviating poverty and making maximum use of human resources. Women are forced into employment in a labor market that limits their productivity. Women have greater needs to increase their economic activity due to price inflation and cuts in government spending. During the 1980s and early 1990s the country experienced stabilization and structural adjustment resulting in raised interest rates, reduced public sector employment, and deflated public expenditures. Urban population is particularly sensitive to monetary shifts due to dependency on social welfare benefits and lack of assets. Current strategies favor low wage creation in a supply-side export-oriented economy. These strategies were a by-product of import-substitution industrialization policies during the post-war period and greater control by multilateral financial institutions in Washington, D.C. The World Bank and US President Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative stressed export-oriented development. During the 1980s, Jamaican government failed to control fiscal policy, built up a huge external debt, and limited the ability of private businessmen to obtain money for investment in export-based production. Over the decade, uncompetitive production declined and light manufacturing increased. Although under 10% of new investment was in textile and apparel manufacturing, almost 50% of job creation occurred in this sector and 80% of all apparel workers were low-paid women. Devaluation occurred both in the exchange rate and in workers' job security, fringe benefits, union representation, and returns on skills. During 1977-89 women increased employment in the informal sector, which could not remain competitive under devaluation. Women's stratification in the labor market, high dependency burdens, and declining urban infrastructure create conditions of vulnerability for women in Jamaica.     

Predicting tree species richness in urban forests

There has been an increasing interest in urban forests and the levels of biodiversity they contain. Currently there are no spatially explicit maps of tree species richness in urban areas. This research tests and identifies GIS and remote sensing metrics (climate, area, productivity, three-dimensional structure) hypothesized to be associated with species richness in native forests and identifies methods that can be applied to predict and map tree species richness in cities. We quantified tree species richness, floristic composition, and structure in 28 1-ha plots in the city of Los Angeles. Climate and remote sensing metrics from high-resolution aerial imagery (10 cm), QuickBird (60 cm), Landsat (30 m), MODIS (250 m), and airborne lidar (2 m) were collected for each plot. There were 1208 individual stems and 108 trees identified to species. Species richness ranged from 2 to 31 species per ha and averaged 17 species per ha. Tree canopy cover from QuickBird explained the highest portion of variance (54%) in tree species richness followed by NDVI from Landsat (42%). Tree species richness can be higher in residential urban forests than native forests in the United States. Spatially explicit species richness maps at 1 ha can be created and tested for cities in order to identify both hotspots and coldspots of tree species richness and changes in species richness over time.     

Making democracy matter: Responsibility and effective environmental governance in regional Australia

This paper will critically examine the changing social relations of responsibility associated with Australia's current regional ‘experiment’ in environmental governance. This experiment centrally involves the transfer of responsibility for natural resource management (NRM) from Federal and State governments to community-based regional bodies. Although governments are promoting democratic NRM planning at the regional level as a more effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, we argue that a tension is emerging in association with the simultaneous pursuit of these goals: ‘effectiveness’ has been defined in terms of the accountability of regional communities to central governments for the achievement of short-term results, an approach which is undermining the democratic promise that regional bodies would be responsive to wider community concerns. The notion of ‘responsibility’ provides a means of investigating this tension, as accountability and responsiveness are both elements of the overarching concept of responsibility. The examination of NRM institutions through this theoretical lens indicates that the shared substantive interests required to motivate a sense of shared responsibility amongst regional actors have been sidelined by the procedural demands of accountability. We argue that, if NRM planning is to be genuinely accountable and responsive to substantive public ends, the properly social and dialogical nature of responsibility relationships must be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social and political relations of responsibility that appear to provide the best opportunities for effective environmental governance, and thus for the achievement of more sustainable NRM outcomes, at the regional level.     

Time‐Series Models for Border Inspection Data

We propose a new modeling approach for inspection data that provides a more useful interpretation of the patterns of detections of invasive pests, using cargo inspection as a motivating example. Methods that are currently in use generally classify shipments according to their likelihood of carrying biosecurity risk material, given available historical and contextual data. Ideally, decisions regarding which cargo containers to inspect should be made in real time, and the models used should be able to focus efforts when the risk is higher. In this study, we propose a dynamic approach that treats the data as a time series in order to detect periods of high risk. A regulatory organization will respond differently to evidence of systematic problems than evidence of random problems, so testing for serial correlation is of major interest. We compare three models that account for various degrees of serial dependence within the data. First is the independence model where the prediction of the arrival of a risky shipment is made solely on the basis of contextual information. We also consider a Markov chain that allows dependence between successive observations, and a hidden Markov model that allows further dependence on past data. The predictive performance of the models is then evaluated using ROC and leakage curves. We illustrate this methodology on two sets of real inspection data.     

Everybody’s Business? A Research Review of the Informal Safeguarding of Other People’s Children in the UK

The paper reviews public discourses and research on the safeguarding of other people’s children by adults at the neighbourhood level. There is much empirical evidence pointing to the existence of thriving informal communities of support and informal childcare for parents across the social classes. There appears to be less empirical evidence related to intervening with children and young people who may be at risk. Nonetheless, the limited evidence suggests that many neighbours, acquaintances and strangers do intervene, or say that they would. The paper concludes by considering the potential negative consequences of promoting the notion that safeguarding children is ‘everybody’s business’.     

Assessing the adequacy of Weibull survival models: a simulated envelope approach

The Weibull proportional hazards model is commonly used for analysing survival data. However, formal tests of model adequacy are still lacking. It is well known that residual-based goodness-of-fit measures are inappropriate for censored data. In this paper, a graphical diagnostic plot of Cox–Snell residuals with a simulated envelope added is proposed to assess the adequacy of Weibull survival models. Both single component and two-component mixture models with random effects are considered for recurrent failure time data. The effectiveness of the diagnostic method is illustrated using simulated data sets and data on recurrent urinary tract infections of elderly women.