People and Pixels 20 years later: the current data landscape and research trends blending population and environmental data

Population and Environment - In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes...     

Career Maturity of Students in Accelerated Versus Traditional Programs

The authors assessed the career maturity of students in accelerated versus traditional academic programs. Students in traditional programs were hypothesized to be more advanced regarding their career decision making and development when compared with students in accelerated programs. The Medical Career Development Inventory (see M. L. Savickas, 1984) was administered to 441 medical students. Results showed that students in traditional programs had significantly greater career crystallization and career specification. Interventions are needed to further the career maturity and developmental tasks of students in accelerated programs.     

White women and affirmative action in employment in six southern cities

The purpose of this research is to examine data from 167 randomly selected businesses on the impact of affirmative action and white female employment in six representative Florida cities. OLS regression analysis was used to explore the independent effects of affirmative action among other employment-related predictors. While white women are doing relatively well in the job market, employer support for affirmative action has no significant influence on their employment, even at higher job levels.     

Conservatism, institutionalism, and the social control of intergroup conflict

This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, group-threat accounts of intergroup relations and the state, and neoinstitutional theory, the findings suggest that hate crime prosecutions are fewer where political conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and black population size are higher, although this last effect is nonlinear. Linkages between district attorneys' offices and communities, on the other hand, increase hate crime prosecutions and the likelihood of offices' creating hate crime policies. Yet these policies are sometimes decoupled from actual enforcement, and such decoupling is more likely in politically conservative districts. The results indicate that common correlates of criminal punishment have very different effects on types of state social control that are protective of minority groups, and also suggest conditions under which policy and practice become decoupled in organizational settings.     

Decomposition of urban atmospheric carbon in Sonoran Desert soils

Urban atmospheres can have high concentrations of particulate organic carbon (oC) but the rate and fate oC deposition in near-urban ecosystems are rarely quantified. We collected atmospheric particulate matter in Phoenix, AZ and applied these samples to Sonoran Desert soils in a series of laboratory incubation experiments. The addition of fine particulate matter (<2.5 μm aerodynamic diameter) increased microbial respiration in soils collected from the interspaces between desert shrubs. The increase in soil respiration was equivalent to 25% to 30% of the added oC. In contrast, we did not detect increases in respiration when coarse particulate matter (>2.5 μm aerodynamic diameter) was added to interspace soils, suggesting that coarse particulate oC is recalcitrant to microbial decomposition. Due to comparatively higher background levels of C mineralization, we rarely detected changes in microbial respiration when fine or coarse particulate oC was added to soils collected beneath shrub canopies. We measured total atmospheric C concentrations within and surrounding Phoenix and, using inferential methods, estimated rates of deposition that ranged from 0.02 to 0.58 mg C m⁻² d⁻¹ for fine particles and from 0 to 6.15 mg C m⁻² d⁻¹ for coarse particles. Results show that fine atmospheric particulate matter deposited at low rates downwind of Phoenix is a labile oC substrate for soil heterotrophs. In contrast, oC deposited at higher rates as coarse particulate matter may accumulate in soils due to slow microbial decomposition rates.     

Pseudo-likelihood inference for clustered binary data

The maximum likelihood procedure to estimate paraneters of a model has scveral attractive properties including the existence of the covariance matrix which yield asymptotic covariances: for a sample size N the asymptotics are in general of order 1/N. Here we give an asymptotic for the skewness of the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of a parameter; this is of order 1/ n2 and this expression is new. Applications relate to the parameters of (i) the Poisson, binomial, and normal density. (ii) the gamna density and (iii) the Beta debsity. Other application are being considered. The expression for the asymptotic skowness at one phase of the study tured out to be unusually complicated involving the asymptotic expressions for variance and bias. When these were identified a much simpler compact expression appeared which we now describe. The work is a much improved treatment of the subject described in Shenton and Bowman (Mariunm likelihood estimation in small samples, Griffin. 1977).