Assessing habitat requirements of pond-breeding amphibians in a highly urbanized landscape: implications for management

Urban Ecosystems - Management of urban aquatic habitats for native wildlife, such as amphibians, is an important contemporary goal for many municipalities. However, our understanding of how local...     

On the Optimal Use of Suboptimal Forecasts of Explanatory Variables

Ashley (1983) gave a simple condition for determining when a forecast of an explanatory variable (X_t ) is sufficiently inaccurate that direct replacement of X_t by the forecast yields worse forecasts of the dependent variable than does respecification of the equation to omit X_t . Many available macroeconomic forecasts were shown to be of limited usefulness in direct replacement. Direct replacement, however, is not optimal if the forecast's distribution is known. Here optimal linear forms in commercial forecasts of several macroeconomic variables are obtained by using estimates of their distributions. Although they are an improvement on the raw forecasts (direct replacement), these optimal forms are still too inaccurate to be useful in replacing the actual explanatory variables in forecasting models. The results strongly indicate that optimal forms involving several commercial forecasts will not be very useful either. Thus Ashley's (1983) sufficient condition retains its value in gauging the usefulness of a forecast of an explanatory variable in a forecasting model, even though it focuses on direct replacement.     

Evaluating the performance of sparse principal component analysis methods in high-dimensional data scenarios

High-dimensional datasets have exploded into many fields of research, challenging our interpretation of the classic dimension reduction technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Recently proposed Sparse PCA methods offer useful insight into understanding complex data structures. This article compares three Sparse PCA methods through extensive simulations, with the aim of providing guidelines as to which method to choose under a variety of data structures, as dictated by the variance-covariance matrix. A real gene expression dataset is used to illustrate an application of Sparse PCA in practice and show how to link simulation results with real-world problems.     

Money Over Marriage: Marriage Importance as a Mediator Between Materialism and Marital Satisfaction

While the negative relationship between materialism and marital satisfaction is well documented, mediators that possibly explain this association have not been widely explored. Based on the Incompatibility of Materialism and Children Model and Marital Paradigms Theory, this article explores the perception of marriage importance as a potential mediator between materialism and marital satisfaction. Using a sample of 1310 married individuals, we found evidence of partial mediation in that materialism was negatively associated with perception of marriage importance, and this association partially explained why being materialistic was associated with lower marital satisfaction. Thus, as counselors, therapists, and financial planners work with married clients, it is important that they consider how their clients’ materialistic tendencies may influence the family both financially and relationally. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

“The words of my mouth,and the meditation of my heart”: The mindset of gamblers revealed in their language

The colorful language of gambling and gaming is essential to creating the players' world; in analyzing it we understand that world. This fringe vocabulary or slanguage is examined in connection with standard language, and is analyzed for its origins, its humor, and for the attitudes it expresses and transmits. This language is seen as a neglected indicator ofl'histoire de mentalité, the mindset of gamblers. It is also suggested that other factors—body language, paralanguage, stock expressions composed of standard words (jokes, catch phrases, etc.)-hold clues to the outlook, superstitions, behavior, the rational and irrational beliefs of gamblers.     

How Local Social Movement Groups Handle a Presidential Election

How do local social movement groups respond to national electoral politics? Previous studies, often based on aggregated data on public protests, focus on the effects of elections on established social movement organizations (SMOs). Some find that SMOs flourish during election years, taking advantage of the political opportunities that elections pose. Others conclude that elections hurt SMOs, siphoning members and resources. Using ethnographic, in-depth interview, and document data on new and emerging social movement groups (SMGs) in Pittsburgh for 20 months before and after the 2004 U.S. presidential election, we examine how members think about elections and whether and how groups decide to respond to national electoral campaigns. We find that SMGs vary considerably in the strategies of action or inaction they adopt, depending on their changing sense of whether the election poses an opportunity or a threat to the group and that these strategies of action are patterned in path-dependent sequences. We conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for integrating concepts of path-dependency and timing into social movement research.     

The Accumulation of National Belonging in Transnational Fields: Ways of Being at Home in Vietnam

The notion of transnational citizenship emphasizes the mobility and flexibility of transmigrants with respect to the affective claims and disciplinary operations of the nation-state. Such representations tend to make redundant the analysis of the deep commitments of time, acculturation, and identification that have traditionally been considered the sine qua non of national belonging. I shall aim to put these modalities of citizenship into a more dialectical relation by arguing that in order to reap the full benefits of their mobility, that is, to be able to secure the highest rates of conversion for their transnational cultural capital, transmigrants must legitimate their claims to national membership by accumulating practical national belonging. These issues will be explored through an ethnographic analysis of the strategies by which overseas Vietnamese attempt to assert and accumulate legitimacy as subjects of national belonging in Vietnam.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL THEORY AS AN INTEGRATING THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK IN TECHNOLOGICAL DISASTER RESEARCH

Conceptual and empirical research on technological disasters has produced a number of seminal contributions including concepts of recreancy, collective trauma, lifestyle and lifescape change, corrosive community, secondary trauma, and the ecological-symbolic perspective. This article presents social capital theory as a comprehensive framework that incorporates and integrates these key conceptual elements and theories. After presenting fundamental elements of social capital theory, we demonstrate how key concepts in technological disaster research relate to social capital. We conclude that while social capital theory has merit and potential for improving our understanding of all disaster events, it is particularly useful in comprehending the multifarious impacts of technological disasters.