Enhancing the efficacy and empowerment of older adults through group formation

Research suggests that efficacy and empowerment are necessary for social engagement and that a sense of efficacy and empowerment exerts positive influences on older adults. However, little is known about how individual efficacy and empowerment are affected by group efficacy and empowerment in later life. To assess the impact of group involvement on the individual, the authors conducted a follow-up study with members of an art guild for older adults. Qualitative data were collected in 1997 and 2001 to ascertain the members' perceptions of group goals and accomplishments, membership benefits, the effect on the community, societal views about older adults, and the impact of group activities on the individual. The results clearly indicated that collective efficacy and empowerment through social engagement were beneficial to members as individuals and as a group, and contributed to well-being through a general sense of accomplishment and pride.     

CHANGES IN FEMALE ENTRY TO TRADE TRAINING IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA

This study examines whether there were significant changes in the entry of young women to trade training in South Australia as a result of equal opportunities policies and initiatives to change the means of entry to trade training. It surveys the period 1981 to 1984 because that, like the present, was a period of change in education and training arrangements. It looks at women's hold on places in pre-vocational courses and apprenticeships in the most male-dominated trade areas and examines in detail the outcomes of the first three Introduction to Trades for Young Women courses in 1982 and 1983. It concludes that they led to only a slight improvement in female participation in trade training. The difficulties these courses faced in articulating with both student income support policies and the selection procedures for pre-vocational courses are discussed. The study demonstrates a marginal increase in the numbers of female apprentices outside hairdressing between 1981 and 1984 and evidence of weak commitment to an effective equal opportunities policy. A brief comparison is made between the situation at the beginning and end of the decade. This suggests that female participation in the most male-dominated trades areas in South Australia was generally lower than the Australian average in those areas, an outcome which must open to question the policy commitment to change.     

Conflict Resolution as the Alternative to Terrorism

We distinguish between the typical sort of short-range conflict management, in which governments must engage, and the long-term processes of conflict resolution, which must include the involvement of entire societies and the replacement of adversarial relations with cooperative ones. How can third parties facilitate conflict resolution? This article discusses five principles that have evolved from attempts to facilitate conflict resolution in the Mideast: enhancement of each adversary's identity , creation of new symbols, enfranchisement of elements within each of the conflict groups, enhancement of indigenous development , and use of indigenous third parties . We argue that this nongovernmental facilitation of conflict resolution (with governmental tacit cooperation) is the real alternative to terrorism.     

Some approaches to statistical analysis of a weather modification experiment

Data from a weather modification experiment are examined and a number of statistical analyses reported. The validity of earlier inferences is studied as are the utilities of various statistical methods. The experiment is described. The original analysis of North American Weather Consultants, who conducted the experiment, is reviewed. Data summarization is reported. A major approach to analysis is through the use of cloud-physics covari-ates in regression analyses. Finally, a multivariate analysis is discussed. It appears that the covariates may have been affected by treatment (cloud seeding) and that their use is invalid, not only reducing error variances but removing treatment effect. Some recommendations for improved design of similar future experiments are given in a concluding section, including preliminary trial use of blocking by storms.     

Cross‐Cultural Differences in Risk Perceptions of Disasters

Public risk perceptions of mass disasters carry considerable influences, both psychologically and economically, despite their oft‐times imprecise nature. Prior research has identified the presence of an optimistic bias that affects risk perception, but there is a dearth of literature examining how these perceptions differ among cultures—particularly with regard to mass disasters. The present study explores differences among Japanese, Argentinean, and North American mental health workers in their rates of the optimistic bias in risk perceptions as contrasted between natural disasters and terrorist events. The results indicate a significant difference among cultures in levels of perceived risk that do not correspond to actual exposure rates. Japanese groups had the highest risk perceptions for both types of hazards and North Americans and Argentineans had the lowest risk perceptions for terrorism. Additionally, participants across all cultures rated risk to self as lower than risk to others (optimistic bias) across all disaster types. These findings suggest that cultural factors may have a greater influence on risk perception than social exposure, and that the belief that one is more immune to disasters compared to others may be a cross‐cultural phenomenon.     

The Potential Impact of ‘Public Access’ Legislation on Access to Forestry Literature

There have been increasing calls for the United States (U.S.) government’s implementation of broad public access policies mandating free online access to federally funded research. This study examines the potential impact of such a policy on peer-reviewed forestry literature. The authors analyze information about federal government authorship, federal government funding, and U.S. authorship indicated in articles published in five core forestry journals in 2006. The results of the analysis provide evidence that federal public access legislation would have a significant impact on the accessibility of forestry literature published in leading journals in the field.     

Land,territory and commons: voices and visions from the struggles

ABSTRACT

All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was nothing more than a commodity, a mere ‘factor’ of production that can be exploited to generate financial returns. Movements and activists are organizing, resisting, protecting and promoting life-giving visions against this continuous enclosure of living beings and paces: they use their bodies, laws, educational projects, histories and visions to regain control over territory as a political space, self-determine and create solidarities. In the act resistance, they are the target of moral, physical and legal violence. They and their ideas are criminalized, disciplined, punished and in some cases exterminated. In this contribution, activists from the Basque Country, Guatemala, Kenya and the Six Nations and a group of academics get together to learn from each other, support the ongoing search for common vocabularies and identify possible milestones of a coordinated and international strategy for a life-enhancing future.     

Correlated z-values and the accuracy of large-scale statistical estimates

We consider large-scale studies in which there are hundreds or thousands of correlated cases to investigate, each represented by its own normal variate, typically a z-value. A familiar example is provided by a microarray experiment comparing healthy with sick subjects' expression levels for thousands of genes. This paper concerns the accuracy of summary statistics for the collection of normal variates, such as their empirical cdf or a false discovery rate statistic. It seems like we must estimate an N by N correlation matrix, N the number of cases, but our main result shows that this is not necessary: good accuracy approximations can be based on the root mean square correlation over all N · (N - 1)/2 pairs, a quantity often easily estimated. A second result shows that z-values closely follow normal distributions even under non-null conditions, supporting application of the main theorem. Practical application of the theory is illustrated for a large leukemia microarray study.