Understanding preferences for tree attributes: the relative effects of socio-economic and local environmental factors

Urban plant biodiversity is influenced by both the physical environment and attitudes and preferences of urban residents for specific plant types. Urban residents are assumed to be disconnected from their immediate environment, and cultural and societal factors have been emphasized over environmental factors in studies of landscaping choices. However, we postulate that local climatic and environmental factors can also affect preferences for plant attributes. Therefore, spatial and temporal patterns in urban tree biodiversity may be driven not only by the direct effect of environmental variables on plant function, but also by the effect of environmental variables on attitudes toward trees and associated choices about which types of trees to plant. Here, we tested the relative effects of socio-economic and local environmental factors on preferences toward tree attributes in five counties in southern California in and surrounding Los Angeles, based on 1,029 household surveys. We found that local environmental factors have as strong an effect on preferences for tree attributes as socio-economic factors. Specifically, people located in hotter climates (average maximum temperature 25.1 °C) were more likely to value shade trees than those located in cooler regions (23.1 °C). Additionally, people located in desert areas were less likely to consider trees to be important in their city compared with people located in naturally forested areas. Overall, our research demonstrates the inherent connections between local environmental factors and perceptions of nature, even in large modern cities. Accounting for these factors can contribute to the growing interest in understanding patterns of urban biodiversity.     

Social Justice and the Low-Paid Workers

This paper defines a minimal set of conditions which must be satisfied by any system purporting to be guided by a notion of social justice with a significant egalitarian element. The aim is to distinguish between egalitarian concern on the one hand and mere alms-giving sentiment on the other. Taking a broad historical span, the paper shows that, rhetoric apart, the empirical data does not support the claim that egalitarian concerns have played an effective role in determining the value of the real wage for the low-paid worker. In reality, the fate of low wages appears to have been determined by little more than an alms-giving sentiment. This has implications not only for current debates over labour market reform but also for social welfare policies in general. This is especially so because of the close affinity between the base Award rate and the evaluation of the ‘poverty line’. Attention to the Award wage of the low-paid worker, the paper argues, is all the more urgent in the current economic climate when an increasing proportion of workers are likely to be trapped in low paying jobs for very long periods and possibly indefinitely.     

Ethnicity,Race and Nationalism in Australia: Some Critical Perspectives

Over the last 15 years or so, a number of writers have undertaken critical analyses of Australian immigration that have challenged prevailing social science paradigms and raised issues of the representation of social and power relations in a very diverse society. These analyses have located Australian immigration within the context of international capitalism, exploring class segmentation and solidarity, the relation between policies and practice and questions of racism and nationalism.     

POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’ rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau's conception of populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms. Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment – and in particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account – enact a set of tropic relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in much the same terms as Laclau's rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes ‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau's political logic.     

Estimation of signal to noise ratio using mahalanobis distance

In this paper, we propose some alternative estimatiors to that given by C. G. Khatri and C. R. Rao (1985), for estimating Signal to Noise ratio. Using Pitman Nearness, Condition for prefering one estimator over the other is estabilished. It is shown numerically that estimators corresponding to Entropy loss function are better more oftern than those corresponding to Squared Error loss.     

Inference problems in life testing under multivariate normality

Modified maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of a multivariate normal distribution are developed when the smallest or largest observations on one of the components are censored. These estimators are used to construct tests for means and correlation coefficients. The robustness of these tests to deviations from normality is investigated.     

Three Journeys Toward The Reflecting Team

The experience of familiestrainee and supervisory therapists involved in reflecting team work are explored through the metaphor of ‘journey’ and by asking a small number of our colleagues and clients about their experiences. Ideas gained from this approach are tentatively used to raise some questions about the reflecting team specifically and the current direction of family therapy. More rigorous research into this area is invited.