Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization's income, paid staff, membership size, and library resources are significantly related to getting media publicity, whereas the number of chapter affiliations is inversely related to publicity. Association type is also a significant factor that influences an organization's ability to get publicity. We discuss the implications that these findings have for current debates about advocacy and civic engagement in the nonprofit sector.     

Fire and restoration of the largest urban forest of the world in Rio de Janeiro City,Brazil

National Park of Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) is about 3,300 ha and considered the largest urban forest in the world. Its floristic composition is typical of Atlantic Rain Forest. The reserve is being altered because of fire occurrences and urban expansion. This study identified locations and causes of forest fires, and makes management recommendations to restore damaged areas. From 1991 to 2000, forest firefighters recorded an average of 75-fire occurrences/year. Identified causes included hot air balloons (24%), intentional (24%), rubbish burning (21%) and religious practices (17%). Primary fuels included invasive grasses and ferns. Although hot air balloons destroyed larger areas of forest in each occurrence, a greater number of fires started in the invasive vegetation along roads that bisect the forest. In response to recurrent forests, invasive vegetation has spread gradually into the forest increasing forest degradation. To decrease fire damage, sites with high fire frequencies and density of invasive vegetation were planted with less flammable species. Results indicate that fire frequency decreased and density of invasive vegetation declined. This approach appears to prevent fire incidence, reduce the need for fire fighting, and preserve existing biodiversity.     

Lives in limbo: Temporary Protected Status and immigrant identities

The United States formulates much of its immigration and refugee policy to match economic and political circumstances. We interpret these policy shifts as a set of graduated positions on immigration and refugee flows that attempts to discipline the lives of newcomers and, in so doing, shapes immigrant identities. In this article, we analyse the interplay between the US government and Salvadoran asylum applicants negotiating procedures that grant only temporary relief from deportation via the policy of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). We find that each policy shift results in the strategic renegotiation of asylum applicants’ identities so as to achieve the best opportunity for a successful outcome. Based on Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship, we argue that what appears more superficially as a patchwork strategy of immigration laws and asylum practices may be theorized more deeply as a set of flexible responses by the state that turn on identity construction at different scales, and that aim to mediate transnational relations.     

Dairy Farm Survival in a Metropolitan Area: Dutchess County,New York, 1984–19901

Abstract The effect of nonfarm development on dairy farm survival in New York's highly developed lower Hudson Valley is analyzed. The major hypothesis is that significant losses of dairy farms during this period are the result of urban development pressures. Contrary to this hypothesis, however, the bivariate and multivariate analyses of data from a mail survey of all commercial dairy operators in Dutchess County as of 1984 and industry survivors, exiters, and new entrants through 1990 demonstrate that nonfarm development has a negligible effect on dairy farm survival; rather, survival is significantly affected by age of operator and by family disruption. Thus, demographic and family process factors are found to be more powerful determinants of dairy farm survival in this particular metropolitan context.     

BIAS IN LIST-ASSISTED TELEPHONE SAMPLES

A number of researchers have suggested list-assisted samplingfor the selection of telephone households to overcome some ofthe operational difficulties associated with the Mitofsky-Waksbergmethods of random digit dialing (RDD). An advantage of a list-assistedmethod of RDD is that an equal probability systematic sampleof telephone numbers can be selected and the variances of estimatesfrom such a sample are usually lower than from a clustered designlike the Mitofsky-Waksberg method. The main disadvantage ofthe list-assisted method is that it excludes some householdsfrom the sample, thus creating a coverage bias in the estimates.This article describes research on the coverage bias for a particularmethod of list-assisted sampling. The two key determinants ofcoverage bias are the proportion of households that are noteligible for the sample and the differences in the characteristicsof the covered and not covered populations. The results showthat about 4 percent of all households are excluded in nationalsamples using this method of sampling. Furthermore, they showthat the differences between the covered and uncovered populationsare generally not large. The coverage bias resulting from theseconditions may often be small.     

Empirical likelihood confidence intervals for the mean of a population containing many zero values

If a population contains many zero values and the sample size is not very large, the traditional normal approximation‐based confidence intervals for the population mean may have poor coverage probabilities. This problem is substantially reduced by constructing parametric likelihood ratio intervals when an appropriate mixture model can be found. In the context of survey sampling, however, there is a general preference for making minimal assumptions about the population under study. The authors have therefore investigated the coverage properties of nonparametric empirical likelihood confidence intervals for the population mean. They show that under a variety of hypothetical populations, these intervals often outperformed parametric likelihood intervals by having more balanced coverage rates and larger lower bounds. The authors illustrate their methodology using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey for the year 2000.     

Statistical Distributions of Daily Breathing Rates for Narrow Age Groups of Infants and Children

Children may be more susceptible to toxicity from some environmental chemicals than adults. This susceptibility may occur during narrow age periods (windows), which can last from days to years depending on the toxicant. Breathing rates specific to narrow age periods are useful to assess inhalation dose during suspected windows of susceptibility. Because existing breathing rates used in risk assessment are typically for broad age ranges or are based on data not representative of the population, we derived daily breathing rates for narrow age ranges of children designed to be more representative of the current U.S. children's population. These rates were derived using the metabolic conversion method of Layton (1993) and energy intake data adjusted to represent the U.S. population from a relatively recent dietary survey (CSFII 1994–1996, 1998). We calculated conversion factors more specific to children than those previously used. Both nonnormalized (L/day) and normalized (L/kg-day) breathing rates were derived and found comparable to rates derived using energy estimates that are accurate for the individuals sampled but not representative of the population. Estimates of breathing rate variability within a population can be used with stochastic techniques to characterize the range of risk in the population from inhalation exposures. For each age and age-gender group, we present the mean, standard error of the mean, percentiles (50th, 90th, and 95th), geometric mean, standard deviation, 95th percentile, and best-fit parametric models of the breathing rate distributions. The standard errors characterize uncertainty in the parameter estimate, while the percentiles describe the combined interindividual and intra-individual variability of the sampled population. These breathing rates can be used for risk assessment of subchronic and chronic inhalation exposures of narrow age groups of children.