‘Slipping through the Net’: The Impact of Incremental Development on the Built Environment of the Historic Coastal Town of Queenscliff in Victoria,Australia

Studies of the impact of development on the built environment often concentrate on areas of sudden change, where new constructions of a radically different scale, purpose or style are clearly seen to dramatically alter existing places. However, change is often more gradual. The cumulative effects of a large number of individual small changes are both extensive and often unrecognized until after they have taken effect, each individual development having ‘slipped through the net’ cast by planning authorities. The problem with this incremental process is that the result is often the erosion of the spatial and experiential qualities previously valued in that locality. As an example, this paper investigates four residential planning case studies in Queenscliff, a small historic coastal town in Victoria, Australia. Through analysis of their individual and cumulative impact on the neighbourhood character of this town, the paper explores the broader implications for the built environment of other Australian coastal towns and highlights the difficulties faced by all planners and residents trying to protect the character of their towns.     

The impact of testing errors on value of information: A quality-control example

In this article, we extend recent work on the inferential impact of errors in data to a decision-making setting. In the context of a simple quality-control example, we illustrate how errors can cause substantial reductions in the value of information from a sample and how uncertainty about error rates can lead to yet further reductions in EVSI. Moreover, we extend the notion of an equivalent error-free sample size (which indicates the reduction in effective sample size due to errors) from an inferential framework to a decision-making framework and find that as uncertainty about error-rate parameters increases, reductions in effective sample size are even greater for a decision maker than the inferential measures suggest.     

Anchoring in lie detection revisited

Previous research has shown that the human lie detector tends to interpret messages as truthful rather than as deceptive (the truthfulness bias) and to infer attitudes congruent with the content of the (sometimes deceptive) messages (over-attribution). It was hypothesized that these effects are moderated by the extent to which receivers are anchored to the verbal content of the message; that is, receivers might form an early impression of the content and fail to adjust this impression sufficiently even if the message appears false. In the present study, receivers either judged the truthfulness of the message first and the sender's attitude second, or judged the sender's attitude first and truthfulness second, or judged only the sender's attitude. We proposed that having to judge truthfulness first would interfere with the role of the verbal content as an anchor for the receiver's impression. Consistent with this rationale, the results showed that both truthfulness bias and overattribution diminished when receivers judged truthfulness first compared to when receivers judged attitudes first or judged only attitudes.     

拉萨鲁康内的佐钦壁画研究

拉萨龙王潭公园内的鲁康,对大多数的藏族和研究藏学的学者来说并不陌生,但对其历史沿革和建筑内丰富多彩的壁画之内容及其来源却很少有人探究。本文通过仔细梳理有关藏文资料,对鲁康的建筑年代、风格及其中的壁画分布等做了比较全面的介绍。尤其是对鲁康第三层内的有关佐钦壁画的内容做了比较充分的研究和论证。