Effects of cultural change on health and fertility in Amazonian Indian societies: Recent research and projections

Presented at the 156th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990 for the Symposium: Cultural Change and Population Growth: An Evolutionary Perspective.     

The intersection of disability and child abuse in England and the United States

This article reports the findings of a World Rehabilitation Fund Fellowship study on the intersection of child abuse, family support, and disability in England. These findings are then compared to the American picture in this arena, and implications for new directions are delineated.     

Long-term immigration to the United States: new approaches to measurement

"The United Nations has recommended the measurement of types of international migration using demographic criteria, including length of stay and purpose of travel. Information systems at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have the potential to provide a basis for documenting these demographic characteristics, in particular, length of stay of temporary migrants to the United States. This article analyzes these characteristics of selected categories of nonimmigrant aliens. The results of the analysis are used to produce series of estimates of alien immigration that conform more closely to the U.N. recommended definitions and better represent demographic concepts of long-term immigration. A strategy for measuring emigration of aliens from the United States using INS information systems is also described."     

Another Look at Daily Lotteries

Lotteries in which the winning number was a number receiving the fewest bets were the subject of “A Look at Daily Lotteries” by Kabak and Simonoff (1983). This note corrects some of their results and makes observations on the probability of winning.     

Does the best practice of rational-style model-based policy analysis already include ethical considerations?,

This paper deals with ethics in the context of the real-world practice of operations research (OR), once an analyst has taken on the responsibility of carrying out a rational-style model-based policy study for a client. OR models are often used by policy analysts to assist decisionmakers in choosing a good course of action based on multiple (and competing) criteria from among a variety of alternatives under uncertain conditions as part of the policy analysis process. The paper suggests that if applied operations researchers (acting as rational-style model-based policy analysts, and not as policy analysts playing a different role or as policy advocates) use the scientific method and apply the generally accepted best practices of their profession, they will be acting in an ethical manner. It, therefore, describes the steps of a typical rational-style model-based policy analysis study, and specifies the tenets of good practice in each step. It also provides a list of questions and statements that the analyst and those evaluating an analyst's work (both internally and externally) can use to help make sure that the study adheres to the tenets of good practice for rational-style model-based policy analysis and remains within ethical bounds.     

Text and Temporality: Patterned-Cyclical and Ordinary-Linear Forms of Time-Consciousness,Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian Life-Historical Interviews

It is argued that autobiographical texts, such as life-historical interviews, provide the richest possible source of information about a person's temporality and a culture's historical past. It is proposed that time-consciousness can be inferred from such texts. To this end, ethnographic and other studies of Australian Aboriginal time-consciousness were used to construct a seven-part model of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness. Turning these seven attributes of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness into their opposites yields seven features of one-dimensional, ordinary-linear time-consciousness, thereby establishing a structured temporal polarity. A lexical-level, content-analytic methodology, Neurocognitive Hierarchical Categorization Analysis (NHCA), is introduced, in which folk-concepts of time from Roget's International Thesaurus were used to construct wordlist indicators for 9 of the 14 definitional components. Then, using NHCA for a comparative analysis of texts consisting of life-historical interviews, earlier results of an empirical study were briefly re-presented. Australian Aborigines, compared to Euro-Australian controls, used a significantly smaller proportion of words for an index of ordinary-linear time but a higher proportion of words for an index of patterned-cyclical time, indicating a time-consciousness that is primarily patterned-cyclical rather than linear. Females were less linear and more patterned-cyclical than males in both cultures. These cross-cultural results contribute predictive validity to the proposed polarity of time-consciousness. Implications for the culture-and-cognition paradox and its resolution in dual-brain theory are addressed.     

City-wide relationships between green spaces,urban land use and topography

The growing proportion of human populations living in urban areas, and consequent trends of increasing urban expansion and densification fuel a need to understand how urban form and land use affect environmental quality, including the availability of urban green spaces. Here we use Sheffield as a case study of city-wide relationships between urban green space extent, quality (vegetation cover and tree-cover), and gradients in urban form and topography. The total area of buildings and length of the road network are equally strong negative predictors of extent of green space, while the former predictor is a more important negative influence upon green space quality. Elevation positively influences extent of green space but negatively influences tree-cover. In contrast, slope of terrain positively influences green space quality and is the best predictor of tree-cover. Overall housing density is a more important negative predictor of extent of green space and tree-cover than the densities of individual housing types. Nevertheless, the latter are more important influences upon levels of vegetation cover. Threshold effects of densities of different housing types suggest opportunities for optimising green space quality, with implications for housing policy. Variation in ecological quality of green space may partly reflect different historical intensities of industrial activity.